NOLL TILL 100 — ENGLISH TRANSCRIPT
Episode 111: Dropshipping as a testing ground for ecommerce #111

English translation of the full Swedish conversation. Original timestamps preserved.
Original audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLlUSX3LxII

[00:00:00] A very warm welcome to a new episode of Zero to One Hundred. With me as usual is Fredrik Ankarsköld, and today we are going to talk about dropshipping. I have had a lot of questions about it from beginners who want to enter the industry, have read about e-commerce and been shown TikTok videos by people who often present themselves as gurus. "I have built X and Y," and then they sell dropshipping courses, which is fairly lucrative, more so in the past. Often, they are international players, so it is hard to verify: have they built anything or not? You get drawn into thinking it might be as easy as it seems. They show figures, screenshots and videos: "This is how much revenue I have generated."

[00:00:53] Not earned. They say they have made money, but only show revenue, which does not even have to be their own. That is one thing, and you also mentioned in your first episode, number 102, that you had built a dropshipping store that turned over one and a half million after a few weeks. In the first month, we sold around one million, I think, and over the summer around 1.9 million.

[00:01:23] Completely crazy. So we need to break down what dropshipping is, how to get started, how it has changed, common mistakes, what you do not need to do, how to find products, the best tips and pitfalls. Let us get started.

[00:01:49] You have built a dropshipping store, and that was fairly recently. Can you briefly tell us about that journey and why you did it? I did not really know which product we would work with. As I mentioned with Core by D, we had a selection of different products. I also saw dropshipping as a test and a way to learn. Can I get a product moving, get started, do the entire flow and gain all the lessons without a huge capital investment? That was one of the reasons.

[00:02:26] After a lot of back and forth... I like finding someone who already knows how to do what you want to do. True. We had a guy called Daniel. I will not mention his surname because I do not know whether he wants us to talk about it.

[00:02:44] I was good at sophisticated stores for entire brands. Daniel could show that it does not need to be so complicated and thought through.

[00:03:00] It is thought through to some extent, but not at the same level as, for example, launching Twistboxes. One trap I fell into early on was making it too complicated. You should focus instead on speed and dare to test.

[00:03:19] Okay, so you thought: we will find some product and test it? Yes. We can start by defining dropshipping. It essentially means you sell without holding the products in your own inventory. The suppliers are often in China, through AliExpress, CJ, Spocket or a private agent who ships directly to the customer. You earn the margin between purchase and sale. Then you have ad spend, and you usually market yourself through Meta, TikTok, Google and influencers. That is one definition. Then you have marketplaces such as Fyndiq and CDON. There, I have also thought: is that sort of dropshipping? Amazon FBA is something else, not dropshipping. Then you have...

[00:04:16] ...you ship through Amazon. But Fyndiq also sometimes has delivery times of two to three weeks. Then I think it is not Fyndiq itself shipping, but a platform with suppliers. I had a customer who bought toy products for a company event. I thought: why did you go there? They charge five times as much as if you had bought the same product directly. I went to AliExpress, searched for the product and found it straight away. Why go to Fyndiq and buy when you could have bought from AliExpress? It might be my lack of knowledge that means I miss the distinction, but they blend into each other a little.

[00:05:00] They do. There are different ways of doing dropshipping. Another phenomenon has started exploding over the last, say, two to four years: what I define as nearshipping. Okay. It is essentially the same definition. The big difference is that you find a Swedish, or at least European, product supplier. You might contact a brand. Say you want to sell Västerbottens Såpa's products without buying your own inventory from us. Now, we do not do this, but say someone wanted to do it...

[00:05:34] Or Core by D. You want to try selling without buying inventory. Then you can agree to set up a site, sell the products and send an order confirmation to the supplier, who ships directly to the end customer.

[00:05:55] It reminds me of something I have heard: if you are good, you can contact someone with a physical store and products...

[00:06:05] ...but not very good e-commerce, and suggest that if sales increase above a certain level, you get a certain percentage of the increase.

[00:06:16] That is really the next level, just marketing in between. Back to dropshipping and its negative connotations: do you agree that it is dead? It is just a way of testing products, a shipping method. Fundamentally, you sell someone else's product. Where is the inventory?

[00:06:45] That is one definition. The fact that the inventory is in China instead of here, how could that die? It is just a way of shipping the item.

[00:06:57] But perhaps competition has become too fierce. People have seen long delivery times, inferior products, varying batches or completely different products in the delivery. You have no quality control or QA when products are shipped directly from an agent or China.

