“You are one product away…”
“All it takes is one winning product…”
I guess you probably heard this from some of our ads, and some of you could actually make this happen, some of you are still trying and will eventually succeed!
Today, I want to share with you a great interview about a young entrepreneur success story.
Tell us a bit about yourself.
Hey EcomHunt, thanks for having me – my name is David Stone, I’m currently 20 years old and I live in Sweden. I’m a very driven person and I have always had a knack for digital marketing. I come from a very poor household and have been moving between countries at a very young age and I even had to flee one country since I was kidnapped, a pretty hard life in my experience so I always have that driving me forward. Of course, there are a lot more to the story but I want to keep this article a little short. So, once I finally settled down in Sweden at the age of five life was finally getting better. As of now I recently started my YouTube channel where the goal is to create pure and transparent content without the fluff and bullshit other gurus on YouTube are feeding their viewers.
When I turned 13, I started doing PPD (Pay Per Download) which was my first introduction to the wonders of digital marketing. I started testing a lot of ideas and finally had one idea which turned into a $100/daily business. I unfortunately had to quit since my mother got scared I was making too much money and it took time away from school.
Fast forward some years to 2017 I started getting into E-commerce & Dropshipping and that’s when everything started falling into place!
How did I get started with dropshipping?
As I wrote in the last section, I have been interested in the concept of making money online from a very young age and I had also gotten a taste of the pure euphoria that it yielded me. I started making $100/daily from PPD and once I had to quit since my mother got scared, I didn’t touch digital marketing for several years. Then I stumbled upon a Discord group called MSW where I basically began to read guides on E-commerce and I also started watching YouTube videos which I did for TWO weeks straight.
I set up my first store, which was focused on women’s products and makeup from AliExpress – oh my what a mistake that was. I managed to make $2000 within a week of opening it, but it yielded me something greater, I got into contact with some very big Facebook pages which ranged from 500k Likes to 13 Million Like. They wanted me to create stores for them and that basically threw me into overdrive learning mode, where I was forced to learn everything very fast.
The stores were set up and money started falling in from page posts and ads – I had never been happier because I basically proved to myself that it was fully possible. One month we managed to get £166,000 = ca $209,555 in just under FIVE days. That was a bliss – but unfortunately, I got extremely stressed out and I decided to go travelling, and once I did that I decided to start doing my own stores instead.
What did you do before dropshipping?
Before I started my first dropshipping store I was trading binary options with a Romanian signals group I found somehow. I started trading using MT4 a software to scan for signals and start trading once you got a pattern in the market. I quickly noticed that was not consistent and I was basically gambling. I learned something useful though and that is to never do binary options again.
After I started working with the stores I mention in the last section I started to get extremely stressed out, it was just getting to me so much that my heart started to let me down. I got heartaches and very strange heart rhythm so I said no more work and more self-development. That’s when I decided to book a flight to Asia and just stay there for a couple of months until I felt better – WHICH I did! I constantly thank myself for actually taking that decision even if I would lose out on a lot of money.
First Sale where did it come from? What was your experience with FB ads?
My first sale came from a Facebook page promotion I had contacted a pretty big page and they wanted to do a post on the product completely free, in turn that I would give them a small percentage of the cut. The product sold for just $2000 but since It was my first store, I was PUMPED! I saved the money and accepted that women’s makeup and products just weren’t my thing and I wouldn’t get far with that product.
This was the product by the way – a booze bangle great for smuggling in drinks for teenagers and what not.
How did you learn, what keeps your motivated?
I learnt basically everything from free content and TESTING – Oh my god I can’t stress this enough. You need do TEST, TEST and then TEST some more. Trial and error yields, you the most knowledge so don’t get demotivated just because something doesn’t work out the first time.
I started testing and playing around with Facebook, Instagram and Google ads and I started to see a very similar pattern in time required and budget needed to be successful with ads. I started seeing which kind of ads were converting and which weren’t and that’s basically a model I follow until this day! I stay motivated by knowing that within a year I made more money than people who stayed in school for 4-7 years getting their degree and by that time they are freaking 27-30 years old. I never liked school as I was always fantasizing about online marketing and how I would get that done.
Why did I want to succeed so bad?
