Post: #926

(01-24-2018 04:42 AM)CleanSlate Wrote:  For the past month or so, business has been slow.

I'm kicking off a marketing campaign with emails, social media posts, google ads, facebook ads, and basically throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.

Hopefully I'll be in a better position 2-3 months from now, after all this marketing.

I heard a great analogy from a mentor the other week.

Imagine you're trying to light a fire using a telephone directory. You rip out a few pages and chuck in a match. Unsurprisingly, the fire doesn't catch. Now imagine you try again, and this time you keep on ripping pages out and throwing them on until half the telephone directory is gone. There is no way that fire won't be lit.

I've got one of my guys out on a machine doing some profitable work for the next month that came from a day of doing just that. When I really didn't feel motivated but sat down and composed the letters anyhow.

Post: #927

(01-24-2018 06:17 AM)roberto Wrote:  

(01-24-2018 04:42 AM)CleanSlate Wrote:  For the past month or so, business has been slow.

I'm kicking off a marketing campaign with emails, social media posts, google ads, facebook ads, and basically throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.

Hopefully I'll be in a better position 2-3 months from now, after all this marketing.

I heard a great analogy from a mentor the other week.

Imagine you're trying to light a fire using a telephone directory. You rip out a few pages and chuck in a match. Unsurprisingly, the fire doesn't catch. Now imagine you try again, and this time you keep on ripping pages out and throwing them on until half the telephone directory is gone. There is no way that fire won't be lit.

I've got one of my guys out on a machine doing some profitable work for the next month that came from a day of doing just that. When I really didn't feel motivated but sat down and composed the letters anyhow.

Great analogy. Thanks for sharing. I needed that.

Something will come. Eventually.

Post: #928

Spoke with my accountant last week. He was confident my LLC would be eligible for the 20% qualified business income deduction. Keep in mind, though, the 20% won’t include the amount I pay towards SS/Medicare. Because I am losing tax deductions elsewhere as a result of the new law, though gaining a benefit via the new brackets, my tax burden will decrease by about 5% assuming my income is the same as in 2017. Look — I’ll take the extra $7k in my pocket. But I still feel I pay entirely too much.

Post: #929

So much good shit in this thread Ive got a business boner.

Post: #930

(01-19-2018 04:15 AM)Malone Wrote:  

(01-17-2018 04:44 PM)Sidney Crosby Wrote:  Just started running a paid twitter follower/unfollower thing. Seems pretty useful and only $12 a month. My twitter gains kind of stalled out and it lets you target your followers pretty well and lets you cut the dead weight and people that aren't following you back.

I'm at 8600 followers now and my goal is 15k by the end of the month.

Which one? I used crowdfireapp for a while and dropped it. Buggy as fuck.

Manageflitter but there are probably better ones.

Post: #931

I've now got to a point where my competition are starting to talk behind my back negatively about my business.

How do others deal with this? Do you look to stamp it out or just put it down to jealousy etc.

I'd be grateful for any thoughts. I can't help but want to confront everyone as I don't like hearing this kind of stuff but I guess that's just the price of doing business.

Post: #932

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/01/why-ebay...titor.html

Long story short eBay is "dropping" Paypal for another payment processor.

I am LOVING this. I have complained about Paypal ever since I started my online business and now they are finally getting whats coming to them.

I struggled with Paypal the majority of last year when I opened up shop.

-Holding payments/profit so I could not quickly reinvest and buy more stock.
-Random holds while they "review transactions" from people who have bought from me before.
-Leaving customers a "Loophole" where they could go to Paypal and get their money back after their 30 day guarantee had run out on eBay.
-Taking a whole day to send you your money when you needed it (has since changed but took forever to change this)

They had a whole monopoly on eBay forever and im glad its finally over.

Post: #933

^ my ebay seller friend is telling me that every computer they sell ends up in buyer paypal fraud - they make some minor complaint right before the 90 days or whatever and try to get the laptops free, pervasive problem due to ebay and paypals buyer is right attitude. I'm not a seller so is this you guys experience?

