Success has a lot to do with your sense of being Find out how to train yourself to make money and stay in tune with your mind, body and soul
So first off, let me make very clear why I’m writing this post: I’ve been a long-time lurker on r/entrepreneur for the past couple years, and like many people, I’m tired of people over-thinking, over-analyzing, and trying SO HARD to copy the successes of others that they spend all of their time reading, analyzing, and researching - and none of their time actually implementing.
Who Am I?
No one special. I’m a long-time lurker and hustler who wants to see less comments containing negativity and excuses, and more posts about people in-the-trenches, getting s#*t done. I cofounded a mildly successful importing startup with a fellow redditor about a year and a half ago, which we recently sold for mid 5-figures, and I work full time as a PPC consultant. While work is good, like most consultants I hate being tied to my work (while I don’t charge hourly, I still have to put in the time to generate the results for my clients), and the idea of running a productized, recurring-revenue based business is highly appealing to me. Be that as it may, between my clients and fiancee, I only have a few hours of free time each day, and so I’m following a strategy of placing little, focused bets.
This was the first of such bets.
How’d I Get The Idea
As much as I hate to say it, I got the idea from Gary Vaynerchuk.
I know, I cringe at the name too.
The thing about most of these so-called marketing “gurus” is - most of them are nothing but complete BS (not saying Gary is, FYI). Take a look at where the majority of their revenue is coming from...almost ALL of them make their money from telling other people how to make money marketing. Which means it is literally their job to crank out content day-after-day for wantrepreneurs and wannabe marketers to consume, until the young wantrepreneur is so confused by all of the options and funnels and marketing software, that they have no idea where to turn, and finally they just collapse and throw their credit card at a $1,000 course, only to find it’s all the same content the marketer was giving away for free.
I’d be lying if I said a young averagejo hadn’t made this mistake before.
It’s all a giant circlejerk, and it fucking disgusts me. Read ONE of u/localcasestudy ‘s case studies, and you will literally be set for your first 6 months. Seriously. You can pick anything else up as you go, and if your business gets to a point where it’s ready to scale and you’re ready to invest in paid traffic..you’re better off hiring that out anyways.
BUT!
All that aside, I randomly stumbled upon a FB video in which Gary Vaynerchuk pretty much calls an audience member out at a conference on his BS (this guy was claiming he could teach 23 year olds to make 32 million a year working from home...lol).
I had respect for the way Gary handled the dude, so decided to snoop around on his website to see what he was about (I’m slightly obsessed with figuring out where people come from...the business models behind their lives, if you will).
I stumbled upon a few posts where Gary wrote about the emerging importance of Snapchat as a social media channel, and how it’s recently launched the ability for individuals to upload their own custom Snapchat geofilters. The cynicist in me did a little more digging to find out Gary is an early investor in Snapchat...so the rah-rah articles checked out, and I pretty much wrote them off.
But then something in my head clicked. I knew that Snapchat has THE highest engagement rating of any social media platform among teens and millennials, and that the average Snapchat user opens the app well over a dozen times per day.
I also realized that being able to upload custom geofilters would appeal to 2 types of people: Average people hosting parties (or weddings!), and any local business that caters to the 18-28 year old crowd (Read: Bars, restaurants, night clubs, and gyms).
I thought there had to be a catch, so I grabbed the first png with a transparent background I could find and uploaded it to Snapchat to see what the pricing would actually be to upload a filter. When it asked me to select the time and area for the geofilter to appear, I chose 4 hours in downtown LA over 3 city blocks...and the price came out to be just $35.
DAMN!
I thought I was on to something, but I wanted to be sure. I’m hypothesizing that medium-term, the only profitability that’s going to be found in this market (if any) is going to be in the B2B market. Personalized wedding filters are going to be a race to the bottom like anything else in the consumer market.
BUT, I figured that it would take a decent amount of education before the average main street business owner would see the value in shelling out cash for a custom Snapchat design, whereas the average 20-something bride-to-be would see the value instantly. So I decided to test the business concept in the consumer wedding market first. Before I allowed myself to get too excited, I did about 30 minutes of market research. A quick Google Search turned up no custom snapchat-filter designers organically, and only a couple paid ads (which were god-awful...if I ever scale up to paid traffic, I will be crushing you. You know who you are).
I checked out Etsy, and saw a few designers, but again - poor quality, and even worse marketing.
I was in business.
I set myself a goal. If I could set up shop and make a sale in 7 days, I’d consider the concept at least worth pursuing, though I still had major doubts about the longevity of the business for more than a few months.
And then there was my final problem: I have no design skills whatsoever.
