The Dropship Unlocked Podcast

An Honest Review of our Journey From £0 to £7M (Episode 123)

• Lewis Smith & James Eardley • Season 1 • Episode 123

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🗣 In this episode, Lewis Smith and James Eardley take you through an honest review of their journey.

They break down the best decisions, biggest challenges, and why investing in themselves was the key to success.

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Topics Discussed:

  • The Tactical Decisions We Got Right:
    Lewis talks about how choosing a scalable business model (high-ticket dropshipping)
  • The Power of Community:
    How being part of a like-minded community helped with motivation, consistency, and learning from others' experiences.

Links and Resources Mentioned:

Key Takeaways:

  • Choose a Scalable Business Model: The foundation of a successful dropshipping business lies in a model that supports growth without overwhelming you.
  • Mentorship is Key: Investing in mentorship saves us time and money. Having someone with experience to guide you can dramatically accelerate your journey to success.

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★★★ Dropship Unlocked - Lewis Smith ★★★
How to Launch a UK Dropshipping Business Offering Next-Day Delivery...
...Even If You Don’t Yet Know Which Products To Sell

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You inevitably learn some invaluable lessons when going from zero to 5.6 million pounds in online revenue. And I'd say the best lesson that I've never shared before is that it's time then to have a bit of an honest review about the journey so far. There's things that we've learned now that we'd love to have known earlier in the journey, and so we can share that now, but especially, there's no way I could have scaled so quickly if I didn't know that. I still cringe at some of the decisions I made early on when I first started. I mean, I realized I think the challenges and the failures are not spoken about enough. So yeah, let's, let's change that today. Welcome to the dropship unlocked Podcast. I'm Lewis Smith, the founder of dropship unlocked, and with me is our client success coach. James Eardley, now when we're not recording podcast episodes or running our own e commerce businesses, you'll find us helping aspiring entrepreneurs launch their own high ticket drop shipping stores. So if you're ready to build your own six or even seven figure online business, then head over to dropship unlocked.com forward, slash, start now. Sit back, relax, and let's unlock your potential with the dropship unlocked Podcast. Today, it's time that we have a another deep dive into our journey. Bit of a conversation back and forth, sharing some stories about what we've learned so far from going from a combined zero and we started to a combined 7 million pounds in online business revenue up to this point. And inevitably, there's lessons. It will be a roller coaster for me, it's been a roller coaster for you, Lewis, to go through the ups and downs of building online businesses. But I think there's so many lessons that we can pull out and share with people, especially if they're in this space of starting their own business, when I share the raw, honest truth about what it's been like in the journey so far. So I think looking back in the journey, Lewis, let's start with when you were first entering online business for the very first time, put yourself back in those shoes. What do you think you got right early on that helped you get to where you are today? Sure. So I think there's some there's two parts to this that I'd probably break it into. There's and there's this, the tactical stuff, and then there's the mindset stuff. And I think they're two huge learning curves when you're coming into entrepreneurship of any kind, but particularly online business for the first time, because those are two big shifts you have to make when you're going from the kind of employee working a job, getting a monthly paycheck, over to running your own business, not only do you need the tactics to be able to sustain that and earn money online and make it work profitably, but you you have to have it built on a mindset foundation that where you won't just crumble at the first hurdle. So I think there's two almost evolutionary stages you go through to get to the point of having a business like this up and running? Yeah, certainly, with the tactical decisions that I've made along the way, they've been big, picking the right business model, making sure that you are very intentional about what you do. You're not just creating a business for the sake of it, but you're really taking time to think so that you can then move quickly, once you have that momentum, and you know that you you're building it on the right foundations, the structure, you know it's scalable that you've even thought about the end point of, what does this business look like at 50,000 a month, at 100,000 a month at 200 what does it look like at that point for me, will it become a thing that I grow to hate over time and that it becomes really, really difficult for me, or with scale, just like can I kind of shield myself from some of that complexity? And I certainly think with the home turf advantage model, it was designed in a way that you leverage higher priced items. They're coming from UK suppliers, fast delivery, nice, high profit per sale. You're not having to worry about shipping 1000s of products out 1000s of orders, lots of complaints, lots of refunds. It's like a few sales per day. If you pick the right high value products, you can really make it work. So I think from a tactic side of things. That's probably the big one initially, yeah, because that informs so many decisions moving forward, the business model that you choose is ultimately the lifestyle that you're building in the future. Because certain business models are very active, very hands on, very in person, and that is therefore the lifestyle that you're building, whereas other business models are suited for lifestyle businesses where you can travel and still earn the income. But also you need to choose business models that are scalable so that you can also