[00:07:18] When it was a new phenomenon, many people clicked. As an ordinary consumer, you were fooled a little, but now many people's eyes have been opened. I think the negative aspect is that some dropshippers lie outright. In my feed, for example, I saw advertising for Skogshjärta, I think they were called. There was Pernilla Wahlgren, among others, I think, and some other people advertising...

[00:07:47] ...and saying: "If you use plastic cutting boards, you ingest microplastics, and that is not good." Skogshjärta was eco-certified, or I do not know what wood; there are various wood certifications. As soon as I saw it, I thought it really looked like a dropshipping product. I went to AliExpress and Alibaba and looked. The utensils did not seem certified at all, just cheap ones from China, without there seeming to be any chemical checks or anything like that.

[00:08:17] They could also have been coated with mineral oil or some other material, or had plastic around the product. When it is shipped directly from the warehouse, you have no control.

[00:08:33] Yet they got big personalities like Pernilla Wahlgren. What happened when it came to light? I read an article about Matgeek, who has gone hard after dropshipping stores and covers them.

[00:08:48] Nice. I have watched some of them. He is right sometimes and wrong sometimes. Not everything is as black and white as it is portrayed on social media. The problem is lying about the product and its benefits just to sell.

[00:09:07] The intention might not be to build a long-term brand. Or perhaps it is, but you do not know the rules. We are both interested in health, and today I avoid plastic.

[00:09:23] Then it is disappointing if you are sold some other bullshit when the advertising says you should use their products instead of plastic cutting boards. I agree. Back to when you started...

[00:09:41] ...the dropshipping store. How did you choose a product? Did you go to AliExpress, or were there better ways? I would recommend... I looked up a few popular tools just now: Minea, [unclear in the source: Adsy], PP Ads, which I remember we used, Sell The Trend and Dropship Spy. There are loads of ways, but two common ones...

[00:10:07] There are loads of ways, actually. But two common ones are to use these tools or just go into Facebook Ad Library. Click the ads when you notice dropshipping ads appearing in your feed. Over time, you train your eye to recognize that kind of ad. If you click them, Facebook thinks: "This person really likes dropshipping products." Then you get more and more in your feed. When they appear, you can then go to Facebook Ad Library and see how long the ads have been active.

[00:10:45] And how many variations they have. If someone has run an ad for three months with several variants, the likelihood is higher that the product is doing fairly well.

[00:10:58] But do you want to compete with a product that already has traction? You can search for how many people are competing. Perhaps only one person has found it.

[00:11:09] What worked for us was finding a product that was already working. It takes time to build a store, write product descriptions, order and film advertising. At the beginning, you can sometimes use existing content.

[00:11:29] You can make image ads, for example. But it is still a process, and you want to find a product. Likewise, in business someone might say: "I am the first person to think of this. I have never seen it anywhere before." Then you might think: "Yes, it could be absolutely fantastic."

[00:11:51] But why does it not exist? Perhaps the product does not solve a problem, so no one wants it?

[00:12:02] Or perhaps the market is untapped, immature or not educated enough. Then it is about finding a product that already works so you do not start from zero. I buy that. At the same time, I think that means you miss... All the tools you mention look at ads or trending products. If you take something that has been around for months because it sells well, it is hard to find something only one or a few people sell. When something works really well, the product companies developing it ought to push it hard to more people who want to sell. Surely they say: "This works for this person. Would...

[00:12:47] ...you not like it too?" I do not think so. But the thing is: to take an example, you do not want a saturated market in Sweden. You go in, search for the product and discover that twenty-five other people are already selling it on Facebook.

[00:13:02] On the other hand, something might be doing well and trending in the US, but nobody is selling the product in Sweden or Germany.

[00:13:13] You can find trends in other countries that do not yet exist where you live or in the languages you know. Now AI makes translation easy.

[00:13:24] What product did you sell? Not the cutting boards? No, flip-flops, shoes, in other words. That was what we sold. Then there are different shipping methods. We got help finding an agent early on.

[00:13:47] The best agents will not take you on before you have sufficient order volume.

[00:13:57] We started with an agent. After a week, they said they would ship soon. We knew the product needed about ten days to...

[00:14:08] ...arrive. If you ship after a week... Sales were going well, so at the beginning I thought: now let us step on the gas. Then I started having anxious nights when I noticed two weeks had passed. When we wrote, they just replied: "Don't worry, we will fix this, we will send this." But you never do. In parallel, we started looking for a new agent who could help us. In the first phase, when you are testing, you have no products of your own and have not placed an order.

