The Growth Booth

#3: How Two 'Ecommerce Newbies' Went From $0 to $25,000/m Using Little-Known Ecom Model

January 20, 2022 Aidan Booth Season 1 Episode 3
The Growth Booth
#3: How Two 'Ecommerce Newbies' Went From $0 to $25,000/m Using Little-Known Ecom Model
Show Notes Transcript

E-commerce continues to boom this 2022, and our guests for today's episode are excited to share their journey of what could also be in store for you!

Welcome to the third episode of The Growth Booth Podcast, a show focused on supporting budding entrepreneurs and established business owners alike, towards achieving lifestyle freedom through building successful online businesses. 

In this episode, we get to know and learn about the journey of Dom and Kerry, two online entrepreneurs who went from knowing nothing about e-commerce to creating not one, but a couple of e-commerce stores with five-figure monthly sales. 

When it comes to ecommerce, there is a lot to be excited about, especially as we approach 2022. We're all looking into different avenues/platforms to sell on, and one of the takeaways you’ll gain from this episode is that the key to success is discipline and with the right mindset, anyone can start an ecommerce business. 

Whether you're looking for step-by-step strategies to start building an online business, simple game plans to grow your business or proven lifestyle freedom frameworks, you’re in the right place.

Stay tuned and be sure to join the thousands of listeners already in growth mode!


Timestamps:

00:00 - Intro

01:11 - How Kerry & Dom Started Their Ecommerce Journey

03:59 - The Struggles of Starting An Ecommerce Business

05:40 - Life Before Becoming an Ecommerce Entrepreneur

07:23 - The Mindset You Need to Have for Ecommerce

08:55 - Kerry & Dom’s Motivational Driver Behind Starting an Ecommerce Business 

10:00 - Habits That Lead to Success

11:27 - Working On A Partnership

15:23 - Business Growth & First Sale

17:32 - Choosing The Right Products

20:02 - Dom & Kerry’s Kibo Code Experience

24:33 - Dom & Kerry’s Ambitions and Objectives for 2022

26:35 - Outro


About Our Host:

Aidan Booth is passionate about lifestyle freedom and has focused on building online businesses to achieve this since 2005. From affiliate marketing to eCommerce, small business marketing to SAAS (software as a service), online education to speaking at seminars, the journey has been a rollercoaster ride with plenty of thrills along the way. Aidan is proud to have helped thousands of entrepreneurs earn their first dollar online, and coached many people to build million-dollar businesses. Aidan and his business partner (Steven Clayton) are the #1 ranked vendors on Clickbank.com, and sell their products in over 100 countries globally, as well as in 20,000+ stores across the USA, to generate 8-figures annually.

Away from the online world, Aidan is a proud Dad of two young kids, an avid investor, a swimming enthusiast, and a nomadic traveler.

Let's Connect!

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Thanks for tuning in! Please don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe!

You are in for a treat this episode because you're about to find out about the story of two online entrepreneurs who went from knowing absolutely nothing about e-commerce to building not just one, but a couple of e-commerce stores that have done five figures per month in sales. 

 

AIDAN:


Dom, Kerry, thank you so much for taking some time out of your day to be here today. I want to dive right into this. Can you give people a little bit of background about what your e-commerce business is all about? Imagine someone doesn't know anything about e-commerce. What are you doing to make money through your e-commerce store? Okay,

 

DOM:


Okay, let me start then Kerry can chime in. We started with a course and taught us how to do e-commerce. We set up our first store, followed everything in the course and tried to do the step by step like you said. We had other businesses but have never done anything online-commerce before, electronic commerce. Followed steps, built on store, added products, advertised those products, and started making sales.

 

AIDAN:

Where do you make these sales Kerry? Are you doing it on your own website? Is it on some other platform? Where do your actual sales happen?

 

KERRY:

No, it's actually on another platform. We do have a lot of experience with website building, but we would never presume to take on for ourselves to build our own website to sell our stuff. There's a lot of value in using a proven platform. That's why we chose what we did.

 

DOM:

A purpose-built platform, for the purpose of e-commerce.

 

AIDAN:

Right. Obviously, the course that you went through is The Kibo Code, which is the course that Steve Clayton and I put out. The platform that you're using is called Cartzy, which is part of that. It’s an e-commerce platform that allows you to set up an optimized store and make sales. You can also sell using other methods as well, like you can sell on the Facebook Marketplace. Are you doing any of that or most of your sales actually have been on your webstore?