achieve the financial freedom as well as time and location freedom, which I know is key for you when you first started. Lewis, so is that a bit of a North Star for you when you were trying to decide which business model to get into? Yeah, you have to have, like, a lens through which you. View the decisions and you make the decisions that that are going to inevitably arise throughout your business journey, unless you have some kind of rule or a set of they call them like heuristics, which are kind of shortcut rules that you can have in your mind that allow you to make quick decisions based on pre determined ideas and rules that you've already made up your mind based on earlier on, and they're quite, quite important, certainly as you're beginning, because you're going to be faced with, like, decision overwhelm and decision fatigue. I mean, I still feel that sometimes to this day, where do you ever get to the end of a day and you're like, you know, I don't know, my wife will say, like, what do you want for dinner tonight? Or where do you want to go if we're going out for dinner? And I'm like, can you make the decision? I'm I'm out of decision making units. I've used them all up today, like I've made so many decisions. And sometimes when you're in the build phase of your business, that's particularly magnified. That's really difficult, because you are constantly having to make decisions. And I think for me, it was refreshing, because coming from the corporate world where, like, you can kind of pretend you make decisions, but really, everything goes through management, and there's so much red tape in bureaucracy, and you want to, I wish I could speak to the former version of myself in that corporate world and say, like, if you think you're busy now and that you're making a lot of, like, impactful decisions, and that You think you do a lot of work now and move quickly now, just wait until you see what you're capable of in the future, especially with like, the addition of an AI and that as almost like your sidekick along your journey, there really is no excuse now to not be extremely productive in terms of output. So I think those are, those are the tactics like you say, have a North Star, have something that you're that guides you. For me, it was definitely the ability, the freedom, the autonomy, the ability to travel. And I think that that may shift over time, and that may change, and you can expand your business or even contract your business, depending on what changes in your life. You know, if you find that actually, you do get another job, and you want to just have this as a really manageable side income. You can absolutely make that. You can make it super simple, have one VA, manage the whole thing. You log in once a week, pay suppliers doesn't take up more than half an hour of your time a week. Eventually, that that is definitely possible. Then there's the mindset. And I think the mindset part is a big shift. I mean, that's probably a whole nother podcast episode, isn't it? That's a different topic for a different day, but that's that builds the foundation to success. I think you're, you know, the people that skip over that part are, it's like going to a going to a library and saying, like, what's the best book here that's full of the most knowledge, and then the librarians out. It's that one there. So you pick it up and and then you're like, you open it up, and then you realize you can't read, you know, see, like, well, it's useless. It's just a, you know, a book with a load of pages and some characters on it doesn't mean anything. And it's the same thing with this, if you, if you don't have the foundations, ie, the skill of reading, if you don't have the mindset right from the beginning, all the right tactics, all the right knowledge, all the right implementations, that none of it matters because you won't see it through, you won't get past those hurdles, you won't take action. So you're just standing there with the book and being like, I think I've got everything, I've got the knowledge, but you need the ability to read. You need the fundamental mindset foundation to build upon. That's right, it's like this level, was everyone out? I think this, this need that no matter what business model you go into, there's a need to be open to learning and a need to be persistent and consistent with the actions that you're taking no matter what business it is that you're building. Did you find that that came to you naturally? Lewis, that that open learning? Did you have any challenges when you were adopting this new mindset? Was it a bit of a difficult road to go down to become more entrepreneurial? Or how natural was it for you? No, I think for me, the challenges is almost like put in the what do they call it? Like the blinders? You know, the horse that has the blinders, where it's like, can only look in one direction. I, if anything, I'm too, too much of a knowledge sponge in terms of my absorption, like, I'll take knowledge from all directions unless I have a clear, focused goal and a set of blinders on that are pointing me in a certain direction. And that's the danger with things like YouTube, really, is that it is this fountain of knowledge, which is amazing, but that's also its biggest problem. Weakness, you know, drawback, whatever you want to call it like it's that you could get lost in YouTube for a day thinking you're making progress, thinking you're learning, thinking you're you're progressing, when really all you're doing is kind of dripping more knowledge into the sponge. And just imagine the sponge is saturated, and at the bottom of the sponge is like water dripping out of it as well. Just like, unless you do something with it, all you're doing is kind of replacing it with more and more drops in an already saturated sponge. So I think I love knowledge, I love learning. But if you can gamify the process of progress, like if you can gamify the taking action part, which is. The bit that really you get rewarded for in the market. No one rewards you for just having knowledge, necessarily, unless you're like a pub quiz champion or something. It's about implementation, isn't it? So if you're, if you're the most knowledgeable person