I am an eBay seller that quit his corporate job to sell used crap online. I LOVE failing at things & love sharing my experiences with the world.
The point of this post if you don’t want to read it all… NEVER give up. No matter what happens, just keep pushing & trying new things.
Over the past several years, my wife & I have sold over $300,000 worth of used things online. It’s been a wild ride, to say the least, but that part of our life is slowly fading…
I’m burnt out from eBay. I’m sick of sourcing inventory all of the time. The constant repetitiveness is killing my soul, just like my corporate job at Sysco Foods did.
So 2020 has been a life-changing year for many reasons… my wife and I had our first son, started & failed several side hustles, & now created something totally different than what we started with!
Things we tried to start & failed at in 2020:
– Tried to engineer a cannabis vaporizer –Hired a mechanical engineer for no reason
– Clothes boutique in our garage –spent a bunch of money, never did anything with it
– Online clothes eccomerce site –spent 2 weeks working on a Shopify site, never used it
– Pot Magnet – prototyped a cannabis product, product designer took my money & didn’t do anything for months – Resell Junkie APP – Hired a dude on Upwork.com to make an app related to reselling / inventory. Went great until I paid him
Let’s talk about each one and what the hell I was thinking at the time…
Engineer a cannabis vaporizer
When I was 19, I had an IDIOT cop put me in a jail cell for literally a roach.
If you don’t know what a roach is, it’s the last tiny bit of a smoked joint. I now have a vendetta against the war on drugs since I saw it first hand. Me going to jail at that point could of ruined my life, but it didnt. I have no problem with cops, I dated one, but this guy was a moron.
All this to say, I wanted to get into the cannabis industry.
Though my views are different now (the cannabis industry is PURE GARBAGE)… I will get hate on that, but it’s true.
The government regulations, the shady idiots, & the low-quality product is absurd. Investing in this sector can make you money on upswings, but there is a lot to work out before real investing can happen.
So my plan was to create a product that was industry-related but still had some distance from all of the crap. I wanted to make a really nice high-end product for high-end cannabis consumers to enjoy.
Off I went down a journey of hiring a mechanical engineer, learning CAD software, & trying to make prototypes at home. All wasting my time and money.
I literally tried to learn how to use a software called Blendr, this is the kind of stuff that animation & studios use to create crazy things. What was I thinking?
The first product I ever tried to invent was a really complicated device with a heating element, sensors, and a bunch of unnecessary crap. I went so overboard with this thing that it failed before even getting started.
This is one of the first sketches I came up with for this product
Here are several renderings that we had done over the course of a couple of months…
We hired freelancers on Fiverr & Upwork to do these for us, you can learn more about these marketplaces here
My passion for this dream of being in the industry & wanting to have a “cool product” led me down a road of researching the most random crap…
I learned about heat ratings for certain materials. Figured out the cost to produce items at scale. Saw how some simple things are really really expensive/difficult to manufacture at volume.
Plus so much other nonsense that actually was incredibly helpful
Do you guys see how much I learned during this time? Eventually, we stopped looking into this just based on the cost to produce. There was no way we could afford to get this started nor were we passionate enough to go down the funding route.
Clothes Boutique in our garage
We got bored during lockdown & said why the hell don’t we open a private clothes boutique in our garage? Sounds like a great plan!
After buying a bunch of rolling racks and taking almost ALL of our 1000 items out of their inventoried homes, we never sold one piece of clothing locally.
So what happened? We just simply lost interest, It just didn’t have the spark that we wanted it to. We realized that having people in our garage was not something that we wanted at all…
This was such a waste of time, but it did steer our business towards being as light as possible (meaning digital).
Wasted weeks creating a website
eBay is great, but we are guests on their platform.
We HATE that feeling & have wanted our own “home” online for the longest time. So off to Shopify I went…
One thing you need to know about me, I am not basic. When I do something, I start at the top and work my way down.
I copy successful/rich people. The old way of “take it slow” is dead. You need to move to get anywhere in life.
So when I started this Shopify site, I went in with that same mentality… but I didn’t know much about website creation. In came the downward spiral…
After a certain point, my perfectionism set in and I started wasting HOURS just changing stupid things on this site. Nothing I was doing was productive nor would it of increased my sales. I was busy, but I wasn’t creating anything real.
That website got nowhere. Never launched, never made a penny. I wasted WEEKS of time on this project… what did it get me? A really great understanding of website creation & the high-level tools needed to be successful.
Pot Magnet
I’m gonna sound like a pothead, but here’s another cannabis product that I tried to invent this year that FAILED!
I started growing pot & learned that training your plants was hard with the items that were on the market. So I created the Pot Magnet, pretty much it helps train young cannabis plants.
Long story short… Created 4 prototypes, hired a guy on Upwork to consult (he said my product would be too expensive).
Hired a designer I met in person to create this product. She took $700 as a start and didn’t do anything for months…
I did sales for a living in NYC so I have no issue calling people out… but I actually liked this lady. She seemed cool and artistic. I figured she was working on this, just sucked at communicating any updates.
Yeah, 4 months later I had to threaten her to send me a refund…
Luckily for her, she did. But I was left so confused. What the fuck had just happened? Why had she not done ANYTHING in 4 months on my product? She was amazing in person, eager to take the project on & even offered great insight. So what the fuck?
I can’t make this shit up guys, it’s like everything, and everyone just kept leading me towards failure.
Resell Junkie APP
Okay so out of all this, Resell Junkie was started. That’s my main brand & what we are pushing, but in the first month, we had this great idea to create an app.
Pretty much we want to scale upward & provide as much value as possible to our students, that was the point of this app.
It would help track inventory, talk to eBay to look up search data, and other things related to that. This was not anything overly complicated.
I went on Upwork.com where I do this day have a Virtual Assistant, & I hired a guy with GREAT feedback in India to create my app.
Again, this dude was AWESOME! At first, everything was so great, he was making things happen & being helpful. Then, I paid him the full $2000, that’s when I lost him.
It was like a light switch, as soon as he had the money from the project communication was gone. He would blame ME for things that he screwed up on. This dude was such a weak narcissist that it was almost comedic.
I HATE weak men that cant admit their mistakes.
We went back and forth for weeks, me telling him really simple things to fix on each “update”. It was so odd, each update he sent me actually got worse.
Again, I have no idea what happened here. Sure I made requests to change things, but that is normal. What wasn’t normal is how he just ditched me. This again was a VERY high rated seller on Upwork.com, I didn’t just hire the first idiot I saw.
In this case, I know what happened. His ego & pride got in the way. I called him out on a lot of things & made him shut down. He was simply a weak man that couldn’t take criticism.
That was 2020…
All in ONE year! Add having a kid on top, moving states, selling our house, AND COIVD… like man 2020 has been FUN!
I am SO excited for 2021 and the money that we will all make! I hope this inspires you to never stop…
Because I did all of this, Resell Junkie was created and it is kinda taking off. We are seeing organic growth, have sold over $200 of digital products in less than two months, & we LOVE creating content on YouTube.
This feels natural to my wife & I. Nothing else ever did. We arent tech gurus that can talk code. We don’t want to have a warehouse full of products. We want to create & teach, that is what our “thing” is!
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