I lost a lot of $$$ trying to Start a Business: Here’s what I learned.

Apr 12, 2024

I tried to start a couple different businesses in 2023.

I lost several thousands of $$$ doing so.

How much $$$?

You’ll find out soon.

In the video below, I share the story of this whole “business” journey and the lessons I learned along the way.

What you’re about to read here is gonna be the main points from the video + much more.

I also included:

Extra tidbits that I forgot to mention while recording
BONUS items (revenue/expense spreadsheet + actual pics of the products I was selling 👀)

If you want to hear me talk through it all, watch the video.

I recommend reading the rest of the article as well to see all the bonus info.

The kid has always known

I’ve always known I wanted to start my own business.

I’ve just had that in me from a young age.

I knew I didn’t want a “normal” life.

What type of business would it be?

I had no clue.

How would I do it?

Still, no clue.

But I knew that at some point, I would at least try.

The voice inside my head told me I could and I should.

Not only that, but I had to. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t.

However, life doesn’t go how you expect it to.

It’s a story all too familiar for many out there.

You fall into a job that you’re not crazy about, and it becomes your “new normal.”

Your everyday life.

And then you wake up 10 years later, maybe even 50 years later, and you realize that your life is so far off from the life you’d imagined for yourself all those years ago.

You had so many dreams.

But now it feels too late to chase them.

It would require you to throw away a lot of what you worked towards already.

The “sunk costs” of your life up until that point hold you back from ever going for it.

But it’s all in our heads.

It’s a fallacy.

Source: todoist

Source: giphy

It’s never too late to pivot. (remember?)

7 year old me didn’t want to let my dreams die.

He’s still here.

With me. Part of me.

Is me.

And he told me at the start of last year, 2023, to finally start. Put your “new normal” aside and start a business.

Because I knew I always wanted to. Because if not now, when?

I’d dabbled in “business” before, albeit, at a small scale.

I told myself that it was time to get back into that and also crank it up a notch or two.

Because it was so fun.

What was this “business”…?

Bare-ly in Business

I started a barbering business in college that I’ve talked about before in this article: Balding? Just shave it off (includes actual pics of some 🔥 cuts I did)

I would set up shop in my dorm’s bathroom or in the common area, and knock out several haircuts a week. I wound up getting pretty good at it. Word started to spread around campus after I started an IG page for it called @barecuts.

It was great marketing. People saw that I could not only not f*ck up their lid, but I could actually give them a pretty solid trim. I started charging $12 /cut. And then bumped up to $15.

A barecut was much better than a cut from the local barbershop, in my humble unbiased opinion.

I think that’s fair to say though…I saw a couple friends’ hairlines get absolutely pulverized by those barbers.

Dead ass.

You’d walk in there looking for a standard fade + shape-up and then you’d walk out looking like this dude (prayers up for him 🙏 hope he got a new barber)

I even had a few people come to me after leaving those shops asking for a correction cut because it was that bad.

Essentially, this is how it went down…

God…those memes get me every time 😂

I felt like I was doing a real service. I was dishing out some of the blurriest fades our small college town had ever seen. I even did some custom designs like dice, stars, lightning bolts, etc. —> see pics on the balding article)

There’s simply nothing like walking out of the barbershop with a fresh cut.

Different gravy.

I loved giving the lads (and a few lasses) that gameday cut energy.

Barecuts was my first real taste of “entrepreneurship” and I loved it.

But then I graduated. I got a “real” job and fell into the corporate world.

I’d still cut some lids on the side, but nothing like in college. I didn’t have the time nor did I really want to anymore. Let’s face it, I knew I had bigger ambitions then running a barbershop out of my apartment.

The haircuts were a good start and I’m glad I did that. I now have that skill for the rest of my life. Although I’m bald now so, I can’t really use it on myself 🤷🥚

But I assure you, my future kids will have the freshest cuts from day dot.

You can count on that.

I have to try…

I knew I was capable of so much more than working a corporate job for the rest of my life.

No shade to my fellow 9-5ers — corp jobs are totally fine, I’m in one currently, it’s just not for me long-term.

It’s something I talked about here if you’re curious: Why I’m keeping my 9-5 job

But there I was, the dreams of starting my own business were slowly dying with each passing day as I clocked in and out. Each week, waiting for the weekend to go out with friends and start all over again on Monday morning.

It was December 2022, and I was about to turn 27 in March of the upcoming year.

I’d worked in the corporate world for ~5 years at this point.

And that’s when it happened…

I decided.

This is it.

Now or never.

I have 3 years before I turn 30.

I have no wife or kids…yet.