in the world, but you don't take any action to build the business, you're not going to have a particularly successful business. So it's about taking those steps. And yeah, I think sometimes people over complicate it. They think too much about it. They think too hard. I see people sometimes in our communities who are just like, over analyzing, overthinking, going around, and I'm like, you're stuck in absorption mode. You need to be in output mode. And it's that that switch, and as soon as you do it, we get people some quick wins and some early momentum inside our programs that I think, really helps people, and it almost like rewards them for the output, and then they feel that sense of like, Oh, that was good. That felt good. I created, I did. I picked my niche, I I just registered my company, I just built my website. You know, it's like, yes, now keep moving. Keep the snowball going, keep the momentum up, and you'll you'll keep progressing, rather than just thinking that you're being productive by watching all the modules, because that's modules, because that's not going to do anything. That's right. It's important. The way that we've set that up is that we are setting up the reward system to be around the actions that you take. So we, you know, we tell people in the communities, and this is why the community is so great. Share when you've taken action. So share with us the time that you've made your first sale. Share with us the time that you made your first 10k in sales, because you're rewarding yourself for when you've taken action and you've achieved something from the actions that you've taken. And so our community, it's full of people taking action because we've incentivized that. That is essentially the thing that we want to make again, make that feel like what the whole point is is the actual action, rather than just absorbing knowledge. Something that stuck with me is that that simple sentence, that it's knowledge without action, is pointless or useless. And in fact, in today's world, it's easy to get as much information as you can possibly think of into your brain. And the real deciding factor nowadays for who's going to be successful and who's not, isn't the person that has all the knowledge, is the person that takes action on the knowledge that they've got. And that's a single clear thread, not just from my own journey, but from the people in our community who succeed best. So if you were to give some actionable advice around that, Lewis, if somebody asked you, okay, I've got loads of information. I've listened to lots of podcast episodes now, but I'm not taking any action yet. What actionable advice would you would you get to get people moving with the knowledge that they've got to get ready to get started. Well, you've got to break it up into actionable chunks, you know, if it's if I just say to you, okay, so you have all the knowledge about starting a business. Now, just do it. It's like, well, that's an overwhelming request, isn't it? And the mind almost shuts down to that, because it's like, okay, well, I could start picking the niche, I could register my business, I could reach out to suppliers. I could build a website. I could start running some ads. I could start working on my conversions. I could start conversions. I could start figuring out how to hire a VA. I could start I'll just go, I'll go for a walk, I'll go and get a coffee, I'll do something else. And then you kind of, you shut down, and you're like, there's too much to think about. I can't do it. So it's reframing that, and it's saying, Okay, well, what the first micro action look like? I like Tim Ferriss way of looking at it, which is, what would it look like if it was easy? What would it look like if it was simple? What would it look like if it was broken up into micro chunks that you could just do one of every day? And we actually do that inside our accelerator community, we set up a 21 day challenge, and I believe it might even be more steps now more days, and it's intentionally created to give you a micro Action Task every day that gets you towards that point. Now we get some people posting inside the accelerator saying how proud they are after they've gone through that and how much they've accomplished in the course of what's that three weeks that they never thought they'd do, and they've been procrastinating over for years, but because they now had something where they'd shown they were serious, they'd invested in it, they they felt like they were now accountable to it. But most importantly, they weren't overwhelmed. We'd created it in a way that allowed them to take bite size chunks and just just go through it one at a time, not get overwhelmed. And some days you might even feel frustrated that you've not moved further ahead than just that micro task. But that's good, because over time, you'll then see another day and there's slightly bigger Action Task, and over time, it kind of evens out and averages out. But that's the key, is being able to see the big picture, then dive in, like, see the macro, as they say, then dive into the micro and really, really segment that out and not get overwhelmed, not allow yourself to get overwhelmed, because you're working from a game plan, and that's really what we can provide and give you that framework and structure around so if you feel it's spinning your wheels and you're like, I've got this information. I know what I need to do, but I just, for some reason, have been listening for six months, and I've just not done it yet. That's why the communities exist. It's for that accountability, that structure, that framework, support network, and to ask questions along the way, as you get stuck, because we all do, inevitably. It's a great point. I'd argue that nobody can take the action build a business. Nobody wakes up and says, I'm building a business today because you can't do it. It's too much of a large macro task. The actual micro task that you can take action on is. Yes, you can register a limited company. You can open a business bank account, you can choose your niche today, and then you can set up a marketing campaign and start making sales. And then you've got a business that you've built. But you