Transcription
When I was 17, I started an online business that ended up doing over a million dollars in sales its first year, from complete scrap. So, in this video, I want to break down exactly how all of that ended up happening, as well as how to go about recreating that differently if I were in the same position today. Right, so I made a video about two years ago, when I first hit a hundred thousand subscribers, talking about how I went from free school lunch programs to hitting my first hundred thousand dollar month in profit with Econ.
Now, for the sake of time, I kind of had to speed through that whole entire story to cover like eight years of finessing. I think the initial success stage is really important and where all the lessons were, so I want to focus this video on that, as well as go into more detail, like what kind of products actually sold. So we'll skip through all of my initial hustles of selling candy, flipping all kinds of different things, trying out Fiverr, working different jobs, and just focus on the one business that I started in September of 2013.
At this point, I was 12 years old and started my first Instagram theme page. I was on Instagram and started seeing these huge repost pages getting a ton of followers, growing an audience, selling merch, and I thought it was really cool. I kind of saw it as a game. So, on September 2nd of 2013, at 12 years old, I started a Bible quotes and verses repost type page, which would then go on to get a couple thousand followers. Now remember that date because it actually plays kind of some significance later on in the story, but I didn't really get anywhere with that page. And about a year later, when I turned 13, I started a text post meme page. This was a meme format that was really starting to pop off in 2014, but that page didn't really get anywhere either; got like a couple hundred followers on it.
Around this time, I was trying out starting a few different types of pages, and one of those pages was a nature photography page. That one actually kind of stuck, and I grinded on it from 2014 all the way up to mid-2016. And it really was a grind because my main strategy at that point was to follow and unfollow people. So I was sitting there for two years on a daily basis, reposting posts, following and unfollowing people, and I did that all the way up to 7,000 followers. At which point, in October of 2016, I just got tired of doing that, I quit and sold that page for like a hundred bucks to a friend. Yes, you can say my company got bought out; my big three-figure exit. But that was a cool like two and a half years of work for a hundred bucks.
But it doesn't end there, because after a two-month break, my persistence got the best of me, and on December 12th of 2016, I was back on the Instagram hustle, hungrier than ever. I started another nature photography page with the same name, but at this point, I'm three years deep into the game, so I knew a thing or two. So I was able to grind that page past 10,000 followers fairly quickly, which qualified me to join Shoutcart, which is a service that connected people who own Instagram pages to people who wanted to buy ads on Instagram pages. I had around 12,000 followers and almost exactly a year after I first started the page, on October 29th, 2017, I got my first shout-out order. It was a two-hour post for $15. After fees, I got like $12. I haven't pulled up here; it was for this free plus shipping dropshipping store selling the travel cosmetic bags that were popping at that time. I put up the post, got paid, and from here things actually really started moving.
The next few months, I continued getting more and more orders. Some people were promoting products; some people were just looking for a shout-out for the photography page, but I got to a point where I was charging a cool $40 for a post. At which point, I decided to aggressively scale; started a ton of different pages in a bunch of different niches—I'm talking fitness, health, cards, new meme formats, you name it—I was posting on all these pages daily using my follow-unfollow tactics for months, but none of them really took off because I was still trying to brute force my way to getting some followers. I wasn't really trying or implementing anything; I was working hard but definitely not smart. However, I was still selling ads on my nature page, and at this point, the dots in my head really started to connect. Everything kind of changed when I found YouTube channels talking about Instagram growth as well as dropshipping. I finally realized what all these ads that I was getting paid to post for the last few months were doing, and that I too could sell products directly from a supplier without handling the shipping.
I wanted, initially, my plan was to sell nature-themed jewelry on my nature page, but I kept learning, doing more product research, and I stumbled upon a more interesting product. I saw ads being posted for this lash enhancement serum. If you're a guy or you're hearing about this for the first time, it might sound a little out there, a little crazy, but I assure you this is a big thing in the beauty space; there's huge companies in Sephora selling their serums for like hundreds of dollars. How else do you think I got these long lashes? So, on January 31st, 2018, I opened my first Shopify store, which would go on to change the entire course of my life. For the next few days, I had my 17th birthday. I don't encourage this, but I actually quit my retail job during those first few days because I had a shift interfering with when I wanted to work on my store, and I was just so on fire for this new scheme that I learned. I whipped up this exact advertisement that'll play over the screen; I built up the store, paid some beauty pages to put my ad up, and with that, I was live. And on February 5th, 2018, about 30 minutes after my paid ad went live, I got an order for one unit of eyelash serum for $14.99—my first ever dropshipping sale. I was so hyped; my mind was racing because I realized that all I had to do was get a couple sales from each shout-out in order to profit. So I ordered more shout-outs, got more sales, getting to about $500 worth of sales within the first couple of weeks. But after that initial excitement, we're off, and I did some math in my notebook; I realized I wasn't actually making money after you count everything up; I was coming out—it's about to break even. So I stopped risking it on the paid Instagram shout-outs and closed down shop, but I walked away knowing that dropshipping really works and that if I didn't have to pay all those people to post my ads, all that money would go into my pocket.
