What comes to your mind when you think or hear about business? For most of you, it may be high risk, riches, luxury, etc, for me initially, it was the riches that captivated my attention and what else you expect from a seven-year-old middle-class kid.
I grew up reading business magazines like a business today of my maternal cousins who were enrolled in MBA. The rich list always kept my attention. But society forced me to believe that it’s not something for the middle-class you need to have a lot of money for that for some part it’s true but for the most part things are different.
How did it start?
My learnings kept ongoing and the same with my brother, we share the same thought process. During my mid-teenage, we came to know about the dropshipping business through a platform known as Shopify (it is a platform where you can make your own store without having an inventory). In dropshipping business, you don’t need to have an inventory and you can list any product in your store. You just have to market your products set up a price and sell and shipment will be done by the shipping company. Sounds easy and simple, that’s how it sounded to us. You will find tons of videos and blogs on how to earn thousands of dollars through the dropshipping business and that may be true for them but I learned later that the rewards should not have to be the thing that drives you to start your first business.
On 28 December 2018, we decided to open our store of fashion and grooming products. Then a question arises what should we name the e-store? There were a lot of names that came to our mind but were not satisfying. So we started filtering out our favorites in the fashion industry. We liked the brand called Hugo Boss and Onitsuka Tiger and being inspired by them we named it HugoTIger. Sounds funny, but it made sense because eventually, Hugo turned out to be a German word meaning mind. So it was a Tigermind, eventually, the name does not play that significant role in a business that’s what I believe. It if does then we would not have a technology company named Apple as the world’s most valuable company.
We decided to launch our store on 1st January in the coming new year of 2019. We started working on our website on 28th January. My brother took the charge of the technical side like building the store and I focused on designing the theme and assisting him. And what I learned that designing is literally tough to do. It sounds easy but literally, it needs a lot of creativity and it was extremely challenging to design an E-Store that should have to be user-friendly, attractive, sales friendly, etc. It requires a sound understanding of user behavior, consumer psychology, behavioral science and I had a bit of that because it is my subject of interest. We sat in front of our desktop the whole day and we were working hard for our launch forgetting everyone else and forgetting the new year's eve celebration. We decided not to borrow money from our parents but we did indirectly. We needed money to buy a custom domain, business email, marketing, and advertising. So it was the month-end and I decided to leave my account's tuition so that I can use the tuition fees of rupees 800 for our business. It was a bold decision because my final exams of class 11th were in February. But I instead focused on HugoTiger.
And on the counterpart, someone spread the rumor that I left my tuition because I got afraid of a girl’s boyfriend in my class who was looking for me to beat me up. When I heard the rumor from my friend I laughed. And all my mates and the teacher still believe that the rumor is true but I never justified it because I don't care whatever they might say.
Shopify offers a free trial of 7 days after launch and charges $90 per month otherwise. So decided to give it a shot for seven days and if that works out we will continue because we would not be able to pay $90 per month otherwise. We focused basically on the foreign audience because we knew that the Indian market is very competitive and we don’t prefer and trust new brands and we are not comfortable buying online from a new brand in India. So we kept the market untouched. So we build our catalog with quite a good range of products in a more narrowed niche of the fashion industry. We had few grooming kits too.
Our first sale
We launched at 12:00 Am on 1 Jan 2019 and had a satisfying sleep of successfully creating and setting up our store. We shared everywhere we could probably do. Every one of my concerns shared that on their social media handles. We got few calls from our friends curious to know what I am doing and I explained to them about the business. There were few people laughing and suggesting and giving their opinions who never did business in their life. And it's quite common in India you might have also experienced it in your family and neighbourhoods. And getting judged by your age is also very common in our society. They use satirical idioms everywhere to let you down. But we never mind because we got full support from my parents and we could not have asked for more.
As time was passing by we were waiting for our first order but the first day passed waiting for them but we kept on improving and watched tons of videos on getting sales and most of them were misleading but we tried it.
