Welcome to Ghost Business 👻 Your weekly Tuesday email, where we turn $1 into thousands building these weird but simple side hustles

Dropped Drop Shipping

They finally got me… I know you’ve heard of it. It’s inescapable. Somehow there’s 15 year old youtubers breaking down how their making more than your doctor working 15 seconds a day.

They say all the good buzzwords; “earn while you sleep”, “little to no money starting”, “work from couch”. It’s enough to peak the interest for the strongest of minds.

It’s called Drop Shipping

In case you secured a super low interest mortgage for that rock you’re living under, here’s basically what drop shipping is:

• You buy stuff cheap/wholesale products online (likely through Alibaba)

• You market the stuff on social media

• You send the products to a shipping partner (to fulfill orders)

• You sell the products at a wild mark up

• Shipping partner sends goods and you make money in your sleep while orders come in

Simple enough, right?

I was finally seduced to try it out and see what the hype was about. The results surprised me.

The MVP (Getting your first customer)

Shooting fish in a barrel… This was almost too easy. I spent $30 getting a website on Shopify and $30 running ads on Facebook.

Hold up… I need to back this thing wayyyyy up.

First I had to decide what I wanted to sell. Baby products was the first to come to mind for a couple reasons:

1. I just had a baby

2. Easy to target demographic

3. People LOVE spending money on babies

So I looked on Alibaba for the cutest baby apparel that could make a grown man cry. I set up the online shopify store and facebook business page to run ads.

Altogether I spent $60 on the store + ads.

I ran 6 sets of ads at $5 ea to test out messaging and images, the ones with the highest conversions would then get higher budgets.

Next I purchased plugins (~$15) so the order would come directly from the seller and not me, saving me time and needing to ship stuff myself.

I also set up an Etsy shop to get more orders.

So far I’ve spent about $75

Getting Your Next 100 Customers

More orders… Orders started coming in almost instantly. Not a ton but enough to start breaking even day one.

Sometimes you have to “pre-pay” for the products. Then move the funds received from the customers (in shopify) to your bank account and you keep the difference.

Ultimately this was a pretty easy gig. There was a few times customers asked about sizing and materials, but this could all be gathered from the wholesale account website.

The equation was simple. You try to earn more than you spend on marketing and product. And spend as much as you can on marketing. That’s it.

As you grow more so does your marketing spend. And then you’ll do campaigns like reach out to parent influencers and send them product.

Overall this is an easy way to make a few hundred to thousands of dollars per month with very little starting out.

Viability:

1 [building spaceships] 🚀 to 5 [easy peasy] 😊 

Taking candy from a baby… This is incredibly easy and now I see the reason people boast this so much. There’s a million tutorials on how to get this started and a ton of proven shipping partners overseas.

You can make hundreds to thousands working from home.

The downside is you HAVE to be on your marketing game and HAVE to respond to customer inquiries asap.

(As usual each business will have it’s own setbacks, and it’s all about the execution and consistency rather than just having the idea 😉)

It’s a great day to be great!

Love, Mike 👋