Afford Anything - How I Built a Six-Figure Online Store -- with Steve Chou from My Wife Quit Her Job

Episode Date: July 18, 2016

#34: Steve Chou's wife used to work grueling hours at a job she dreaded and despised. When she became pregnant with their first child, she decided to quit.  The problem? She earned six figures, and their family needed that income.  She opened an online store, buying handkerchiefs wholesale from China and retailing these online at a significant markup. She and Steve worked together to build a retail website and find customers. They bought Google Ads; they wrote blog posts; they created seller accounts on various shopping portals.   They earned more than $100,000 in their first year of business. In this episode, Steve explains how he and his wife earn six figures as online retailers while enjoying a much more relaxed, liberated lifestyle. He offers pointers for anyone who's interested in making money selling goods online -- either as a side business or as a method for quitting your day job.   For more, visit http://podcast.affordanything.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, hey, this is the Afford Anything podcast, all about making better decisions with your money, time, energy, focus, attention, and life. My name's Paula Pant. I'm the host, and today we're going to talk to someone whose situation you might be able to relate to. His name is Steve Chu, and back in 2007, he and his wife felt like they were just getting by. They had good educations and good jobs, but they weren't loving life. They weren't really enjoying their work. And his wife in particular was very unhappy with her career. One of the main things that kind of caused us to want to change our lives is because my wife really hated going to her day job. Every single morning she would complain that she was going to the hellhole.

She called her job and she would go. And this cycle just kept on repeating. So when you're in a job you hate, ideally you'd quit. The problem is that sometimes you need money. And that was the situation that Steve and his wife found themselves in. She was earning $100,000 a year, and they couldn't really afford to lose that income. So they found an unusual solution. They built an online business, but not a freelance-based business or a consulting business.

They decided that they were going to start selling physical products online. In effect, they built an online store, complete with shipping, labels, customer service, the whole nine yards. How did it turn out? We basically replaced my wife's income within a year. And so as soon as her maternity leave ended, she ended up quitting and then running the shop. Turned out pretty well for them.

So let's find out how Steve and his wife built a six-figure online business in one year, giving his wife the freedom to quit a job that she hated. And let's find out what lessons all of us can learn from that when we're making decisions about our careers, our money, and the opportunities that lay ahead of us. But first, I want to take a quick moment to give a shout out to our new sponsors. This company is amazing. They have really come out in support of this podcast.

They are a really innovative new company that streamlines small business invoicing. So if you're running any kind of side hustle or small business and you're trying to figure out how to manage your books, this is a really, user-friendly online platform that just simplifies the whole process. It makes it super easy to get the money side of your small business under control. They're called FreshBooks, and you can try them for free for 30 days by going to FreshBooks.com slash Paula. That's freshbooks.com slash Paula, P-A-U-L-A. And when they ask, how did you hear about us? Say Paula. Tell them that you heard about them from Paula, and you'll get 30 days free. Try them out. See if you like them. With that being said, let's learn from Steve how he grew a $100,000 grossing business in a year from his living room.

Hey, Steve, how are you? Hey, good. Steve, I want to introduce your story to all of our listeners because you and your wife, I think, had a background that a lot of people can relate to. You talk about how back in 2007, we're going to rewind the clock, your life was quite. comfortable yet complacent. Yeah, I mean, I don't know how many of your listeners can relate, but basically we both had full-time jobs. We would go to work, we'd come back, watch TV for a couple of hours, have dinner, go to sleep, and it was just like this day in and day out. One of the main things that kind of caused us to want to change our lives is because my wife really hated

going to her day job every single morning. She would complain that she was going to the hellhole. she called her job and she would go and this cycle just kept on repeating. So let's set the stage a little bit. First of all, what did the two of you do for a living? Yeah, so my wife was a financial analyst at a Fortune 500 company. I was a microprocessor designer. If I may ask, how old are you? I am 41 now. And your wife? She's roughly the same age, but she's ageless. Yes.

And where were you living? Bay Area, California. Oh, high cost of living area. High cost of living, yes, absolutely. Tell me about how you got into those fields of work. Initially, were you passionate about financial analyzing and microprocessing? For me, I really liked my job. In fact, I was there for 17 years, just recently gave notice.

