Hey fastlaners!
Name is Nathan, 22 and from Sydney Australia.
Brief history:
- started my first biz selling vitamins on ebay at 16 - made $12,000 profit in 3 months and then blew it on a girlfriend and other stupid stuff.
- over the next 5 years launched a really broad variety of startups. got seed funding from Angel investors for some and bootstrapped the others. brief summary of them:
There's about 10 other businesses I've had that I won't bother explaining - they never advanced. I have a serious issue with sticking things out and I acknowledge that. It's something I'm determined to fix.
Since reading Fastlane over the weekend I've had an internal struggle about my next steps. I'm 40k in debt so I need to make money fast - and after reading the book I'd rather be putting my day hours into generating sales for my new idea, and not giving them to some job. That said - I'm so broke I can't even afford phone credit to do sales calls for my new business that I've today started a new job which takes up 3 days per week.
The plan is to get my first pay cheque and then use it to buy phone credit and then do all the cold calling necessary to generate enough money to validate the business.
I'd like to document the journey and use this forum as an accountability partner to taking action towards my goals. My added incentive is that I turn 23 in 2 days and I am in no way where I imagined I'd be when I was 21.
To your Success
Nathan
Name is Nathan, 22 and from Sydney Australia.
Brief history:
- started my first biz selling vitamins on ebay at 16 - made $12,000 profit in 3 months and then blew it on a girlfriend and other stupid stuff.
- over the next 5 years launched a really broad variety of startups. got seed funding from Angel investors for some and bootstrapped the others. brief summary of them:
- MuesliForMe - customise your own muesli mix (granola for americans) and we ship it monthly to your door. Subscription commerce model that was inspired by DollarShaveClub. Ran it for a year but struggled to acquire users and keep them. Sold my stake to other cofounders.
- EyeCrowd - allowed people to get surveys from 99 people on their new logos and marketing material within 10 minutes. Got seed funding and won a business pitch comp, went to Silicon Valley to raise Series A but failed. Gave up way too easily on this one - but also had no domain expertise at all.
- SuperTea - sourced a white tea supplier in Sri Lanka and validated demand for the value proposition of '3x the antioxidants of green tea'. Imported the tea and then sold through ecommerce. Got bored as hell really quickly and sold the business for a profit on gumtree (like craigslist for australia)
- AudioHighSchool - thought to create an online marketplace where high school student could download audio notes for their curriculum. the thinking being that kids spend so long on public transport and could be listening to the material as well as reading it. Built MVP of platform with a partner but never launched.
- The Sandwich Hero - late last year started a sandwich lunch delivery business. We wore superhero costumes when we delivered sandwiches to offices which resulted in great PR and word of mouth growth. Got to 500 subscribers of our daily lunch menu email. Couldn't scale the logistics of delivering in a small window to so many people over a wide area and still make profit - so we decided to open a shop. Invested over 50k of my personal and friends/family - went broke within 3 months. Sold the shop a few weeks ago and now working on my next project.
There's about 10 other businesses I've had that I won't bother explaining - they never advanced. I have a serious issue with sticking things out and I acknowledge that. It's something I'm determined to fix.
Since reading Fastlane over the weekend I've had an internal struggle about my next steps. I'm 40k in debt so I need to make money fast - and after reading the book I'd rather be putting my day hours into generating sales for my new idea, and not giving them to some job. That said - I'm so broke I can't even afford phone credit to do sales calls for my new business that I've today started a new job which takes up 3 days per week.
The plan is to get my first pay cheque and then use it to buy phone credit and then do all the cold calling necessary to generate enough money to validate the business.
I'd like to document the journey and use this forum as an accountability partner to taking action towards my goals. My added incentive is that I turn 23 in 2 days and I am in no way where I imagined I'd be when I was 21.
To your Success
Nathan
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