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Lessons learned while starting an online business (grassweb.com.au)
105 points by KatRid on Dec 3, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 17 comments



Interesting and well written. I like that the author broke the process down into what seems like something simple and repeatable. I would be interested to see the specific price breakdown along with actual hours spent on each step.

Not sure why there's so much hate here, I don't know that selling animal silicon bracelets is any less noble than most of the social startups out there. At least the article wasn't about how he resold buyers shipping information and product purchase history to Walmart...


The best part about it was predicting demand for something that hasn't plateaued in Australia yet, based on other, established, markets.

This is essentially how Rocket VC etc make their money.


can you provide link to Rocket, not familiar..


https://www.rocket-internet.com/


thanks - sorry I forgot to include the link.


The article stated the total cost for the goods and shipping to Australia was $8000 and that they needed to sell 500-600 items to be profitable.

$8000 / 600 = $13.33 profit per item

At the end of the article they stated that they sold about 2700, which would be a profit of

2700 * $13.33 - $8000 = $28000


Interesting, thanks.

Then the real question becomes how much time did he invest into the whole thing and what was the resulting hourly rate.


> dealing with suppliers also only a couple of hours all up

I assume the extent of their product design involved shipping a couple of the kits from the USA to the Chinese supplier and saying "make one of these." I know that's not that uncommon, but still... it just feels a bit unsavory to me. And of course opens them up to all kinds of legal liability with the USA company over IP.


More likely, they were already being made in China, he just went on alibaba and found them there


Coupled with purposeful design changes, this sounds like competition to me.


I did a similar thing a few years ago. Anti snoring mouthpieces like this [0] cost $1-3 on alibaba for 500 moq. They sell for $60-70 branded (just search "anti snoring mouthpiece" and look at adwords results), but every product is the exact same piece of moldable rubber. On ebay, generic versions sell for $10-15. If you buy a branded version, you are getting ripped off in exchange for a nice package, an expensive advertising campaign, and a fancy stick to hold the mouthpiece in the boiling water.

I bought a bunch on alibaba, sold on ebay with a nice template, made a profit ($15 > $3). Easy $1k in a few months. Issue was slow velocity on ebay (~1 sale per day).

I imagine this could be replicated in a lot of verticals. The only work it required was printing out instructions, buying envelopes, and stuffing the mouthpieces into the envelopes when I got a new order.

Here's a great forum thread on doing this. [1]

[0] http://goo.gl/QiUgIA

[1] http://www.wickedfire.com/products-and-merchants/86310-guide...


I love stories like this. You can read similar tales in book form in "Four Hour Work Week" with much more detail (including links) on setting up an online business.


So what happened with the unsold inventory?

Maybe you could donate it to a children's home or a school or something?


To paraphrase:

- I want to make money selling anything no matter how meaningless, animal silicon bracelets will do, I really don't care.

- Get a cheap supplier in China and pay a broke student to redesign the box.

- Order thousands of said items and sell on eBay.

Did I miss anything?


To come out profitable selling anything online is a lot harder than it looks. Really don't appreciate this comment on HN.


- Sell only about half of them.

- Use your profit to dispose of the remaining stock.


... profit?




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