I have no one to take care of financially but myself.

If I don’t do it now, I never will.

If I don’t do it now, I’ll always be a “wantrepreneur.”

So, what did I do?

I said,

“Fuck this. I’m doing it. I have to try.”

I didn’t (and still don’t) want to die knowing that I suppressed my abilities and my ambitions because it would be too much to rock the boat.

Too radical to throw away this nice little comfortable life I found myself in with my cushy job and decent apartment.

So in January 2023, I decided to educate myself.

To “smart myself up”…if you will. 😉

Source: giphy

“Smart Yourself Up” - Mr. Y

My journey began with a realization: I lacked financial literacy and clarity on how to build a business.

So first, I dove into the world of Personal Finance YouTube, looking for advice on how to gain financial freedom and how to create a life outside the confines of a traditional 9-5 job.

Little did I know, this was the start of what you’re reading right now. This website you’re on, the YouTube videos you’re watching, and the tweets you’re reading.

All of it.

But it wasn’t a straightforward path here. It never is.

Business is a reflection of life. Life has it’s ups and downs. And there are plenty of highs and lows, believe me.

2023 was a trial year for me.

I knew I’d probably fail. Many times.

And I did fail. Many times.

But I also learned a lot. I mean, A LOT.

In my finance YouTube research phase, one of the books I kept hearing people talk about was "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" by Robert Kiyosaki.

Initially, I was skeptical of self-help books, which is something I talked about in this article: In defense of “self-help”.

But I found this book extremely enlightening. It emphasized the importance of not trading time for money and introduced me to the concept of making money while you sleep through assets that make the money work for you, instead of you working for it.

After reading this book, I wanted to test out these principles myself, so I dabbled in a few different business ventures.

Etsy: Print-On-Demand and Digital Products

First, I tried my hand at Etsy doing print-on-demand selling clothing like t-shirts and hoodies, and then eventually coffee mugs.

I worked really hard on the clothing for about a month, but then realized it wasn’t it for me. I was limited by lack of quality control, slim profit margins, and the hassle of doing customer service.

So, I bagged it.

I removed all of my listings and pivoted to digital products, specifically resume templates.

Let me start off by saying, the profit margins for digital products are through the roof. Way better than clothing or any physical product. They’re close to 100%. Wild stuff.

How?

All that happens is this…you make the thing, you post the thing, and then when a customer buys it, they get an instant download of the thing.

Whatever it is you’re selling, they have immediately. No shipping, no handling, no production costs.

That’s it. Money in the bank. (shawty whatchu drank? - s/o lil scrap x young buck)

The only production cost is the time you have to put in to make the thing.

This caught my attention. A lot of it.

I saw daily planners, ADHD habit trackers, and all sorts of other digital products being sold in enormous volumes.

The one I chose to pursue was resume templates.

I felt most equipped for these because I interview/hire people in my dayjob a decent bit, so I know what looks good and what should be on a resume.

And yes, people buy resume templates off of Etsy. I know, I was also shocked by this. There are some resume template shops that absolutely crush. Like crush crush.

Exhibit A: CoResume

I tracked this shop over time to see how much the MoM change in sales would be.

I wanted to know how frequently was she selling these each month.

Conclusion: Quite a bit. Cosima is raking 🤑

Obviously there are taxes, blah blah blah. But these numbers are pretty crazy, right?

I thought so.

All for resume templates that you work on once and then that’s it.

But as I started getting deeper into the resume template game, I realized that it still had an element of customer support that wasn't aligned with my interests.

A lot of my “competitors” like CoResume had 24/7 customer support in their included services. And I didn’t want to be the guy telling people how to format their resumes for them after they bought my template.

Could I have hired someone to do that part for me? Definitely. But did I want to? No.

Were resume templates the thing I wanted to focus on 100%? Nah fam.

Here’s why…

I kinda felt like, ya know, I’m this guy who doesn’t really want a 9-5 job in the long run (even though there’s nothing wrong with that) but do I really want the thing I’m working on to be helping people further themselves into that life when I’m trying to do the opposite…?

It all felt counterintuitive to me.

So I didn’t wind up actually launching the resume templates, but the experience taught me a bunch of valuable lessons about how digital products work that I’ve banked for future endeavors.

Later on in the year, I relaunched my physical Etsy store with coffee mugs.

I realized that the profit margins were way better for mugs than clothing (it’s way cheaper to make a mug than clothing), but I still ran into the quality control problem. And honestly, I just realized that I didn’t want to sell coffee mugs.

Why?

Go BIG or go home

This is a major lesson.

Probably the most valuable lesson of the year and one of the most impactful lessons of my life.

