Learn from my mistakes Part 1

When you see opportunity you quickly grab it by its balls (or trump's version). That is how I looked at things when I wanted to start a teespring's version of selling customized merchandise in India. I was playing around with teespring platform back then, selling tshirts in the US and I was so excited about doing it in India before others catch up. I did all my market research on how to set things up and found out source codes that can help me build teespring like interface quickly. I had a very little money saved up from my previous job and I decided to invest everything into this little project. Quickly bought the source code and found a developer who could customize and build it further. Because the source code I acquired was built on zend framework it was a little difficult to find a guy with expertise on zend, who also fits in my budget. Hybrid entrepreneur: Once I set things in motion it was consuming much time to put it all together because developer guy I hired was not giving me desired output on time. Teefry.com domain name was registered, functional website layout was built and hosted on a private server. Once all the money was spent up just for developing a decent looking website (around 1.5 lakhs) I realized this project is not moving an inch without enough money. Either I should raise funds through VC or bring in my own money to support the venture. I was not looking at things from an entrepreneur's standpoint..I was just a digital marketer and my views and calculations were simply based on that. I have gone cash negative several times before and this was one such scenario. No more cash was left in my bank account and I had no incoming cashflow too. Even credit card balance were running low so my situation forced me to pause the project and quickly find a cash-cow that can support it. Though I had a list of things to make quick money, I realized, if it is tshirt business I am looking to build, that is where I am making my money from. Anything else will just be a distraction from this project so I decided to make teespring model work for me. Facebook marketing was my strength and a little bit of photoshop designing skill I developed over time helped me design for tshirts. Few successful campaign gave me momentum..soon I found a winner campaign and that payed my debts. Campaigns are not evergreen, they work for a month or two and comes to an halt. Chilling at the cost of your freedom: Once you have a little success the feeling that you have to reward yourself is quite natural. But at what cost? You have the momentum..you have cashflow..you have cracked something that could make money x10 or x100 times what you are making currently.. So what will you choose? taking a deserved chill time or going hard at it and milk it until there is nothing left? By then I realized a pattern about myself. I was constantly getting back to square one no matter how many times I taste success. I was simply getting run over by success constantly. Back to my teespring story.. I decided to approach things with certain discipline this time. Streamlined all my thoughts and ideas. Painted a picture of my vision on my big white board, joined swimming, started reading, running, etc,. I had a company for swimming who was on the same situational dynamics at that time so it helped us both swimming and discussing regularly. It started feeling like we are mentally organizing, removing clutters and simplifying things. Despite facing so much pressure we had unusual calmness all around us. We made promises to each other: #1 Doesn't matter what project we work on..Let's give ourselves 2 years time and focus on making more money. #2 Let's scale it and milk it until it dries out. No chilling before that. I was a little embarrassed at myself. Looking at the industry I come from, having spent around 7 years at that time (2016)..and still haven't made any considerable progress. Very soon things started falling in place with all the discipline and calmness. Found a winner campaign and I kept at it until it made my previous accomplishments look so dwarf. I was having so much momentum, scooped up all the money I was able to make. It was weird that I was intimidated and worried about the money I was able to make in a day (though it doesn't look the same looking back). Within 2 months I had enough money to build teefry again. The plan was to find a cash-cow so I can take teefry tshirt company online. So I made decisions and jumped into reactivating teefry again but not a teespring Indian version anymore. I just let go the previous source code and developments and got a shopify subscription and I decided to sell tshirts as a marketer. Bad moves! Big mistake was not focusing on teespring while it was already being lucrative. You can only understand and analyze exact dynamics of things from a vantage-point view. Sadly you can see all that after days have past and mistakes are made. For an entrepreneur, possessing such a skill is vital. What went wrong: When you are building your asset online...things won't stay status quo There are several variables that keeps changing regularly and if you are not on top of things you simply get run over. For marketing, facebook was genius. You could target people precisely and create laser targeted ads for unbelievable ROIs. I have days when i got 1000+ ROIs. Facebook marketing algorithms were constantly changing what works today will not work next month. So unless you get creative and reinvent methods to promote you cannot excel in performance marketing. I knew this very clearly but what I misjudged was, since a lot of people were jumping into facebook marketing and teespring money making wagon, very quickly cpms skyrocketed! To give you an idea, I was paying $3 average for cpm (cost per 1000 impressions) Within a year anything less than $25 had become so difficult. Also the Facebook ads platform was generally changing from creatively targeting platform to AI optimization. So lots of targetable fanpages and interests were being removed with every update they roll out. I had almost a year before these problems happened. I was spending money and time on building inventory and all kinds of dropshipping setup for teefry. ...... I will be publishing part 2 very shortly