The second day passed like the former day and there were no orders. We were disappointed because after watching guys earning thousands of dollars and our expectations rose up and being not able to get even a single sale was disheartening. We tried different marketing strategies but nothing worked out. We just returned from our maternal cousin's wedding and we had some money that our elders gave us. We collectively had Rs. 2000–3000 that was left.
So we decided to do some Facebook marketing through facebooks ads. It is believed that Facebook is the most efficient, effective, and precise way of paid marketing to your targeted customers and for the most part, it is but it all comes down to how well you set up your campaign so that it could lead to some actual sales but we just started with Facebook ads and obvious we were no the beginners. We figured out the complex Facebook ads and launched our campaign with the expectation of getting high sales and guess what happened leave sales we even did not get a single response for the products.
It has been three-four days since launch and we were still zero at that time. It was disappointing but we started looking for other ways to conquer this challenge. We figured out that and came to know about marketing on Instagram. It was not the usual type of paid marketing. It was called Instagram influencers marketing. In it, you reach out to pages of your niche and pay them to post a story and posts of your brand. So we started reaching out to those who were in our niche. And paid $10 -20$ to a few of them. This was our last hope because we were running out of money.
On 5th January the day went the same as usual and we were working on website improvement. We were having a usual discussion with our parents and suddenly we saw on our store dashboard that there were few visitors on our website and suddenly a ray of hope arose. And slowly everyone bounced from the website but after few minutes at 23:48, a notification comes that someone ordered a men’s beard grooming kit worth $26.96. It was ordered by a woman named Blanca verges from Spain probably for her husband and I can tell you it was the best feeling ever. It brought tears to my parent's eyes and gave us a sense of accomplishment.
What went wrong?
We geared up and started preparing for shipment. We were integrally connected with Alibaba so we did not have to keep an inventory. They have a product with a certain price including shipment so we only have to set up a price and the rest will be done by the company. In simple words, it was an “inventory on-demand”. But things started going wrong when the payment comes to our Paypal account they blocked the payment for security and asked for a verification process and that took two working days. We have to pay for the cost of the product to the factory which was $15.99. On the other hand, PayPal blocked our money. We have to pay to Alibaba through a credit card so we asked dad for his credit card because we did not have one. But when we went to do our payment, a technical error occurred. Alibaba refused our payment because the store was made with my brother's account so the credit card should have to be from the shop owners and it should have to be an international card.
We were in pressure from all the side. The free trial was about to get over, and we were unable to complete the order and get the payment. Our customer started asking questions about the shipment of the product and we were speechless. There were no points of escape. We decided to return her money back honestly with a sorry note.
And we finally decided to shut the business because we burnt all of our money and we ran out of money. We took it as a great experience of learning. It was like a ten days flight of learning that ended somehow with failure.
What was my take and could be yours from this experience?
After reading the story you might have encountered many mistakes that we did and I agree too. Here are a few of my learnings and its outright my opinion and facts but eventually you are free to take it or not-
- I learned that we should not start a business with a motive to earn money because it will kill our motivation.
- Do not start a business after seeing others doing great in that business you will end up nowhere.
- Do not start something without doing proper research in that particular industry.
- Do not idolise the wrong person and please do not get influenced by so-called influencers on social media.
- Do not start after watching so-called idea videos of how to get rich and earn millions because I believe that for most of the successful persons the goal was to solve problems of business.
- Please try to grasp information and suggestions from someone who is worth giving you the advice. Please check the source.
- Understand your customers and their behaviors because everyone is not your customers.
- There will be challenges but eventually, if you try hard you will end up overcoming that.
These were some of my opinions and learnings and I would say that please follow these instructions or otherwise always try to learn from others' failures, their experiences, and please try to avoid those mistakes. Please don’t take advice from someone who has never done any business in their life even if they possess some authority in your family. It's like taking the advice on swimming from a wrestler. And please change your mindset before doing business that you need a lot of money but it's not like that. One of my mentors says and I quote
If you cannot do a business with no money you cannot do it even if you have it.
Doing business is not easy it's hard but I would say that nothing comes easy even job is hard but eventually business is fun. It's full of adventures and challenges.
