Growing up in Romania, I was a regular person, even a regular student, in a regular family. Actually, I have extraordinary parents, so the “regular family” bit might not be so true.
Both of my parents worked hard to support our family in a country in which life was difficult and people didn’t have a lot. One example of how amazing my parents were: there was a time when my mom had not slept in bed for about 3 months because she took care of the kids during the day and worked at night.
Though we had more than most people, there were times when we had no money and no food. And those experiences certainly make me appreciate how much I have now (most of the people reading this post don't know what it means to go hungry for a day or two). Do you realize how blessed you are?
##Move the the United States
Back to my story. I moved to the States before I turned 18, and ended up moving across the country from my family to go to school. At the time, I understood English (some), but I did not speak it very well. So, that led to a lot of interesting experiences. Trying to support myself through school and get a diploma taught me a lot of important lessons and I’m glad I went through that period in my life.
My favorite story to tell, though, is the one of how I turned $250 into a six figure business because it happened shortly after I almost died (sounds more dramatic that I intended it, but I guess being close to death is pretty dramatic). So, I’ll start my Steem adventures with this story.
But first, let me provide the context: how being close to death changed my perspective on life and gave me the strength to succeed.
Shortly before the end of my last semester in college, I had to undergo an urgent surgery, which should have been a simple surgery. However, things didn’t go well, and I had complications. After a few days in the ICU, blood transfusions, allergic reactions, fear of infections, and more, I finally made it. But the complications could’ve very easily been deadly (I don't have any pictures to show you).
It’s amazing to think about it now: I almost died; yet, I didn’t. That thought (or reminder) helped me go on many times when things looked bleak.
After this experience, I decided to move back home (Sacramento, California). I had lived on my own for the previous eight years of my life and realized that I wanted to spend more time close to family . . . since life is so short and we are not guaranteed the next day, much less the next year.
And the first step after getting back was to find a job . . . except I did not find one. The health complications I experienced after moving back did not help a lot either.
For example, one Monday, I had an interview for an office job. When I woke up, I realized something was not right. I could barely stand up (good thing the interview was in the afternoon). After struggling to get out bed, I took about an hour just to take a shower. Even the smallest action required strength I did not possess at that time. Somehow, I succeeded in getting dressed and getting to the interview. But I can’t say my mind was all there. I probably seemed high to the interview committee.
How would you react if you were on an interviewing committee and the interviewee seems high? Exactly.
Needless to say, I did NOT get the job.
So, what is the connection of my close-to-death experience and my job search?
Realizing each day was a gift allowed me to appreciate each day a lot more. And while my job-searching experience was frustrating at times, I found motivation and strength in not taking each day for granted.
I challenged myself to make this entrepreneurial journey a success—even though I had people in my life who laughed when their heard I was trying to build a successful business online. These people were encouraging me to just get a job.
But the scorn only motivated me more in my personal challenge (I guess I did not realize I was a performance-driven person-->these people are pretty competitive).
Somehow, around this time, I learned of freelancing sites like oDesk (Upwork.com now) and applied to a few jobs there. Within a few weeks, I received a research position for a consulting firm in Washington D.C. and the world of “making money online” became a reality for me. Using the money I earned from this part-time researching job, I bought more e-books and more courses, trying to gain more skills that would in turn make me more money. And I had some small successes (but mainly mostly failures).
Almost by chance, I encountered the idea of selling on Amazon private-labeled products, and I was intrigued. In a nutshell, private labeling is the process of adding your own brand to a product manufactured by someone else (when you go to Safeway or Walmart, you will notice they sell food products; do you think Safeway or Walmart have their own factory making food products? No, they private-label those products).
By this point, I was not making much doing research online. But I also learned some basic web design skills and got my first client (web designing was something I taught myself from free resources available online). Most months, I could not even pay my bills. But I was willing to find a way! And the private label route seemed to be “it.”
So, I paid for a course that supposedly had the answers needed to help me succeed . . . finally.
##First step
The first step taught in the course was to research products that sell on Amazon decently (dozens of units a day).
Side note: You might wonder, “How does one identify how many units a product sells on Amazon?”
The platform assigns a best-seller rank (BSR) to each product based on how many units sell and how frequently. This number gets updated several times a day. The smaller the number, the more sales a product generates.
You can find the BSR of a product on Amazon by clicking on the product’s name and looking under “Product Details” (somewhere in the middle of the page):
##Second Step
Once I identified a few products that sell well, I went to Aliexpress and tried to find a manufacturer willing to sell me a few units of that product.
