Hey all long time lurker, my name is Gar and I'm 29, from Dublin, Ireland.
I'm a mechanical engineer by trade in my slow lane job. I suppose my entrepreneurial journey all began when I read the 4 hour work week, pretty sure since reading it i’ve worked way more than the average person not 4 hours, but it helped to contextualize some thoughts that I had in my head about being an employee. I remember thinking that I could be one of the most valuable people in that company, but that as an employee there's always going to be a ceiling, I can't ask for a 1000% pay raise, I can help save the company a fortune with the way something is designed (and have done numerous times) but none of those savings will ever go into my pocket. With this in mind I started looking at some ideas.
The first idea I looked into was drop shipping, after looking around at what to sell I eventually settled on vinyl record players (not really sure why thinking back on it). I got to work and found a supplier and got building my site. Once the site was built I quickly realised that having a website is the easy part, it's actually getting traffic to it that's hard. Unsure what to do from here I settled on running Facebook ads. The ad campaign wasn't really much of a success but considering I hadn't really much of a clue what I was doing I basically recouped the cost of running it and made a couple of sales. I distinctly remember I was on a weekend away with some friends in Poland and getting a notification that I made a sale while doing nothing. This helped prove to myself it’s possible to make money on the internet but I didn't think the margin was there on the record players.
After taking a couple of weeks away I came across an eBook about running Instagram accounts and then selling t-shirts with them so decided to give it a go. I set to work setting up 4 different niche accounts and posted a couple of pictures to them each day. I also found a bot that could automate liking and following other accounts for you to help grow them. After a few weeks and getting into a couple thousand followers on each account I started posting some t-shirts on them with a link to buy. After a few sales came in I decided to scale this up and went about creating a network of over 150 accounts and set them all up on autopilot. Over the course of about a year and a half this made a bit north of $50,000 with very little effort just occasional maintenance every so often.
Around the same time a guy joined my team in my slowlane job @Glen7337 and I we soon found out that we had similar ideas and began discussing potential business ideas. I showed him my whole Instagram setup and we decided that since I had managed to grow my Instagram accounts to a cumulative total of about 7 million followers people would probably pay for the same service to grow their own personal accounts. From this we decided to set up an Instagram Management Service. We also recruited one of his friends from college and set to work. Between the three of us we managed to grow the service to over 300 clients at it peak paying anywhere from $50 to $75 per month with a total income of about $28000/month.
We created a company here in Ireland and currently the two other lads work full-time in it and I work part-time staying in my slow and job Monday Tuesday Wednesday and then the rest of time working with them. The problem however is Instagram is really cracking down on botting, as many of you can probably guess this violates MJ’s control aspect the CENTs framework so we always knew this was a possibility. With this in mind we are going to leave that company running in a maintenance mode and to be honest let it slowly die while we are creating a web development agency help to help move us forward. I have personally signed up to Fox Web School which has been a great help for me so far and we’re working on finishing some portfolio projects. The plan is to try grow this web development agency over the next 2-3 years and then move onto a couple of other ideas that we do have that can be more fastlane potential.
I plan on creating a progress thread over the next couple of days to help document our work going forward. Hope I’ll be able to add some value to the forum too.
EDIT: Progress thread is started HERE
I'm a mechanical engineer by trade in my slow lane job. I suppose my entrepreneurial journey all began when I read the 4 hour work week, pretty sure since reading it i’ve worked way more than the average person not 4 hours, but it helped to contextualize some thoughts that I had in my head about being an employee. I remember thinking that I could be one of the most valuable people in that company, but that as an employee there's always going to be a ceiling, I can't ask for a 1000% pay raise, I can help save the company a fortune with the way something is designed (and have done numerous times) but none of those savings will ever go into my pocket. With this in mind I started looking at some ideas.
The first idea I looked into was drop shipping, after looking around at what to sell I eventually settled on vinyl record players (not really sure why thinking back on it). I got to work and found a supplier and got building my site. Once the site was built I quickly realised that having a website is the easy part, it's actually getting traffic to it that's hard. Unsure what to do from here I settled on running Facebook ads. The ad campaign wasn't really much of a success but considering I hadn't really much of a clue what I was doing I basically recouped the cost of running it and made a couple of sales. I distinctly remember I was on a weekend away with some friends in Poland and getting a notification that I made a sale while doing nothing. This helped prove to myself it’s possible to make money on the internet but I didn't think the margin was there on the record players.
After taking a couple of weeks away I came across an eBook about running Instagram accounts and then selling t-shirts with them so decided to give it a go. I set to work setting up 4 different niche accounts and posted a couple of pictures to them each day. I also found a bot that could automate liking and following other accounts for you to help grow them. After a few weeks and getting into a couple thousand followers on each account I started posting some t-shirts on them with a link to buy. After a few sales came in I decided to scale this up and went about creating a network of over 150 accounts and set them all up on autopilot. Over the course of about a year and a half this made a bit north of $50,000 with very little effort just occasional maintenance every so often.
Around the same time a guy joined my team in my slowlane job @Glen7337 and I we soon found out that we had similar ideas and began discussing potential business ideas. I showed him my whole Instagram setup and we decided that since I had managed to grow my Instagram accounts to a cumulative total of about 7 million followers people would probably pay for the same service to grow their own personal accounts. From this we decided to set up an Instagram Management Service. We also recruited one of his friends from college and set to work. Between the three of us we managed to grow the service to over 300 clients at it peak paying anywhere from $50 to $75 per month with a total income of about $28000/month.
We created a company here in Ireland and currently the two other lads work full-time in it and I work part-time staying in my slow and job Monday Tuesday Wednesday and then the rest of time working with them. The problem however is Instagram is really cracking down on botting, as many of you can probably guess this violates MJ’s control aspect the CENTs framework so we always knew this was a possibility. With this in mind we are going to leave that company running in a maintenance mode and to be honest let it slowly die while we are creating a web development agency help to help move us forward. I have personally signed up to Fox Web School which has been a great help for me so far and we’re working on finishing some portfolio projects. The plan is to try grow this web development agency over the next 2-3 years and then move onto a couple of other ideas that we do have that can be more fastlane potential.
I plan on creating a progress thread over the next couple of days to help document our work going forward. Hope I’ll be able to add some value to the forum too.
EDIT: Progress thread is started HERE
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