And so I've really liked my job. It was just my wife who didn't really like hers. And I, you know, it's funny. I'm not sure how she arrived at that, but I think she was just trying to choose a position that was marketable and paid well, as a bunch of people often do, right? You go into something that you think that you can make a living at. It may not necessarily be the thing that you actually want to do for the rest of your life, but it pays the bills.

Right. And both of you were very well educated. I know you went to Stanford, didn't you? And your wife also went to... She went to UC Davis. So she has a degree in economics, and I have a master's in electrical engineering. So you've both put some serious capital and have some serious sunk costs. Well, yeah, I mean, we're Asian, so we...

As am I. I know the feeling. It's like a given that... When I was a child, people didn't say, what do you want to be when you grow up? People said, are you going to be a doctor or an engineer? Or a lawyer. Lawyer qualifies, too. Oh, lawyer was my rebellious answer. Oh, okay. That was my teenage rebellion.

In fact, when I got really rebellious, I threatened that I was going to major in philosophy before law school. Sociology. That was actually what I ended up majoring in. I majored in sociology with a minor in philosophy, and my dad was so embarrassed. He would not admit it to anyone. People asked what I was studying. He would say, pre-law, pre-law. Yeah.

That's too funny. Before we move on with the story, I'd like to know a little bit more about what your wife was experiencing at work. In terms of, in some of our previous episodes, we've talked about the conditions. that make a job joyous. So, you know, we talk about developing mastery and skills such that you feel like you're good at a given area. We talk about having some level of autonomy and control over work that you do. Did she feel any of that?

That's a good question, actually. I don't want to, like, just put words in her mouth, but my general sense was that she was underappreciated at work for what she was doing. she would have to work after hours too and kind of longer hours. And so basically, you know, she would get home. We would have dinner and she would have to kind of log on for a little bit longer. And then by the time it came for us to hang out, she was already pretty tired. And to just kind of repeat this cycle for an extended period of time while not getting necessarily appreciated with your work kind of just started wearing on her.

Right. And you said that you enjoyed your job. Were you feeling some of it? that? No, I like my job because I have autonomy. There's a creative outlet, you know, doing hardware design. And it's kind of something I've always wanted to do, you know, ever since I was little. And all the people that I worked with were super smart. They all had master's or PhDs from Stanford or MIT. So I was happy. And that's why I've stayed there for so long. So you were also surrounded by peers that inspired you? Yes. Everyone at that company was just

amazingly smart. So then tell me about how you decided to start transitioning, because at this point in the story, your wife is frustrated with the status quo, but how did you begin to take action on that? And how did you begin to initiate change? See, that's the thing. It's really hard, it was really hard for us to take action unless there was some sort of trigger point. And for us, that trigger point happened when she became pregnant with our first child. And we had had this conversation way back when we were dating. And she basically told me that she was going to quit whatever she was doing to help raise the child. And I kind of agreed with that because when I was little, my parents both worked and I didn't really see them that often. Obviously, we didn't want that

to happen with our child. And so as soon as she became pregnant with her first child, I knew that we were about to lose a six-figure income. And that's kind of what sparked things into motion. Because you've said that, you know, one of your thoughts when you found out that you were pregnant, when I was pregnant, yeah, right. Was also about the money that you would need to raise the child. You felt like you wanted to start a college education fund. You wanted to make sure you lived in a good school district. So you're about to lose a six-figure income, but you also are about to add to your bills.

Yeah, I mean, as you mentioned earlier, where we live is just ridiculously expensive. And so, for example, just like a 2,000 square foot house around here is like over $2 million. Pretty much everyone who lives here has two incomes of some sort, just to scrape by. Like six figures is actually in the poor house. And in fact, in Palo Alto, kind of down the street, they're offering subsidies for housing if you make under $250,000 a year. Wow. That's just the way it is here.

And so what's the monthly payment on $2 million? It depends what your loan is. I bet it's really high. I'm going to, as you're talking, I'm going to run that on a mortgage calculator real fast. Yeah, you should. It's probably crazy. We knew that we needed to replace that income because schools are obviously very important. You know, we were talking about education earlier.

And so we knew that we had to replace her income in order to get that house in a good school district. The other option, of course, is to go private school, which here is also ridiculously expensive. It's worth it if you only have one child, but if you have kids, two, it pays to actually move into an area with good schools. What was running through your mind at this time? It sounds like you knew that you wanted to find some alternate ways to generate income or to replace your wife's income. But how did you start that brainstorming process?

