Selling time vs selling product

[Gavster]

Need to find a way out of selling time for a living, whether it's solo as a freelancer or larger scale as a consulting company. Scaling up services like consultancy is so stressful as you simply take on more people whose time you have to sell and more client problems.

I really want to get into selling product (physical or information). Just trying to find a way to do it that aligns with my current work and scales nicely.

[Broccers]

Charlie

[ZedLeg]

Whatever you do you end up selling your time anyway.

In my long experience of selling things to people you don't get an easier time from customers. People are entitled arseholes

[tim]

Self-service products ideally, I'm guessing, rather than a B2C type situation. Selling kids bikes was enourmous fun and pretty profitable, but it was hard work. And customer are cunts. Although I really liked dealing with the cunty ones.

[Gavster]

Charlie

Charlie uniform November tango?

[Gavster]

Whatever you do you end up selling your time anyway.

In my long experience of selling things to people you don't get an easier time from customers. People are entitled arseholes

They both require time, however the difference is how they scale. Think of the biggest companies in the world, they usually sell products, whether they are physical or digital products, it’s the same thing. They have a product which can be replicated and sold, and scaled easily if successful.

[ZedLeg]

It's a lot of work to get there though.

I've spent the last 6 years working with an ecommerce company that's grown from a small business to one of the biggest brands in it's market. It's a constant push to keep moving forward.

[Rich B]

Just buy loads of Bitcoin and wait for years.

[Jobbo]

If you sell things rather than your time, you will need to become VAT registered very quickly when you are expecting over £85k of turnover. At a margin of, say, 30% that's when you're only making £25.5k profit. Adds a level of bureaucracy and makes your products 20% more expensive than the small-timers and tax dodgers. Selling stuff means you need to grow quickly to make any money.

[Gavster]

Self-service products ideally, I'm guessing, rather than a B2C type situation. Selling kids bikes was enourmous fun and pretty profitable, but it was hard work. And customer are cunts. Although I really liked dealing with the cunty ones.

Self service digital products would be amazing. However I’m also drawn to physical for some reason. I’ve done about £10k in eBay sales over the last 12 months and really enjoyed it. Customer service is easy too. Even the worst customers have been easy to handle.

[DeskJockey]

Could you design a gizmo of sorts and then contract with a turnkey provider to do the whole thing?

My mate is getting into brewing beer and they're planning on using a brewery that does everything except distribution. They work out a recipe, the brewery add their expertise to help scale it to the agreed size, and then brew, bottle and load onto a lorry.

[Gavster]

Some of this is because more than 2 million people per month see my face on social media, so I might as well have something to offer them, beyond the free information I provide.

[ZedLeg]

Just get those bots that offer sponsored posts in the replies of your original post on board. Job jobbed.

[Mito Man]

OnlyFans? You are the product

[Jobbo]

Merch seems to be the way all the Youtubers go - is that viable? Does it actually make them much?

[integrale_evo]

I’ve only just worked out who you are on TT.

I did wonder why a pretty successful food blogger would start following me, I’ve interacted with a few vids too

[Explosive Newt]

You just need to invent a thing, patent it and spin out a company that makes it and sells it.

Easy peasy.

[Jimmy Choo]

So it sounds like you want to separate your time from your money. I know a couple of people who have successfully done it. One set up a luxury French canal barge holiday that costs probably well upwards of $40k per week at the moment.

The other wrote and self published books. They do a bit of marketing for them but it ticks over.

[Gavster]

Merch seems to be the way all the Youtubers go - is that viable? Does it actually make them much?

If your followers are really invested in you as a brand then it can make a lot, especially people with millions of followers. This doesn't quite seem to translate for someone like me at my level. There are definitely associated food products (either edible or equipment) which I could try and sell, which might be the easiest way to start, because I've got a large targeted audience to market them to.

[Gavster]

I’ve only just worked out who you are on TT.

I did wonder why a pretty successful food blogger would start following me, I’ve interacted with a few vids too

You've got a great audience and could probably start selling stuff too. I reckon we're at the level where we could put 'authorised by' products in our tiktok shops and people might go for it.