 

DOM:

Actually, as time went on, we added more channels. We added it up the other day. We got six channels and hope that at least one if not two more this year. Two Facebook Marketplaces, two Facebook shops, and two e-commerce stores.

 

AIDAN:

That’s some great diversification right there. I think that's one of the real keys to predictable income online is not having all your eggs in one basket. You guys have done a great job.

 

KERRY:

We actually found that out in the very beginning because we had all our eggs in one basket.

 

AIDAN:

I followed a similar path. I had all my eggs in one basket when I started out as well and I learned that lesson pretty early on thankfully. Now the model that you're doing is called Drop Shipping where you don't have to buy any inventory upfront. You don't have to have any products in your own home. When someone orders a product on your store at that point, you get the money from them and then you can buy that product. That's what The Kibo Code method is all about. Depending on when people watch this video, they may be able to go to thekibocode.com and actually participate or they may not, just depends on when they're watching this. Did you have struggles when you were starting out with your e-commerce journey?

 

DOM:

Like we said, ground zero. We bought all your stuff in e-commerce but we never sold anything on e-commerce. We were total newbies. Over the course of time, we would get locked out of one thing or get locked out of another and have to get our access back. We were advertised on say Google and Google would say “No, you're a bad actor,” and shut us down. Then that's the eggs in one basket. Our only outlet to let the world know was Google. When they said “No, you can't advertise anymore,” we were like, “Now what?” That prompted us frankly to get into the Facebook Marketplace. As we were working with Google and working through the issues that Google thought they have, thought that we were doing incorrectly, but in fact, they finally figured out that no, we were behaving correctly under the rule and then turned us back on and we've been on ever since. We were probably off for 12 weeks near the very beginning. We were just getting started. Now it's not as big a deal but then it was a huge deal. Basically, as you said the eggs in one basket. Kerry said, “We have no outlet. No way to get our message out.”

 

AIDAN:

Unfortunately, part of the reality is that a lot of these platforms like Google, they'll often think you're guilty until proven innocent kind of thing. That's their approach and there are some bad actors out there who do try to do suspicious things online. Once Google and the other platforms like Facebook and so on, realize that you're the real deal, normally they have no issue at all with people selling. What about your background though? You said that you didn't know anything about e-commerce. What did you do prior? Did you guys have day jobs? What's your background?

 

DOM:

I'll start and Kerry can jump in because our backgrounds are different. I have a day job many years ago and got laid off in 1993, I think, somewhere around there. I said “What the heck am I going to do now?” So I went into business for myself and have had a corporation running ever since. It's evolved and does very different things now than it did then, some similar, a lot different, and we look to diversify.  One thing we always want to do is diversify, and that's what got us into going to The Kibo Code.

 

AIDAN:

Is that business anything related to selling physical products online?

 

DOM:

Absolutely not. We have a couple of SaaS products, Software as a Service. Mostly we do marketing agency. We help people build their business, grow their business, use automation… 

 

AIDAN:

It's a completely different model.

 

DOM:

Totally. We really mostly sell services.

 

AIDAN:

Right. How about you Kerry? What was your past life prior to becoming an e-commerce entrepreneur?

 

KERRY:

I worked with Dom and his business on and off over the years, more and more as the years went by. But prior to that I was a nurse working in hospital setting. I did different roles as a nurse but yeah, it was a job.

 

AIDAN:

Obviously also a completely different world to building your own e-commerce business. There are some different skills and mindsets and characteristics that helped you guys succeed because I don't think success really happens by luck. Can you talk a little bit about the mindset that you feel like people need to have to be able to succeed at a course like The Kibo Code or any kind of e-commerce business for that matter? What's the type of mindset they have to have coming into something like this?

 

KERRY:

I think they have to be open to opportunity, have pretty strong work ethic. Doesn't mean you have to do it as a full time endeavor, I don't think, because I do think you could do it part time but you have to be committed to it. There's a lot to learn. There's the everyday things that need to be done and strategic things that need to be done. That what I think spells success.

 

AIDAN:

Sounds like it's a real business. 

