Hello from Singapore!

[Jugg]

Hey guys, just wanted to make a quick little introduction about myself here.

I graduated with an automotive engineering specialized degree right about 3
years ago, and have been working on building up a retail furniture business with
the girlfriend since then. (Her dad owns a factory in Indonesia)

My dad made his first serious monies from the car industry but is now taking it
easy and only doing financing for other car dealers. I'm working out from his office
right now and learning the car trade as fast as I can while working on the other
businesses.

Current income is primarily derived from affiliate marketing.

It's pretty decent money in the five-figure range a month, but I know it's not
going to be there for the long-term and I would really like to use the marketing
and advertising skills I have to apply to new fastlane businesses.

Affiliate marketing gets a really bad rep but I see it as a way to make seed money
really quickly for diversification to other businesses. Plus the marketing chops and
math you hone from successful (and unsuccessful) campaigns are very helpful for
businesses that require marketing and advertising. (Practically all of 'em)

I'm pretty close to getting to a level where I could start investing in real estate,
and that's something I really want to start doing ASAP, so I'm very excited about
that too. I'm talking to friends about making our first investments together to
kinda "soften" the blow if things don't work out well lol but we're all pretty confident
about it.

My "secret dream" is to own a shophouse in which I would have a team of designers and
developers churning out in-house and client projects. Not exactly fastlane there but
it would be just one of multiple businesses, I don't intend to manage the day-to-day
and hey, I said it was a secret dream, and secret dreams are sacred, you don't
question their viability

I have no plans to retire as I foresee loving the work and challenge, but my goal is
to have my businesses and investments run nicely by themselves by the time I'm 35.

The "Addicted to Passive Deposits" thread by Vigilante is getting me very revved
up, and I do look forward to start selling physical products online too. I could probably
start with products that our factory makes and move on from there to "unknown"
suppliers from Alibaba etc.

I've actually bought from China twice; one of the two times was a scam, but on hindsight
I was really stupid to have fallen for it but hey, it shows I was willing to take risks, albeit
stupid ones lol. Second time we bought something from China, was for some decoration
items for our retail showroom. The transaction was surprisingly smooth and quick, prices
were great and the lady we dealt with was professional too. Being a Chinese myself could
also be a nice perk of buying from China.

(By the way if you guys encounter and problems with communicating with China folks who
REALLY don't understand English please feel free to hit me up.)

One little problem with building an import business here is that the population in Singapore
is only 5 million plus so I'm not sure how much of a market that would be but it's definitely
a case of low down-side and unlimited upside.

What's more, when I've mastered the process of importing in Singapore, I could
always repeat the process for other countries.

Intending to write a flurry of posts and to make use of this forum to implement some
public accountability for myself. Not sure, but I'm probably going to make some sort of
thread on the forum about each of my projects and link to everything from here.

Might make for some interesting reading, and the pressure might just force me to get
everything done that much faster and better.

I'm still far away from reading the majority of the threads but I can already see the
experience and wisdom of many of the members here, (and how blunt many could be
towards noobies lol, I'm skerd) I'm very excited about learning from everyone here, and
hopefully be able to share some knowledge of my own when I'm a little bit more settled
down and comfortable.

So that's it about me!

===
Update:
I'll be posting progress for my 5 fastlanes with this intro thread as sort of like the "control
tower" with a brief summary once in awhile. Not sure if this format would work out but I'm
excited about it, keeping my fingers crossed!

Kang's Fastlane #1 - Mobile App Project
Kang's Fastlane #2 - Not for Profit Project
Kang's Fastlane #3 - Retail Business
Kang's Fastlane #4 - VRE Factory
Kang's Fastlane #5 - Freelancing

 

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[andviv]

Welcome to the fastlane forum....

I really like your intro.

So, after all this, it seems to me you have a good background and are sitting on a great place to make things happen.

What's more, when I've mastered the process of importing in Singapore, I could
always repeat the process for other countries.

Would you mind sharing with us how is the import process over there?

What regulation do you have to meet?

Banking/payment systems?

If I want to sell to Singapore, what needs to happen?

What products are you seeing over there that are being produced in the USA?

 

[Jugg]

Thanks andviv!

Would you mind sharing with us how is the import process over there?

The only real "importing" we do is from our own factory from Indonesia. We have 20/40 footer
containers coming via ship and handled by a forwarder.

Singapore is really chill with international trade so everything's a breeze, though once in awhile
we run into spot checks at the customs but the only thing that happens is a delay of a few
hours, nothing serious has happened in our 5 years+ of operations.

Banking/payment systems?

What do you mean by this?

If I want to sell to Singapore, what needs to happen?

As I mentioned in my intro thread, the population in Singapore is only 5 million+ so unless you're
very familiar with Singapore, there are probably much better places to sell to. This is in no way a
tactic to deter you from competing with me lol, just stating facts.

What products are you seeing over there that are being produced in the USA?

In terms of products being used in Singapore, we are actually pretty similar to any other
city, we have your IKEAs, Sonys, Apples, Panasonics, Dells, etc.

Like everywhere else most things we use are made in China especially consumer electronics.

I think Singapore is a great place to START a business, not necessarily a great place to SELL to
if you're intending to build a fastlane biz.

We have very favorable corporate taxes, capped at 18%. It's also very safe here, there's very
little/no corruption in our government, it's clean, has good food along the entire price spectrum,
we are part of Asia BUT most of us speak proper English, etc etc.

Foreigners love to come here to settle down; Eduardo Saverin, Derek Sivers, and
this Austrailian billionaire that owns oil mines are some of the more prominent examples.