if you were to set that massive macro goal, there's just going to feel so overwhelming that you end up taking any action. And something else you mentioned, Louis, is that idea of when we get started we want to have we almost overwhelm ourselves, because we want to be at the end stage straight away. And I remember always feeling like I was in a rush when I started my business, like I've started my business. I want to feel a sale come in tomorrow. I just want to be ready. I just want to have a marketing campaign live. And I just want to be making sales straight away. And it was that rush of going through everything as quick as I possibly could, because I wanted to get there. But there is something to be said, I think about taking your time with the foundation parts, because you then get paid for the long term, if you take time in in doing that, did you feel like you had to slow yourself down when you were building a business at any point? Yeah, definitely, there are points where you feel that you're getting ahead of yourself and your mind, if it's anything like mine, is racing towards the day where the business is up and running and running, and you have your team and everything's in place, and you start worrying about problems that might occur at that stage. And I think what that then does is, you know, if you think about, imagine you have a jar, little glass jar next to me here, and it's full of mental decision making units. I get little I get only little tokens like you get at the fair, and there's a finite amount of them that I can use in a day. And if I start using those tokens and putting them into the mental decision making machine to make decisions about things that may or may not happen, five years down the line, suddenly, when it comes to like, which business bank do I open? I'm like, I'm out of tokens. I don't know. I'm done for today. And that's the problem. It's like you've almost got to not see what the future looks like. A little bit. You've got to almost be blind and oblivious to it, so that you can concentrate on today, making action and taking action that gets you to the point where perhaps those questions and decisions then unfold and they need to be made. But if you think about any business, no business starts with the founder making all the decisions for the lifetime of the business on day one, they have to unfold as they go. It's a natural process. So I think that helps relinquish the feeling of like trying to rush ahead and actually think, well, it's okay, yeah, every successful business owner and entrepreneur had to cross that bridge when they got to it, and so will I? I'll be no different to them, because I'll figure it out too, and I'm surrounded by people who've figured it out in this community, and I can ask them when I get stuck, and I can lean on them and, you know, ask what they did. So it's just knowing that it's okay not to know everything at the early stage and not feel inferior or inadequate because you don't, but just know that that's part of the process, and it's it's that feeling of being okay with the the unknown and taking action in spite of it, even if it's just 1% and taking one action that day, because you're not overwhelmed by the larger the larger task. And something I've known in business is that there's very few unchangeable decisions that you make. The vast majority of decisions you make, you can go back and change that in the future, even large decisions in the context of an E commerce business, choosing your niche, big decision. But it's not irreversible. If you want to pivot later down the line, you can do that. Which marketing campaign to set up. It feels like a big, irreversible decision, because you're going to put some ads on behind it, but again, not irreversible. And it helped me then to make these decisions, because I've always got it in the back of my mind, well, even if it's a big decision, it's very rare that it's going to be irreversible. So you learn from the data, you learn from the output, you learn from what you get back from the decisions you make, and you just pivot. And I always kept an affirmation in mind for me was that there is a way, and I will definitely find it. And so I always knew that there was something, there was always a way towards my goal, and I would just be in the in the mode of taking action every day until I got there. And eventually I will find the way. I just had to be able to pull down the barriers and just take those decisions going on to your point about the decision making fatigue. I think that's a crucial one here. Lewis is for people that aren't ever familiar with that concept of the fact that decisions is not an infinite resource, and you have so many decisions you can make in a day. What's the best way for people to get started knowing that that's the case? Sure. So if you are not familiar with the concept of decision fatigue. Just imagine that, for example, you are surrounded by, you're in a nursery, right, full of full of young children. This is very topical for me at the moment, by the way, my household and you're constantly being asked questions, like, Daddy, where are the crayons? Like I need. I need some paper. Can I build? Can we build a house? Can I Where's the screw, the toy, screwdriver? Can we do this? Like, I want to cook a pizza. I want to do this. I want to do and you're, you're constantly having to, like, yes, okay, let's do that. Do that. And you're, there's task switch happening. There's decisions like, which cranes do we get out? Which paper do we get out? Which where's the toy? What book are we going to read? What time we're going to bed? What are they having for dinner? There's all this stuff. And you ever get to the end of the dead, if you have children, you. And relate. I'm sure, if you don't, I'm sure can picture yourself in that environment, it can become like you at the end of the day, you lie there in bed and you're like, I just my brain just feels fried. And I think that is very true, that that is decision fatigue in action, isn't it? It's like being you. You must feel like you have no autonomy over the day, because you were just being asked constantly for to make decisions on behalf of someone else. So you