 

DOM:

Yeah. Exactly. Our goal is to make money. Additionally, I'd say you're going to have setbacks. If your background is having worked for an employer for most of your career, it's a different world because the setbacks are more personal, I would say when you're working on your own. You just have to just keep on going through it. As Winston Churchill said once, if you're going through hell, keep going. That’s what you have to do. Don’t give up – you’ll get out of it if you just keep working the system, whatever it was. Like our Google slap, when we were shut down, we just worked with Google. We kept working, we kept working. We kept asking them again to relook at our stuff, and eventually, if we had [inaudible], we’d have said, “Oh, we’re done.” We could have been done.

 

AIDAN:

What was the motivating thing for you to start? Why did you want to start an online business in the first place? What’s been driving you to be able to want to have an online business?

 

KERRY:

I got the answer to this one. Overall motivation for that was to have a successful business that we could do from anywhere. It's much harder with our marketing agency to do it anywhere, but an e-commerce business really felt it would lend itself well to that.

 

AIDAN:

Yeah. So geographical freedom is a big one. Yeah. I think most people start an online business because they're looking for some type of geographic freedom or I guess a lot of freedom in general. A lot of people, first thing they think about is the money, but that quickly, in my opinion, becomes almost a second priority because you get the money eventually, as long as you keep chipping away at it like you guys have done. I think it's the other benefits of having the time freedom and the geographic freedom. That are really essential ones. For sure. Are there anything special about your daily routine that you guys do that you think has helped result in your success? When you're obviously disciplined about what you're doing, you've got…

 

KERRY:

So for me, my day starts with dealing with any orders that have come in, customer service inquiries. We have a team of VAs, so I'm always interacting with the VAs to make sure they don't have questions, haven’t run into problems, that sort of thing. That's how my day begins. That can take anywhere from a pretty short time to half my morning, but then I always have time to work on the strategic stuff later on.

 

DOM:

For people who are new, VA is a virtual assistant. Basically, it's a person who we've hired to help us out and they don't work physically with us. They work somewhere else. My day is similar. Two things that I'd like to take care of early just to get them off the table, those things that happened overnight that I have to deal with in all of our businesses. Then I have a list of things that I do each day; some are tactical, some are strategic. We have a set of goals for every week, and we try to meet those. We try to work hard to meet those goals. Then we have of course longer term goals for the quarter, for the year, and going forward. On a day-to-day basis, we work on the weekly goals, which will lead into the quarterly and the yearly. If we have to do these five things this week, we try to knock one off every day.

 

AIDAN:

It sounds like you both work together in your different businesses, but in the E-commerce business in particular, how have you sort of divided up the operations? Do one of you do the heavy lifting? Are you both kind of splitting that up? How do you approach that, working in a partnership there?

KERRY:

How do you define heavy lifting?

 

AIDAN:

Good question.

 

DOM:

We both do heavy lifting, but in different areas. I'm sorry, I already answered, because that’s politically correct.

 

AIDAN:

Be careful what you say.

 

DOM:

Exactly. Basically, I do the more technical side of things in general. I manage my own Facebook marketplace. I do the looking for technology that'll help us. We both kind of look for products. Kerry does management and she can tell you better of the virtual assistants and putting the order in. She actually puts the orders into our drop shippers.

 

KERRY:

Right now, I do all the order management, but we're always looking for things that I can delegate out the VAs. We've done more and more of that over time. So yeah, I think I agree with Dom. We do different things. We pretty much spend I would say equal time on the business.

 

DOM:

I would also say that getting a virtual assistant was life-changing, if you will. It made a difference in the business both in its growth and our excitement about it. Not excited because we got more money but excitement because we could do things we were better at…

 

AIDAN:

and that you want to do.

 

DOM:

And that we want to do. They kind of are the same, right? If you're better at them, you kind of like to do them. If you're not, they’re kind of dull. Then we were putting things out that we don't like or things we're not great at to freshen who's better at doing them and that made a big difference. It kind of lifts a weight off the shoulders because you know everything is getting done. You’re only doing the stuff that's important for you to do and you have someone else doing some other things. I would highly recommend anybody going into this business to do that as soon as possible, even as it starts costing you a little money at the beginning.

