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Free registration at the forum removes this block.@SteveO -- Thank you for the kind words my friend. I have said it before and I will say it again: I can't thank you enough for adding fuel to my fire at an important time in my life. You are an invaluable friend, mentor and example of a man I am privileged to be able to emulate on my path in life. Very thankful we crossed paths in the early days of this great forum.I have said this story before but it is worth repeating. When @G_Alexander was 18 years old, he arranged to come to my house in Scottsdale. @biophase was there also. He had his dad drop him off to spend the evening at a stranger's house to talk business with a few experienced people that he only knew from the forum.
I know at the age of 18 that I would have been doing anything else but that.
It was impressive and I am very happy to have been able to follow along with his success.
Maybe it has changed but this is what he wrote earlier on the thread:
I myself have met with aI have said this story before but it is worth repeating. When @G_Alexander was 18 years old, he arranged to come to my house in Scottsdale. @biophase was there also. He had his dad drop him off to spend the evening at a stranger's house to talk business with a few experienced people that he only knew from the forum.
I know at the age of 18 that I would have been doing anything else but that.
It was impressive and I am very happy to have been able to follow along with his success.
I myself have met with a legendary contributor on this forum. Its true that they are very helpful people, and they will take as far as they can with knowledge. You have to put yourself out there to meet them and put in the work because they are not there to do it for you. I think people on this forum want some Fastlane guru to start the business for them and somehow they will finish it off with millions. I hate to break the news to you but this is a process from start to end. Some may find luck along the way and hit it big with millions and some may just get thousands but the fact is that you must put in work.I have said this story before but it is worth repeating. When @G_Alexander was 18 years old, he arranged to come to my house in Scottsdale. @biophase was there also. He had his dad drop him off to spend the evening at a stranger's house to talk business with a few experienced people that he only knew from the forum.
I know at the age of 18 that I would have been doing anything else but that.
It was impressive and I am very happy to have been able to follow along with his success.
Hey Bio, I have heard a lot about you from a mutual friend, don't want to say any names here. I just wanted to know what do you actually do for your own limiting beliefs?You don't understand because you have a limiting belief in yourself.
I don't understand why you think this? $400k in sales is $35k a month or basically $1100 a day. If you are selling $100 product, that's like 11 sales a day. If it's a $300 product, it's 3.5 sales a day.
I was shocked and nicely surprised when I saw the $400k number. It's a great number to hit!
If you think he had help, it was all from this forum. I do know Alex but I've talked to him ONE time this year about his business. The point is that you CAN do this yourself without much help. Don't just give yourself excuses as to why you can't.
I finally crossed the half a million in yearly sales threshold and it's only May 15th
Little update for those who are still interested!
Well, that escalated quickly!
Surpassed last years sales already. Maintaining higher conversion rate. Hired GM for the eCommerce store in February. He is AWESOME! I've been able to get away from day-to-day to focus on growing the business. Launched an Amazon store for the eCommerce products for new sales channel:
...and a second website (which has done $4,100 since March so far, and sells similar products).
Adding the first site and Amazon together, I finally crossed the half a million in yearly sales threshold and it's only May 15th (and it feels like nothing at the pace we are moving)!
Outside of my online business, I've been focused on my B&M business (in which I have a partner, and in which we are grooming to be a franchise). It has one location so far, but we get asked if we are a franchise all the time by our customers (due to our attention to detail when building it). We will open several more locations as a chain first and then evaluate our options.
Onward and upward!
Wait what? I thought the secret code was ACTION?Congrats G_Alexander,it is really inspiring to young entrepreneurs.This thread is going to create more millionaires(those who will smell the secret code revealed here + ACTION)
Since I am starting a similar business soon I was doing some homework this morning. Using the data in this thread I have come up with some growth figures relating to orders, visitors and profit per day. I don't know how accurate these are (I range it from the 1st of Jan for every section, actual figures would be higher) but they give a great insight into the explosive growth of @G_Alexander business and what going fastlane truly looks like.
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What I find really interesting is that conversion has flatted out while views per day is still growing rapidly. I think it will be over a $1000 a day in profit October (@20% profit margin - maybe its higher now!?).
Great stuff G_Alexander, really shows what is possible with lots of action and focus. I love this thread.
This is pure speculation. Just find some stuff and start selling it. That's the only "data" that will matter. Planning ahead is good, but projecting visitors per day and profit of a dream is just inaction.
This is pure speculation. Just find some stuff and start selling it. That's the only "data" that will matter. Planning ahead is good, but projecting visitors per day and profit of a dream is just inaction.
This is awesome success, and I congratulate you.