have to be very careful with those tokens, especially when it comes to business, especially if you're doing it alongside, like another job that requires some of those tokens, and a family that requires some of those tokens. And maybe it's I'm going to go for a workout this morning, but which workout do I do, and what am I going to have for lunch? And there's a life as well that will require some of those tokens. So I think that that way of visualizing it is really, really powerful and being intentional with what you use them for. So the way that we've built this out as a framework, as I mentioned, inside our programs, are we know the decisions, and we know the use of those tokens that is going to get you to the result in the shortest and most direct time frame possible. So don't guess. Don't, don't, don't. You don't have to guess. That's the point. I guess you don't have to put in the tokens see if those were the right decisions in two months, and if you have created your business, great, but if it hasn't worked out, then you've wasted a lot of time and you're probably quite fatigued, or you can just come in and know the exact things you need to do in the right order and the right steps to ensure you don't get overwhelmed, and you can get up and running and get past that overwhelm. So we've tried to gamify that process as much as we can, so that you don't really even have to think about it too much, because overthinking will hold you back. Yeah, and the more overthinking you have to do, the more decisions you have to make yourself, and so the more fates you get, and the less likely it is that you'll see things through. So that's why I was really keen when I joined the dropship a lot masterclass, that there was a step by step guide. So I knew that my part of the deal was to take the action, and so dropship on lock the master class part of the deal was to tell me the actions to take. So it was a nice partnership then between me and the master class, so that I could just put my head down, not have to worry too much about which decisions to make, and just take the action on the proven path that had already been laid out in front of me, which, yeah, I credit a lot to my to my success so far. So moving on, then mistakes. There will have been mistakes that you made in your journey, and you can share those so that people can learn from them. Now, which mistakes do you think of when you're asked about a big mistake that would happen on your journey that you think others can learn from Sure? So I think some of the early mistakes that I'm sure I made early on, and I see lots of other people coming into this world do fall into is trying to run before they can walk, and it's the rushing thing that we talked about, and ending up getting overwhelmed and making such fast mental progress initially, but not actually doing the actions required to take that First step and learning how to walk and then eventually being able to run. So that's probably the first one. It's just not having a broken down, accountable, step by step process and and I think as a kind of secondary consequence of that, or actually, maybe it's like upstream of that really is not having someone to or something to follow. So having that mentorship, having access to a community, having a blueprint, a step by step framework that has kind of been designed and created and battle tested, you know, thought through around the business that you're creating. So not something generic, not, you know, using AI to put together a generic list of steps that you need to take, because it's never run a business, and it doesn't necessarily know what you know you're going to run into and have the answers to those things, because they'll be very, very kind of case dependent, specific and niche, and you'll need to find out those things from other people who are further ahead than you. I think the other big shift is thinking that I have to be a unicorn, and that I have to come up with an idea that no one else has found, and that my niche has to be so niche that no one's ever thought of it before, because that's the only way I'm gonna stand out. And whilst it's true that you can do that, I think that the people that see the best results with this build on a model that's already working, so they just validate the market, like we do in week two in our program of of niche validation, figure out the niches that are working, and then they look for a kind of a an additional value add in those markets that they can build upon and make it better. So that part is actually really fun when you get the hang of it. Frustrating for people who think that they need to become this, like unique market offering, and be the unicorn in the market, because they're going to constantly be trying to find a unique niche, and then eventually it's probably going to fail, because there was a reason why it was unique in the first place, and it's because there's no demand for it. But even Yeah, the people that do go through that process have VA. Validating what works and then building upon it and value add. I mean, that's entrepreneurship, but it's fine. It's that's like helping the world solve a problem that it has in a better way than already exists. And that's great if you can enjoy the process of building that and creating it, and injecting your own personality into your brand and the your own quirks and the things that make you you into your business that can really bring it to life and make it exciting. You're not just building some boring corporate website where it's like the same as every other website out there, because you're not going to stand out. You might make a few sales, but remember, if you pick a huge market, a huge pizza, you only need one slice of that pizza to replace your income. You don't need to invent a new type of pizza. You just, you just need your one slice of it. So I think that's the bit that I see holds a lot of people back. And probably one of the biggest mistakes I made early on is thinking I had to be this, like, unique, niche, finding unicorn. And then, yeah, I'd say those are probably the big ones that hold most people back. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I can resonate with that. I think when you're younger and maybe you have some ideas of being a business owner in the future, or an entrepreneur and running your own businesses, the very next question that comes to mind is, what am I going to do? What business am I going to run? Because I've got no experience running a business before, and if you don't have your dad's business to go into, your mum's business to go into and fall into naturally, then it's quite difficult to know what business it is to run, but drop shipping is one of the most attractive parts that I found about it was that it gave me the confidence in the business that I was going to set up, even without having no business background. And when you grow up and you watch things like dragons den, and a lot of the entrepreneurs are dragons den, they have a background in the business that they're running. So if you were like me, and you felt like you didn't really have a background in any business or any real expertise or specialities, you can feel quite distant from entrepreneurship, like you can't enter it without any special knowledge beforehand, whereas drop shipping gives you a step by step guide for building a business, even without any experience in business or any real specialties before. So that was a big one for me, and I just need to needed to become action orientated, you know, give give myself the confidence to get started. And importantly, I followed a program. And something else that I look back to as a crucial part was I followed a program that I invested in as well. And there was something about paying that made me take it so much more seriously, because I knew that I had to make it work, because I invested in the in the master class. Do you think there's something in that for yourself when you pay for something? How much more commitment Do you think that you saw in mentorships that you've paid for 100% Yeah, I still do courses, you know all the time. I still I find something, and I'm like, this person's got something, and it's there, and it's like, Yes, I could probably go and watch loads of stuff on YouTube about what they're doing, and then, like, enhance this area of my life with their materials. But I know that to hold myself accountable, more than anything, I just need to put down some money and pay for it to show that I'm serious, to tell my subconscious that we're doing this and I'm going to see it through to completion. So, yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, I've had friends that are like, Oh, can I do that? And that theme that you do where you sell products, I'm like, and can you help me do that? And I'm like, Yeah, sure. If you come and join, it's like, because, if, because you'll cheat yourself out of the results, if you don't put down some money towards it, like, you've got to, you have to invest in yourself to tell yourself that you're you take an action. It's like, you, you know, we talked to and talked before about there are some of the most valuable, like university lectures now available on YouTube, yet you still people still pay. What is it? Something like 30, 40,000 for a university degree now just on like tuition fees. Well, if the knowledge alone was the thing that they were looking for. No one would pay because they just go to YouTube, find all that information, go to chat. GBT say, summarize this lecture, and write me up the notes, and then they'd be good. They have what they need. So it's it's clearly not just the knowledge that people pay for, is it? Now we that's a whole different kind of worms talking about mainstream education and its validity in modern day society. And you know what professions do and don't benefit from from like university degrees, but certainly, I think there's something to be said around if you put your money where your mouth is and you say, I'm doing this, I'm going to commit to myself and show myself I'm serious about this by paying you will then take the actions so much more seriously along the way, because you're holding yourself accountable to it, and you're surrounded by other people who've done the same as well. That's a big part that we'll talk about as well. Like community. If you're surrounded by other community members who take their own personal development as seriously as yours, that they invested in themselves too, there's something in there, the water, you know, in that environment, there's something there that will you'll you'll start to really level up just through osmosis of being in the same community as people like that. Yeah, it's huge. It means that you can all commit together. And I think there's very three, just to add to your point, there's very three different ways that you can commit, or burn the boats, as it called, to go all in on something that you're going to build, you have to commit either. Either financially or through time or through status, and you have to be willing to lose each of those three things in order to really go for something. And also, I think there's something behind pre setting up, the fact that you will lose something in committing to setting up a business, because you then give yourself the reason to be hold yourself accountable. So what I mean is with finances, you pay into a course you're willing to lose that money. But what it means is it gives you that commitment to make sure you don't lose the money, because you really have made that commitment to yourself, that you're going to go in with time, you're going to commit the time and you don't meet that time you wasted. And then with status, by telling people in a community, you're opening yourself up to others to hold you accountable, because you're asking people to hold you accountable to what goals that you've set, and they can be a superpower for you if you get those three working on your behalf, because you'll do everything in your power to make sure that you do what you said you're going to do, and you don't waste things that you've that you've committed to putting up to build this business and community, I think, is probably the biggest and quickest shortcut in order to get around people that will hold you accountable. And so if you don't feel like you're the best at self discipline, you