How did you start that discovery process? Yeah, we actually started by looking at like brick and mortar operations, actually. So one of our top candidates, and I don't know if you guys have this in your area, But there are these places that help kids get ahead in school, like kumans, and that sort of place. And so we were actually thinking about running a kumans because it was in line with our beliefs. And, you know, we could send our kids there and that sort of thing. And we also had a couple of other ideas, too, like a place where you go and you pack your meals or a meal prep service, basically. Is this kind of like a franchise type of a thing?

Yeah. Yeah, actually both of those were franchise operations. That's correct. And you need initial capital in order to enter. You do. That's the problem. So to start some of those things required like half a million dollars up front to start for some of these things. That was just a tremendous risk.

And that's kind of what led us to online. And, okay, so just to kind of back up the story a little bit, the reason we decided to go online was back in the day when we got married, my wife, you know, we spent a lot of money on photography for the wedding and she knew she was going to cry because she was a cry baby. She wanted to make sure that she wasn't using tissues to dab her tears, you know, during our wedding. And so we looked all over the place for a handkerchief. We couldn't find any locally. Ended up going to China to get them. Had to order a bunch. We only used a couple.

And then we sold the rest on eBay. It sold on eBay like hotcakes. And so that's why later on, you know, we were brainstorming all these brick and mortar operations. But then we were like, hey, why don't we get back in contact with those handkerchief manufacturers? And see if we can put something up online because, one, there's like very low upfront cost. And two, you actually don't have to be present to make money. So when you bought those handkerchiefs in China for your wedding, did you buy them directly? You bought them directly from a wholesaler or from the manufacturer?

Yeah. And so I think the minimum order back then was like 300 or so. Okay. Three hundred pieces. And so, yeah, we only needed like six. Right, because you were just buying it for your own personal use. But it was so inexpensive. that to buy them in the U.S. would have only been, you know, a little bit more expensive than buying that huge bulk amount.

Were you as ordinary, everyday people without any type of specific licenses, you were able to buy things from manufacturers directly in China? Yeah, I mean, you don't need any licenses at all. Okay. So anybody could do that. Anybody can do that as long as what you're importing doesn't have any special licensing requirements, I should say. Okay. So in case of what you were specifically doing, the handkerchiefs, it was fine. That's correct. Yeah, textiles has nothing, really. Did you need to have any foreign language? Could you make this transaction in English? You can. So here's the funny thing. So everyone over in China, they study English, right?

And so even though they might not be the best speakers, anything that's done via email, like, you can communicate via email because the written language is okay. Right. Okay. And how did you? know where to go. Specifically, when we're talking about this buying handkerchiefs for the wedding, how did you even know where to start looking? Did you just Google, like, handkerchief manufacturer China? You know, so back then, you know, during the wedding time, we actually just used Google. And we, and again, we couldn't find anything local from what we wanted.

And so we found these really sketchy Chinese sites. And, you know, most of the manufacturers over there, they don't have really good websites. And so just on a chance, we reached out to them. And it was a risk, but it was such a low dollar amount that we were like, hey, if they rip us off, they rip us off. It's not a big deal. Do you remember about how much it was? Yeah, it was on the order of $300, or just under $300. Okay, yeah.

So worst case scenario, you're out $300. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. All right. Yeah, not a big deal. And then when you sold them on eBay, do you remember roughly how much you made from that? And I know that you weren't doing that as a business. It was just...

Yeah, that's a good question. I actually don't remember anymore, but we were just trying to get rid of them. Yeah. And so I can't imagine that we made a whole lot of money doing that. We just wanted them out of the house. But we probably made like a good three to four X markup. Hmm. And did you sell them one by one?

Do you have to like mail each handkerchief? That sounds like a lot of mailing. Yeah. So we did sets of 12 and sets of three, I remember. Oh, okay. And the reason for that was there were certain items that were already kind of packaged in dozens. And so we didn't want to just, we just left the packaging alone and just sold them as is. Okay, that makes sense.