[00:14:42] But you receive the order. If I order from your Swedish site, what happens? It depends on the volume. If you do not have your own inventory at the agent, they first have to buy in the product and then ship it, which causes an extra delay.

[00:15:00] They have to find it, perhaps from two, three or ten factories? Yes. The problem there was that they might choose the price that is best for them and add a margin we cannot see.

[00:15:17] That is their business model. They do packing, picking and shipping, but also want extra margins that are invisible to us. That was the first problem. Eventually, they started shipping some orders, but by then we had already found a new agent and asked them to buy inventory. At that point, we had received money to buy the inventory with. But it was a stomachache every day...

[00:15:43] When are they going to get it out? The new agent was fairly good at the beginning and shipped shoes. I suspect they were very disorganized. We noticed that at even higher volumes.

[00:16:02] What is higher volume? Fifty orders per day, or what? No, I think we sold perhaps five thousand flip-flops over the period. If you have a messy warehouse... We have seen pictures, because the new agent who took over photographed their warehouse. There were sacks in a pile in some corner, absolutely zero control. I remember a customer who got a Baby Shark costume instead of shoes. [laughter] "Wait, I did not order this." They could even send someone else's product.

[00:16:40] Wow. Then we ended up with a third agent who was more organized. The later agents had really nice websites and sold themselves as though they would change everything. Then it was bad anyway.

[00:16:59] The third agent was good. Or good, actually they were not, now that I think about it. [laughter] They landed us in the shit by buying shoes without asking us. By then, we had already found a manufacturer and done product tests. "This is the manufacturer whose shoes we feel have good quality and feel. They are the only ones we should buy from." Then we could also laser-engrave our logo onto the shoe, making it feel more like our own. During the period, we had also added our own packaging. That is a step when you want to make the product more unique: your own printed box or bag. That was the first phase. Then...

[00:17:47] We thought we had done the research and found the best manufacturers. With a laser-engraved logo, we got both our own packaging and product.

[00:17:57] But they did not do that. Instead, they bought from loads of different manufacturers. People were so happy with our product that they came back. They had been really damn happy with the first shoe and wanted to buy more, some for other family members. Then they came back, bought again and felt it was completely different. Then we started getting returns: "I was happy the first time. What has happened since?"

[00:18:28] That was part of the headache. With low order values and lots of tickets, there is a lot of support. Luckily, we had Gorgias with macros, but it was still no fun sitting with all the tickets.

[00:18:40] How many tickets from five thousand sales, a hundred or fifty? I do not remember exactly. Five hundred? I would be more inclined to guess three hundred. You do not want to spend time on that with low margins.

[00:18:53] That is about six percent? Yes. Three hundred tickets as a new business is a lot to handle and perhaps not something you planned...

[00:19:05] ...to spend your time on. We wanted to get the product out more, because it was only a matter of time before more competitors arrived and the market became saturated.

[00:19:16] Reasonable. Is that one reason people have grown tired of dropshippers? I think so, but I would not say it is the delivery times themselves.

[00:19:29] No, it is not the delivery times, but the expectation and when you lie about them. It is a way of getting [unclear in the source: charge för klar], the most common thing when you are running it. Many of these use Shopify, after all.

[00:19:42] Some who have reached sufficient volume... Luckily, I have never been banned anywhere. But I know there are people who have even been banned from Klarna when the volume and number of chargebacks became large enough.

[00:19:57] There is probably automation for that. I would guess so. Define chargeback. Basically, it is... One thing might be that you do not even say the delivery time is long.

[00:20:09] The other is that you might promise delivery in four to five days when in reality it takes seven to twelve or fourteen days. Then the customer can report to Klarna: "I have not received my order." Many use Klarna with thirty days. If delivery takes longer, they do not want to pay before receiving the item. Our first agent took so long to ship that suddenly we were up to thirty days. Then I understand why people get annoyed.

[00:20:43] But on Fyndiq, it can also often take seven to fourteen days, and there does not seem to be a problem there. It is not that there are no problems, but that you do not see them. I can guarantee there are surely problems.

[00:20:55] But there, you see it. Amazon also has products with long delivery times. I think the worst I saw on Amazon was three months or something like that.

[00:21:04] Then you know, because the delivery time is very clear. Then you will not be disappointed if it is longer. Many items are only produced when you order, and therefore have a long delivery time.

[00:21:18] You can even buy a tiny house, like a Swedish Attefall house, on Amazon in the US. Then you understand that the house might not already be finished.

