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Which skill to capitalize on?

Anything considered a "hustle" and not necessarily a CENTS-based Fastlane

EternalX

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Hey everyone,

I wanted to have an opinion of what would be the best freelancing option to get the money necessary in order to cover my expenses as a student and save money to create a business

So I have build a network of 60k+ followers on Instagram around shoes, I could use that skill to help other brands to the same

But in my dm's, I get a lot of request to sell custom sneakers to my followers, maybe I should go to that route?


I feel like I do waaay too much mental masturbation, and I should just stick to something but for some reasons I am stuck in a phase to choose between different things that I don't enjoy at all because it's preventing from doing the work


What would you do in my situation?
Thanks for reading this post!
 
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RazorCut

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What would you do in my situation?

Personally I’d steer well clear of selling footwear. Notoriously difficult market as fashions and seasons change rapidly plus you have to stock each item in many sizes. Recipe for disaster for someone new to entrepreneurship.
 
G

Guest61835

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Here's my serious quick answer for what you need to do:

1: Learn how to problem solve 1 thing at a time and make a map starting from now that leads to your end goal/s you wish to reach.


Here's my quick list of things you could do with a little help and advice:

1: Pick a skill you're good at or can improve upon so you can start finding solutions for a problem that has to do with shoes.

2: Once you've built up a good skill that revoles around shoes and use it. Find what problems you need to solve in the market regarding shoes.

3:The rest is up to you.
 

Tourmaline

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@EternalX interesting that you're getting requests for custom sneakers. Can you elaborate more? What exactly are they asking for? What sort of customization?
 
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MAB1138

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@EternalX interesting that you're getting requests for custom sneakers. Can you elaborate more? What exactly are they asking for? What sort of customization?

I think he means that other people or companies are contacting him to try and sell to his followers.

If that's the case, then there is no inventory overhead and he can essentially just market to his followers. Maybe sell access to companies or earn a commission from referrals...
 

EternalX

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Personally I’d steer well clear of selling footwear. Notoriously difficult market as fashions and seasons change rapidly plus you have to stock each item in many sizes. Recipe for disaster for someone new to entrepreneurship.

Yeah I agree with you
It's not my plan to launch a sneakers brand, the barrier of entry would be too high for me, and it's not something that I'm planning to do in the future (at least at the moment)

What I wanted to talk about is that people are interested to have unique pair of sneakers to stand up from the crowd
Some people are painting various designs on them (it's mostly on air force 1's) and get paid for that

There isn't any upfront inventory, they buy the sneakers only after people purchase them on their website!

I have linked some of those designs (but the only barrier here is your imagination, any design can be brought to live )
 

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Tourmaline

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Would you be able to simply post people's custom sneakers, and then get a cut from the actual seller? Say 30% for example?

If so, seems like an easy way to monetize.
 
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EternalX

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Here's my serious quick answer for what you need to do:

1: Learn how to problem solve 1 thing at a time and make a map starting from now that leads to your end goal/s you wish to reach.

This is something that I need to do
I have already some ideas about what I should do now (start customizing shoes and then once I get enough customers I could hire people to do the work to make it more based on CENTS principles )

My end goal is pretty unclear except that I want to be able to retire my parents (but I have to work before getting there )

Here's my quick list of things you could do with a little help and advice:

1: Pick a skill you're good at or can improve upon so you can start finding solutions for a problem that has to do with shoes.

2: Once you've built up a good skill that revoles around shoes and use it. Find what problems you need to solve in the market regarding shoes.

3:The rest is up to you.

I don't know how to custom shoes yet but I should be able to do it without much difficulty with the tutorials on youtube

There is some points that I think could be enhanced in the shoes/sneakers market

I haven't found any platform that is dedicated to find custom sneakers (but maybe there's a reason for it, I don't know if it really fulfill a need )

There are marketplaces that are dedicaded to sell "hype" sneakers and clothes like stockx (which is the biggest one, the company is valued at 1B $) but they have a really bad customer support (you can check on accounts like @stockxbusta), and they charge way too much for what they are doing

To give you an example, on a pair of Air Jordan 1 high Travis Scott, the resale price is 1900$ in average, the one that is selling it gets 1400$ after fees (9.5% of transaction fees + 3% of payment processor + luxury import duty tax of 300$) whereas the one buying it pays 2750$ to get the pair (original price + 700$ of "import duties and processing)
Their margins are really good but not really great from a customer perspective
 

EternalX

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@EternalX interesting that you're getting requests for custom sneakers. Can you elaborate more? What exactly are they asking for? What sort of customization?