So let's go back to, you've discovered that your wife is pregnant, you want to quit your job, and now you're thinking back. You've looked at some franchises, but those require a significant amount of upfront capital. Correct. And now you're thinking back to that chance experience that you had buying handkerchief. from China. What happens next? A bunch of things happened all around the same time. One of my buddies, he started a little photography website. He showed me like his website and I was like, wow, this is great. How much did you pay to get this starting? He's like, oh, I didn't pay anything. Mainly because he used an open source platform, just like WordPress is an open source platform. For the listeners who

aren't familiar with that, what is that? It just means the software is free in a nutshell. And so I pretty much followed in his footsteps. I signed up for hosting and I just, put up this free software and all of a sudden I had a store. And then my brother-in-law, he wasn't my brother-in-law at the time, he was working for Google on their AdWords team. And he was like, hey, why don't you give AdWords a try? And so I gave it a try. And all of a sudden, we were getting very targeted traffic and we were making sales. How much did you initially spend on AdWords? In the very beginning, we were spending like 10 bucks a day. Okay. Something very minimum. And then Once orders started coming in and I was confident that the ad spend was leading to sales,

I immediately just cranked it up to the point where, you know, my budget was higher than the actual number of searches that we were getting to the site. So what type of returns were you getting on that? Let's start at the beginning when you were just testing this for the first time. This is back in 2007 when Google AdWords was much less saturated. We were getting 10 to 12 X returns. Oh, so you'd spend $10 a day and get 100? 100 to 100 to 100.

Yeah. It was crazy. In gross orders? In gross orders, yes. But remember, our product costs were like nothing. Right. So. Right. So $100 to $120 a day with a 3 to 4x markup means that about $75 a day at least would be profit.

So naturally then, when you saw that that was working, you would crank that up. We crank that up. We had three basic strategies. We started putting out content because it was really easy. to get ranked back then too. Ranked in search engines? In the search engines, yeah. And then we also started reaching out to like event planners,

people who were willing to buy in bulk. And so that was just kind of our three-pronged strategy. All the early orders came in through AdWords. SEO started kicking in maybe in the six-month mark. What is SEO for the listeners? Search engine optimization. And that was as a result of blog posts that you were putting on the site? Yeah, these were, so what's funny is WordPress,

I don't think was hugely popular back then when we got started. And so I whipped up my own little content management system and we were putting up blog posts on the store. It wasn't even called blogging back then. I don't even think. Wow, you were in the early days of blogging. Yeah. And so these, I just called them content pages. And so yeah, those started ranking and we started following those people to the store. Okay. All right. So you're getting traffic through people finding blog posts. You're getting traffic through Google AdWords and you were reaching out directly to event planners. That's correct.

What time frame are we talking about? How long did it take between when you initially set up that website and when you started doing all three of these things? Are we talking like a week? Okay, so the timeline is a little weird because I had been researching this stuff way before we actually launched, right? Mm-hmm. So I would say the website probably took me at least three months, I would say, because I had to learn the code for the site in order to customize it. Which you wouldn't have to do today. Which you would not have to do today. That's correct.

Outside of that, the rest of the infrastructure, and it's really hard because this was like seven years ago, or longer than that, actually. The other infrastructure, I think, was just very basic. We bought some stuff, some packing materials on U-line. We were just going to the post office, like manually. So I was really friendly with all the post office folks because I would walk in every morning with like a huge bag of borders. Yeah, so early on, we didn't have much sophistication at all. So there wasn't really much upfront outside of the website. The website was probably the biggest hurdle.

So we basically replaced my wife's income within a year. And so as soon as her maternity leave ended, she ended up quitting and then running the shop, essentially. Wow. Was there a ceiling to that demand? Was there a ceiling to how many handkerchiefs you could sell? Because, I mean, as I'm listening to the story, I'm thinking, well, if you can spend $10 on Google AdWords and that $10 generates a hundred in revenue, most of which is profit, then in theory you could do that infinitely. Yeah, of course, there's a ceiling. I mean, you're limited by the amount of people who are actually searching for those things, right?

Yeah. So that's why I mentioned in AdWordsland, we kind of max those out so that our budget exceeded the demand. Okay. And what point was that? Okay. So there's different flavors of handkerchiefs, right? Okay. And so there's lace, there's personalized, there's, you know, just plain, there's colored.