don't feel like you're the best at holding yourself accountable, it's a quick shortcut to get others to hold you accountable. So what role did community play, and what role does community play for you now in building your businesses? Our community is a huge one. I mean, having that peer support, being surrounded by like minded people is so motivating, people who can understand your struggles, your wins, like the things that you're going through at that time, that you just can't underestimate how powerful that is, especially with building an online business. It's not like we're all coming to an office together and we're all kind of talking at the water cooler about the challenges we're facing, like we have to create that digital water cooler environment, and so that we can have those conversations. And so it can be quite lonely running an online business, unless you're in a community. So I'd say that's super powerful. In that sense, the accountability, as you mentioned, having other people who are also working on their businesses around you, and seeing them kind of progress through the milestones as well is great, not from a case of making you feel any inferiority, but just making sure that you're like, Oh yeah, we're all on week two. We're all selecting our markets. Oh, we're all on week three. We're all building our stores, we're all signing our suppliers. We're all started running ads like, oh, so and so made their first sale. They've just hit 10k. I just made my first sale. I'm going to share it, because everyone else shared it, and that motivated me. So we see a lot of people in our community posting wins, but then almost caveat, not caveating, but like justifying, the reason why they've posted the win is because they saw wins being posted by other members early on that really motivated and inspired them. So they might make a four or 5000 pound sale, or some huge first sale, and then post it in the community and say, like, I thought this would help with inspiration, because I know it certainly did when I was just beginning. And then the other members are like, great, amazing. But what's then happening in their mind is they're thinking, that's really inspirational. I'm going to take action, but they're subconsciously thinking, when I hit that point, I'm also going to let the ladder back down and share that with the next generation, the next group of people that want to do this because they've kind of been through that, that transition to freedom. So, yeah, definitely, learning from others, accountability, having that peer support, the collective knowledge in a community, can save you so much time, help you avoid so many mistakes, and it's more than any video program can do. You know, we can make the best content in the world, and I'd argue that we do. And but when you are in a community surrounded by other people who are facing those challenges, there's nothing like it. We see it in person at our live meetups, right of this brain rub and the entrepreneurial sparks flying. And so if we can create that in a digital environment, you can just tap into that from an app on your phone every day of the week. It all comes down to being the average of the five people that you spend most time with, and that can be the people you spend most time with in person and virtually nowadays in a community, because you still get the idea the mindset behind some people with the thoughts that they share daily inside the community, and you can see the osmosis effect that happens across the whole community, because it comes it becomes a culture. And so if you're not like the the positive, successful mindset that we see in the community, then you feel left out. So you join in with the culture, and you also adapt that same mindset and and way of approaching a business. So to wrap up, then we've shared a lot about the stories today, to summarize and to give people steps to take away, and maybe the first step to get started with growing their own business. Where would you suggest that people go? Yeah, absolutely, there's, there's one place you can go which will really help you get started. So I'll guide you to that. But I think just to summarize, like starting small and having a long term vision, there's nothing wrong with that, but not rushing the process, taking those micro chunks, taking those micro actions along the way, and remembering that you're carrying around your jar of decision making tokens, so use them wisely. Focus on creating really solid mindset foundations before you decide to scale up and try and build a team and run ads and everything like just make. Sure you're building it on the basis you're doing your mindset inner work every day, making sure you've got the right community and mentorship around you to make your journey smoother. It's much easier to just ask other people, what did you spend your decision making tokens on to get you the result that you have that I want when you started? Because I've got only a limited amount of tokens and unlimited decisions in front of me that I could make. So it's much easier to just be in that community and ask and so yeah, hopefully you found this episode helpful. We've given you a brutally honest look at our journey from zero to combined 7 million in sales, probably more now I think it's 7.6 million, maybe. And but yeah, we hope you can take some of the lessons that we've learned along the way, and apply them to your own e commerce journey. And if you are ready to start, then the place to go is dropship unlocked.com, forward slash start. Are you enjoying the podcast? We'd love to hear from you leave a comment or a review, and we might feature it in an upcoming episode, and for detailed show notes and resources, visit dropship, unlock.com forward slash podcast. If you found value in any episode of this podcast, please. Could you take just 10 seconds to leave us a quick five star review on your favorite podcast app? It helps us more than you can imagine, and who knows, you might just hear your comments read out on the show. Thanks for being a part of our community. Your support helps us keep delivering new episodes to you every week. Okay, it's that part of the podcast where we're going to answer