[00:21:27] It might have to be manufactured. A container house is shipped in a container. Exactly, it takes time. I misspoke earlier: people get disappointed if it takes too long. If it takes a long time that they already expected, they are not disappointed.

[00:21:39] No. Everything is about communication and the customer promise. There is a lot of that in e-commerce. If you promise fast delivery and it takes three to four days, you are not fast.

[00:21:53] Three to four days is more like the average today. Instead, write that it takes three to five days, with a little margin. You might lose a few purchases, but get happier customers, fewer returns and fewer chargebacks, as you mention.

[00:22:13] Back to dropshipping. You find the product and set up the site, obviously in Shopify. How long was it from finding the product until the site was up? Days or weeks?

[00:22:27] Less than a week, at least. Were you completely or almost completely new to it? I had done some things before, and we got help from Daniel too.

[00:22:35] I would not say I was completely new, more that I was too complicated because I had already run... You wanted to simplify the processes so it would be quick. Less than a week is not much, but were you working eight to ten hours a day? More...

[00:22:50] ...less than that, perhaps five or six. In total, perhaps thirty hours of work before it was up. Still a quick sprint. Then you got your first orders when you started the ads, I am guessing on Meta?

[00:23:05] Yes. How long until the first order, do you remember? We tested another kind of shoe first, so a day or so passed in between. But it moved fairly quickly once we found something that worked. It showed, and it did not take a long time. I met another woman who had a regular company and had hired a Facebook Ads agency. I asked how the advertising and agency were going.

[00:23:39] She said: "They are so good, because they do not charge as long as I am not making money." I asked: "Okay, how is it going? How long have they been at it?" I do not remember the exact number of months, but I think they had burned fifteen thousand a month for six months without a single sale. She thought: "Perhaps they will fix it soon, and they are not charging anyway." But add up fifteen thousand times six.

[00:24:09] That quickly becomes a lot of money, especially for a small entrepreneur without a large cash reserve trying to get something going. It could have been that the agency was bad. Just because someone does not charge at the beginning does not make them good.

[00:24:23] Almost the opposite: you do not sell your service for free if you know you are good. They might want to prove themselves in the market, but if that much time has passed without succeeding, something is wrong.

[00:24:35] Yes, or perhaps several things are wrong. The product itself might be difficult. You might need to do other things first to make the market more mature and interested in the product. But it could also be that the ad itself is wrong. When you look at dropshipping, the advertising is normally often oriented toward solving a problem.

[00:24:59] Not just a feeling, but solving a problem. We can take Skogshjärta: you have plastic cutting boards, replace them with wood.

[00:25:11] Even clothing brands are doing that more. Take Sennormal. It is not dropshipping; they have real designers and most production in Portugal, I just want to say.

[00:25:22] Something that works in a Facebook ad is not just: "Here is a pair of trousers." You can say they have deep pockets or extra stretch that makes it easy to move. With dropshipping, at least when we worked with it, it was often about solving a problem and demonstrating it.

[00:25:48] Reasonable. I usually divide e-commerce brands into two categories. One is lifestyle, such as Sennormal, Mockberg and many others. There, you buy into the brand or a product that improves your lifestyle.

[00:26:09] Then there is the other category, problem to solution. You have a problem in everyday life that you want to solve. Here is the solution, such as Västerbottens Såpa or the cutting boards you mention, skincare, haircare and similar things. Those are roughly the two categories. You have to know: which category does my brand belong to? That also defines the kind of advertising you will primarily run.

[00:26:40] I would say it is very difficult for a problem-solution brand to work with lifestyle images and aspiration. At the same time, it is difficult for a lifestyle brand like Sennormal to focus on "here is the problem and here is the solution." Sure, you can have slightly deeper pockets and more stretch, but there are only so many problems to find in a lifestyle brand. The foundation is: I think the product looks good...

[00:27:09] ...that it suits my lifestyle, or that I aspire to be like the person in the picture or video. I want to be a little more like Jon Olsson and buy these trousers to get a little closer to him. That is how I see the categories. It is difficult for lifestyle brands to move to problem-solving alone. That is why it is no surprise that dropshipping companies...

[00:27:36] ...are usually problem-solution companies. I mentioned earlier that you can train your eye to see which ones are dropshipping stores.