And it’s this:

Whatever you’re working on, you’re going to give 100% effort to it.

So would you rather be working with…

pennies, nickels, and dimes

Hundreds, Thousands, and Millions?

If you’re effort is 100% regardless of what you’re doing, you might as well put that effort into something that yields high returns.

If you’re selling t-shirts, coffee mugs, or resume templates on Etsy…wouldn’t you rather have you 100% time and effort return millions of dollars rather than a few tenners or even a few $100,000 like Cosima?

The same concept applies to your 9-5 job, whether you’re salaried or hourly, you’re limited in how much money they decide to give you.

The idea is to maximize each hour of work’s potential return.

An hour of work is an hour of work.

But for some people, an hour of work will make them another’s person whole year of work.

Example:

Person A makes a YouTube video about Personal Finance giving their finance tips/tricks and promotes a finance brand’s product in the video. The video does +3M views. They make $100K from this video that took them 2 hours to script, 1 hour to record, and 5 hours editing. 8 hours total. They get paid from:
- YouTube Ad Revenue
- Brand Deal
Person B works a corporate job making $100K over the course of the entire year. A traditional 40-hour workweek is about 2,080 work hours per year, or 8 hours a day multiplied by 52 weeks.
Person A makes $12,500 / hour — ($100K / 8 hours)
Person B makes $48.08 / hour — ($100K / 2,080 hours)

And guess what?

Person A’s $100K is still growing. That video will make even more money every single day for the rest of time as long as it’s active and YouTube Ad Revenue continues to exist. Which it will. Because money.

(The $100K earned on the video is just for the example’s sake. I’m not sure exactly how much the YT Ad Rev + Brand Deal would amount to in reality. But the point here is, 8 hours of work on a video can yield a metric ton more than a year’s worth of work in a regular job)

Even if Person A made $10K on the video, it’d still be $1250 / hour.

That’s an astronomical difference.

Digital Real Estate.

Get on it.

I explain this example in more depth in this video:

Same effort. More zeros.

Sounds too easy, I know.

But it’s how these kids on TikTok are living in mansions and buying supercars like they’re Hot Wheels toys.

In the words of Alonzo Harris from Training Day:

Source: tenor

This led into the concept I have now of:

Learn to work smarter not harder.

But then work hard smarter.
— Ryan Ward (@iamryanward) March 24, 2024

I thought, hmmmm, if I can learn a skill that yields high returns, I’ll win big. Because I know that whatever I do, I’m going to go all out doing it. I might as well go big or go home, right?

Let’s play smarter.

Let’s go bigger.

This led me to AirBnb.

AirBnBUST

I was inspired by the success stories of Airbnb hosts across social media.

So I enrolled in YouTube University. Literally just scouring youtube, there is no actually university. Come on, get w the program, people.

You can learn anything and everything on YouTube.

I spent countless hours watching those videos. Ryan Pineda, Bigger Pockets, Mr. 4 to 8, Tony Robinson, Michael Elefante, Robuilt, Stayly, etc.

I even joined Tony’s paid community. I was looking for guidance from people who were already successful AirBnb hosts who had these massive Bnb empires.

However, as I delved deeper, I realized that real estate wasn't my passion. The complexities of short-term rental regulations and financial calculations going into purchasing these properties didn't do it for me.

Not to mention, interest rates were pretty high and it was tough to make the numbers number. Ya feel me?

I even developed a twitch in on of my eyes because I was staring at the spreadsheet calculator they gave us for too long just hammering numbers from Zillow and Redfin trying to find the right property. One that would yield high returns in an area that allowed STR (short-term rentals).

I’m sure there were opportunities out there despite the interest rates being high.

But I was always a little afraid to buy a house. I’d never bought a house before. So that part was scary for me. Especially given that I’d be investing a ton of money into it and going into debt, with the hopes that I could make it work without ever doing something like this before.

So buying a house was a limit.

Then there’s AirBnb Arbitrage too, where you essentially rent an apartment through an LLC with “corporate leasing” and then sublet it out through AirBnb or other rental platforms like VRBO or Furnished Finder.

But again, the numbers need to work and a lot can go wrong when you’re first trying to figure things out.

I realized I needed to move on.

With all that being said, there are people who have done this and still do it. I’ll be honest, they have bigger balls than me. Good for them, go on. Get those properties. Make that money.

Even though I didn’t make any money, I learned a ton about real estate, and again, I’ve banked this knowledge for a later date.

