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The following is a reverse-chronological timeline of my entrepreneurial endeavours in 2021.
September – November 2021: Business Theorycrafting
Following Triumph of Modern Man, I spent a few months theorising and playing around with different business ideas. I was learning about online business, about things like funnels, upsells, niches, sub-niches, and the like. I was getting fully settled into my job (having passed probation and being offered a fulltime contract) while starting to look for a place of my own to rent. As such, I didn’t have much time to dedicate to a business, which is why I was learning.
July – November 2021: Random Redbubble Print On Demand
Print On Demand (POD) is a business model that’s great for creative people. I’ve found it to be a nice source of passive income.
The premise is simple: you create a design to go on a product (think t-shirts, mugs, laptop cases, etc) and upload it to a site such as Redbubble. When someone wants to buy a product with your design, they’ll order the product through Redbubble. Redbubble will then deal with the manufacturing – costs, management, etc. They print the design onto a product when it is requested; they Print On Demand.
I had around 200 designs. There are a lot of quotes from my favourite book series, The Stormlight Archive, as well as some abstract designs and other random illustrations.
And that is unfortunately how that business ended. I believe I was unlawfully using copyrighted logos from that series, and as such, that Redbubble account was closed. Which was a shame, because it was a nice steady source of income.
I did later start a new store though. I learned that you have to be careful with trademarks and copyright, and only upload designs that you’ve fully created yourself.
You can find my (current) Redbubble shop here.
April – September 2022: Triumph Of Modern Man
Triumph Of Modern Man was an online blog helping men to overcome an addiction to pornography. This is something I’ve personally struggled with in the past, and so I feel a strong sense of duty to help others in a similar position. Porn addiction
Unfortunately, due to legal issues, I had to close the business. Part of my growth strategy was to use the keyword ‘NoFap‘ – perhaps the most popular porn addiction recovery community – for SEO and other marketing. I am not allowed to legally do this. I cannot mention that name in my products or blog posts with the intention of making a profit.
That’s the short story. Instead, I have integrated the content from Triumph Of Modern Man into this site. I still want to help as many dudes as possible, but now with more care surrounding legal issues. The info products that I’ve created to help overcome porn addiction are still available, but now without the mention of NoFap. I will continue to share my thoughts on advice on this topic through this site.
For those interested in porn addiction and recovery, Your Brain On Porn is an incredible resource.
Here’s a link to all of my porn addiction recovery content.
May – July 2021: Bournemouth Web Hosting
For a few months, I was looking into ways to earn decent passive income from upfront work. One of the methods I stumbled across was reseller web hosting. Essentially, you purchase white label web hosting and can sell it as your own. Intrigued, I gave it a shot. Here’s how it worked.
First, I bought a reseller hosting plan. Then I decided a niche (usually recommended as an area) – Bournemouth, the place I was living, and hosting for small businesses. I then made a website to promote the business.
From there, I set up a plan and started writing a script for cold outreach. Cold outreach and sales was the main learning from this side hustle. At my job, I was working with the sales guys who were doing cold outreach of their own. I asked for some help on writing a call script, and they sent a template which I tweaked.
Once everything was in place, the hard part began – actually acquiring clients. My strategy was pretty simple – I’d use my skill in website building and design to create them a website for free, with the catch that they’d host it on my servers. I had two methods of cold outreach – Facebook and via phone. The latter was terrifying.
Actually picking up the phone and trying to sell someone something they don’t really need… that was a real challenge. Especially for an introvert. It was super difficult to pick up the phone, to hit the call button, but I gave it a shot. Uncomfortable things help you to grow.
Surprisingly, nobody took it up. Well, I say surprisingly – I now realise that cold outreach relies heavily on numbers. I only reached out to about a dozen businesses, only a handful of which I spoke to.
So yeah, in short it was a useful learning experience that I’m happy to have tried.
April – May 2021: Chess Cheat Sheets
Early in 2021, I was playing a lot of chess. I had time to spare and thought it was a ‘positive’ game that was good for your brain. Let’s just ignore the many hours of time I spent playing and not building an actual business…
See, chess is a complicated game. Many games start very similarly and then progress to unique board states. The opening, and how you respond to your opponent’s opening, almost always determines who will win the game.