[00:27:46] How do you learn that? I learned by sitting and analyzing. I had a Google Chrome extension, I do not remember the name, but there are loads for downloading Facebook ads. Through PP Ads, I found what was popular, a lot on TikTok but also in Facebook Ad Library. I downloaded the ads and opened them in Premiere Pro, which I know. But you can use CapCut and other free programs to break them down. I sat and watched: "Okay, first they talk about this. Then these parts. Then a product and then a problem."

[00:28:25] That was part of how I learned to make good ads. So you did not buy a course? Yes, I did that too. During the period when we were going for it, we bought a course that I think cost ten thousand dollars.

[00:28:41] Dollars? Yes, dollars. What? That was one of the courses. I bought several other things too, so I have spent a lot of money on...

[00:28:50] Did they not go through how to do it in the course? It feels very basic: step by step, do this. They went through it, but I still feel I like analyzing how others do it, because then you find other details. Even if we explain a plan for something, sometimes it is the nuances: where are they standing, what background do they have, and what setting?

[00:29:18] It is nuances like that. A course is often general and needs to cover many product areas. Then you have to find examples in the areas you want to advertise in yourself. We also did this... Now AI can analyze really well and transcribe the text. We sat and wrote down by hand what they said in the ad, which gave us a structure. Then you can put it into your AI and say: "I want to produce ads with a similar structure. Analyze this structure." Ideally, do not just take one ad, but perhaps ten different ones to feed in.

[00:30:00] Now it is much quicker. But back to you burning more than a hundred thousand Swedish kronor on a damn course.

[00:30:08] How did you fall for that? Sorry, but I am spectacularly impressed by people who spend that much on often general digital courses. Where did you see the course? Did you search, google, see someone talk about it or follow a person for a while?

[00:30:30] It was an agency that did not advertise on YouTube, but had free content there. I was desperate at the time...

[00:30:45] ...to really learn. For me, there is also an opportunity cost. You have your time, and if I do not know this, that also costs me things. Money.

[00:30:59] Perhaps more ad costs when you start and burn money on ads that do not work. If we take you: you probably do not sell consulting hours. Someone might wonder what Fedja charges. I do not know the hourly rate, but let us make up twenty-five thousand kronor.

[00:31:18] The last time I did that, it was 3,800, in 2020 or before 2020. Since then, I have not sold consulting hours. But take 3,800: someone might think that is very expensive per hour. You can easily burn that on Facebook.

[00:31:38] In less than a day, if you want, on rubbish. It is good to test first and get basic knowledge before hiring a consultant. Sometimes it is the other way around; you need the consultant to get started. If you know nothing, eventually you do not even know what to google.

[00:32:00] I understand that. But there is so much free content, and this was recently. When was the store up, 2024 or 2023? 2024 is more likely, if I...

[00:32:14] 2024 is about two years ago. AI existed, and there were loads of blog articles, free YouTube content and guidance on TikTok. What makes someone spend more than a hundred thousand Swedish, I imagine after-tax, kronor on...

[00:32:34] Luckily, it was company money. Okay, pre-tax money. A lot of money on one of the courses, and you say there were more. What were the others? Small...? Ten thousand is a lot for a digital course that can be sold in many copies. You bought one for more than a hundred thousand Swedish kronor.

[00:32:55] What made it different was that you could participate in weekly group calls. It also included six personal meetings with one of their advertising specialists.

[00:33:08] I like that. So it was consultation in a package too. Yes, a hybrid, more than a pure course. Okay, that was what the money was supposed to cover. It was an American agency, I think you said, and they usually cost more than Swedish ones.

[00:33:27] Sometimes quite a lot more. Salaries in New York can be two, three or four times Swedish salaries for the same roles. Those people cost money.

[00:33:39] The challenge with courses is the promises. Someone buys one for twenty or twenty-five thousand from a dropshipping guru who says you will get rich with easy money. The problem is not the course itself. People can study for five years at university and still struggle to get a job.

[00:34:02] Loads of them. But [unclear in the source: det är en blåsning]. It is more about what they promise. If you go to Yale, whose promise I do not know, they do not say you will be driving a Ferrari on the first day after graduation. Those are not the kinds of promises.

[00:34:19] That is why people have different expectations. When I buy a course, perhaps I expect to need six courses that complement each other. The first might contain one component I need to learn. It is called skill stacking. I do not know what that would be in Swedish, skill...

[00:34:39] Everyone understands skills. If you only know advertising, you might not get far. You also need to be able to analyze products, product design and have an eye for it. If you buy shoes, you cannot buy the world's ugliest ones and think they will sell just because you know Facebook advertising. That is hard to believe.

