Startup Experience with Product, Sales, Entrepreneurship, and Development Experience

In 2020, during the COVID lockdown, I was in my second semester of B.Tech and I wanted to learn coding and web development to improve my skills. However, my old laptop was almost dead and I couldn’t afford to buy a new one. I had about 340 INR (Indian Rupees) in my bank account from savings, but I decided to try trading without any knowledge of it and ended up losing all of it.

I needed to find a way to earn money, but I had no resources, system, money to invest, or specific skills to earn money online. All I had was an internet connection, a smartphone, my mind, and a lot of energy and passion. I spent a lot of time researching, reading articles, blogs, and books, and watching videos. I came across ideas like print-on-demand and Amazon, but they all required some sort of initial investment. Borrowing money from my parents or family was not an option.

After a lot of research, I came across the term “drop shipping”. Dropshipping means that you can deliver products to customers without having to buy the products or keep an inventory of them yourself while keeping the profit margin for yourself other than what is paid to the original seller. However, all the fancy tutorials and articles I found about dropshipping emphasized that I needed a website, a Shopify seller account, and the ability to drop ship from Alibaba, which meant I would still need some investment and resources.

So, I did what was in my hands - started my business with Zero Investment. These were my broad learnings:

- Provided stakeholders (customers, and manufacturers) with value-oriented deals in terms of sales and revenue. 
- Designed a landing page from scratch using React.js to build trust among customers and increase conversion rate. 
- Tested 4 User Acquisition channels for the business - Facebook marketplace, Instagram, Telegram, and WhatsApp with WhatsApp being the top-most in terms of success rate.

You can read my entire journey here.

Looking to hire a Product Consultant/Associate Product Manager? DM Me here :)