Post: #934

(01-28-2018 10:59 PM)Ski pro Wrote:  I've now got to a point where my competition are starting to talk behind my back negatively about my business.

How do others deal with this? Do you look to stamp it out or just put it down to jealousy etc.

I'd be grateful for any thoughts. I can't help but want to confront everyone as I don't like hearing this kind of stuff but I guess that's just the price of doing business.

It doesn't matter much what your competitors are saying, it matters what your customers are saying. The people giving you money are the only people you need to make and keep happy (within reason).

If this is just standard petty talk you've heard through the grapevine then ignore it. If what you're hearing is serious and public defamatory remarks causing or likely to cause damage to your livelihood then that is a different matter with different steps to take. You would have to explain more in order for me to give more accurate advice.

Either way, it is better not to get into any confrontation, if you end up needing to take legal action later that will not do you any favors.

Post: #935

Big Decisions Ahead
2018 is going to be a very important year for me. I've earned a good living in Beijing and had a very acceptable lifestyle as a result, but the city just keeps getting more and more expensive. Every year I have to work more to maintain the same standard of living. The reality set in when I went apartment hunting in January. Rental prices had gone up 25% since the summer.

I ended up settling for a tiny shoebox Hong Kong-style apartment so that I could keep my money as free as possible to invest into my business needs. I also decided that when the 10 month lease ends, I'll probably be leaving Beijing (at least for a while).

My plan is very simply. I focused less on earning money during 2017 and more on product development, a decision which paid off. I have my first set of products inches away from being market ready. I'll have two weeks of Chinese NY vacation time in February before I start doing paid work again and I'll use that time to finish the products so that I can start aggressively pursuing sales. My goal is to have enough of an income from product sales by December that I can relocate to a new city in Asia with a lower cost of living. This will allow me to focus 100% on product development and sales, even if it takes some time for replace my current income.

Staying in Beijing till December will allow me continue earning from hourly work with my existing clients, while experimenting with different approaches to sales. Now, the ideal sales vehicle would be a website that automates the whole process and sells to customers around the globe, but I'm not going to delusionally assume that this would be something I can build a meaningful income from in under a year. It might never produce meaningful results. I do believe in the products I'm offering, however, and initial tests of showing products to my ideal target audience has yielded very positive feedback.

Sales Strategy
So, I won't be sitting back in my office trying to drive sales primarily from a website. I'm going to be aggressively marketing directly to my target audience with cold calling and other techniques as necessary. Over the past few days, I've been experimenting with posting some ads on an expat website and I've already got one school owner who has agreed to meet me as soon as I'm back in Beijing from my Malaysia trip. Just one lead, but the fact that I can produce even one lead in a few days with non-aggressive marketing shows promise that there is a real demand for my new product line.

My strategy is to learn about how to sell my products in Beijing and once I've developed an understanding of what works and what does not, I'll be able to expand my approach to other cities in Asia. Since I'm just starting out, it would probably be a mistake to pay for flights here and there just to do a demo of my product, but once I have a general idea of what ROI I can expect, it might make sense at that point to pay for travel out of my own pocket.

Although I'm not counting on the website to be able to create sales on its own, it is a key component in my sales strategy. My products are very hard to understand in anything other than a visual medium, so having a website with great photos and video display the products will be a great asset, even as I pursue primarily offline sales efforts.

Why I Don't Want To Count On Online Sales

Don't get me wrong, the best way to scale my business will be through automated online sales. In fact, I plan to roll out products in the next two years that will be specifically designed to be products that sell themselves online. However, the products I've been working on building over the past three years require a certain level of investment by customers interested in using them. This goes beyond the sticker price that I charge, as the products I will be selling initially work best in conjunction with the purchase of a certain number of physical tools. All told, it would cost both individuals and schools a few hundred dollars of investment to properly implement my product.

That's why I believe that initially, it will be important to take a hands on sales approach to ensure that each prospective customer is convinced that my product's value is well worth the investment.