 

AIDAN:

I think I've got two regrets with my own online business. One of them was I didn't start e-commerce sooner because I kind of put it in the too-hard basket, and the other was that I did everything myself for too long. I can vividly remember when I started hiring a VA or VAs, virtual assistants, that my business started to explode. There's like a point in time, I can vividly remember it, and I was getting them to do the most mundane little things, but it was a game changer for me because I'd go to sleep at night, I'd wake up in the morning, and I'd have 10 hours done. I was like, “Oh my god!” I was still working a day job at the time. All of a sudden I was getting so much more work done in a week and that sort of put the turbo charges on my business, so I'm glad you found the same thing. Did you have experience in working with a virtual assistant in the past?

 

 

KERRY:

We do have a couple of US-based virtual assistants that we've used on part time basis over the years in our agency business. So we have some experience with that, but the VAs that we’ve hired for the E-commerce business are not US-based and they've been delightful to work with.

 

AIDAN:

I can totally relate to that. I think just building a team in general, in Steve and my business, we’ve got a team of must be 65-70 people around the world. When you sort of multiply out how much work you can get done on a daily basis, and not just that, but that you can have someone who is actually a lot better than you at doing things, it’s just such a no brainer. That's how businesses grow. Talking about business growth, I want to try to paint a picture for people who are listening to this. You’ve got a couple of stores. What has been the best month in those stores in terms of a dollar number? Just to sort of paint that picture for people.

 

DOM:

I think our first store, our best month was like in the $10,000 range, a little above that, and our other store, I would say it’s about $15,000. The months are much better than they were at the beginning, so best and current are not that far apart. 

 

AIDAN:

Of course. Yeah. How long did it take you to make your first sale? Was it like an overnight success thing?

 

KERRY:

No. We put a reasonable number of products into our store and tested a reasonable number on I don't remember the exact number, on different ad platforms. I think we got probably our first sale probably pretty early, but we certainly didn't have a great month until it was a while later.

AIDAN:

I think that's reasonable. You got offline business experience. The thing I always say to people is if I compare how quickly I can get an online business going to an offline business, then even if it takes a few weeks to get your first sale, it's still quite remarkable. I don't know how long that took you exactly. 

 

DOM:

It’s remarkable because there are so many tools out there to get you new customers. If you have an offline business, whether it's brick-and-mortar or even another kind of service business, it's a much tougher, longer, and harder, difficult job to get your leads, prospects, and customers than it is when you have these outlets to let the whole world know what you’re selling.

 

AIDAN:

If we talk about the products that you are actually selling, how do you choose these products? Are you following a general sort of theme? Do you sell products that you're interested in? Or is it just everything and anything?

 

KERRY:

So we did with what we learned in the Kibo Code programme initially and had a general store, sort of a very eclectic mix of products. We chose them not randomly. What we learned in the Kibo Code programme was how to research products, and so that's how we chose them. We tried really hard to keep our emotional bias out of the product choice. Just because we would buy it or we wouldn't buy it, it really is irrelevant.

 

 

 

AIDAN:

I always get amazed. The products that I think are going to do the best or the products that I think don't have much chance sometimes end up being my winners. It's so hard to predict these things that you can do to stack the odds of success in your favor. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what products you sell, but sometimes it's the most mundane object or bizarre object that turns into homerun. It's just the way it goes.

 

DOM:

Different outlets have different products that sell. So you can have one outlet which sells product day and another outlet which couldn't sell product day if you gave it away, and then vice versa. We found that what’s very interesting from a human interaction or whatever, you may have the perspective to analyse that and say, “Wow, I sold a million of these over here, but I can't sell any over there.”

 

AIDAN:

It really is fascinating. I think the more experience you get, the more you realize that almost any product can sell. Sometimes I see something being sold and like, “What the heck is that thing?” I don't even know what it is because one of my team has put it up and I see all these orders coming in and then I discover, “Oh, didn’t know that thing existed.”

 

DOM:

We have one of those. Our VAs do a lot of our product research with guidance from us of course. They don't put anything up we don't approve. But as you said, “Oh look. Everybody wants to buy this thing.” “What the heck is it? Okay.”

 

AIDAN:

Doesn't matter as long as there’s demand for it. Now talking about the blueprint that you've used, which has been The Kibo Code. I'd love to dive down drill down a wee bit more into your journey. Did you just follow the steps step by step by step? Did you sprinkle a bit of your own metric in there? What did you guys do to see success for that?