And let me just say, Tony’s community is really well run and was super helpful to join. If you’ve never bought a property before and you’re thinking about AirBnb or rentals in general, talk to people who have done it before. There’s a lot more that goes into it than just finding a house and renting it out. A lot more. You need help from someone who’s done it. Trust me.

But like I mentioned, this was a learning experience for me. And I learned that real estate wasn’t where my heart was.

I was sitting there like, “do I really want to be another AirBnb guy?”

Sure, it’d make me some money if it worked out, but is that what I want to be doing all day every day? I already didn’t love it.

And that’s what led me here…to you :)

Before talking about finding my true passion…let’s do a little show and tell.

BTS of my Etsy/AirBnb Journey

Here ya go, the BONUS items you’ve been waiting for…

In the video, I mentioned my Etsy #’s but failed to mention the Airbnb #’s.

So in the name of transparency…

In total, my net net on the year was: - $6,128.94

Here’s a link to my Etsy store, which is still up, but no listings remain active.

Some photos of my clothing/mug listings:

As I mentioned in the video…I think it’s absolutely hilarious that people were buying this stuff from me. Me, of all people. HAHAHA.

Like seriously…who would think that I’m the person on the other end of these transactions? 😂

Some mom buying her daughter a Capricorn hoodie, meanwhile, it’s my bald bearded ass head on the other end.

Pure comedy. A bit and a half.

Hey, they were a hit. What can I say. The data doesn’t lie.

I even threw in some mouse pads 🐭 in at the very end. I didn’t sell any off these though. They were in the post-mug era, but I bagged the whole operation soon after posting them.

Mouse pads? Really? Checkers. Possibly even Tic, Tac, Toe.

Here are a few of the resumes templates.

Clean af. I know, I know.

If you want one, hmu. I gotchu fam 🤝

Any names sound familiar…?? 👀

So look, I did lose a bit of money. Several thousand of my hard-earned ~ moneyz ~

Oh 🐳

We move.

We go again.

As I mentioned in the video, I would rather spend my money on trying these things myself than paying for a course on “how to start an online business” because, truthfully, you have to get in the lab yourself.

Try something. See if it works. If it does, great. If it doesn’t, pivot to something else.

With that, let me just say this, I do think there’s value in buying a product from someone who’s done a specific thing before and has condensed their knowledge into the product itself. Like the AirBnb community I joined for a pretty penny. (High ticket. We’ll talk about this again soon.)

You’re buying all of someone’s knowledge and years of experience.

Now look, some courses are a load of BS. Stear clear of those. Do your research. But sometimes it does pay to buy the fast-pass to getting what you need to know from someone who’s done it already.

It won’t replace actually learning by doing the thing yourself, but it may speed things up a bit for you.

And speed kills.

The money will come

Throughout all of these endeavors last year, I learned so so much.

Yea, I failed. A couple times. And I lost money. A couple ~ moneyz ~, in fact.

But a wise man once told me, “we learn more from our losses than we do from our wins.”

And that’s definitely true.

That whole journey led me here. Writing to you. Aren’t you glad it did? ;)

It helped me realize where the overlap was between what I’m good at, what I love to do, and what the world needs.

Which is:

writing, thinking, observing, analyzing, and making stuff

It’s good to add in: what you can get paid well to do as well — completing the whole quadruple of Ikigai, but I’m still working on that piece.

Source: learnlife

Eventually, I will monetize my content in a few different ways, but we’ll talk about that on another day.

For now you get everything for $FREE.99…

es gratis como la piel de gallina recordando el gol de Iniesta, de nada 🤑 🐔 y espabila… (oh he speaks speaks spanish now? claro que sí, papi)

The money will come.

Look, it’s not all about the money…But it’s definitely kinda about the money.

Money leads to freedom of choice. We’ll hit the topic of money dead-on soon, don’t you worry.

But let me repeat, the money will come.

It’s about doing something every day that you enjoy and doing something that positively impacts others.

It may take a while. You might have to try a lot of things before you find it, but as long as you keep at it, you’ll find it, and then the money will find you.

Those who seek truth in themselves and in the world will be rewarded.

That’s how it works.

Finding Your Passion

You have to figure out what you don’t like to figure out what you do like.

The only way to do that is by trying a bunch of different things. And most importantly, taking action. Stop talking about it and just do it already.

You’ll know you’ve found “it” when you willingly stay up late/wake up early to do “it.”

“It” makes you forget to eat.

“It” makes you feel like a kid again.

Work becomes play.

Sounds fun, right? It is fun.

This is “it” for me. Sharing with you all. I absolutely love it.

And guess what?

I’ll be here doing this for a while.

I’m here to stay.

So, let’s play.

-Ryan Ward