And so I would say, I actually don't even know how much we spend on them right now because our budget just exceeds the demand. Right. I think I have it set like a couple hundred bucks a day, maybe more than that, just for handkerchiefs a lot. alone. But you're right, it does get saturated after a while. And so after a while, we started looking at other product lines. So we introduced like linen napkins, linen towels, a bunch of other wedding stuff like parasols. We started catering different industries. So for example, funerals, they're always looking for handkerchiefs, you know, with deceased name and date and that sort of thing. And so we started just branching out to different markets.

Wow. Same products, different markets. So there's a lot of, what I'm hearing there is that there's a lot of strategy going on in terms of keywords that you're using, lace handkerchiefs versus, I forget one of the other examples, silk handkerchiefs. Yeah, I mean, you can bid on the keywords for the product itself, but oftentimes it helps to provide context for those. So, for example, we also noticed that sororities were using these things. And so, you know, we started bidding on like sorority gifts or stuff like that. So it's not just the product itself. It's the way that people look for it.

That's correct. And trying to understand what people are looking for. Interesting. So I can see how this would be a very fascinating business because you're not just selling handkerchiefs. You're analyzing and strategizing. Yeah, I mean, for me, certainly, because I wasn't interested in the product at all. And there's a lot of fun things that you can do, like with email, with just running advertising campaigns.

There's a lot of human psychology involved. That's what makes it interesting. Tell me more about this. So where does the story go from here? Within a year, you've replaced your wife's income, so you're making $100,000 a year at least. Right. So she quits, just from a lifestyle perspective at this point,

she basically took care of our kids during the day, and then at night we would both help pack. Pause here, kids, plural? No, one kid, sorry, yeah. At that time, it was only one child. We have two now, but at the time it was just one. Okay. So her maternity leave ends. She quits her job. She's running this. She's watching the kids during the day. And when they're asleep, she's running this business. And you're also helping quite a bit. I'm still, I'm working full time, but then I come home. And so it was actually my idea to do the personalized products. So we actually bought this industrial sewing machine to actually embroider people's names on these handkerchiefs. Oh, you were doing that yourself?

Yes, we were doing ourselves. There's actually my wife's hobby in the beginning, but I wanted to monetize it. And it actually ruined her hobby. And she was just fed up with it. And so I was like, okay, I will do it. And so I would come home from work. I would sew for a couple hours, you know, for a while until we found someone to do it for us. Wow.

Did you know how to sew before that, or did you have to learn? No, I had no idea. Yeah. Had to learn. Oh, this is great. I love this story. So, yeah, I did that for a lot. long time, actually. I can't remember the exact duration, but it was somewhere between six months

and a year. And it was worth your time to... Oh, God, the margins on monogramming are like 90-something, 95%. Even counting the value of your time? Yeah, I mean, at the time, I just wanted this product out there. And if my wife wasn't going to do it, then someone had to do it, right? There's a lot of processes in place that you have to put down before you can actually hire someone to do it, right? Right. And the personalized turned out to be our most profitable sense. segment. So definitely worth the time invested. Wow. Can I ask about numbers? How much would a monogramed handkerchief sell for? You can charge 20 bucks for something that costs like nothing, basically. Okay. So $20. And how long would it take to monogram a handkerchief? It depends.

And again, this is all computer done, right? You enter into design and the machine does all the work. Oh, okay. I'm imagining you on a singer-sewing machine like. No, no, no, no, no, no. It's not like that. You basically, you can automate it such that the design kind of pops out, and then you just upload the design to the machine, and then you just have to load it at that. Then you hit start. Oh, okay. Sorry, yeah. No, I'm not on a sewing machine, like manually sewing. Yeah. I was really having fun with that visual image for a minute. So, yeah, I guess technically that I'm not really sewing, the machine is sewing, and I'm just setting up the machine. I still count that. I give you sewing credit. Okay. All right. So then what? First of all, how are you feeling at this time? You're running a business. You're working a lot, but now you've got certainly mastery and autonomy and novelty as well. Were you enjoying this? Were both you and your wife? I was enjoying it because it was growing. Like early on we were like having triple digit growth.

from year, triple and double-digit growth from year to year. And, you know, we started making enough so that we could hire people. Mm-hmm. It was still fun for me because e-commerce just evolves so quickly every single year. Mm-hmm. And so there's always stuff to learn. And really, the product that you're selling doesn't matter so much as the processes and the marketing that you're putting in place.