So what I do on my Instagram pages is sharing customs sneakers videos and photos from other creators (I've send some of them above)
And people started to Dm me to know if they could buy the pair from me

Would you be able to simply post people's custom sneakers, and then get a cut from the actual seller? Say 30% for example?

If so, seems like an easy way to monetize.

This is something that I'm trying to do too, I contacted over 30 customizer on Instagram, most of the time they don't answer, and when they do it doesn't lead to any partnership because they already have too much request to handle or they are down to have affiliate but never setup the systems or try to scam (I've send traffic to some website not a long time ago, people were using my code to purchase the sneakers but I never got the money from the owner of the website...)

That's why it would maybe be better to do it on my own or hire local people to do it
 

Tourmaline

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Hmm, is there an affiliate system that exists and can be adapted for any supplier and marketer?

If not, I smell a NEED.
 
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EternalX

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Hmm, is there an affiliate system that exists and can be adapted for any supplier and marketer?

If not, I smell a NEED.

I found two affiliate system that seems to be the big players of the industry : Leaddyno and Refersion (maybe there are bigger companies than those ones but they are the one that got the most reviews from what I've seen)

From the review, Leaddyno is a great product but have difficulties to connect to the cart processor sometimes and the company have a very poor customer support
They prices are based on the number of page views that the website have(starts at 49$/month for 3500 unique visitors) , and not the affiliate sales, it's also something that people doesn't seem to like, you could have loads of traffic but no sales from affiliates at all

Refersion is the main competitor of Leaddyno.
The reviews are pretty good for the software but one of the concerns is that they are a bit pricey (the first plan costs 89$/month for up to 130 affiliate sales, after that it's a custom plan), some people would like to have a cheaper plan to start with.


Both seems to have the same features for their software and integrate with most of the platforms (shopify etc...)

In my opinion it would possible to enter in that industry and outrank them with a better price point, a better customer support and some educational content to help companies to get the most out of the platform!

I don't know how I could do it though
It seems like in order to get inside the industry I would need to spend a lot of money upfront to hire developers and create a mvp
 

Pudgey

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I'd say, don't attach yourself to one niche and start building up other IG pages. I recommend the fitness niche, as it is huge and offer plenty more opportunities for Instagram (i.e fitness models, supplement companies, partnerships, etc..). Therefore, if you cannot get partnerships, there are plenty of Clickbank offers and other affiliates to sell different fitness products. You'd have to A/B test and find the right products. Alternatively, you can create a landing page to capture emails and create automated funnels around that clickbank offer.

In regards to the shoe industry, women are very choosy, but there are definitely fashion brands that would probably love to leverage your audience. Therefore, I recommend you to sell the audience instead of the niche and shoutout fashion brands and their variety of products. Especially up-coming fashion brands just launching, with little to no IG followers.

I'm sure they'd love to invest $300 bucks up-front for a total of 3-months worth of promotion.

Keep building up a conglomerate of IG pages around the fashion industry and use that as leverage as well.
 

EternalX

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I'd say, don't attach yourself to one niche and start building up other IG pages. I recommend the fitness niche, as it is huge and offer plenty more opportunities for Instagram (i.e fitness models, supplement companies, partnerships, etc..). Therefore, if you cannot get partnerships, there are plenty of Clickbank offers and other affiliates to sell different fitness products. You'd have to A/B test and find the right products. Alternatively, you can create a landing page to capture emails and create automated funnels around that clickbank offer.

In regards to the shoe industry, women are very choosy, but there are definitely fashion brands that would probably love to leverage your audience. Therefore, I recommend you to sell the audience instead of the niche and shoutout fashion brands and their variety of products. Especially up-coming fashion brands just launching, with little to no IG followers.

I'm sure they'd love to invest $300 bucks up-front for a total of 3-months worth of promotion.

Keep building up a conglomerate of IG pages around the fashion industry and use that as leverage as well.

This is something that I also thought of, to create fitness pages to sell info products as an affiliate haha
Building an email list would be a must so even if Instagram isn't here I still have my email list
 
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foodiepersecond

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Hey everyone,

I wanted to have an opinion of what would be the best freelancing option to get the money necessary in order to cover my expenses as a student and save money to create a business

So I have build a network of 60k+ followers on Instagram around shoes, I could use that skill to help other brands to the same

But in my dm's, I get a lot of request to sell custom sneakers to my followers, maybe I should go to that route?