[00:35:04] It is about several skills. Many courses say you will get rich by taking that particular one and doing a single thing. You probably learn one thing there and need something else from another course.

[00:35:18] Some things you need to learn through experience. Usually, it is not just one thing. I think that is one of the problems with courses. When you sell courses...

[00:35:29] ...you quickly see that not many people buy if the marketing is not aggressive enough. That is why we have people like the Swedish guy [unclear in the source: Samuel Wember], whom we have talked about before. They aggressively show a glamorous lifestyle with expensive restaurants, luxury cars and screenshots of students' successes, but leave out everything else to entice people to buy the course.

[00:36:01] I can imagine the competition is brutal, or I can see that it is. You might have the right expectations when choosing six courses and building a skill stack. But most people who are a little younger than you and want to buy a course do not. They think they will get the lifestyle being portrayed. That is where it goes wrong, I think, because expectations are so high. Samuel might not literally say: "Buy my course and you will get rich." I do not know, because I do not follow him.

[00:36:35] Or: "Buy my course and you too will drive a McLaren or Lamborghini immediately afterward." I do not think he says that. Then there is no explicit expectation, but you see him doing it and get it indirectly. Why can he do it? Perhaps he has built an actual e-commerce business, or a course business with an inflow of capital that makes it easy to buy the car. Many other course gurus do that. But if you finance a Lamborghini and look at the monthly cost at, for example, Platinum Cars, perhaps it is twenty-five thousand. Then you might think...

[00:37:22] ...how many courses does that person need to sell to buy a Lamborghini that then helps sell more? One course per quarter if they cost a hundred thousand? Exactly.

[00:37:38] Then you also cover insurance and fuel. Then more courses sell, and the Lamborghini becomes a tool for getting more buyers. I see a challenge there. At the same time, there are two sides: some do it because they think it works.

[00:37:59] I have an acquaintance as an example. He makes a living from trading and said he was sitting on a park bench waiting for a friend. Then people came and gave him money because his clothes were so worn out. He buys a pair of trousers and uses them until they are so torn that he cannot wear them anymore. He has no need for luxury. He said he could surely sell a shitload of courses if he were interested in luxury goods, bought a Lamborghini and things like that. But he does not have that interest, so no one notices him.

[00:38:38] Instead, they tried to give him money on the bench. He thought he really had to change his clothes when people mistook him for homeless. Then it is time. Back to your store: it took a week or thirty hours. You found flip-flops...

[00:38:57] ...and got logistics problems and a stomachache, perhaps trouble sleeping. You had promised customers delivery after twelve or fifteen days, perhaps that was on the site?

[00:39:08] We wrote an expected delivery time of nine to twelve days. And that did not happen. Then came complaints and chargebacks. Luckily, you were not banned.

[00:39:19] No. But you ran it all summer? June, July and August, it must have been. Okay. What do you do after selling and perhaps turning off the ads? You sold 1.9 million.

[00:39:36] How much did you spend on ads? I do not remember exactly, but more than half a million, at least. So you have built a no-brand, and the idea is to make money on that half million. The sales of 1.9, was that including or excluding VAT?

[00:39:58] Including VAT. First, the VAT has to come off. Many dropshippers miss that, I have noticed. They show what it says in Shopify, including VAT.

[00:40:07] I was invited to dropshipping forums. I sat asking questions in various chats and forums because I constantly wanted to learn more. When people noticed I was getting results, they invited me into their other discussions. Then I could see the tone. Now, this does not apply to all of them; some forums are really damn good, but in some I thought I could not even stay. The discussions were basically: "These old bitches just complain that the shit does not work. What the hell do they want their money back for? Idiots."

[00:40:46] That was their view of customers. Others said VAT ate up the profit and discussed how to avoid paying it. It was not about taking care of customers, but complaining about them. I left those forums. Then there are forums with people who genuinely want to build something sensible.

[00:41:12] My overall view of dropshipping, so people understand, is that it is like other e-commerce: some people behave badly, others behave well. It is not dropshipping or e-commerce itself. Those who get noticed are usually those who have behaved badly. You do not notice those who do things properly.

[00:41:38] True, and you leave those forums, often toxic forums. A shame. But you run it over the summer, those three months. What do you do then? A large part is eaten up by VAT and ad costs, then product purchases and payment to the agent. Three months have passed. You have obviously paid a lot for courses and learning and spent time, surely five hundred hours or more together with the team over the summer. The hourly earnings from running it become very low.

[00:42:13] Do you do it again, or did it die there? No, I think I calculated it at around two hundred thousand in profit after all...

