Dropshipping is often pitched as a way to make big money with no money down. Matt watched a guy try to make $1,000 in a month with dropshipping and breaks down the reality of what he did. Was his “success” really worth it? Let’s talk about the downside of chasing trends and why this isn’t a long-term business model.
There are tons of people out on social media giving business advice. Some of it is good advice, but most of it isn’t good. In this series, watch CapForge’s owner react to different advice videos. He’s an expert in all things business and has 20+ years of experience under his belt. Some of the things he reacts to might even surprise you!
Video Transcript:
Business Advice Video:
So I tried dropshipping for 30 days with $0.00 to see if I could make $1000. Day #1 I needed to find a winning product without spending money. So I went to TikTok and searched TikTok, maybe buy it and then filtered by the most like this month and final products going viral right now. Now on day 2 and three, I designed my online store using Atlas AI on Shopify’s free trial. Day 4, I ordered the product through Amazon so I could get it fast. And then I literally started recording the same viral videos that my competition was making but with my own original content. Now in between day 5 and 10, I started posting 3-5 videos every day on TikTok. And after my 7th video, one hit over 100,000 views overnight. Now in between day 11 to 20, I kept posting more videos consistently. And by day 15, I already had a video with over 1,000,000 views, bringing in over $900 in a single day. My profit margin was around 30%, so that’s roughly like $1200 in pure profit.
Matt’s Review:
Okay, so it sounds like he worked for a month, creating dozens of videos. Basically, copying exactly what other people did, selling a product that he made 30% on. Which came out to 1,200 bucks the way he tells it, which is 40 bucks a day for hours and hours of work a day, so less than minimum wage. Now, you might think, I’ve got all the time in the world, and I’d love to have 1,200 bucks, I’d be willing to put in 40 or 50 or 60 hours a week to get to 1,200 bucks. If that’s you, great. The follow-on problem with this business, though, is like ones we’ve talked about before, you’re just chasing trends, you’re copying other people’s products, and you’re hoping that amongst the millions of videos created, you’ll get one or two that get some traction and get some clicks. It means you’ll never get off the treadmill of grinding away, doing hundreds or thousands of videos a year, hoping for a few hits and selling a product that is not going to be something anyone cares about after a few days, after the video goes viral. It’ll be a very short peak of interest, and you’ll constantly be working to bring in the next dollar as opposed to figuring out a business that you can do for the long term. You can connect with customers, you can come up with products they want, you can build a real business around it. Not just chasing fads and memes and trying to go lucky, going viral once in a while, and making a few bucks here and there. You can certainly try this, you can see if it works for you, but I would use it more as a learning process of how to do those different things, rather than expected to turn into a real business. If he spent almost full-time basically for a month to earn $1,200, how would he grow that to another product and another product and another product? There’s not enough time in the day to make all those videos and do all that rip-off content and be successful. So I think this has a pretty limited chance of success, and even there, success is not probably gonna be what you’re really hoping for, which is a long-term stable business that you can grow and really change your financial situation with.