 

KERRY:

Quick story. So many ask your question around by the way. We followed the blueprint step by step, and part of the reason we did that is because we have learned from our own experience that if you think you know better than the experts do, you pretty much usually don't. A friend of ours years ago decided he was going out of business degree. He was going to buy a Subway franchise, which is a sandwich store in the US, but he knew better than the company did and he put his own sprinkle, his own magic on his franchise, and went belly up in six months. So we kind of kept that in the back of our minds when we started the Kibo Code. We watched all the videos, we talked to all the people, we listened to all the webinars. We really did walk the walk.

 

DOM:

As we got more experience, we were able to deviate slightly, but all with the basis and the foundation of what we were taught. We didn’t just go off on our own.

 

AIDAN:

Yeah. How about for someone who might be considering whether or not they want to go down this path? Maybe they're unsure of whether something like The Kibo Code is going to work for them. Maybe they've got some uncertainties around whether or not they're going to be able to do it. What would you say to people like that?

 

DOM:

If you follow the course and you can do that step by step, you may be one of the first guys to be successful or one of the last guys to be successful or somewhere in the middle, but you will be successful if you follow it and don't sprinkle too much of your magic on it too soon.

 

KERRY:

I think that people need to understand that starting any kind of business, whether it's e-commerce or not, is going to involve time and it's going to take a bite out of your personal time, your work time, or whatever, and you need to be prepared for that because it's not an easy road to start a business. It's a lot easier when you have a proven framework to work with. It does require time and commitment.

 

AIDAN:

Yeah, I think that a lot of people expect magic to kind of happen overnight with online businesses. That’s because there is a lot of unrealistic claims floating around out there. I do think that in the world of online business, e-commerce is probably the most predictable. Certainly, in a matter of a couple of weeks, you could have a store up and you could have products up. Once you got a store and products, you could have traffic. Once you've got traffic, then it's really just a matter of time until you make sales. So I think it's important that people are aware that there's no magic bullet in any kind of a business. Online business is the same. However, I would say that I think online business and particularly e-commerce, it's just riding this amazing wave right now and there's so much to be excited about as we roll into 2022. We're looking at all kinds of new avenues, new platforms that we can sell on, the likes of Tik Tok, the likes of Pinterest.  Walmart is a massive one. A lot of people don't realize the potential of Walmart and just how it's exploding in growth. This is in addition to everything that we've done in the past like Facebook marketplace, like the different term shopping platforms like Google and Microsoft advertising and so on and so forth. I think there's just so much to be excited about. The important thing is you do have that discipline that you guys have had and you followed the recipe. I think they're the key ingredients that we keep seeing in success from lots of people. The background doesn't matter. I mean you guys are proof of that. It's not like you had a background and in online e-commerce, but you are e-commerce entrepreneurs. It sounds funny when you say that, but it's the reality. Just final question for you: ambitions, objectives for 2022. With your business, have you got any numbers that you're chasing in terms of revenue or anything like that?

 

DOM:

We have revenue numbers in general of how much we'd like to increase our monthly net revenue across all of our business lines, but I don't think we broke it down, I’m assuming. 

 

KERRY:

I think we did this morning. We did for a quarter. For Q1, we'd like it to be 1.5, what it was in the fourth quarter of 2021.

 

AIDAN:

I think the growth that you can see was with e-commerce once you've got that foundation, it's absolutely huge because if you roll back the clock a year ago and imagine January 2021, I think you knew almost nothing about e-commerce and here you are a year later, you've got a couple of successful stores. So yeah, you should keep seeing this incremental growth.

 

KERRY:

It works for us. 

 

AIDAN:

I'm excited. I'm excited about what the year is going to bring for you guys. 

 

 

DOM:

As horrible of things that the world has gone through in the last two years, there there's never something that's 100% horrible right? Everything has some bright spots here and there. We'll never downplay what's happened to the world, but I will say that there are some opportunities that presented themselves. I think e-commerce is an opportunity that has grown exponentially faster, because of what's gone on in the world in the last few years.

 

AIDAN:

Yeah, that's definitely a big silver lining and this is not definitely not slowing down. You guys are riding the wave and I'm looking forward to watching you guys continue to crush it. Thank you so much for taking some time out to share your story with everyone here today. It’s inspirational, it’s motivational. For people who want to find out more about The Kibo Code, you can go to thekibocode.com and get information. If you are listening into this as a podcast, it’s podcast episode #3. Go to thegrowthbooth.com and you can find and see show notes, transcriptions, important links, and so much more. So that's a wrap for this episode. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you on the next one.