[00:42:27] ...costs were paid. Yes, and this is before tax. Instead, we used it to build something more sustainable. Nice. It has given me confidence: it can be done. At the same time, I took lessons with me. Whatever I do going forward, we must always be the ones in control. The companies I work with should have direct contact with the factory themselves, without intermediaries. If you want to develop or change something in the product, the dialogue should be with the factory, not an intermediary. Then there are differences. I do not work in fashion, but know that there you sometimes need agents even to get in touch with the right factories, on...

[00:43:13] ...because as a new business, you do not have much volume. Okay, it sounds strange that you need an agent to reach the factory. Is it just the one making the material, or what?

[00:43:28] I am not a designer; I have only spoken to people at clothing brands. Sometimes it is cheaper with an agent in between...

[00:43:40] ...to get volume. The agent might order a lot of dresses. Whatever, let us move on. I will let you off that one. You are not going into a new dropshipping project?

[00:43:54] It is a story I have heard from others too. You test two, three, four or five products that all flop, and quit. Or you test several and something takes off. You think: that was so much fun, and get a dopamine kick from selling. Then reality catches up with returns, chargebacks, agent problems and disabled ads, which is really common. A block from Facebook, start a new account. A block from Shopify, not uncommon.

[00:44:25] Or from Klarna or another payment platform. A lot can go wrong. You get annoyed and start again, sometimes even in someone else's name. You take over your girlfriend's or your mother's Facebook account to advertise...

[00:44:45] ...until it gets closed. Or perhaps not this time, because you have warmed up the pixel, installed [unclear in the source: chapig] and done more work, and you no longer promise as much.

[00:45:00] But then you do not get as good a ROAS and cannot quite make the business work. I just want to say it is not as easy as it looks. If you follow the TikTok gurus, it looks easy: buy a course, do and install this. We will find the products for you together, you get a few guidance calls, and then you are done. Even though you managed to sell [unclear in the source: 5.9 million], it still took three months and produced two hundred thousand before tax. After tax, it becomes much less. You have not taken a single krona out of the company, I am guessing, but have a little startup capital for the next one. The lesson I take from the story, and why it might still be worth...

[00:45:47] ...starting and doing genuinely good dropshipping, or nearshipping, which I think is an even better step. Much better, by the way, because you have better control over inventory. There are challenges there too: inventory synchronization that does not work in real time, or the store you contacted running out of products. A lot else can go wrong. But you get fewer customer problems and better quality, and sell less rubbish out into the world.

[00:46:14] The lessons you took with you, right? You have learned to set up a store, what ads to create, problem-solution angles and how to write scripts for Meta. Conversion optimization on the site, where you surely changed things two or three times. How you built the texts, a little copywriting: what title should I use? You might not have worked on SEO, but surely thought indirectly about how it looks in Google when someone searches for the brand. You learn a lot across different verticals at what I call hyperspeed.

[00:46:49] Normally, you might study e-commerce management at IHM for two or three years, or at a vocational college like [unclear in the source: KH]. There, you learn analysis and setup over one or two years, fairly slowly compared with your turbo: your own courses, store, products tested with your own money, sales of 1.9 million and then tax and VAT.

[00:47:20] I see it more as a school than a profession to live on. I would say the story repeats itself 999 times out of a thousand. Perhaps one in a thousand manages to live off their store, while 999 do not. It is more the rule than the exception not to be able to support yourself. Do you agree?

[00:47:52] Yes, I would agree. Even before that, I had met entrepreneurs who do not dare test anything, or make it too big. I remember a first product, but do not want to mention it and reveal the company. Their first inventory purchase was for one million. They even managed to get a contract with NK, so they had the products there.

[00:48:20] Really legitimate. The problem was that they did not know advertising and could not get revenue moving, at NK or elsewhere. They sold a little at NK, but did not know advertising: we have a good product but cannot get it out there.

[00:48:41] I wonder if they are still sitting on that inventory. I have not asked, but it would not surprise me. Still, one million.

[00:48:50] A risk. You hear that story often too: you are good at finding a gap in the market, design and develop a product, and perhaps work for years...

[00:49:03] ...before realizing you do not know the part about getting the products out. Then you go to my agency or others and hope for a miracle. After all, they got Västerbottens Såpa, Mockberg and a shampoo company going from zero to substantial revenue. So it must be possible.

[00:49:28] Those agencies are often busy. I have no shortage of inquiries: perhaps a hundred people per quarter now, versus a hundred per year before. I do not have time to go through everything. Some people literally have to get in touch daily for months.

