My Favourite Failure: I made a big bet on the wrong product -Mussayab Ehtesham

0:00I'm going to level with you. I'm not the best manager in the world. I'm a decent coach, but management is my co-founders thing, not mine. And thank god for that because developing your team is one of the single most high leverage things you can do as a leader Which is why i'm really happy we're working with personio They're the all-in-one hr platform You need to handle everything from hiring to onboarding handling absences to managing compensation Their features touch every point of the employee life cycle from onboarding right through to exit interviews And because they automate so much of the boring but necessary hr admin you and your managers can focus on getting the best out of your people.

0:40So, if you're leading a growing business and want to spend less time on HR admin, then book a demo at personio.com forward slash secret leaders. That's personio.com forward slash secret leaders. There's a link in the show notes. Hello and welcome to Secret Leaders.

1:01Masayib was working as an engineer in Canada when he thought to himself, hmm, this 9 to 5 life isn't for me. He wasn't sure how he was going to get out of the grime, but he knew he needed some form of passive income. He tried trading stocks, but that had him up all night stressed and up early to make sure he was there for the opening of the stock exchange. He tried dropshipping, but it turned out to be too much work marketing the product. Real estate was out of the question because he didn't have enough money to start. But then he decided that e-commerce would be his ticket and he would use private label.

1:36Private label is where you buy products that are already manufactured from other manufacturers and you put like your own brand label on it and you just sell it. So you're not the manufacturer, you're just buying it from someone who has already made it. You're just branding them as your product and then you're selling it. As it turns out, this would have a steep learning curve.

2:04Masayab wasn't just looking to make money. He was looking for a sense of freedom. I was just sitting on my desk one day. I think it was maybe after three, four years. I was climbing up the corporate ladder. I was promoted to first from a junior mechanical engineer to a project manager to a senior mechanical engineer. And I was just sitting one day on my desk and I realized, you know, I am capable of more than that. And the thing that I was looking for was freedom. And then I figured out, hey, in order to be, you know, have more freedom, what do I need to do? So those are the things that I identified, real estate, stocks, whatever.

2:46I need to do something like passive. But the number one motivator was to have more freedom. This is a mission Masayab took incredibly seriously. he became obsessed with changing his life. I became so obsessed with success. I became obsessed with changing my life. I became obsessed with following the successful people. Why are other people successful? Why does everyone have the same 24 hours in a day and they make so much money and we have the same 24 hours in a day and we're stuck? Slowly, I realized that, you know, it's number one thing, it's the vision. You need to have a bigger mindset. that you need to tell your brain again and again that you can do it.

3:27So I actually made a vision board at that time as well. I made a full vision board. I took the pictures from the internet. And I actually bought a book at that time from Lewis House, The School of Greatness. That book actually really changed my life because it kind of broke down the step by steps, like what successful people do every single day, you know, how they wake up and how they are spending every single day. So again, in that book, number one thing was the vision. You cannot have a life that you want without having the vision for it. You need to know exactly where you are going. I started watching motivational videos all the time.

4:05I was driving, I was listening to videos. I was showering, I was listening to videos. I was obsessed with that. Like, I want to achieve that success. So with this motivation to find freedom and an all-out obsession with changing his life, Masaib found private label e-commerce. He took some courses, he did some research, and he finally found a product he could sell.

4:49you know there's not a lot of competition you can improve the product you can improve the listing and you can make a better product better packaging and then sell it at a lower price so this guy was selling like really expensive i think 39.99 at that time and i thought this this product was doing hundred thousand dollars a month and i was like you know this is really good like even if i take like 20 30 from him you know it's good enough for me 20 30 thousand dollars a month at that time But I was still very skeptic. I will be honest with you. I was, since I was coming from this like mindset of doing a job, I was procrastinating.

5:25I did identify the product, but I was not pulling the trigger on it. I was questioning myself again and again. And I think some of my friends actually may have pushed me to just take action on it because they were actually making fun of me all the time. You know, hey, you've been saying that you're going to start a business. And, you know, whenever I would sit with them, they would make fun of me that, you know, you're just all talk and no play. But it worked out well because they pushed me that, you know, hey, I cannot be all talk and no play. I actually need to, like, you know, figure this out, just pull the trigger on it.

