Kory Szostak (27) and Rodney Zachariuk (25) were borderline embarrassed to be launching their own business. “Where we're from, this is not a traditional job at all,” Kory says. That might sound silly now, after a couple hundred thousand in revenue. But before they found success they were basically tiptoeing around the topic with family and friends. They’d politely decline offers to hit the bars and instead spend their nights lurking on Reddit and consuming hours upon hours of YouTube tutorials. "To explain that we're busy from the time that we wake up to the time that we go to bed is kind of difficult for people to comprehend when it's not a traditional job," Rodney explains.
They’re not being secretive anymore, though. And in this episode of Start Yours, Rodney and Kory – a pair of friends from Vancouver – explain exactly how they turned an interest in ecommerce into a job that has fueled the lifestyle they always wanted. They hit on...
How awkward it felt at the beginning: "And people understand – okay, yeah, when you're working, you're busy, but they think you're off at 4:00 PM or 5:00 PM... But we couldn't really explain to people. It's not that we have a salaried position anymore. Let alone no one knew what we were even working on this, so it was kind of just us saying like, 'Oh sorry, we can't make it,' but not really having an excuse or trying to deflect the questions for the whole time."
Evaluating their options before they started: "We were looking at, is this gonna be worthwhile for us in the long run? Especially when we're working in an industry where we have the ability to move or work remotely, so you wanna take advantage of that, and that's where we're at now, just searching for places to go where we can have the lifestyle that we want to enjoy with just WiFi and the accessibility of the Internet."
How they sniffed out the best niche: "So we just wanted to reverse engineer the process and we saw that social media was a huge driving factor to build an organic engine for a lot of these stores. So we kind of started to build the social media accounts on Instagram to see if there was gonna be audience engagement, if people were interested in it to begin with, and we wanted to just test that to see if it was worthwhile before we put all of our effort into that specific niche."
The importance of choosing a target audience: "I think it's a lot easier to kind of move people down the conversion funnel when they are invested in something like their hobby. People are more likely to spend money on their hobbies versus anything else. That's something that brings joy to them, that's something that... it kind of plays on their emotions, because it's something that they get excited for. It's one of those things that when you're passionate about something, you don't really have an issue with spending money on it, right? Like if you went to a guy that loves fishing, he has no problem buying a $300 fishing rod whereas he might have trouble or he might find friction with purchasing an expensive dinner. So, there's two different avenues where he can spend his money and one's a lot easier for him to spend his money on."
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