One day, while playing an opening, my entrepreneurial spirit had the idea of creating PDF info-product versions of the different openings in the game. The intention was that when a person is playing, instead of having to learn every single move of every opening in the game (which is really the only way you get good at chess, aside from learning to think – quickly – ahead), they could quickly open up a PDF for that specific opening and know the best moves played by Grandmasters for that exact board state.
If a player could open like a Grandmaster, then their chances of winning were much higher. With Chess Cheat Sheets, they could make that happen.
So I made a handful of these cheat sheets and started selling them… and got no initial sales. I learned many lessons from this business, too many to go into depth here. Some of which include:
- Solve a problem that people actually have and know they have
- Market in channels that your ideal customer actually uses, rather than the channels that you use
- Fit your marketing strategy to the customer. Forcing your customer to a marketing strategy does not work. Rather adapt your strategy to them.
Ultimately, it had – has – potential, but I lost interest in the game and didn’t want to invest more time and money into growing it. It’s a really good idea, yet without the interest in the game, I had no motivation to build an audience around the game, and thus nobody to promote to.
So while I don’t actively work on the business any more, I keep them available in an Etsy store, which you can find here.
Interestingly, in the time since creation, I’ve made a decent bit of change from Chess Cheat Sheets. I enabled Etsy Ads and I’ll get random sales, totalling around £90 as of September 22, before I started running offsite Google ads.
February – April 2021: Dropshipping
Ahh… another return to dropshipping. I’ve tried this business model a handful of times now, to no success every time. The difference this time was I convinced myself that it perfectly fit my skills. I’ve got a creative media background which is great for ads, I’d been doing a lot of copywriting work which is great for conversions, and I’d learned a lot about online business from my months of self-employment with The Growing Graduate.
Dropshipping, for those who don’t know, is a business model where you never touch the physical product. In the mainstream, recognised through all of the YouTubers who share videos like ‘How I made 6 figures a week with dropshipping’, you use Shopify and sell products that are manufactured in China, on sites such as Alibaba or AliExpress.
Such products are made for cheap, often £3 or less, and promoted in your Shopify store for a significant markup. You keep the difference as gross profit.
The way most dropshippers drive traffic is through Facebook ads. When a product is sold in your store, you ‘fulfil’ the order by purchasing it on an outsourced site such as the ones mentioned earlier. Then, it’s sent directly to your customer using the details they provided (albeit very slowly, usually several weeks, because it’s coming from China). Your advertising costs are taken from the markup of sales, resulting in net profit.
So anyway, I thought I’d give it another shot. This time, I’d do some learning. I completed another online course and refreshed myself on the previous course I took, and followed the relevant steps.
I picked out a cool niche that appeared to be selling. I created a name, a logo, and a website – Avalon Lighters (I thought it was a cool name). I picked out products to sell and launched some Facebook ads. I was so confident with it that I thought I could run two dropshipping businesses at once. So I did the same again, this time for a one-product store – Ear Wax Spiral.
And after spending a hundred or so pounds with no sales, I pulled the plug on Avalon Lighters. Halfway through that process, I realised that I wasn’t legally allowed to promote certain products for sale on Facebook – particularly those promoting tobacco usage. Not a problem, we still had the second store.
So, undeterred, I kept a few ads running. This time with a different strategy – offering the product for free with the buyer only paying shipping costs. It was a strategy some YouTuber shared, and it couldn’t hurt to at least try it.
And it worked! …Somewhat. Over the month or so that the business was up, I had 3 sales. It was something, even if it was much less than the cost of ads. I received a few enquiries about how long the order was taking (consumers expect fast delivery in this age of Amazon Prime and next-day delivery), and realised that dropshipping really isn’t a good model.
In the end, I decided that it wasn’t worth pursuing, and told myself I’m done with this kind of dropshipping. So while outsourcing is a great opportunity, and Print on Demand uses similar principles, dropshipping is a dead business model.