Hmm. It's a challenge. Were you feeling overwhelmed since you were working full time and then coming home and doing more work on the second job and you had a newborn. How did you manage your time? Yeah, I mean, we didn't start working on the business until the newborn went to bed, which was pretty early, actually. We were actually blessed with a baby that slept pretty well also. So I think our kid would go down on like 7.7.30, and then we'd have the rest of the night to just work on stuff. But yeah, definitely overwhelming in the beginning. Lots of nights and weekends,

even before the child was born. But, you know, once you have all, everything's set in place, it becomes a lot easier. Right. What do you mean by everything set in place? Your processes, basically. Okay. Like when an order comes in, this is what you do, and this is how you ship. Once you have all, like, the automation in place, it makes it a lot easier.

Okay. And how would you do that? Would you have checklists? Would you automate it through computer programs and software? Mainly software. But most of it was just, you know, once you go through it, you just kind of gradually refine it to make things faster. So I'll give you a stupid example. We were taping on our shipping labels manually in the beginning.

But then, you know, when we invested in these stickers, very early on, it just made the whole packing much faster. We started investing in packing materials where it was just, you know, self-stick, essentially. Little things like that that just shaved time off of fulfillment. Right. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. So then what? What happens next? Now your wife was able to quit her job. She's making $100,000 at least a year from this business.

Where does the story go from here? We get a bunch of friends who start asking about our business. I just decided to start a blog that just kind of documented our experiences. I don't know where you're going with this, Paula. So I started writing about this stuff and it started getting a following, which ultimately led to me teaching a class on e-commerce. and it's just kind of snowballed since then. Nice.

And are you still running this handkerchief slash linens business today? Oh, yeah, definitely. We've consistently grown in the double digits ever since 2007. And so it's been like nine years now. Wow. I'm still a little shocked at how you find time for all of this because you mentioned that you've just put in your notice at work. So you've been balancing a full-time job with all of this?

It's actually not that bad. So if you think about it this way, if you were to break it down, my wife runs the e-commerce store. I'm in charge of marketing for it. And then the blog, I put out one blog post a week. For the podcast, I only put out one podcast a week. So you have a podcast too? I have a podcast too.

And for my class, I just put out, I just do one live webinar a week. Wow. So for my time, it ends up being around 10, 15 hours a week. And then my job was pretty nice too in that it was basically a 40-hour week under normal circumstances. So plenty of time, Paula. I'm going to pause here really quickly to give a little shout out to anybody who's listening who does any type of work outside of your normal 9 to 5.

Whether it's freelancing or consulting or anything that you do, you probably send invoices. And that is probably not a whole lot of fun. And it takes a bunch of your time and you have to track all of your payments. And it's one of those annoying pieces of running. your own business, whether it's full-time or on the side, that you're not super into. Check out freshbooks.com slash Paula for a free 30-day trial of a program that can really streamline this for you, that can make invoicing super easy so that you can spend your

time doing more interesting stuff. Again, try them for free by visiting freshbooks.com slash Paula. And when they ask, how did you hear about us? type in Paula, that's P-A-U-L-A. Back to Steve. Tell me a little bit about, you have a blog post about overcoming self-doubt, where you talk about how one of the biggest challenges when you were initially starting the store was feeling a little alone or isolated. You didn't have people to talk to. You couldn't compare strategies.

You were figuring out what you were doing as you were going along. How did you deal with that? So here's the problem, especially around here, everyone worked. So we're in Silicon Valley. Everyone's working at a startup or do something along those lines. And so when you're selling hankies, that's just not interesting to a lot of people. Okay. It's, I don't want to say lowbrow, but compared to some of these startups that are happening that are changing the world, you know,

doing an e-commerce store sounds pretty basic. Right. And so I didn't really have, we didn't really have anyone to talk to about this stuff because everyone was off doing like gigantic startups, getting funding and that sort of thing. Right. And so that was the biggest challenge. we were basically just working on our own in a vacuum on this store and just trying to figure things out. There weren't a lot of blogs out there writing about this stuff at the time.

