 I went from this to this. The bad news is that it took me approximately 5 years. The reason why I make this video is because I don't want you to take 5 years to get here as well. You see, somewhere in the 4th year I made a very important decision that changed everything. And that decision is what I'm gonna talk about in this video. So let's get started. Alright, so when I first started my dropshipping journey back in 2016, things were not so bright. The very first dropshipping store that I opened was called the Pirate Deals. In my head I wanted to make millions of dollars with this store without actually doing any kind of work because it was dropshipping and I was thinking that dropshipping requires no work. That was the time when everybody was jumping on a fidget spinner wagon. Everybody was selling the same product so I decided to do the same. You see, after all these gurus were bragging on the internet about making millions of dollars with this trivial product, I was thinking to myself I can sure take a piece of that pipe. I can surely make $10,000 per month at least. The problem is that I didn't know how to get there. I was just thinking that all of these guys were just making this money by just posting these products on their websites. I didn't know what an ad was. I didn't know how to promote a product. I didn't know anything about that. I just knew that dropshipping was this very easy business model in which you didn't have to do anything and money would just come after you. And of course, that was completely wrong. It was not that I didn't make $10,000 per month but in the month that I started testing products for that store, I only did two sales totaling around $40. Needless to say, I was very disappointed. I was thinking all of these guys are scammers and dropshipping is a scam. All I did back then was to just go to Facebook groups and promote my product for free or just pay some money to some guys that had a lot of followers in there but actually nobody cared about this. That is when I realized that these guys were actually running ads. Of course, I didn't know what an ad was so I started studying about ads. About three days after that, I launched my first ads. I remember it very vividly. I didn't sleep at all at night. Those ads brought me two sales in one day and that was the actual first volume of sales that I ever did by using ads. My first reaction was, hmm, I spent $20 and I made $40. What if I spend $40? Will I be able to make $80? And that's exactly what I did. The next day, I made $80 and I was just thinking that this is a free, infinite money glitch. And of course, the very next day, I woke up and I set my budget to $500 per day. Even before launching the ads, I was already thinking that I'm going to make like $1.5, maybe $2,000. I was pretty chill. I was at my office. I was just sitting like this and I was calculating how much money was going to go into my bank account the next day. Well, it turns out I only did one single sale. So I spent $500 and I only made like $20 back. The whole world came crushing on my head. I didn't understand what was happening. I felt entitled. I knew that I had to make $2,000. And the first thing that I did was I went to Facebook support and I wrote them a very long message telling them how they stole my money. I basically demanded my sales from them. I was thinking that they somehow stole my sales. And that is where I learned about the Facebook Pixel. And I knew that the Facebook Pixel had to be maturated. You cannot just go out there and put a big budget and expect a lot of sales to come your way. You need to slowly but steadily grow it. The Facebook Pixel is just like a small child. You need to feed it very good information in order for it to grow the way you want it to grow. So then I started implementing this. I went slower. I only did smaller budgets and I tried to grow it constantly. But it seemed like things were not going anywhere. After like two months of struggling and going back and forth I realized that I was going nowhere. So I closed the store. But then a few months later another set of gurus appeared on my screen and they were all bragging about how much money they are making so I knew I had to jump on this bad wagon again. But this time with more knowledge I knew what to do. Fast forward a few years I was doing pretty good with dropshipping. I was doing constant sales. I had a constant stream of money come in my way but it was nothing close to what I imagined. You see I was always thinking that if I was gonna do dropshipping and e-commerce in my life I was gonna be very rich because of it. But I was only making the average income that a normal employee would make in my country. Of course I was working from a laptop. I could do whatever I wanted. I had the time freedom but I was not happy. I was not content with how much I was making. And then it hit me. All of this time I was just selling products that I was thinking were good products to sell on an e-commerce dropshipping store. But then I learned the biggest lesson that shifted everything in my career. And that is the shifting of my mindset. You see until that moment I was selling products that I was thinking were good. I didn't do any kind of product research. Any kind of product testing. Nothing like that. I just went on ad express. I looked for the products that caught my eye. And the first product that I found to my liking I just imported it to my store. I created a product page and there you go I started running ads. But then I went out for a coffee with a good friend of mine that was doing the same thing. And he told me that you should not sell something that you think would sell. You should only sell products that people wanna buy. Because up until that point I was only selling products that I would personally buy. So after that a whole new universe opened up before me. This universe gave me so many possibilities