No Guts, No Glory: Chronicles of an aspiring entpreneur

Another brief post for today. I finally finished a book that I bought either last month or the month before, “How to invest in real estate” by Joshua Dorkin and Brandon Turner. The information I’ve come across makes me glad that I took the time to read through it. Even though, I’d already told me self that I’d go with investing fourplexes, it gives me confidence in knowing what other alternative niches are available, what several investing strategies can be used, and ways to find deals. It’s helped my affirm my ideal first real estate move will be to househack a fourplex. It’s also exciting because up until recently it had been awhile since I challenged myself to read any written material beyond a few pages, much less an actual book, and to do it more for gaining knowledge and not just entertainment. Before yesterday I had read the first 100 pages of this book over the span of several weeks but yesterday I buckled down and ready 30-50 pages and today I read another 100 pages, completely finishing the book in the process. On a Saturday! Right now I feel pretty energized. Before the end of the tomorrow I plan to order another book that I feel will helpful for my goals. Also, I will work on a writing a plan to find and buy my first rental property.

This will be a brief post, just something to capture what my thoughts are right now. The whole coronavirus situation took out a lot of steam from me. Or to be more honest, I let it do that…I’m slowly starting build my the steam back up. Something that’s helped was a Youtube video I watched that explained a method of dropshipping using US-based suppliers on Aliexpress. I feel so stupid for not thinking to research that before letting myself get to discouraged. I could’ve made some headway on starting a dropshipping store by now. Thanks to that, it’s prompted me to want to look into how I can still make a deal in real estate in the current situation. The last week or so, I’ve worked a few days at home as part of my companies plan for social distancing and minimizing the spread of Coronavirus. Not surprisingly, my parents have also been working from home for the same reasons. The experience trying to work at home at the same time as them has made me realize that, although I love my parents to death, I can not stand to live with them anymore and want to move out as soon as I can. If I find success with dropshipping yet still need to commit long hours of work everyday I will be able to maintain focus as long as I stay where I’m at now. Maybe I won’t have a choice but to wait until the Coronavirus situation is under control but once it’s over I want to be in a position to go without delay…

It’s a new month and it is with great pleasure to announce that I have found success with dropshipping and bought a foruplex as my first rental property at a great price!

Psych, April fools!

I wish that I could proudly give more achievements since my last post but unfortunately that is not the case…I’ll admit first of all that I lacked the discipline to follow through on what I had planned. However in hindsight, it seems that not taking action turned out to be a good thing. Why?

Coronavirus.

During the duration of March, the disease which, at first, wasn’t even remotely on my radar had completely pulled the rug from beneath me. I started out believing that I had the leisure of pursuing my top two ventures at my own pace. Dropshipping and Real estate investing. Now the landscape is such that I struggle to find a foothold to even get started in either of them.

The impact of the coronavirus pandemic has shook the whole world. Many places, my city included, have taken action by ordering many businesses to restrict their hours of operation or close down completely until the virus stops spreading. This has caused many companies from different industries to lay off people and/or restrict hours to avoid loosing money. People in general are also being encouraged to stay indoors as much as possible in what’s termed “social distancing”.

The result that’s affected me is that now doesn’t appear to be the time to pursue dropshipping since not many people will be willing or able to buy things online outside of the essentials and delivery service may not be as efficient as before. And if I were to try any real estate investments, it’d be difficult to make any deals since any sellers or real estate agents I’d work with are unlikely to be available due to practicing social distancing.

The only venture that seems like it’d be a good idea to chase now would be stock investing since the market is down. However, I don’t feel educated enough yet to jump into it…for now anyway.

So I’ve stepped away and did some more reflecting since my last post… Looking back, I do believe I jumped the gun with building a Shopify website so soon. I did not research my product thoroughly enough. Simple as that. Also there are more aspects of dropshipping that I need to dig deeper in to before I go all out. I had enough wisdom to create an LLC last month but I was not even aware of the fact that I’d also need a sales tax ID and/or a Employer Identification Number (EIN). These are things I need to be familiar with if I want to succeed at dropshipping and my other ventures longterm…

With that said, I’m going to reconsider my pace. My new goal will be to learn as much of the ins and outs of dropshipping and come up with a plan before the end of the month. I’ll still push myself to starting up a store with a potential winning product but at the same time not shoot myself in the foot…

To end on a good note, I have accomplished a few things that I think will be helpful in the future:

Applied for a Sales Tax ID (Don’t have it yet)
Applied for an EIN (Got it)
Created an email for my LLC
Opened a Paypal Business Account for my LLC

Nothing new to add other than I’m deciding to change gears and pursuing another or maybe completely different product. I happened to do more searches of my former top candidate and found more websites that are already selling it in a branded one product store format. Looks like I’ll have to see about cancelling some domains that I’ve opened up yesterday…Oh well. Whatever product I choose this time around, I’ll make sure to get a sample to test first before making a Shopify for it.

Wow. Today has been a real grind. And I haven’t even started selling product yet. Getting to that point is still ways away…So what have I done so far? What are my achievements for today?

