How To Go From Zero To A Wildly Successful Micro Brand

How To Go From Zero To A Wildly Successful Micro Brand

This is a post I originally wrote for Facebook but thought it would be more appropriate here.

My name is Jamie, and in this post I’m going to show you how to go from absolutely nothing to owning your own micro ecommerce brand.

I’m also going to talk a little about my story, and what I learned from reaching massive success early on as well as hitting rock bottom (nervous breakdown) by age 22.

This is not about dropshipping trending products from China.

This isn’t about Amazon, it’s actually probably the most unique and untapped opportunity right now for anyone in the world to create a lucrative business of real value.

If you give me a few minutes of your time, I’ll try to explain this as quickly and simply as possible. I hope you enjoy it.

My Brief Backstory Behind Building A Brand

So, my name is Jamie Hudson and ever since I was 12-13 years old I’ve been building little businesses on the Internet.

I never had an interest in school (I quit at 15 because I was making $300/day online).

My early success was short lived, and I spent the next eight years figuring out the Internet.

I learned how to do copywriting, created software that ranked sites on Google, worked behind the scenes single handedly creating 8 figure marketing campaigns for big name “gurus”.

Among many, many other things as I just didn’t know how to focus all of my creative energy.

Long story short, three years ago I stumbled into ecommerce (selling physical products online) and fell in love with the business model.

I knew I wanted to sell something real, and I knew I didn’t want to deal with people or answer to anyone to make a living.

I didn’t want to do consulting. I didn’t want to work with other businesses. In fact; ask anyone who knows me and they’ll tell you Jamie rarely likes leaving his apartment.

So I found ecommerce and for the first time in my life, everything just TOOK OFF. It was like everything I did turned to gold.

I could setup a new online store, and start printing $1k, $5k, $10k, $20k+ a day virtually overnight.

I sh*t you not; it was a ridiculous thing to experience being 20 years old and having all the money and freedom in the world.

So back in 2016 the business model was extremely simple.

Find trending products on social media, import them to some stupid store like “mytrendydeals.com” and run video ads on Facebook & Instagram to them.

This would create unreal results, pretty much every time. In fact, when I found a winning product I could just share it with 10 different people and all ten of them would get the same insane results overnight.

I blessed many different people in the following 24 months, allowing them to copy my model and products; creating millionaires in the process (most of which don’t even talk to me anymore).

But then something started to happen.

The model started to break down as too many people started getting in on it. Chinese suppliers also got greedy and sent out terrible products, used the cheapest shipping methods or simply took people’s money and shipped nothing at all.

It started getting nasty, and there was no solution in sight. From the end of 2017 it quickly became harder and harder to find a winning product.

And… as soon as you did about one hundred other stores would rip the product, steal your video and stick their logo over yours to sell it.

As you can imagine; this rapidly saturated the marketplace and killed the model. With so many customers getting angry at anything they bought off these ads; Facebook had to do something.

So they implemented methods of penalizing pages/businesses using shady tactics or simply banning them from advertising all together.

This was the fall of the infamous business model known as dropshipping; and it happened much faster than anyone could anticipate. Some lost everything due to refunds and merchant account shutdowns while others made millions.

Finally, I broke down and cried to myself in a room one day as I realised I had screwed it all up and after generating so many millions of dollars what I was walking away with was measly.

On paper things looked great but the reality was very different. I had screwed up the best opportunity of my life which took my 8+ years to get to.

Then, a new solution hit me like a bag of bricks.

“All I need to do is figure out how to create brands”

While dropshippers were going out of business and stores were being shut down; an entirely new breed of people were crushing more than ever.

Niche, targeted, value-based brands.

Go on Instagram today and search any niche category and you’ll find an array of different brands absolutely dominating.

I call this “The Rise Of The Micro Brand”.

It’s the first time in history where entire industries are being turned upside down and the buyers are moving away from billion dollar brands; towards micro brands.

People want to follow and engage with brands now. They don’t want to buy from faceless conglomerates. This presents a massive opportunity to establish yourself in countless different old and new evolving markets in every country globally simultaneously.

Most of them happened accidentally. Like some lady who used to sell jewelry on ebay who moved to etsy who eventually built a Shopify store and Instagram page.

By consistently releasing quality content for her niche audience she builds a following; eventually snowballing into thousands of raving fans who buy out all of her product.

These micro brands are usually operated by people who know nothing about marketing, with no prior experience and they don’t even run ads on Facebook, Google or Instagram.

If you know what to do… the opportunity is infinite.

Whether you’re the little old lady in Australia who loves DIY or a 19 year old kid in Delhi you can capitalise on the exact same markets.

Personally I don’t give a damn what we are selling as long as I enjoy the process of building the business.

The system is simple.

Step 1: Identify Brand Opportunities

Use a variety of research methods like browsing Etsy shops, Amazon, Facebook, Google or existing ecommerce brands to look for under-served, highly profitable markets with LOW competition. You don’t wanna compete with big dogs who have established themselves as leaders over many years.

Look for little niche markets with the opportunity to make at least six figures per month. Six figures per month is very simple to do. I’ve done this over and over in multiple niche markets now following this process.

If your average order value is $75 that’s just 1334 sales in 30 days to hit six figures revenue. That works out to just 40 or so sales per day.

With a storefront and advertising that works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week it’s not so crazy to grab 40 customers per day in any small niche market.

You could make 40 sales a day selling apparel to people who like penguins or weird rings to goths.

The key is testing fast, making yourself look like a trusted brand and positioning yourself as a small company operated by a real human being. When you find several brand opportunities its time to go to step 2.

Step 2: Create Your Micro Brand Store

This is simply a store on Shopify.com’s platform and a good Instagram as well as Facebook page. These social media accounts are key to your success.

Make your store look real. Pay careful attention to the name, feel and design. Have good customer service and delivery. Product selection is out of the scope of this guide, pick up my new Dot Com System Micro Brand report to learn that stuff.

Step 3: Make Good Ad Creative & Test Fast

Finally you make some ad creative. Put a lot of energy into this. Make carousel ads, make video ads, use photos for ads. Get reviews from customers that you can use for advertising and remarketing to people who visited your store but didn’t purchase.

Use stuff you can find, friends and family or pay influencers to create high quality photos and video material to edit into quality branded ad creative.

Then its time to test it on the Facebook advertising platform on both Facebook and Instagram. Depending on how this works; you’ll either keep iterating it until you success; expand to other platforms or focus on organic growth like the little old lady selling jewelry.

Most times your idea won’t work right away. But if you followed what I said you should have created a brand where others are already making sales. So either keep going, testing other things or move on to another niche. If you can’t make it work after testing many creative and $300-$1000 on ads in the first month; it will probably be a slow grind. You might want to try find another idea that pops from the get go. Or employ organic strategies like Instagram and search engine optimization + content marketing.

This is it, folks.

This is how tens of thousands of people are literally getting “r.i.c.h” online. Many of them got lucky with a random passion of theirs that has the right market timing and opportunity.

But if you do it with my system; you can eventually strike your gold and prosper.

Hope you enjoyed this post, I just wrote it in 30 minutes.

I’m sitting in a cafe in Colombia right now which is like my second home.

I have a dope ass apartment here with 4 bedrooms, a pool table, a movie room and a lot more. Easily paid by one or two good days from my stores.

What will you do when you pull this off?

If you liked this; I invite you to sign up for Dot Com System 2.0 – Micro Brand Edition which goes into greater depth on this entire process.