How I Did It
Fortunately, I knew that decent design work could be outsourced for cheap. I also had stayed in touch with an outstanding design student from California I’d hired for work (found him on Upwork, believe it or not) with my previous startup. I asked him how much he’d charge me for a wedding design Snapchat filter template (making it easy for me to edit it in Illustrator to customize the names and wedding date of whoever ordered), and he quoted me at $5. AWESOME.
I had him mock me up 4 different filter designs, and the first thing I did was find an iPhone mockup image to insert the filters in (to make it look like the filter is actually on the phone screen). Something like this
I then spent FAR too many hours f#ckng around in Photoshop trying to get images to line up, and image sizes correct for uploading to Etsy. Seriously, over the course of the whole project, I spent 17 hours...and literally 9 of those hours were spent in photoshop and other entry-level design-related tasks. Fortunately, I eventually stumbled upon Canva, which made me feel like less of a moron..but regardless. Graphic design is HARD, man! I manage over $250k in ad spend per month, I juggle 30MB spreadsheets in my sleep, but it blows my mind how you graphic designers out there make things look so good. Mad respect.
Anyways, I finally had my products to sell. 4 filters that looked better than the competition. Now I just had to get it in front of some eyeballs.
For the purposes of this test, I decided Etsy was where I was going to launch my products as a test. After coming up with a cute little name and throwing up a picture of my fiancee as my shop image (she’s gorgeous, who wouldn’t want to buy from her??) I hammered out some item descriptions and a quick 3-step process buyers should follow to get their filter customized, and I waited.
Now, let me stress that these item descriptions were terrible. So bad. I finally went back after my second sale and edited them, and I literally felt embarrassed for myself.
The average wantrepreneur would get stuck at this point, worried about writing the highest-converting copy, and where to place the CTA (that’s what all the gurus say after all!).
Here’s the thing about all that, though: Optimizing your copy, landing page optimization...all that is great, but it only works as a percentage.
If you do ALL the optimizations PERFECTLY well, you might hit a sweet spot and see….a 15% conversion rate increase. Now, if you are a website seeing 10,000 qualified leads per month, this is a meaningful number. Optimize Away!
But as a complete newbie business with zero traffic...guess how much 15% of 0 is?
0!
Moral of the story: Don’t overthink things. Get something up that is good enough to get the job done and better than the competition, but it doesn’t need to be any better than that.
So I’d posted my products and shitty copy...now it was just a matter of waiting for the sale.
The Sale
2 days later, my first sale hit my inbox. Hurray! $27! Counting hourly profitability, I was officially at pay-parity with a child in a Chinese sweatshop.
BUT, I had determined that there was at least ONE person out there interested in buying these. However, I also noticed that over 4 new competitors had already jumped into the Custom Snapchat Filter market on Etsy in the time it had taken me to launch! I quickly saw Etsy becoming a race to the bottom, so I decided to test expanding into other channels.
I built out a rudimentary Shopify website (again, wasting FAR more time than necessary on basic graphic design BS...there HAS to be a better way!) Set up FB targeting to women between the ages of 20 and 30, with interests in weddings, engagements, wedding rings, wedding ideas, etc, and let some FB ads fly at $20 per day. So far after 2 days FB tells me I’ve had 80 clicks to my website, but no conversions. This is less than encouraging. However, I DID receive a sale for a custom filter on Etsy during this time, bringing my total revenue after 11 days (with 17ish hours of work) up to $94!
Moving Forward
As I mentioned before, I ultimately feel that the only profitability in this market is going to be in the B2B world, and it’s only a matter of time before that becomes a race to the bottom as well, so at this point I’m pausing any paid traffic tests for consumer weddings outside of Etsy.
I think that Snapchat geofilters are a GREAT idea for any local restaurants or bars (imagine putting a custom Snapchat filter that advertises 2fer beers over the bar of your competitor…) I’ve been in talks with several owners of bars in my city, and they’ve all expressed interest in having filters designed in the near future. After speaking with them in-depth, I think I’ve seen a more sustainable long-term pivot for my little test, but need to do a bit more thinking on that.
TL;DR
This was a pretty long post, but the moral of the story is this: it doesn’t take a great idea, or even an original idea - AT ALL - to take action and make some things happen. Is this project going to turn into an income-replacing business? No. Is it even sustainable? Probably not. But I took action with virtually zero planning, and was able to generate a profit in a little over a week with just a couple hours of work each day.
Stop overthinking things.
In the words of my boy Shia, Just Fucking Do It!
Queston For You Guys
Seriously though, does anyone else struggle with doing the entry-level design work (super simple image tweaks and edits), that doesn’t warrant paying a professional graphic-designer, but just takes too damn long when you try to do it yourself? What do you guys do to combat this? Or am I just an asshole who needs to take a course on photoshop and web design? I need some recommendations!!
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