Well, I’ve picked one of the 15 products I’ve researched to sell for my first dropshipping attempt. I won’t specify what exactly it is for now but I’ll share the fact that it belongs to the electronics category. I think it satisfies the key characteristics for a good dropshipping product in that it has sufficient “Wow Factor”, good quality, and can be found on Alibaba.

That simple bit right there was the easiest part of today. The rest was a struggle…I spent at least 6 hours following a tutorial on how to make a Shopify store from scratch on Youtube by Dan Vas. And I’m still not doing going through it. By following the first few steps I was able to select the first product to try dropshipping, find potential suppliers on Alibaba, see how to contact suppliers, create a Shopify store website, and create a logo for my website. I could’ve done this quicker but I got slowed down by my own ignorance and some technical difficulties. Note to self: never try to do any of this using wi-fi at a local cafe…

So my haste to start dropshipping I realized I’ve done some things out of order. To elaborate, today I’ve reserved a domain name and created a Shopify store website for a product…before reaching out to any suppliers…and before getting a sales tax ID. By the time I get that sorted out, I’ll probably have used up all 14 days of the free trial for my Shopify website before I can make any sales. Luckily, I already made an LLC a week or so and that was helpful when I applied for a Sales Tas Permit today. But it’s still going to take a few weeks for that to come back…I’ve made quite a few new accounts across several websites such as Alibaba/Aliexpress (Product and Supplier directory), Shopify (for the electronics product), Zoho (business email for shopify site), Canva (logo creation site), “State” Comptroller of public accounts (Sales Tax permit application). I hope I can remember all the login info for those a few weeks from now. Also making the last one actually made me a bit nervous. To this point, I hadn’t put much thought to how manage my ventures in terms of taxes. This is something I definitely need to dig deeper into because I don’t want screw myself over with the IRS…

Getting this first Shopify store up and running properly before the end of the month may be more difficult than I initially hoped. I thought I’d spent too much time researching but am now thinking I didn’t spend enough. But I’m making progress a little bit at a time and I intend to keep moving forward even if I stumble. A lot… Some next steps I’ll aim to complete before the end of the week is to open a bank account for my LLC, contact a supplier for my product, and then order a sample with my company logo.

I didn’t get to start the next step today but will be able to tomorrow. At the moment I have at least 15 products listed as potential winners. The top 3 best candidates have been identified and I will start tying to make websites for those first.

It’s almost midnight so there’s not much time for a lengthy post. And TBH I don’t have much to say anyway so no big deal. I’m still researching products that could be used for initial testing. A difference from my activities yesterday was that in addition to browsing through posts only on instagram, I also expanded my efforts to Facebook and Alibaba. I think I’ve found a few more good candidates for testing which is encouraging. I may continue searching tomorrow but if I do I know it won’t be for long. I intend to move forward to the next step with the products I’ve found so far before the end of tomorrow.

So after watching several how-to videos for starting a drop-shipping business on Youtube I finally begun working towards the first step. Finding a winning product to sell. I have to say, despite how easy some Youtubers make it seem, it’s pretty difficult finding a product that’s not considered saturated (no surprise there though). So far I’ve used a method where I search through instagram to find posts of potential winning products. It seems like I either find several posts for iphone cases, make-up, clothes, or some weird-looking gadgets. I’ve come across maybe three products that might be worth testing. For now I’ll keep note of those and continue searching tomorrow. I want to have found at least one good candidate that I can create a website for before the end of the coming weekend. I’m sure I can get that done.

I’ll get right to the point with this point. Continuing from yesterday’s post, the other income option I’ve chosen is investing in real estate. From what I’ve seen on Youtube, it’s a definitely a viable option that I can rely on getting income in addition to my 9-5 job and eventually replace said job with it and gain passive income from it. I’ve seen different strategies for investing in real estate and at this point feel that I’ve found at least one that is straightforward for me to try out. This would be investing in small multifamily homes primarily and doing fix-and-flips secondarily.

To be honest, I’ve always been aware of the fix-and-flip strategy but I’ve never thought of investing in multifamily homes. For the longest time I’ve been focused on buying a single family home for myself and possibly renting it out but after learning more about options for multi-family I couldn’t care less about single family homes. My ideal scenario for the next few months is to find a local fourplex (4 unit home) that I can afford to buy via an FHA loan and house-hack (i.e. live in one unit and rent the others). This would allow me to live as an owner-occupant landlord and have my housing expenses paid for by my tenants. Furthermore, if I pay my cards right, I could have a monthly rental income far exceeding the expenses for the property and with this “cash flow” I could use it to invest in more multifamily homes to use as rental properties.

Looking at it from the relative short term and long term perspective, investing in real estate via multi-family homes is my main bread and butter to building wealth and eventually financial independence. Its a venture that I could definitely start this year and being profiting from. In fact, in terms of money, I could afford to start right now but this is something I don’t want to screw myself over by not doing enough research first. I’ve started reading a book “How to invest in real estate: the ultimate beginner’s guide to getting started” by Brandon Turner and Joshua Dorkin as a start and will probably read others as I focus on researching processes for buying and renting out multi-family properties specifically. I’ve created a profile on a website called Biggerpockets and it seems like it’ll benefit me due to being able to network with established real esate agents and other investors. I really look forward to making progress with this option.