I feel like I do waaay too much mental masturbation, and I should just stick to something but for some reasons I am stuck in a phase to choose between different things that I don't enjoy at all because it's preventing from doing the work


What would you do in my situation?
Thanks for reading this post!
Maybe narrow the population a bit? I know gamers are huge into custom clothing and pay good money for art they like. Maybe focus purely on video gamers or sci-fi and sell at conventions? Other than that I think you are on the right track of learning how to customize your self or just hire someone and split the costs. Sports its another route, but I don't know the copyright rules on that.
 

Ismail941

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Hey everyone,

I wanted to have an opinion of what would be the best freelancing option to get the money necessary in order to cover my expenses as a student and save money to create a business

So I have build a network of 60k+ followers on Instagram around shoes, I could use that skill to help other brands to the same

But in my dm's, I get a lot of request to sell custom sneakers to my followers, maybe I should go to that route?


I feel like I do waaay too much mental masturbation, and I should just stick to something but for some reasons I am stuck in a phase to choose between different things that I don't enjoy at all because it's preventing from doing the work


What would you do in my situation?
Thanks for reading this post!


If I were your in situation, I would do this:

Doing a A/B Split Test: Test it, Tweak it and Optimize it

A) 60K Followers with JV Partner
Timline: 90 Days or Less
Result: See it for yourself

B) Sell Custom Sneakers
Timline: 90 Days or Less
Result: See it for yourself

I think you have built some foundation steps already and don't ever let it go
If you can generate profit by lowering the costs of production = You will be a Winner
 

SmallBets

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I don't know how to custom shoes yet but I should be able to do it without much difficulty with the tutorials on youtube

There is some points that I think could be enhanced in the shoes/sneakers market

I haven't found any platform that is dedicated to find custom sneakers (but maybe there's a reason for it, I don't know if it really fulfill a need )

There are marketplaces that are dedicaded to sell "hype" sneakers and clothes like stockx (which is the biggest one, the company is valued at 1B $) but they have a really bad customer support (you can check on accounts like @stockxbusta), and they charge way too much for what they are doing

This sounds like the opportunity here - become the marketplace aka StockX for customs.

Rather than trying to learn how to do customs yourself, create a platform you can point these people asking you for customs to, and let the creators get a better market/price for their side.

If you maintain good social media edge on customs specifically (not the entire hype sneaker market), this distribution edge of your social head start can be your barrier of Entry. (& helps your Control to move them from insta to a platform you control) .

Need, Time, Scale sound clear from the larger sneaker culture which has now been solid for decade+, and demand you're seeing on customs directly from DMs, and the speed/scale that similar marketplaces like StockX, Stadium Goods, etc. have exploded.
 
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EternalX

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This sounds like the opportunity here - become the marketplace aka StockX for customs.

Rather than trying to learn how to do customs yourself, create a platform you can point these people asking you for customs to, and let the creators get a better market/price for their side.

If you maintain good social media edge on customs specifically (not the entire hype sneaker market), this distribution edge of your social head start can be your barrier of Entry. (& helps your Control to move them from insta to a platform you control) .

Need, Time, Scale sound clear from the larger sneaker culture which has now been solid for decade+, and demand you're seeing on customs directly from DMs, and the speed/scale that similar marketplaces like StockX, Stadium Goods, etc. have exploded.
I looked a bit about that, and the market for sneakers customs seems pretty small, in my opinion it could be easier to become a big player in it as nobody is focusing on it, but the margin from building a marketplace seems slim (about 10-15% of the sale)
As an example, to get to 10k/month , I would need to have 500 pairs sold at 200$ each in average every month on the marketplace) which seems to be a lot for the sneakers custom industry but still possible
Should I go about it?
 

SmallBets

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I looked a bit about that, and the market for sneakers customs seems pretty small, in my opinion it could be easier to become a big player in it as nobody is focusing on it, but the margin from building a marketplace seems slim (about 10-15% of the sale)
As an example, to get to 10k/month , I would need to have 500 pairs sold at 200$ each in average every month on the marketplace) which seems to be a lot for the sneakers custom industry but still possible
Should I go about it?

If you can manage to become the leader in this, there will be opportunity beyond marketplace fees. Advertising is one that comes to mind, both from big companies in the space but also boosted listings. Another thing is because there is established players in the parent niche (stockX/stadium goods etc) the natural fit for an acquisition is right there. So IMO plenty of potential upside if you become the leader.
 

AFMKelvin

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I think there might be a need for this out there.
Can you capitalize on this by

1. Creating a seller/buyer platform like Fiverr but only for custom sneakers?

Or

2. A printer that prints on shoes.
 
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