The Entrepreneur Forum | Financial Freedom | Starting a Business | Motivation | Money | Success

Welcome to the only entrepreneur forum dedicated to building life-changing wealth.

Build a Fastlane business. Earn real financial freedom. Join free.

Join over 80,000 entrepreneurs who have rejected the paradigm of mediocrity and said "NO!" to underpaid jobs, ascetic frugality, and suffocating savings rituals— learn how to build a Fastlane business that pays both freedom and lifestyle affluence.

Free registration at the forum removes this block.

Getting from instagram followers to real buyers. Input wanted.

Social media marketing, advertising, and growth

Rawr

Gold Contributor
Speedway Pass
User Power
Value/Post Ratio
95%
Aug 12, 2007
1,838
1,755
south florida
Thanks for the inspiration from the instagram marketing thread, my gf had started hers about 6 months ago in the girls stationary niche category. She is at 10400 followers with good response/likes numbers. She now wants go branch into actually monetizing it, by offering physical products. The issues we're facing -

1. We are in Spain, over half of her fans are in US. (hence, shipping there from here is out of the question)
2. We don't have $1000+ spare to buy product
3. We haven't reached out and asked what actually sells from other competitors. My gf is young an new to business, so of course she thinks a coffee mug with a cool design will sell, but I am more afraid of it not being the case. I was suggestion she asks her fans what items they will actually want and vote. There are other instagram pages will less followers who have stores and actually have physical stores, and gf asks how they do it, and I just say probably money from something else invested.

What I've thought is 1 - she can offer product through companies that make the stuff themselves and ship it (there are t-shirt/cups companies that do this). This would eliminate the shipping problem.

2. She can offer products that don't need to be shipped - desktop wallpapers, iphone wallpapers, but what else that people would pay for?

3. We can figure out a way to dropship from the factory itself - but I think talking to China will need at least ???? $2000? to start?

So gf is very excited about this, but I am not very much. She wants to make unique stationary items in a certain category, but what can we do to test the market without spending up front?
 
Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

amp0193

Legendary Contributor
FASTLANE INSIDER
EPIC CONTRIBUTOR
Read Fastlane!
Read Unscripted!
Summit Attendee
Speedway Pass
User Power
Value/Post Ratio
444%
May 27, 2013
3,639
16,159
United States
1. We are in Spain, over half of her fans are in US. (hence, shipping there from here is out of the question)

Find a 3PL (3rd party logistics) company to store and ship your product in the U.S. Or put it up on Amazon, and use Amazon FBA to ship out the product.

2. We don't have $1000+ spare to buy product

Put together a really cool product that customers would be willing to "pre-order". Use that cash to make the product.

Or, just save up however much money you need. Shouldn't take long to get $1000.

Or, try to find some brands who'd be willing to promote their products on your account in exchange for a fee.

3. We haven't reached out and asked what actually sells from other competitors. My gf is young an new to business, so of course she thinks a coffee mug with a cool design will sell, but I am more afraid of it not being the case. I was suggestion she asks her fans what items they will actually want and vote.

Sure, ask the fans. Take 5 min to throw up a post. Delete it after 24 hours, so it's not on your feed forever.
 

Rawr

Gold Contributor
Speedway Pass
User Power
Value/Post Ratio
95%
Aug 12, 2007
1,838
1,755
south florida
Good input, thank you @amp0193. Another question that came up was - I read over the licensing standard vs extended, and I'm not too clear. One one hand they say you CAN put images on mugs/tshirts (if it's not the main image), on the other hand they want $1500 for 25 photos on deposit photo extended license. Does anyone know how hard they look into this, or ways to be within standard license if you want to take an image and put it on something. (how much does it need to be edited?) We've found a person who makes the designs and are thinking of contacting her directly, and negotiating something directly off sales so not to pay upfront.
 

Rawr

Gold Contributor
Speedway Pass
User Power
Value/Post Ratio
95%
Aug 12, 2007
1,838
1,755
south florida
So we have the samples from China and some good photos from a photoshoot, with fans engagement to the IG posts.

Next step is a crucial one - getting pre-sales to fund this thing. China says it's 20 days to make the item. Need roughly 100 units pre sold to cover production. Shipping not yet calculated.


Questions to members here:

1. How to sell something you don't have yet for a month? Pre sales (ugh), or say you have it but it takes 30 days for shipping? Something else? Tell them must be 100 units pre ordered?

2. There were some mistakes on the hand made samples from China. They say manufactored product will be better, but some details they missed they didn't mention. How do we protect ourselves so we don't get 100 units of something that need to be tweaked further? What happens if this happens, who eats the costs, etc?

3. Apparently there is a dirty little secret - shipping from China to US is dirt cheap because US gov eats it. How much would a Chinese 3rd party shipping company charge to mail stuff directly to clients? Would anyone advise against doing this?

European shipping is still a concern, we think we'll just ship half of the units here to ourselves and ship them out ourselves from Spain.

4. Instagram has a feature you can put on a post, where you get a button "shop now". But I can't figure out what's needed to add it - facebook says it's for US based accounts only, but I couldnt add it on my US based account. Someone told me you must have shopify to work this, and its a trial basis so far. Anyone knows more? This is absolutely vital.
 
Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

Post New Topic

Please SEARCH before posting.
Please select the BEST category.

Post new topic

Guest post submissions offered HERE.

Latest Posts

New Topics

Fastlane Insiders

View the forum AD FREE.
Private, unindexed content
Detailed process/execution threads
Ideas needing execution, more!

Join Fastlane Insiders.

Top