Creators of meh, how do I start a similar business?
3Hi there. I want to start my own business and seeing what you guys did previously with woot and now with meh, how exactly do you start a business like this? I’m talking after getting the name, business type, etc. Do you just approach random companies and ask if they have any items for sale? I would really like to start something similar. Any input would be very much appreciated. Thanks!
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Me too. Or, better, how do I skip all the work and just get the Amazon $?
@f00l Assuming you’re doing this on the cheap, start here. Build an Amazon in 1 Semester
@cranky1950
The goal here is to avoid work.
@f00l but it would be a labor of love, therefore not work.
@cranky1950
Labor of love:
@f00l A spirograph?
@PantHeist
A properly constructed spirograph could do that. I just thought it was lovely.
In order to get true lower-than-wholesale prices, you pretty much have to commit to buying out whatever leftovers from that company. That takes capital. Judge the market incorrectly, and you lose.
Then reselling the said items; is your price so much lower that it’ll sell out, or will folks not care that your price is just a few percent lower than someone else that’s much bigger than you?
Marketing? Staff? Business licenses? Warehouses? Other overhead expenses?
Profit comes after that.
@narfcake
@narfcake Thanks for the advice! Great tips.
You should enroll in Trump University, learn from the best I say.
I believe it was Louis Armstrong who said “man, if you gotta ask, you’ll never know.”
Until you have a reputation you probably have to work it backwards. Find some stuff you can get, find a place to sell it (or better yet the other way round), and then become an expert in whatever niche you find. Unless you already have a niche, in which case you wouldn’t be asking this question.
I think this came up in the Meet the Buyers or Ask the Wholesale team, but you’ll use a site like this: http://bstock.com/ and acquire stuff.
Good luck, because this is a hard business.
Am I the only one that finds it weird when someone has been on this site for over 800 days and never comments, votes, clicks, anything… ?
@RiotDemon Strong silent type?
@RiotDemon Nothin’ wrong with lurking.
@narfcake Creepy but nothing wrong with it
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They must be really picky to never order anything either.
@RiotDemon
/youtube not that there’s anything wrong with that
@RiotDemon Lol, yes. You are the only one.
@hotsacoman cool. Glad to be unique.
First, get yourself a time machine and go back in time . . .
http://www.ecommercefuel.com/woot/
@KDemo
Glad to see that the humor which @snapster referenced with the overload of sending robots to a teen has been brought over to Meh. (Particularly with part 2 of the Fukus, as well as the Fukos).
@KDemo Thank you for the article! Definitely some good info to learn from.
In all honesty, I don’t think it’s possible at this point to start a successful Meh-like site from scratch. After Woot got big, lots of similar sites just kind of popped up, nearly all of them are now either gone or switched to a more standard business model. Even Woot itself is only scraping by as a pale shadow of its glory days. Meh exists but nearly all of the core community base are refugees from Woot who left after it got really bad. Meh keeps steadily plugging along but doesn’t really seem to be thriving–two years on and we still haven’t had a major event like a Woot-off. I think starting a new one from the ground up would be a Sisyphean task.
@Starblind
And I imagine only a smallist % of Mediocre’s revenue comes from Meh.
@f00l I think somewhere around here that’s basically been said. My impression is that this isn’t losing money, but it’s not likely to become a major center of the company either. There’s more money to be made elsewhere.
Happy to see this covered quite well here. Smart crowd
@hotsacoman you’ve picked an area of interest where there are zero high growth examples and at least one billion dollar competitor. My least snarky advice would be to start a profitable business in a related but more conventionally profitable area and then funnel profits into a daily deal experiment like a deranged idiot.
Want a parallel? This is also how you succeed as a wine maker. At least there are examples of success there other than one selling 7 years ago.
@snapster Good point. I will surely ponder over this…