And so that was the hardest part, getting support. And in fact, I always felt like even friends were just, they would ask me how things were going, but they didn't really think that it would succeed. They were just asking just to be friendly. It was just a whole bunch of different factors like that that made it difficult. How did you deal with that? I think the fact that it was both my wife and I helped a lot because if I was in there by myself, it would have been pretty overwhelming. So just basically having a spouse that's on the same page.

And over time, there were blogs and other people that kind of popped out and started talking about doing these things. And I immediately hooked up with them. My life completely changed once I started going to conferences where I actually was able to meet some of these people face to face. and to have like a virtual relationship, so to speak, outside of my local community. What advice would you give to any listeners who are interested in possibly opening up their own store? What advice would you have for them? How would you have them start?

Yeah, so if you go to MyWife Quit Her Job.com, which is my blog, I offer a free six-day mini-course that goes over all the basics on how you want to run your store if you want to, to see if you're even interested in doing this at all. And it just kind of walks you through the entire process. So that's like the best place to start. And if you are really interested in doing this today, things have changed a lot since when we started. I actually recommend that you start on Amazon first because there's a built-in marketplace and because it's so easy and you don't have to worry about inventory or customer support. Start on Amazon. see if your product has any legs,

meaning like you can validate your product on Amazon. And then once you start getting a good amount of sales on Amazon, then start launching your own online store website. How much is a good amount of sales? I would say four figures per month is enough to warrant starting your own site. Okay. What if somebody doesn't know what they want to sell? Yeah, there's a whole bunch of tools out there that help with the research.

And again, this is all included in the six-day free mini course. but basically there's tools that will help you figure out what sales other people are making. You can kind of go through different listings to get an idea of what's popular. There's also other tools, and I'll just give me an example, like Terapique. That tool scrapes all the eBay listings, and they can point out what are the hot sellers in a market. Some people like to just go to trade shows. Like, for example, every other year we go to the Canton Fair in China, where there's just

thousands and thousands of exhibitors that come, and you can kind of go through. and see if any of the product samples kind of reach out to you and see if you can turn it into some sort of product that might be popular in the U.S. A bunch of different ways to find products to sell. Should you look for a hot product or should you look for a product that isn't out there yet? Do you know what I mean? Like, let's say that there's some product that is selling, it's super popular and it's

selling on Amazon and eBay and it's just the obvious, duh, product. I'm trying to think of an example and I can't come up. Yeah, I get what you're asking. I tend to stay away from super popular products because those products tend to be high profile and they tend to get saturated really quickly. I like to just stay right under the radar. Now, you also asked about creating a completely novel product that no one's ever heard of. That path is a little bit harder because you don't have any prior sales data to base your

assumptions off of. And so if I was going that route, creating a product that no one else has ever seen, I would probably create the products and prototypes. I would probably run some Facebook ads to it, give out some as just like prototypes and get feedback. And only once I got some positive feedback would I start actually selling it to the mass market. So it's different. There's just two completely different strategies depending on what you decide to sell. Right.

So if you're making your own items such as like maybe making your own jewelry. Jewelry is a little different. I was thinking more like inventions. Oh, okay. Jewelry, in my opinion, is a very difficult niche to pursue because from a search perspective, it's really saturated. And there's just so many different jewelry stores around. You really have to find some sort of angle to make yourself stand out somehow. What would be an example of a product that you'd invent yourself?

That's a good question. I can't think of something right off the bat. But if we were to go with the jewelry example, one of my friends recently started selling jewelry, catering to the essential oils market, for example. That is like a spin on jewelry. Like if you just decide to sell jewelry, that would be really hard. But if you can kind of frame your jewelry in a certain way that targets a special niche group, then that will make your chances of success much more likely.

I will admit that I've spent some time just poking around on olibaba.com. Just brainstorming. You know, not that I've realistically, I'm not going to go into this at least at this point. but it's fun to look around on that site and think about products that you could buy wholesale and then sell here. Yeah, totally. And in fact, I mean, it's getting so popular now that Amazon's getting saturated with a whole bunch of identical products with different brands. What I always advise the students in my class is you've got to think of that one thing that differentiates your product from the competition in order to kind of succeed in the long run. You can sell Me Too products right now and probably make some money since Amazon's so big.