I come from a very poor family, I never had a dad either and my mother was always the one taking care of me. I wanted to give back to her so badly for everything she’s done for me. The support she always showed to me when I had crazy ideas on things I could make money from. She is my motivation – the goal is to buy her a house some day in the woods where she loves to be the most.
I also worked at the famous car brand Volvo for a month, and I never really liked working and making someone else’s pockets bigger by doing slave work. So I worked there for a month, then said f*ck off to my boss and left. After that I was right into the beginning of my first store.
Once you throw away your safety of a job and start working on yourself – YOU CAN DO ANYTHING!
What is your sales record?
The one and only question – If we count all stores I’ve had in total and how that went the track record is around $3,650,000 in sales. Although I sadly don’t have ALL the screenshots to back that up anymore. I did however post very regularly in a group called MSW with all my earnings from time to time. So, I can back up at least a couple of million in sales.
The only thing people need to know is that drop shipping is simple, not easy. Once you get the jest of things you can do the exact same strategy OVER & OVER again. That’s the beauty of it since once you learn everything there is to know about a strategy you can only improve but you know you’ll always make money one way or another.
Start again what would you do different?
I would start re-targeting way earlier than I did, there are literally 100’s of things I would do differently, one of those would be starting LAA ads faster and start testing different ad creatives earlier. When I first did ads I only used one ad creative and I was very greedy with profits – so I never re-invested the money correctly which is sad now that I think about it.
5 tips to someone who is just getting started?
1. Start building a one type product store instead of a big store – you will have a MUCH better learning curve than building a general store. General stores usually require big budgets and will just stress you out. If you focus all your attention to a couple of products within the same type of products you can learn everything from scratch 20 times faster.
2. Create 5 ad creatives no less but more. This is important because you want to split test different texts, colors, everything really, but 5 ad creatives gives you a great start when scaling horizontally first.
3. Don’t be scared to try out new things, don’t be put off by big competitors and such – start building and mimicking everything you see that you found convincing. Once you start mimicking what’s already working, you learn way faster!
4. I know this might seem like a promotion, but its not! Get EcomHunt paid plan – It’s worth every cent and it will pay itself. You have a head start and can see all the information you need right from one place basically. Don’t waste time on product research when you can put that to the more tedious tasks!
5. Once you start getting orders every day, get a customer support virtual assistant asap.. You can’t imagine how much stress I had when I had to fulfill orders, customer support, website maintenance and every alone. It was extremely stressful to do all that and I suffered because of it and so will you. Don’t worry the mental clearness from having that done for you will net you more profit in the end.
Thank you once again EcomHunt for having me, It has been a pleasure.
So, What’s Next?
Now, David has already started another store and is using the same approach to growth. He’s using the dropshipping method with Ecomhunt again to test his products in the market. Once he hits another ‘winning product’ he’ll use it to build his next brand. This time around, he’s focused on making it even bigger and wants to grow the business into a major international brand. He’s also now offering aspiring ecommerce entrepreneurs free video tutorials on his Youtube channel.
“I love Ecomhunt since It takes away the whole process of finding great products so I can focus more on the growth of my store.” And for anyone else thinking of building a business using the same model, he agrees it’s a great approach, “The sky is the limit”
Follow David to see what he gets up to next on Instagram and YouTube.
Ready to start making some $$$ ?
How to Find Winning Products and Start Selling Online
Pros and Cons of Dropshipping and Wholesaling
How to Make Sales in Every Way Possible !
Have a question? Got some killer tips? Comment below!
Mordechai Arba is running multiple successful online stores, and is now the Founder & CEO of Ecomhunt. Ecomhunt was founded to help store owners easily find winning products, and build stable online store businesses.
Hey Arba. Thanks for this platform. I learned about ecomhunt when I was watching some YouTube video on dropshipping. I have been contemplating opening an online store for the past six months after reading the book 4 Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss. This has prompted me to research as much as I can before diving in. What I wish to find out is what is the best way to hosting the platform, using Shopify or building an independent website then sourcing products from AliExpress? Any help given in regard to this shall be highly appreciated. Regards.
Free ecomhunt course 🙂
https://university.ecomhunt.com