5:55And even if I fail, you know, at least I know that I would have tried. I can tell myself, hey, I tried this as well. It didn't work for me. So the sales were good. I found some suppliers on Alibaba, found two, three different suppliers, ordered the samples from three people. I like samples from one of them. That supplier was really good. His quality was really good. And he was actually able to customize a couple of things for me based on the understanding of the product from me. So I'm an engineer, mechanical engineer. So I obviously like told them a couple of modifications and i ordered the product when the product was actually finally arriving it gave me a push hey you know it's almost coming in stock and so i found someone on fiverr to write the whole listing for me i paid like 200 300 dollars for it then i found a local photographer i gave the product to him to do like a full nice video shoot i spent a lot of money on that i think so based on the uh the data the other guy was doing about about 100k so i think my initial order was like$30 ,000.

6:58The product price was like$6.5 per piece. So I ordered like a lot. And the product, when it actually came in stock, you know, it was just like crickets, you know, no one was buying it. It was his big bet. He researched the product, built up the courage, spent 30k of his own money that he'd saved and nothing. The product wasn't selling and he had a choice. Give up and take it as a loss or push it harder. Why is it not selling? Like why? Why is it not selling? I was just checking 12 a.m., 2 a.m., 3 a.m. Then I thought maybe the product listing that I got from Fiverr, the person who wrote it is not good.

7:41So I started learning how to write the product listing myself, you know, how to maybe include more keywords in it. You know, maybe the title is not good. Maybe the Amazon description is not good. So maybe it's not ranking well. So I started learning more and, you know, started figuring out how can I optimize the title? How can I optimize the bullet points? How can I optimize the description? Then I did that, that, that didn't even work. Still was doing two, three sales a day. Then I went to the pictures. Okay. What can I do on the pictures? Because the pictures were just the normal. I thought maybe I can include some features and benefits on the pictures.

8:16And maybe people are seeing the pictures. They are not seeing the differences between me and the competitor. I did that and still it was not selling. And then I realized maybe that the customized product that I have ordered, it's not actually needed by people because the data was still showing me that the guy is doing a hundred thousand sales a month. Right. But his camera app was a smaller, a little bit smaller in size than mine. So I thought, you know, maybe I ordered a big one and people don't need that big of a wrap because I was trying to go for something, you know, custom. So I talked to the same supplier and I said, you know, I want to order a smaller version as well.

8:55So I ordered a smaller version too to test it out. And I think they gave it to me that one for$4.5. The other one was like$7. Same customization, but just the size was different. So I ordered that, I think maybe 2000 pieces. And it came in stock and it was still crickets. It was not working. As you can hear, Masayib tried everything. He changed the photos. He changed the description. He's now spent an additional 9K just to change the product. And it's still not selling. One day, I actually downloaded another software. And I opened that software. And I saw the sales of the same camera app. The other software was showing$100 ,000 per month.

9:40This was showing$14 ,000 per month. so that was like a shocker for me hey shit like this is like this is not accurate because amazon doesn't share their data about sales with anyone right and i did not know that i did not have that knowledge because i was a newbie so i i realized hey you know these people don't have that information so they're all doing their own estimation and that guy did the estimation in a wrong way and that's why his his data was skewed which actually after some time he also fix their algorithm and they also fix their estimations about that product. But that kind of gave me a shocker that, hey, you know, this is all has been based on the wrong data.

10:25I said, you know, I'm not going to give up because I started realizing like I have learned so much. And instead of giving up, I realized that this has a potential. And I was actually excited about doing these things. I actually doubled down on some other products. I said, you know, screw this product. I'm going to finish this, you know, whatever the stock is, which did not sell. And I had to actually, you know, discard all the inventory. But I started going in another route because I said, I'm not giving up this. This has to work. I don't care. Even if I lose money, this has to work and I'm going to make this work.

11:04This new product that I have found out, it has some potential. I verified the data for the next product, some two, three different sources. So I doubled down on those products. And eventually, like, you know, those things started to surface up. And I'm still losing money on the new products as well. So first six months, I was not profitable. I wasn't making any money. But then I still kept on adding more and more products, low cost products that actually had the potential. I was engineering some of my own products myself. I went with a baby brand and a fitness brand. So I launched three, four products in the baby brand, three, four products in the fitness brand and optimizing them at the same time.

11:44I had no employees at that time. I was just doing everything myself. And yeah, eventually at the end of the year, I ended up closing in one million in revenue. From the beginning, Masayib was obsessed with changing his life. It was his commitment and obsession that kept him afloat. When his products weren't selling and when his savings were depleting, he knew he'd find something that would stick. The biggest lesson that I have learned is that success is going from failure to failure without the loss of motivation.

12:25That's it for this episode. I want to thank Ms. Saib for sharing his story and advice and you. Thanks for listening. I've been your host, Dan Murray-Serta. I'll see you next time.

12:40Thank you.