Furloughed and Unfulfilled

[actual99]

Long time lurker, first time poster. Years ago I read a post on this forum about understanding what you want to do in life and aligning your goals to those things. I sort of forgot about it and focused on work for a long time but recently I've been feeling unfulfilled brought on by a death in the family and I randomly thought about that post again.

I went through an re-read the post a couple of times and maybe being a few years older it hit home differently and I realised since reading that I've been living my own life in accordance to how other people tell me it should be run. Here are the values I've come up with:

Sovereignty
Supreme power over my own life. The ability to say fuck you, this isn't right for me and mine and I'm not doing it.

Persistence
A continual daily march towards my goals. When the Roman army encountered a hill, they didn't turn back or waste time going round, they kept going straight.

Simplicity
Not overthinking problems and solutions, not trying to reinvent the wheel and not buying shit that I don't need.

Realisation
Finally using my potential, advantages and skills to achieve what I want in life.

Courage
I've always been passive in my life but to achieve my goals I know I need courage to take chances and make hard choices.

So, while I'm still lucky enough to be on furlough it's time to start a business that allows me realise my potential. I'm still not sure what I want to do but I know what I don't want to do which is build an affiliate site.

It just feels too fragile like your money could be taken away at any moment by getting banned from a network or commission cuts. It also seems way too hard to get paid traffic working which is going to be important as SEO takes too long to get going (I've got a family to feed).

We need to hit the ground running and to do that we need to run paid traffic with a good ROAS.

I also want to avoid dropshipping. I want control both over the product and the customer and to me, dropshipping is a lot like affiliate in that it just doesn't sit right as a long term business model.

Ecommerce seems to be the way to go. It's what I've done well for over a decade and have seen brands go from start up to many millions. I also have experienced the frustration of working with a brand that could easily do hundreds of thousands each month but the owner wants to keep it small. The product has a huge mark-up, is evergreen and necessary with few competitors but the owner doesn't want the short term pain for long term growth so is happy to keep things where they are. I've long though they're sleeping on a winner and before too long somebody is going to come in and own the market - maybe it's my time to do this. I know there's a market, I know the product sells and I can afford the stock (enough to get me going anyway).

 

[Ryuzaki]

Welcome, @actual99, thanks for your intro.

We need to hit the ground running and to do that we need to run paid traffic with a good ROAS.

I'm extremely interested in this myself but am really deep into the SEO game and doing well with it. But with PPC and a great product plus all the CRO that gets done, you can literally print money as long as you can float the PPC and product costs in the mean time.

Yeah, I would avoid dropshipping. Since Shopify came around, I know many people who aren't internet savvy who keep ordering stuff on Shopify sites and of course it's dropshipped crap from Alibaba that takes 3 months to arrive. Lot's of credit card chargebacks and what not going on there.

I don't, as a consumer, have a negative opinion of people using fulfillment centers. I do with dropshipping. You really only get one sale per customer with dropshipping too, because they immediately see the shipping labels coming from China or wherever after waiting half a year to get the item, and then figure out they got ripped off in terms of price inflation. It's rarely packaged well, not white-labeled, etc.

but the owner wants to keep it small.

I've heard this line so many times. It's a fear thing. The Jonah Complex, a fear of success and the responsibility that comes with it. Rather than an attraction to the rewards. Complicated business, this psychology stuff.

I've long though they're sleeping on a winner and before too long somebody is going to come in and own the market - maybe it's my time to do this. I know there's a market, I know the product sells and I can afford the stock (enough to get me going anyway).

Yeah, I was about to say as I was reading along... sounds like there's your entry point. You already have exposure to the industry and have a grasp on the data and know where the openings are. Sounds like an aggressive takeover is ripe for the happening.