Down the road, once I expand my produce lines a bit, this won't be as necessary, but for the first year, it may be highly essential.

The upside is that these products will provide legitimacy to the products I plan to offer in the future. Even for the customers that don't buy the products that require a higher level of investment, just seeing them on the website will probably help convince them that the other products (that require a lower level of investment) are worth the money.

So, building a qualify, professional sales website will be an important task in 2018. I don't want to rush it, however. It needs to look swell, even if that means spending money and time ensuring that it looks highly respectable.

The steps I intend to take are as follows:

February to May - experiment with sales in Beijing, see what sticks
June - launch website
June to September - continue with sales efforts in Beijing, but possibly expand efforts to nearby cities
October to November - possibly visit some ESL tradeshows if my results so far warrant it
December - if sales are generating enough income for me to live somewhere more affordable than Beijing, end things on good terms with my existing Beijing clients and leave Beijing

Where To Next?
If this year goes according to plan, the big question would be where to move to next. The next city would need to be a place with direct and affordable flights to key Asian cities, at least half as expensive as living in Beijing, decent enough Internet (doesn't need to be spectacular, be reliability and enough speed and bandwidth for Skype calls is important), somewhere that I could live for a midterm period of time (6-12 months) on tourist visas, plenty of prospective customers locally, inspiring environment (something I find pretty important when I'm trying to do creative work every day) and ideally a genuinely pleasant place to live.

Kuala Lumpur is currently my leading choice. It ticks a lot of the boxes. Living expenses are half as expensive as Beijing and there are no shortage of English language training schools here. I like the city, Internet is good enough for my needs and there hasn't as of yet been a crack down of people living here on tourist visas. I also find many of the women intelligent and enjoyable to spend time with. KL is also about as good as it gets for low cost travel to other major cities in Asia, with several budget airlines using KLIA as a hub. For example, I can fly to Beijing for about $100 most of the year (one way) if I'm willing to book an early morning or redeye flight.

Bangkok might be another option if it wasn't for the crackdown on repeated use of tourist visas, but I suppose I could also consider a major city in Vietnam. Taiwan is not on my list currently, as flights from Taipei to elsewhere in Asia never seem to be very cheap and taking a train isn't an option.



As always, thoughts and comments are appreciated.

Post: #936

Suits, this sounds like a good plan.

Seeing that you're concerned about the crackdown on tourist visas in Thailand (and yes it's real, as I've experienced it myself), Vietnam can be a good option because you can get a 1 year multiple entry business visa without having to leave the country every 3 months.

You should be able to get that with a Canadian passport. I'd check to make sure, but it's a much better option than having to leave the country every 2-3 months as is the case with Thailand. Just FYI.

Post: #937

I lived in KL from 2001 until 2005 back when I was in middle/high school. Even back then the infrastructure in Malaysia was on par with the developed world, no poverty, low cost of living, no government suppression.

I think KL is very very underrated not only on here but also on other expat forums.

I don't know if its a viable option for you but if you can land a high paying gig in Singapore you can easily live in Johor Bahru and commute daily to Singapore while taking advantage of the low cost of living in Malaysia. The only downside is that Johor Bahru is way dull compared to KL but you can easily save 4-5k usd a year.......

https://www.quora.com/Is-it-possible-to-...m-everyday

Post: #938

(02-08-2018 07:27 AM)Blancpain Wrote:  I don't know if its a viable option for you but if you can land a high paying gig in Singapore you can easily live in Johor Bahru and commute daily to Singapore while taking advantage of the low cost of living in Malaysia. The only downside is that Johor Bahru is way dull compared to KL but you can easily save 4-5k usd a year.......

Not an option I'm interested in. The goal I am working towards is to earn all of my money from product and service sales (of the products and services offered by my own company) and to not trade any of my time for money.

I'm already self-employed, but I still do trade time for money as my primary form of income. The goal for this year is to get to a stage where if I lower my cost of living far enough, I can survive purely on product sales. This would free me up to work fulltime on product development and thereby really speed up the process of building my company into a respectable enterprise.