But looking forward, you really have to establish your own brand. Great. Well, thanks again for coming on the podcast. Again, people can find you at My Wife Quit Her Job.com, where you offer a free six-day mini course on how to get started in e-commerce. That's correct. And if any of you guys are getting married, you can go to bumblebeelinens.com. We'll hook you up with some handkerchiefs.

Thank you, Steve. All right, thanks, Paula. What are some of the key takeaways that we've learned from Steve? First of all, I was intrigued by his observation that even if you are in a situation that you don't like, you might not make a change unless there's a compelling trigger. His wife didn't like her job. She dreaded going to work. She had no energy when she came home.

And yet, she stayed in a job that she didn't like for years until a compelling trigger. which was the birth of their first child, drove her to take actions to change her situation. I want to highlight that part of the story because I would like to invite you to ask yourself, is there some part of your life that you're not happy with, but that you might have become complacent with? In other words, is there some aspect of your life that you don't like it? You want it to be different. But it's not unbearable. And so you're allowing yourself to live with it for longer than you should. And if that is the situation for you, how can you introduce some type of a trigger into your own life?

It doesn't have to be as drastic as the birth of a child, but is there some trigger that you can set up in your own life that will drive you to taking action? Because as we learned from Steve's story, once they started taking action, the results for them happened almost. immediately. Within a year, they had built enough income online to replace her $100,000 salary. That's incredibly impressive. But it's also achievable. It's not so impressive that it's outside of the bounds of anything that you could imagine doing. Because as we heard from Steve, it started very simply. It started one step at a time. Make a small bet. Set up a website. Buy $10 worth of Google AdSense ads. See if it works. If it does, keep going. And if it doesn't, switch courses and try something else. And that's the second key takeaway that I got from Steve's

story was that he and his wife made a series of small bets one step after the next. They didn't start thinking, oh, I'm going to sell handkerchiefs and linens and parasols and we'll monogram them. They didn't start with these big, grandiose ideas. They started small, made time. tiny bets and refined along the way, sticking with what works and building upon that. And the third key takeaway that I got from his story is that you don't necessarily need to be in love with a physical product that you're selling online. And this is where we get into more specifics. If you're selling a given product, a lot of people assume that they need to be passionate about the product itself. like, oh, I need to be passionate about jewelry or essential oils.

The reality is you don't necessarily spend a lot of time interfacing with the product. You spend a lot of time interfacing with building a business. And so the thing that you need to be passionate about is the act of building and growing a business. And if you are, then the product, so long as it's not harming anyone, is almost an after thought or almost not totally relevant. Those are three core takeaways that I got from this interview with Steve. I'd love to hear your thoughts. You can find me on Twitter at Afford Anything.

Reach out. Let me know what you think. If you enjoyed this show, please do me a huge favor. Go to iTunes and leave a review. Let me know what you think about the show. If you enjoy it, if you enjoy the interviews, I would absolutely love to hear your feedback. And those reviews make a huge difference. So please go to iTunes.

and leave a review for the Afford Anything podcast. Thanks again to FreshBooks, our sponsor who helps keep us on the air. You can try them for free for 30 days by going to freshbooks.com slash Paula. And when they ask, how do you hear about us? Say Paula. I really appreciate you listening. Thank you so much. If you want to know more, you can check out the show notes at podcast.offordainthing.com. Thanks again, and I'll see you next week.

So I'm starting to get my first few grays, but I have black hair, so it's extremely evident. Oh, that's cool, though. It's like, it probably looks like silver. Yeah, that's how everybody's... It's really cool. It'll be good for Halloween. Oh, yay. That's what I've always wanted to be, a 365-day Halloween costume.

Are you dyeing them? You know, I'm not totally sure how. I was trying to find pens that could cover up specific. strands, but I must have googled the wrong thing, so I can't find them yet. All I can find is, like, dyes for your whole hair. Just use a Sharpie. Really? Yeah. Pick, like, a dark brown or black or whatever, and just, yeah, it's just one strand or two strands here and there. That's maybe like 12. 12. That's okay. Even if they fell out, it still wouldn't bother you if you, like, damaged them, right? They're gray. You don't like those guys.

Wow. I don't think you could actually sharpie your hair. I sharpie when my black or brown shoes get messed up when furniture scuffs, anything that scuffs or it gets bad, I literally use a Sharpie for everything. You're blowing my mind.