At this stage, I have to admit, I felt like giving up! Finding a product that would actually make me profit after paying the Amazon fees and product sourcing costs seemed impossible.
Alibaba, Aliexpress’ sister site, offered better prices, but the problem on this site was that most suppliers were asking minimum order quantities (MOQs) of 1,000 units. I did not have thousands of dollars to get this going (in fact, I had almost no money).
The only thing that kept me going was my decision to make this successful, a decision that was a result of my understanding that each day was a gift. I used to think, every time I wanted to wallow in self-pity: “You are alive. Isn’t that enough?”
And I’d get back to my computer, look for more product ideas and contact more suppliers. After a while of doing this, my friend and I found a potential product on Aliexpress (since neither one of us had the money to invest, we decided to work together in hopes of figuring out a way, somehow). We bought about 40 units of the product and paid $250 using Paypal.
##Third Step
Once the units got to my friend’s house, we created a seller account on Amazon and created a new listing on Amazon for our product (we took some pictures, wrote a good description of the product, and hoped for the best).
We shipped the units to Amazon, to have Amazon fulfill the orders for us, and waited.
To our astonishment, we sold the first unit within a few days. Slowly, but surely, our product started to sell a few units a week. I had no clue how people found us (other than the fact that we wrote a good description).
We gave a few units away and asked some random people to use the product and leave us a review. About 2-3 people did it.
As the sales kept trickling in, we ordered about 200 units through Aliexpress.
And the sales kept coming.
Within six months, we were selling 6,000 dollars-worth of product per month on Amazon. About two months later, we reached $10,000 in revenue per month.
So, we decided to get a second product, to rinse and repeat. Boy, I was glad we did it. The second product did even better.
Now, I am not a millionaire (not yet :D). But I’ve made some decent money on Amazon. More important that the money I made, though, are the lessons I learned. Because I could lose everything I made, but knowing the things I’ve learned after this experience, I am not afraid to start again. And this time, I will be more profitable, sooner.
Here are a couple of the lessons I’ve learned, which I believe would allow me to start from scratch again, if I had to.
#Lesson #1
The most important lesson for me was the realization that even me, a person lacking any business skills or any training in business, can do well--if persistence and hard work are involved and as long as one is willing to learn.
In school, I studied the major world religions and education. That was obviously no training for starting a business.
In fact, before college, I did not consider the idea of starting a business as something realistic or possible for someone like me. I just “knew” I don’t have the skills to do it, not realizing that almost any skill can be learned.
My small success on Amazon has given me the confidence to try new things and welcome failures. While I don’t believe the only limits to what we can achieve are the limits we impose ourselves, I believe our self-limiting beliefs are the major causes for why so many fail so often.
#Lesson #2
The quickest path to success is to follow an already-proven process.
No matter what you do, there is no simpler strategy for success in business than this: follow what is already working. In my case, that meant paying the last money I had in my account to learn from another person that had success before.
Applied to sales on Amazon, this principle means to look for products that are doing well already and do something similar.
I too wanted to innovate, to come up with an idea that will improve people’s lives and lead to human flourishing—like many others. But it’s hard to do that when your bank account is empty and you don’t know how you’ll pay your bills this month. Out of 1,000 people, maybe a few are able to invent something or create a unique system. Initially, the quickest path to success for most of us is to follow a proven model and simply focus on improving it as much as possible.
That’s my focus now: I find successful models, pay a successful person to teach me their methods (or buy a course on the subject), and seek to replicate their success. And there are quite a few successful models out there (in the future, I’ll share the successful ones I tried).
#Lesson #3
Last but not least, I learned not to give up. I noticed that being in a community (virtual community) of like-minded entrepreneurs and hearing their failure stories as well as their success stories helped tremendously. I've learned that it was normal to encounter obstacles and fail. It had nothing to do with me, many times.
Overall, the community showed me that the difference between failure and success in the long-run was only my attitude of how I dealt with the issue.
Let me conclude with a last comment: do you know why I love this story of how I turned $250 into a six figure business so much? Because it shows that you do not need to be very intelligent or have any special skills to succeed. It is the story of an average person who was willing to follow good advice.
What good advice have you received that you haven’t followed yet? Share with me in the comments.
P.S. If you are interested in finding out what was that initial product we got on Aliexpress to re-sell on Amazon, let me know and I’ll share with you.