GreasyGinger
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Well I've been a lurker/member of this forum for awhile now and have been trying to find my place in the entrepreneurship world.
I have a couple one off side hustles for some extra cash when I need it. I flip the odd car. I offer a mobile auto repair service in the summer time. I like to buy and sell on kijiji (Canadian craigslist, my favourite recent flip was a pool table, so much profit).
I built an app connecting auto shops with customers. This idea is still a work in progress, I built the app and corresponding web app for the businesses but getting shops to buy in proved an obstacle. Then life happens, wife pregnant, new more stable job, project is on hold for now but I WILL go back to it.
I needed something to cure my entrepreneurial appetite, and I'm fascinated with making money online lately. I came across a blog about a t-shirt shop and also read the story on here of the guy who made t-shirt designs and then hyper targeted his facebook ads to sell them. I am also a big customer of stupid online t-shirts, most recently those about being a dad.
Now I know this breaks all the rules of CENTS but I felt like it could at least be a learning experience. So I set up a shopify store linked with a print on demand service and ordered some sample shirts. Picked a shirt I liked and I was off to the races.
My first goal was to sell one shirt while spending zero dollars on marketing. I created a personal facebook (I know, late to the party), a facebook page and an instagram. I thought I would post funny parenting memes along with ads for my shirts to get people to visit my instagram and then of course they would click the link in my profile and spend loads of money on my shirts, I was wrong.
After a couple of days I had 50 followers, my wife was impressed, but knew I would need more. I kept posting 3 times a day, one being an ad, the other 2 being funny memes. I might have gotten 2 clicks through my instagram account and only 10 of my facebook friends had liked and followed the facebook page. Then I found an article about automating instagram likes, I got the free chrome extension Everliker and set that up to run day and night on my works laptop. I was getting over 100 visits to my profile everyday and every time I opened the app I would have more followers. Untill I didn't.
I guess instagram didn't like what I was doing, so I made a post and used the usual hashtags, except I went from 30+ likes to zero. What was happening? So a frantic search ended in me reading about shadow bans and how instagram will stop listing your posts under your hashtags. This is what was happening. So I killed the automation and wondered what I was to do next.
Discouraged I took a break from the whole thing. I had advertised the majority of my designs on the gram and my wife went into labor. Then came the shopify invoice and I was officially $105 in the hole without even the hope of a sale, which got me back into it. So next was to make some facebook ads, and then Lambo. (I'm more partial to Aston's myself, my desktop is a DB11).
I made 4 different ads with different images hoping to appeal to different parts of the world. Facebook makes you pay for impressions for your first ad spend on a new account, they say $13 but in reality you must wait for the first automatic cycle of $30, even if you pay them manually.
The ads went live, I got 30 clicks over $30 of ad spend. Zero sales and not enough data to really do much with. I decided to focus on one country, Canada, and put up 4 ads with different copy and different limited time offers. Another $20 of ad spend and found that 1 ad had 7 of the 9 clicks, I went all in on that one ad.
Then, it happened. I was watching the Santa Claus parade with my daughter and eating kettle corn on the sofa. My phone made a notification sound I hadn't heard before. I made a sale. I have gone from nobody to eCommerce maven while stuffing my face with sugary popcorn. I was high. Like over the moon high, I was drafting up my resignation letter.
I let the ads run, and run and run. Facebook had finally given me a relevance score of 3.0, which I understand is bad. I turned the ads off for now, I can finally run PPC on facebook now and will maybe try another part of the world, who knows. Maybe try some local promotion of my dad shirts. I know that a customer acquisition of $65 for $31 in revenue is not sustainable haha
Next step is to wait for my one sale to be delivered and give that customer a call and thank her for her order in person, over the phone, in hopes she might tell a friend who tells a friend who tells a friend about this website that actually has a person behind it.
I'm not sure there is much of value to this post, but for me writing it all out has really gotten me to sum up the experience in my head.
I have a couple one off side hustles for some extra cash when I need it. I flip the odd car. I offer a mobile auto repair service in the summer time. I like to buy and sell on kijiji (Canadian craigslist, my favourite recent flip was a pool table, so much profit).
I built an app connecting auto shops with customers. This idea is still a work in progress, I built the app and corresponding web app for the businesses but getting shops to buy in proved an obstacle. Then life happens, wife pregnant, new more stable job, project is on hold for now but I WILL go back to it.
I needed something to cure my entrepreneurial appetite, and I'm fascinated with making money online lately. I came across a blog about a t-shirt shop and also read the story on here of the guy who made t-shirt designs and then hyper targeted his facebook ads to sell them. I am also a big customer of stupid online t-shirts, most recently those about being a dad.
Now I know this breaks all the rules of CENTS but I felt like it could at least be a learning experience. So I set up a shopify store linked with a print on demand service and ordered some sample shirts. Picked a shirt I liked and I was off to the races.
My first goal was to sell one shirt while spending zero dollars on marketing. I created a personal facebook (I know, late to the party), a facebook page and an instagram. I thought I would post funny parenting memes along with ads for my shirts to get people to visit my instagram and then of course they would click the link in my profile and spend loads of money on my shirts, I was wrong.
After a couple of days I had 50 followers, my wife was impressed, but knew I would need more. I kept posting 3 times a day, one being an ad, the other 2 being funny memes. I might have gotten 2 clicks through my instagram account and only 10 of my facebook friends had liked and followed the facebook page. Then I found an article about automating instagram likes, I got the free chrome extension Everliker and set that up to run day and night on my works laptop. I was getting over 100 visits to my profile everyday and every time I opened the app I would have more followers. Untill I didn't.
I guess instagram didn't like what I was doing, so I made a post and used the usual hashtags, except I went from 30+ likes to zero. What was happening? So a frantic search ended in me reading about shadow bans and how instagram will stop listing your posts under your hashtags. This is what was happening. So I killed the automation and wondered what I was to do next.
Discouraged I took a break from the whole thing. I had advertised the majority of my designs on the gram and my wife went into labor. Then came the shopify invoice and I was officially $105 in the hole without even the hope of a sale, which got me back into it. So next was to make some facebook ads, and then Lambo. (I'm more partial to Aston's myself, my desktop is a DB11).
I made 4 different ads with different images hoping to appeal to different parts of the world. Facebook makes you pay for impressions for your first ad spend on a new account, they say $13 but in reality you must wait for the first automatic cycle of $30, even if you pay them manually.
The ads went live, I got 30 clicks over $30 of ad spend. Zero sales and not enough data to really do much with. I decided to focus on one country, Canada, and put up 4 ads with different copy and different limited time offers. Another $20 of ad spend and found that 1 ad had 7 of the 9 clicks, I went all in on that one ad.
Then, it happened. I was watching the Santa Claus parade with my daughter and eating kettle corn on the sofa. My phone made a notification sound I hadn't heard before. I made a sale. I have gone from nobody to eCommerce maven while stuffing my face with sugary popcorn. I was high. Like over the moon high, I was drafting up my resignation letter.
I let the ads run, and run and run. Facebook had finally given me a relevance score of 3.0, which I understand is bad. I turned the ads off for now, I can finally run PPC on facebook now and will maybe try another part of the world, who knows. Maybe try some local promotion of my dad shirts. I know that a customer acquisition of $65 for $31 in revenue is not sustainable haha
Next step is to wait for my one sale to be delivered and give that customer a call and thank her for her order in person, over the phone, in hopes she might tell a friend who tells a friend who tells a friend about this website that actually has a person behind it.
I'm not sure there is much of value to this post, but for me writing it all out has really gotten me to sum up the experience in my head.
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