In this article, I just want to share a little of my personal story. People tend to assume that I have a rich dad or I struck a lottery to be able to come this far. I’m not lying when I say that I did not have any financial support aside from a bid and they room from my family members or from anyone else.
When starting out my first online businesses, I was working in cafes. Then when I had inventory, my parents were kind enough to allow me to use the storeroom, and there were products all around my room.
I did not take a single cent from my family members to start this e-commerce business, and I know that a lot of people think that you need a large amount of capital before you start.
Taking The First Step
When I was working my full-time job for the first three years, I did my best in saving up some money even though I didn’t know how to handle money right. Before leaving my job and taking the leap, I managed to accumulate 7,000 US dollars worth of savings.
I first started by enrolling myself in a programming boot camp, where I told myself that I need to make the most out of the program. Then I hit my first obstacle. I did not know what I wanted to do, I was still, lost.
While looking for what business I would want to do, I realized that there are many people who vape and I want to start something related to vaping. I decided on going for a subscription box service for vaping products. After completing the landing page, and adding in the payment process, I was very eager to get it running.
The First Obstacle
The first thing I did, was creating ads on Facebook and I was happy to see that my site is driving traffic and after a couple of days, I received an email from Facebook. My advertising account was deactivated, and I have violated its advertising policies.
This was the first obstacle that I had to face on my own. Thoughts kept running in my head as my heart sank. How am I going to market my service now? How am I going to achieve growth? Were all my efforts wasted? I know that I will need to find a way around this, I needed another marketing channel to promote, so I got to work.
For the next couple of months, we spent hours creating Youtube reviews with our mobile phone cameras, writing articles for our blog, outreaching to other media sites, and it was all mind numbing. We only managed to validate our progress after five to six months once there were results. From then on we have changed our business model after realising that subscription service isn’t the way to go for my store.
Success won’t be coming overnight
Unless a miracle happens, success won’t come to you overnight. There will be times where you feel it isn’t worth, or have the thought of giving up. I personally had a hard time going through this phase as I was just eating instant noodles, having sleepless nights trying to solve something, or even missing out on hanging with my friends.
People tend to remember you for your greatest success but never the struggles you took to be where you are. I have a broken old phone that I used for years, but when I purchased a new iPhone a year back, my friends only see that I succeeded, not the journey I took to be able to afford it.
So in conclusion, I am just sharing my personal experience of going through the process of starting a new business. Many of you would experience something similar, and I hope that this article can give you a few insights and motivation to get through your hard times and push further.
It’s all part of the hustle.
Jeremy has been running several online businesses behind his laptop for the past 5 years and he has worked as a freelance web developer previously. A trained marketer by profession, he also has Ruby on Rails and web development knowledge. His forte lies in eCommerce, SEO and content marketing. He’s been featured on Vice, Thrive Global, YFS Magazine, Forbes and several other publications. He prefers to connect with people on LinkedIn.