A number of years ago, I burned all existing copies of my resume and vowed to never work a regular job again. I've kept that promise and have no plans to look for a regular employment.

Not that I haven't considered the possibility. I'm not to proud to change strategy if it helps me reach my goals faster, However, every time I analyze the pros and cons of such a move, I realize that the products I've created have more value than me as an employee. If I was to interview for a job, I'd seek to demonstrate my value by showing the prospective employer the products I've created AND the smartest thing an employer could do would be to put me to work creating similar products.

As such, it makes the most sense for me to stick with my current direction and really push product sales this year until I can generate an income from it, because getting sidetracked from that goal is only going to slow me down. Creating products for other people, would give me stability in the short term, but ultimately my cut of the long term value of my creations would be far smaller than if I create products that I own the exclusive rights to.

Post: #939

Regular employment can be very fun if you have a very decent side income. You could just go to work essentially to build a social circle and troll the fuck out of people and your superiors who make less than you without worrying about office politics.

Couple of years ago I used to work at a 5 star hotel, there was this world renowned executive chef, he just didnt give a fuck about anybody, he went as far as to engage in locker room banter in official settings. They couldn't fire him, the whole kitchen depended on him. The rest white collar wage slaves constantly had to kiss somebodies ass and play the politics game, but that executive chef was the only free person in that company. He is my role model.

Work is great for building a social circle, when you have enough resources no one can boss you around even at work.

Post: #940

Suits, I humbly accept your gratitude for me being the first one to recommend KL to you over a year ago as a reprieve from the inhumanity of China. As you set off on your life changing journey I know that your thoughts will only be on the crucial role I played in your successes.

Though I will not accept your offer of satisfying your Malay gf's (don't do 5's), I will allow you to treat me to many dinners at fine restaurants around KL in the future. It is the least I can do.

Post: #941

(02-08-2018 09:16 AM)GlobalMan Wrote:  Suits, I humbly accept your gratitude for me being the first one to recommend KL to you over a year ago as a reprieve from the inhumanity of China. As you set off on your life changing journey I know that your thoughts will only be on the crucial role I played in your successes.

GlobalMan isn't kidding. I visited KL for the first time last year based on his recommendation. Here's the actual recommendation he gave me in October of 2016:

(10-24-2016 12:13 AM)GlobalMan Wrote:  Suits, have you spent any time in Kuala Lumpur or Penang? I'd suggest those for future scouting trips. Malaysia has plenty of things to dislike, to be sure, but there are a lot of things to like as well.

Based on what you've said you're looking for, and keeping in mind the places you've already crossed out, I would say skip Taipei for now and take a trip to KL.

Personally I like Taiwan as a whole, but I think you might find a few too many things there that you're looking to get away from. Still should check it out of course, but maybe someplace with a greater difference from Beijing/Mainland China would be a better bet.

I like KL. It's large enough, but not too large. Efficient transport. Generally clean, decent air quality. Great food. An adequate amount of girls to be swooped.

The value that GlobalMan and men of his quality bring to this forum can not be overstated.

It may have taken him just a minute to rattle off the above statement 16 months ago, but his willingness to share his incredible knowledge had a transformative impact on my life. A year and a half ago, I barely knew a thing about KL or Malaysia. Now, I'm seriously considering moving here and living for a number of years.

I will forever be in awe of GlobalMan's greatness. He is an incredible man and his contribution to this forum is only outweighed by the length and girth of his prostate.

I remain eternally grateful.

Post: #942

Can anyone recommend a good, reliable VA? Data entry work, like 1 hour per day during business hours EST. Please PM, thank you kindly!

Post: #943

(02-07-2018 09:43 PM)GlobalMan Wrote:  

(01-28-2018 10:59 PM)Ski pro Wrote:  I've now got to a point where my competition are starting to talk behind my back negatively about my business.

How do others deal with this? Do you look to stamp it out or just put it down to jealousy etc.

I'd be grateful for any thoughts. I can't help but want to confront everyone as I don't like hearing this kind of stuff but I guess that's just the price of doing business.

