28/12/2023
Zero money or not much money?
I started a business that made me a good 6 figure income for many years. I that business started with £600 I borrowed from my mum. I wrote a longer post about it if you go through my history.
However, briefly, aged 31 I had to move home with my parents having previously been quite successful. This was not great. I had to have some knee surgery and knew I would be in bed for months. I’d always loved tea, and bought small amounts for myself, but decided to go on Alibaba and find a tea supplier. I found one in Taiwan, who could sell me really high quality Chinese and Taiwanese teas, and they would pack it for me in 25g bags.
I began listing this on eBay. It didn’t sell. I kept reducing my prices. It still didn’t sell. I knew my product was excellent so eventually I wrote more bullish adverts and hugely raised the prices. It began to sell.
My eBay sales were strong but not strong enough to be able to afford a Shopify site so I learned how to make my own website. Whenever I needed to do something SEO, PPC, product photos etc, I had to figure it out myself. This was a decade ago so competition wasn’t quite so tough but you can still bootstrap things. Anyway, I slowly built up that brand into a well respected and successful artisan tea brand.
I then created a lifestyle tea which became a pioneering brand for a whole category. This made me a lot of money and eventually I was able to sell that brand, just as the sales were starting to plummet as the market was ridiculously saturated (I paid pennies for PPC when I stated, this had risen to pounds).
It’s definitely possible to still build up businesses if you’re willing to work however, I made many sacrifices which I now realise weren’t always worth it - I lived with my parents, even after I could afford to leave, simply so I could reinvest in my business. I didn’t take a single day off for 6 years and had a 1 week holiday (during which I worked). I drank obscenely heavily. It was problematic.
If you have zero money, sell things on eBay. People love to hate on eBay and criticise it however, you can learn a lot about writing compelling copy and taking good product pictures. It’s astonishing how much money people miss out on by writing no / bad descriptions or bad images (a modern phone can take professional quality images if you work at it - again, I sold hundreds of thousands of units of product with photos I took on an iPhone 3 or 4).
People make excuses, or claim you need lots, you don’t, you just need to work hard.
Don’t worry about feeling like you’ve lost your spark. I have a great life. I live in a beautiful house, have two amazing kids, and am sometimes proud of what I’ve achieved in the past. Yet, I still wake up most days with anxiety, tell myself I’m the stupidest person alive, question why I have wasted my life, and am constantly filled with imposter syndrome. However, after about 10 years of daily meditation (which I’d recommend) I can generally acknowledge those feeling and just get on with what I need to do to achieve my goals.
Even when I’ve been super successful, I still felt like a fraud. Some people, at least appear, to be super calm and confident but who knows what’s going on inside their head. I’m not one of those people but, this is what has made me be successful in the past. These days I don’t try to hide it and this is good because I now no longer mask all my anxiety and sh*tness with alcohol!