I do warn you, though: this is a GOLD thread on the outside forum, where anyone can access.
You've given a lot of information here, especially on your sales numbers. This is dangerous, as some forum members have already experienced.
People are going to keep guessing your niche, your profit margins... if they find out, they might find who your supplier is. I do hope you have adequate protections as people on this forum (even unregistered users!) are a little bit more... trigger-happy than the general public.
I'm sure you'll be able to beat the copycats, but it's an unnecessary thorn in your side. If it gets out of hand, it might be worth asking to move this thread to the Inside.
A little paranoia never hurt anyone.
would one of you please move this into the INSIDERS forum?
No worries, lots of that goes on. My progress thread should be up within 1 -2 months. I want to start with a certain amount of work done (results had) instead of just posting an idea.@G_Alexander , @Fox I stand corrected, I thought the excel thing was one of those planning a millionaire empire in excel, without going outside. Good on you for taking action.
Just read every post in this thread. Congratulations on your success and thanks for sharing it.Topic of the day: Growing vertically.
May 1, 2014. The day I launched my ecommerce business. 6 months of preparation leading up to the big day. Two days later... I had my first sale. That was over two years ago now, and looking back I can't believe how much has changed.
I have worked through dozens of considerations throughout this time:
Back to what I said about the "half an ecommerce website":
- Optimizing product offering (cutting the stuff that doesn't sell, adding in stuff I like or I see selling elsewhere) -- I CONSTANTLY monitor
- Dropping suppliers (the ones who were slow or didn't offer the things I liked)
- Picking up new suppliers (ones I didn't know about orginally or who thought I was too small when I first approached them)
- Negotiating on my pricing with current suppliers as my volume increased
- Monitoring search analytics within my own website (in the BigCommerce control panel)
- Your customers search your website for what they want quite a bit (using the search box)... so don't neglect this. If you see lots of searches for a product in your niche that you don't carry... get it up there!
- Bought a domain and built half an ecommerce website in a very similar niche (more on this later)
- Bought a domain and launched a second website in my same niche
- Considered manufacturing my own brand of products...and stagnated for a bit while honing in the growth of my store (which still has more room to go).
One of my top 3 biggest suppliers (I spend the 3rd most with them... and I am the largest customer they have in my niche) offers 20% products related to my niche and 80% of their products in a similar niche that is MUCH larger -- which means it has much more competition. This larger niche has very solid competitor websites (top 2 or 3 on google are $30-50M+ a year in revenue with hundreds of employees). I knew I could get on the first page of this larger niche in 2-3 years, so I started building a second website in it.
Halfway through loading product for the new site (didn't mess with the design at all, thankfully)... I had a thought: Have I truly reached the full potential in my current niche? The answer was: no. So I stopped loading product for the bigger niche that instant and instead bought a domain for a second website in my own current niche.
You might be asking yourself, "Why would you double down in a smaller niche?". I am already the number one google result for the products I offer in my first cluster of keywords... so what is the play here? Well, I'll tell you. My customers have been asking for me to offer more product options (within my own niche) and so have my suppliers.
Imagine, if you will, that I sold "seat covers" for cars (which I don't)... I am DOMINATING seat covers, but many of my customers call and ask if I also sell air fresheners, floor mats and steering wheel covers (which all my suppliers carry) and I am happy to ring them up for. After enough of these phone calls, a light bulb turned on and I launched a second website for all these products. No new suppliers needed. Same LLC. Made perfect sense.
The reason I needed a second website was I didn't want to clutter up my first website with an overwhelming mixed bag of products, thus diluting my "expert" in the field approach. So we set up shop and are now on google page 2 for the second website/ keyword cluster (basically the same niche just another, bigger keyword set) and have done ~$20,000 in sales so far in 2016 on this new website.
The reason I bring up this story is that sometimes I think people want to grow horizontally (getting super wide and offering tons of products in different niches) -- when really, there are neglected subsections of each niche that could be dominated further. The best thing I can liken this to is to call it targeted "narrow-horizontal" growth. Staying close to your niche, but bolstering your offering (or simply "beefing up your offering"). Makes a lot of sense and utilizes the same platform you already have in place.
The next logical step for me now that I am "wide enough" is to grow up the stream (become a distibutor and, finally, a manufacturer) -- Just had a great business trip to meet with a supplier I do a lot of business with. His family owns a factory in China and he is now going to private label my brand (and even stock it for me since I do $x,xxx,xxx with them per year. Hoping to build a network of retailers we sell directly to.
Just wired $4,000 over to China two days ago. Samples will be here in November. More on that later. Very excited =D
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