[Tracking] Lost the startup capital, but bought Tesla a year later

Quitting your job to start your own business and saying goodbye to stability

I quit my job and started freelancing in early 2018. The reasons are complicated and I won’t go into details here, but anyway, I gave up my job with an annual salary of over 100,000 yuan and started working on my own before I found a new job.

At that time, I was not sure about the direction of my business. E-commerce was actually just one of many attempts. With the mentality of giving it a try, I started Amazon in February 2018.

I was relatively lucky as I avoided domestic e-commerce platforms like Taobao at the beginning. If I had fallen into these platforms at that time, there might not have been any story of turning around later.

However, Amazon was still very difficult for me as a newbie at the time. I had to learn and master the product selection and listing as well as daily operations on my own. It was very difficult. Until the middle of 2018, my average daily sales were only around $70 to $80.

And because I was not familiar with it, some batches of goods were wrongly labeled and sent to the FBA warehouse. I didn't find this problem until the customer reported it, and then I had to find an overseas warehouse to change the label and re-stock it. Not only did I waste a lot of money, but the product was out of stock for nearly a month, and the ranking dropped to thousands of places in the small category.

Anyway, at the end of 2018, I did a rough calculation and found that of the 100,000 yuan my family supported me when I started my business, only about 20,000 yuan was left. Adding the value of the goods, which was less than 30,000 yuan, it was equivalent to not doing anything for a year and still losing half of it.

A turning point, a take-off

After taking stock at the end of the year, I found that I had suffered huge losses. I was actually very anxious inside. I also knew that this would not work, so I looked around for ways to improve and change.

At this time, the boss of a factory where I used to work mentioned Alice, saying that Alice was a great operator and was currently recruiting students, so he asked me to give it a try.

I had a pretty pleasant relationship with this boss, and I trusted his recommendation. Plus, I really thought I needed some systematic learning from scratch, so I contacted Alice and participated in the first incubation camp in January this year.

In this incubation camp, I think the biggest help to me is that it overturned many of my previous wrong operations and understandings. For example, when I wrote keywords before, I only referred to the words used by my peers and wrote all the words that I felt were related into the keywords and titles.

In the incubation camp, I learned Alice’s own keyword announcement, and only then did I realize the importance of subject and adverbs in the title, and that only by reasonably combining adjectives and subjects can a good title be written.

I can learn several revolutionary knowledge points like this every day. Combined with the practical exercises in the afternoon and homework in the evening, it can help me understand and apply them in practice very well.

After the incubation camp ended, several of us students formed a special group where we often communicated and helped each other. Soon, some classmates reported the good news in the group, and the effect of the course was very obvious.

My own account started to take off after I returned from the Chinese New Year. Around March, monthly sales doubled to around 8,000 US dollars.

Then I participated in the free Prime exclusive activities on Prime Day and this year’s Black Friday, and followed Teacher Alice’s instructions to run advertisements and improve rankings. During this year’s Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday, my highest single-day sales even reached more than 6,000 US dollars.

At the same time, monthly sales this month reached about 50,000 US dollars.

Now I can not only recoup my initial investment, I can even look forward to achieving higher sales next year. Changing cars also gives myself a motivation and incentive with the monthly car loan.

I am just one of the thousands of ordinary small sellers. From my perspective, Amazon is far from being a place where there is no money to be made. I may have thought so in the past, but now I think Amazon is still a good choice if you find the right product and the right way.

PS. Students who need to join our seller communication group can also scan and private message me to add you to the group