It doesn't matter much what your competitors are saying, it matters what your customers are saying. The people giving you money are the only people you need to make and keep happy (within reason).

If this is just standard petty talk you've heard through the grapevine then ignore it. If what you're hearing is serious and public defamatory remarks causing or likely to cause damage to your livelihood then that is a different matter with different steps to take. You would have to explain more in order for me to give more accurate advice.

Either way, it is better not to get into any confrontation, if you end up needing to take legal action later that will not do you any favors.

Thanks for this.

I can't go into more details here without doxxing myself but no, it's just petty talk, annoying stuff, bullshit. Nothing serious enough to sue people over.

That's a good reframe to make sure that the only people happy are our clients. That's wise advice that I'll take with me. Thanks

Post: #944

(02-08-2018 02:00 AM)Suits Wrote:  Over the past few days, I've been experimenting with posting some ads on an expat website and I've already got one school owner who has agreed to meet me as soon as I'm back in Beijing from my Malaysia trip. Just one lead, but the fact that I can produce even one lead in a few days with non-aggressive marketing shows promise that there is a real demand for my new product line.

I've posted four different ads so far. I've received a number of emails so far, but only one was someone actually interested in the product I am offering.

China has a real serious ESL teacher shortage, especially for part-time work (since its illegal and such workers have to come up with their own visa). So, I've gotten a number of emails from people who didn't seem to even bother reading the content of my ad properly and are just trying to locate a white face to teach English classes for them.

I'm tempted to respond negatively out of irritation, but the potential client I have a meet with planned for Wednesday started with the guy emailing me to ask if I could teach at my school.

After I politely responded that I don't do that type of work, he contacted me again the next day saying that he actually could make use of the product/service I offered in my ad. So, despite the temptation to give people who waste my time a piece of my mind, it's obviously wisest to remain professional and not burn any bridges.

Still very annoying.

So far, just one solid lead, but the page count trackers are giving me a useful metric for measuring the attractiveness of each ad title. I've got a number of months ahead of me to experiment with different ad copy to see what sticks.

Post: #945

Delete.

Post: #946

I wish I could start a poll here to know this, but this fascinates me;

How many of you are entrepreneurs, because you simply can not work for another person?

Post: #947

(02-11-2018 10:40 AM)Vaun Wrote:  I wish I could start a poll here to know this, but this fascinates me;

How many of you are entrepreneurs, because you simply can not work for another person?

In many ways, working for someone else was easier. I just got bored working for someone else and wanted to work on projects that got me excited. That and working for someone else didn't help me to build up other skill sets that would lead to more success. I got trapped into a monotony that didn't require expanding my skills nor require much thought.

Post: #948

(02-12-2018 06:16 AM)worldwidetraveler Wrote:  

(02-11-2018 10:40 AM)Vaun Wrote:  I wish I could start a poll here to know this, but this fascinates me;

How many of you are entrepreneurs, because you simply can not work for another person?

I got trapped into a monotony that didn't require expanding my skills nor require much thought.

You are on to something there.

And I hope others didn't think my question was an insult. More about what drives and motivates entrepreneurs. Its completely true for me, and something I have yet to fully acknowledge; I do very well, very quickly, when I go out on my own.

Post: #949

(02-11-2018 10:40 AM)Vaun Wrote:  I wish I could start a poll here to know this, but this fascinates me;

How many of you are entrepreneurs, because you simply can not work for another person?

I can, but not for long if they're idiots.

The places I've stuck around the longest were the ones where I worked with men I respected.

So, if you're not in a position to fire the idiots you work with, you either have to move to a job where you won't have that problem, or start your own thing.

Post: #950

(02-11-2018 10:40 AM)Vaun Wrote:  I wish I could start a poll here to know this, but this fascinates me;

How many of you are entrepreneurs, because you simply can not work for another person?

That's me. As an arrogant 18 year old I looked at the job the boss gave me, and the tools he gave me. I thhen went out and bought the right tool for the job, and quit the next week.