[00:49:45] It might be interesting and I want to work on it, but I want other things too. I like the podcast and taking care of my health, and cannot find time to prioritize it. There is a lot to gain from learning yourself.

[00:50:01] Get a good way along and say: "Hi, now I have proof of concept." Some guys started a poster shop last fall and contacted me then for advice and tips. I love helping, so I respond, am friendly and show exactly how I would have done it, or answer their questions. Then they come back during the winter and give an update: "Hey, it has gone really damn well. Now we are selling one and a half million a month."

[00:50:28] Wow. Or perhaps that was over the period. In any case, it was rapid progress. In recent weeks, they come back: "You have to take a meeting. Five minutes is enough. Can you help us take the next step? Now we have taken it this far." It is not dropshipping; they have bought a laser machine and print posters themselves. I do not know whether it happens in a basement or someone's house, but they show videos walking around. It is so entrepreneurial and interesting. I want to help the young guys, and they get in touch often. I want to take the meeting but do not have the time, so I put it off. If they keep writing, they become top of mind, and I will...

[00:51:12] ...take the call. Now you are encouraging all the listeners to write every day. No, but if you only write once, you get nowhere, because my inbox fills up daily.

[00:51:23] Even in 2021, I did not have time for calls. Elvira at Mockberg wrote first, then again, and the third time we took the meeting.

[00:51:36] It took a few attempts before my interest was caught. The rest is history; Mockberg has become a great success. The same with Såpa: Sara made her list and emailed. I happened to reply, but forwarded it to a colleague to validate it.

[00:51:56] That process might have taken even longer. What do you think about Steven Bartlett, who runs The Diary of a CEO? He also shared that he cannot answer every message.

[00:52:09] You can understand that. I am not Steven Bartlett. He gets a million listens, completely crazy. Ten or fifteen million subscribers, however many it is. But in the comments, people wrote: "Are you too good for this?" What do you think?

[00:52:27] Many people develop a personal relationship with those they listen to for hours and think they know each other. You sit and listen week after week.

[00:52:39] I listen to The Diary myself and almost feel I know Steven indirectly. When I met him at D-Congress a year and a half ago, I said: "Hi Steven." I had a relationship, but he did not know who I was. I could talk to him, because he has talked about his private life, his girlfriend and how they met. I have listened since before he started interviewing, when it actually was a diary of his entrepreneurial journey. That was when I found the podcast most interesting. Since then, it has become interesting for other reasons, with the health aspect in my life. Without all the health nerds he interviews, I would probably have stopped a long time ago. Anyway, it felt as if I...

[00:53:25] ...knew him and had a relationship. He was very nice, so no problem. But that is the feeling people get, and then the comments are not so strange.

[00:53:41] If we bring it back a little to round off dropshipping: would you advise people to start a store in 2026 or 2027, or advise against it? Is it tougher now than in 2024? I actually do not know whether it is tougher or easier. The tools make some things easier, while competition makes others tougher. I would still recommend people try, because it is an affordable school.

[00:54:18] To learn product selection, advertising, inventory, logistics and things like that. An affordable school, good advice. I agree, a good final punchline. I also usually recruit people to Porobic Group who have worked with dropshipping, because I know they have had to learn at hyperspeed.

[00:54:51] Because if you do not do it at hyperspeed, you are out. Then you never get the product moving, and you can even end up in debt up to your ears. It is a good school, by far, perhaps even the best e-commerce school, because you do everything yourself in practice. Then there is [unclear in the source: ingen vikt i produkterna] that you release. They are often unethical and of fairly poor quality, though they can be good. There, I want to add that you should avoid dangerous chemicals in what you sell and not promise too much. Then you also get happy and returning customers. The most important thing is really that you do not...

[00:55:36] ...poison people. Then you have to keep track of the figures and learn that. Otherwise, the Swedish Tax Agency will come, perhaps in two years rather than this year: "The money you thought was yours, we want it now."

[00:55:53] And you do not want to be prosecuted for financial crime. No, true. With that, we say a big thank you for listening to another episode of Zero to One Hundred. If you found it interesting and like the new format, share it with a colleague or friend. We really appreciate it. Go and leave a review, write a review or at least give a rating on Spotify. We are now also on YouTube, where you can see the episodes and both listen and watch.

[00:56:32] Soon, we will also publish more reels in different places, so you will see us on social media. Many thanks. Thank you very much. Bye.