So, with the closing down of my first dropshipping store, I started a bunch of makeup pages. This was like peak James Charles Instagram makeup era; videos were now getting more traction on Instagram than before; there's now Instagram growth discussion videos on YouTube that I was watching. So I really started growing; in a sense, I was in the right place at the right time, but that was five years after I first got into this business. At this point, I was finishing up high school on some very sus behavior, buying privacy screen protectors so I wouldn't be caught lacking, reposting makeup videos in the middle of class. Those pages really started growing, and it got to a point where people were now reaching out to me to put up ads for their dropshipping beauty products.
Now you might be thinking that's dumb; why would I saturate my pages with all these dropshipping ads when I myself planned on using them to dropship? Well, first off, I could really use the money, but also I was kind of sneaky about it; I was, in a way, getting paid to test product. I started accepting money for these different shout-outs and seeing how different products and different advertisements perform. Now this alone got me to a point where, in June of 2018, I made about $500 from just posting ads on my pages. I continued to grow and start new pages, so next month in July, I made a thousand; August, 2000, from again just selling shout-outs on my now network of Instagram makeup pages. But at this point, I was just so tired of selling ads; it was kind of a nightmare. I'm posting like five times a day on a bunch of different pages, negotiating deals on each of these pages; I'm trying to upsell them on other pages; people bail; people try to scam you; you get a plan a bunch of different pages and ads on them for like weeks in advance. I was also taking a summer semester in college and working two jobs at that time, so I figured I'm gonna stop and get back to why I really started these pages—to drop ship.
So, in August of 2018, I started asking around, talking to the people who bought ads for me, talking about, "Hey, how did that ad perform? Did you have a good experience? Did you get any sales?" And I would then use that info to try to find a winning product. So I built up a store around a product that I saw from a repeat customer; it was this random makeup box that got them a few sales. I had the store built; I was getting to launch my second ever attempt at dropshipping when I randomly stumbled on a product that I've never seen before from a big brand that was now starting to use Instagram theme pages for ads. And with my experience at that point, I instantly figured, "Whoa, this is a product that could definitely work again." It was like a fire inside of me that I had to execute on this right now. So I scrapped that whole makeup box idea, created a new product page on the same beauty store overnight, posted an ad on one of my makeup pages, and on September 2nd, 2018, it all started to pay off.
It's honestly nuts because, if you remember, five years ago on that same exact day, September 2nd, I put up my first Instagram theme page. That product that I was starting to sell was the teeth whitening pen, which are all over Target now; they're in stores everywhere. Back then, it was completely new. So, on my first day of selling this product, my advertisements hit the explore page, and on September 2nd, I did $531 in sales—the first day ever selling this product. On the days that followed, I reposted the ad on some of my other pages; I kept cycling the ads through all of my different pages; they kept blowing up, hitting the explore page where new people could see the ads. So that first month of September 2018, I did over $33,000 in sales. At that point, I directed, filmed, and edited some of my own ads using some friends as actors, and those ads did really well. I also started paying a bunch of other people's pages to put up my ads, and within three months, by the end of November, the store hit a hundred thousand dollars inside. I remember exactly when this happened; I was in college, in between classes, eating my lunch with my Shopify dashboard in front of me when I hit that magical six-figure number.
At this point, I made a lot of noise; my ads were everywhere. Chances are, if you were into makeup and you'd go on your explore page, there'd be multiple posts on the same screen of my app. The friends I used in my ad started getting recognized in real life from the ad, but all of that attention meant that other people saw the product, hopped on, started selling it themselves, and it all kind of came crashing down when one of the biggest, most trusted YouTube dropshippers of the time made like a 20-minute video breaking down my store specifically. So then everybody started selling these pens, and the product kind of dried out, which was fine because at that point, I had my proof of concept; I knew this works. So I had the motivation to go out, find other products; I started using Facebook ads and eventually scaled this store alone within the first year to over a million dollars in sales. The rest of the story we're going to save for the Netflix special.
But now the question becomes, is this possible too? I don't know if you could do exactly what I did on Instagram today, maybe through Instagram Reels; that's kind of intense. However, I would honestly argue that right now it's easier to start with dropshipping than it was when I started, all thanks to TikTok. I was starting out today and I had some money to start spending on ads off rip, no doubt about it; I would start dropshipping using paid TikTok. I updated my dropshipping course a few months ago to mainly focus on TikTok ads, and the results that people started sending me is crazy. I'm seeing more people than ever have their first dropshipping success thanks to how easy TikTok ads are right now. I have that course linked in the description. But let's say you don't have a few hundred dollars to start spending on ads right now; there is a more guerrilla marketing approach to TikTok where you can spend more time than you would money, similar to how I did what starting my own theme pages. Find a winning product right now, build a store for it, order it to your home, start making completely free videos and posting it on TikTok, and those ads can pop off organically. It is more sporadic and less consistent than paid TikTok ads, but there's people right now making six figures by just filming TikToks of eye-catching products.
But I think the overarching theme in my personal story is persistence. Honestly, I believe if you pick any proven business model and spend enough time learning and trying it out, it's kind of only a matter of time before you have some level of success with it. Most people won't because they'll give up after the first one or two attempts, but it's not like I'm super smart or better than anyone watching this video, right? All it came down to for me was persistence. If anyone spent five years working towards something, they'd likely achieve some level of success with it. But I don't want to scare anyone off; with the resources available today, it probably wouldn't take five years. But anyways, hope you guys enjoyed this video and have an amazing rest of your day. Peace.