But it is about as bad as it gets. I’ll tell you about another one. This one does not revolve around real estate, but still..
Back in 2010 I decided to try a new drop-ship system that allowed me to sell scarfs in a webshop without keeping an inventory. All I had to do was to sell a product and then provide the Chinese manufacturers with a shipping address.
I set about hiring some programmers to help me build the webshop and began inserting the thousands of products I wanted to sell. I had no money and didn’t want to get a job, so tons of time on my hands for a project like this.
After about two months of work it was done. And it looked great :) Total cost wasn’t more than 1 000 US and for that I got a Webshop with several thousand items. A bargain.
Then came the hard times. As it was all there I realized I didn’t know anything about marketing of a website like this. The old saying “Build it and they will come” didn’t really seem to work.
To solve my issues I started researching and studying online marketing. I read everything I could come across and it eventually got me to a place where I sort of knew what to do. After using some of my new knowledge I finally broke through. A sale! The first sale!!
I took the customers information and went to the Chinese manufacturer homepage where I was supposed to enter the details to finish the transaction. Once there I logged in to the account and saw this: “After experiencing some issues with our Drop-Ship agreements we have decided to stop working with that system. Sorry.”.
And that was it. In total I spent three months of work and 1 000 US to get one sale that I then couldn’t process. Kind of painful.
Lessons learned?
Our time is only worth what the alternatives are. In order to waste time, there must be something better that we would have been doing instead. Never count the hours.
I suppose an initial step to becoming an entrepreneur is being willing to spend time on something that might or might not give you anything back. To me it feels like most people won’t do anything unless they know they will get their $30 an hour.
Let’s say you offer someone to work for one hour with a 50% chance of making $ 10 000. Believe it or not, but most people would turn it down because they are scared of working for ONE hour without getting paid.
In the end it feels like I came out of this with more real business knowledge than I would have gathered if I were to spend the same amount of time in school.
