How I turned $1 into $102 (Case Study)
Okay, You might have thought, either impossible or I was lucky like a lottery winner. But, neither of them are true, I actually invested $1 and got a return of $137.47, after deducting the expenses, it leaves me with a profit of around $102.
What I did was, I opened a Shopify store, promoted it on Instagram, got some sales, then I bought the products on aliexpress with ¼ of the price. That’s how I made that crazy 10,900.00% ROI
Well, are you interested to hear the full story? Why not, you can copy this method too! Let’s do it!
Planning
It was July 2019, I mean last year and I was broke as a freak. All I had was around $2.5 in bitcoin. I was getting by lending money from friends and family, I just have to do something.
I needed a shortcut, and everywhere I go, it seems Shopify dropshipping was the thing I was looking for, it has crazy profit, less hard work, and super easy.
But it has one big barrier,
Money!
Shopify dropshipping needs money everywhere. You have to buy a domain with $10, buy the least plan of Shopify with $29, and promote your shop by Instagram influencers with at least 100 bucks. So, even if you are a minimalist, you need $139 just to start and it doesn’t guarantee any revenue at all.
All I got was $2.5! It seems a joke.
But I had to do dropshipping. I spent days over days watching videos on how I can reduce costs, or completely free.
After spending days and nights, I understood something. I can buy a domain with $1/a year but costs a lot in the next years (but who cares, I need money right now) and if I work a lot, I can get sales for free, the chances are still extremely low, but not impossible.
But I still needed $29 for Shopify.
I have managed to get it for free (I’ll elaborate on how later in this story) and it was a blessing or me.
So here’s how my starting budget was
Domain: $1
Shopify: $0
Promotion: $0
Total: $1
Let’s discuss every step in detail.
Buying the domain
I was searching for the cheapest but reasonable price. I found it on hostinger.com
They were selling “.store” for $0.99/for the first year.
It will cost around $30 in the next year. But who cares? If I can make money with it, I can easily pay that.
Not to say, this $1 was our entire budget.
Let’s do the next important thing.
Buying a Shopify plan for free
This was one of the impossible challenges I faced. It was compulsory $29 and I didn’t have that.
(Although they have 14 days free trial, it doesn’t work)
I searched the entire internet, “how can I use Shopify for free?”
As a blessing, I found one!
It was their developer program. If I sign up as their app developer, they will give me a store for test purposes. It was all I need. I was worried about $29 a month, but I got it for the entire year absolutely free!
Preparing the store
This was easy. I opened a hat store.
I watched some videos, used a free theme, designed a logo in illustrator. Added hats from Aliexpress using an app called Oberlo. It adds products from aliexpress to the Shopify store by one click. One-click and it will add product photos, variations, and everything.
So It didn’t take much effort.
The payment method disaster
It was a nightmare. Bringing money in my pocket is more difficult than earning money itself (for my country). There are 100+ payment methods in Shopify, do you know how much of them support my country?
Only One!!!!!
And it was 2Checkout. From then I have to transfer it to Payoneer. It was only one way, no second chance and they have a minimum payout of $50, so even if I sold a couple of my hats, I still won’t be able to get the money and deliver them to customers.
My first application to 2checkout was canceled after 13 days of reviewing. It was heartbreaking.
I had to do everything all over again from the scratch. Building a new site, applying again. I was never ready to give up.
It took them at least 3 days to reply to a single mail. So, after 38 days, I got approved.
Now I’m all set for promotion.
Promoting my store on Instagram
I knew that I couldn’t reach a significant number of audiences for free. I might end up all for nothing. But I had no other choices. I opened an Instagram account and started posting. All the photos I uploaded weren’t products, some of them are just random hat photos just to grab attention.
To reach a large audience, the only way I had was to use hashtags and a lot of it. I analyzed the hashtag performances through some apps and scaling up every day.
It was fun but still no “financial” results coming up. I made a promo code of 30% off for Instagram followers. To increase followers, I used follow and unfollow techniques, but hashtags were more effective. I got almost all the likes from hashtags. After a month, the like reached to average 40 to every photo.
I was happy.
Getting the first sale!
After a looong one and a half months later, I got my first sale from Instagram. It was an order of around $60. Although I was confident about getting sales, I couldn’t believe my eyes. All my hard works of these months, worries — all gone. I was never happier than this in my life. I did it, I generated $60 from a single buck, unbelievable!
Profits
Then some more sales, the revenue was over $140, after so many fees I received around $137. So there was enough money to buy hats from Aliexpress and send it to the customers. It cost around $35. That leaves me a profit of $102 from that $1 investment.
Final words
Unfortunately, the free Shopify method stopped working in March 2020. Also, I was not interested in that store, I started to make investor pitch deck and I was making enough money from that. So I closed the store. It still shows but not effective.
Although it was not much money, I’m not doing that anymore, but it was an experience I’ll never forget in my life.
If you want to copy this method
As free Shopify is not working, you can buy a hosting as low as $8-$9 and use woocommerce plugin free edition. So, your total budget will be $10
Then, and everything remains the same. You can give it a try anyway. It worked for me and you can do this too!
I have some more crazy financial experiences, I intend to write here. You may follow me if you’re interested.
Oh, and thank you so much for reading this long story, I really appreciate that.