a question that we've received from a listener. So do let us know if you have a question that's pops up in your mind while listening to today's episode, simply leave a comment beneath the YouTube video version of this episode, and it won't just be answered in the comments. It might also be called out and answered on an upcoming episode. So this week, we've had a question in from Rizwan Asgar 331 thank you, Rizwan for your question. I'll ask it to you now. Louis, so Rizwan has asked, How do you know that a product is a winning product? What requirements or qualifications can you pre check before taking your website live and spending money on ads? Sure, so we talked about this a little bit today. So firstly, thank you for your question. Rizwan, and I think the first thing I would recommend is using our niche validation criteria to assess whether a product is even worth pursuing. So for example, we would check things like consistent demand. Is there enough search demand from people in the niche notice, they say niche, not winning products, because I don't really like a business that's built just around one product, that's putting all your eggs in one basket. And we can use tools like Google Trends to figure out, Is it, is it trending upwards? Is this becoming more popular? Is it, you know, extremely seasonal that we're going to make no sales for a load of the year? You know, for example, does it only peak around Christmas time or something? That's not really the kind of stable lifestyle business that I would want to create. So we can check for demand with tools like Keywords Everywhere that's a great tool, or Uber Suggest is another option, and then making sure you check the price point. So looking at are the products high ticket? Are we going to make a good amount of profit on that first sale so that we can be profitable, even after our spending our money on ads, as you put it, on that very first sale? Number one, there are plenty of other things, as well as when we look at competition, to make sure that there's already proof of concept, remember what I talked about in that we're building and modeling on what's already working and adding value to a market. We're not trying to create a new market for ourselves. That's a risky maneuver if you're gonna go that route. And looking at price consistency would be another thing. I don't want to be pouring my money in on ads to get customers to my website only for them to go and buy it cheaper from a different website. So I'd make sure that any niche I'm going into has a stable price point for those same products from the same brands across the different retailers. I mean, there's a full data driven process we guide you through all of this. We've got a three part series on YouTube that we can link below this episode where I actually went through that process. And, yeah, maybe even just jumping into our accelerator, taking the seven pound trial in there would be your best way to go through that process and figuring out which niche you want to go into before putting any money into ads. But yeah, certainly not advise spending any money on ads before assessing and validating your niche with a data driven process before, because we want to be confident on the niche based on data, not just based on I think it will work. You know, gut instinct can be a bit of a dangerous thing, sometimes early on in the journey. And for a much deeper dive into how we find winning products, you can also queue up Episode 114 of the dropship unlocked podcast after this perfect Yeah, great question. I can tell Rizwan has probably listened to some of our content lyrics because he was keen to know about winning products before spending money on ads. It's important that our philosophy is do the research up front and then spend money on ads once you know the product is going to work, rather than start spending money on lots of different products and find a winner based on the data that you collect, because that is a more expensive way and sometimes. Often more time consuming as well and painful if it doesn't work. And so thank you for your question. Rizwan, so next up, we are going to highlight a review that we've had for the podcast as well, because we love to highlight these reviews. So thank you. Everyone who's left one. This review has come in from Mark Gaskin, so Mark has shared his thoughts. He said, dropship or not, has taken away the bad image of drop shipping from platform to platform, and made it into a real business. Those days of undercutting tiny margins and sniping listings, not forgetting unreliable price changes and out of stock software are a thing of the past. Thank you. Lewis and James, great work, wow. Thank you so much for your review. Mark Gaskin, I can tell that you've had experience with some of those nasty other types of E commerce in the past that have caused you problems and headaches. So really glad to hear that you've been enjoying what sounds like not only the podcast, but also the business model as well. If this episode resonated with you today, would you consider sharing it with someone else who might benefit from it? Your recommendations help us grow our community and continue delivering valuable content. So a really quick share. You could open up WhatsApp and share the link to this could make a huge difference to someone else you know in your life, and you would be the person that they have to thank thank you for joining us on this episode of the dropship unlocked podcast. We hope you are leaving with new insights and inspiration to fuel your entrepreneurial journey. To kick start your E commerce business, head over to dropship, unlocked.com. Forward slash, start. It's the perfect place to start and get access to resources that will help you build your business from the ground up. And don't forget to hit that subscribe button for more episodes packed with strategies, tips and success stories, plus, if you enjoyed this episode today, a five star review would mean the world to us, and you might even get a shout out on the next episode. Thank you for choosing to spend your time with us today. We can't wait to bring you more insights on the next episode of the dropship unlocked podcast. You