and it's basically called product research. That is the moment when I understood that I should not fall in love with a product. But that I should test that product and let the potential customers fall in love with a product. Not me. In other words nobody cares about what you personally like. Because it doesn't matter what you personally like. Maybe you're like it it's not something that would sell on the market. And that was exactly my case. I was an average guy like in just average things but I was so arrogant into thinking that whatever I like other people must like as well. And it turns out it wasn't quite like that. So from that moment on I started vetting products. I didn't get married to the first product that I saw but instead of that I took the product and I tested it for 2 or 3 days. If the results were promising after those 2 or 3 days then I gave that product more attention and money. If not then I just deleted the product and I stopped paying attention to it. And this was the moment when I realized that I could test anywhere between 12 and 15 products a month. This gave me so much more accuracy. I've learned that by doing this as many times as I could the chances for me to find a very good weeding product were exponentially higher. After doing this I started finding a lot more weeding products. The average was around 1 weeding product per week and that's where I decided to create a lot of stores and dedicate each store to a weeding product. I was thinking that by doing so you can just create a store with one single product in it and the people will know that you only have that one product. It was something like take it or leave it and I made sure that my ads were looking very nice. There was a time in which I had like 14 stores with 14 different products. More money more problems. My next problem was the fact that I could not fulfill all of those orders. There were a lot of orders coming in and I could not fulfill them. And after that I also automated the product research part. Thinking that I found this very cool platform that does the product research for me. They have a team and that's what they are doing 24-7. It's basically cloning myself like 20 times and putting each and every clone to do product research and to find these weeding products. That platform is called AutoDS and they are giving us weeding products on a daily basis. These products are vetted by them so we don't have to go through all of that tedious process in which we have to test all of those products and find which ones of them are actually worth our time. I was so happy to know that AutoDS is offering this feature. As you can see right here they have this Weeding Products Hub section in which they are posting every single day. Now each and every one of these products is actually clickable. You can click it and you can see a lot of information about that product such as how many other stores are selling it. You can check out the actual stores so they are giving us links. I can click on those links and I can actually spy on other stores that are selling the same product. So you can learn a lot from this. They are also giving us targeting ideas. They are telling us how saturated is the market. They are giving us pictures of the product, videos of the product, competitor analysis and a lot of other things. Even if the product that you want to sell is not on AutoDS for example it's on eBay or AutoDS or Amazon. They are working with more than 30 suppliers. Meaning that you can go to any supplier's website for example I don't know Aliexpress and import it to AutoDS with the help of just a few clicks. After you import it it's going to be saved in your draft section meaning that you're going to have the freedom to do whatever you want with that product. You can change the title, you can change the description, you can change the pictures, you can change whatever you want with the product until you're happy with it. And after that you can just push it to your store with the help of this button save and import. This will basically save all of your work and push the product to your Shopify store. I wish I knew this earlier because making a product page from scratch takes a lot of time. I know it took me like 3-4 hours from the moment I found the product to actually import the product and build a product page about that product on my Shopify website. With AutoDS you can do this in like 5 minutes. And the cherry on the top with this platform is the fact that they are also offering fulfillment. So I didn't need my VA's anymore because AutoDS is also taking care of my fulfillment and they also have a lot of warehouses all around the world so they can fulfill and ship my product for me. That's a very big plus because I realize that this either takes a lot of time or money from myself. Right now I'm in a position where I always find winning products and I can always make a lot of money with those winning products because I have all of the infrastructure laid ahead of me. But now I have other problems and those other problems are how to scale, what budgets to use for scaling, what platforms should I use to advertise this product. Now all of these are high level problems and I wish that everybody who's watching this video can get to these problems. But we're gonna leave that to another video. If you like this video, check out one of my other videos as well. I'm doing a lot of case studies on this channel in which I'm showing some of the stores that I mentioned in this video. And I'm taking you guys by the hand and I'm showing you how did I get from zero to $56,000 for example, one of my past videos. And there are a lot more videos just like that one from which I think you can learn a lot because I'm taking it from zero up until the point I was able to generate some nice sales with that store and I'm showing every step of the process. Guys, just to wrap it up, please leave a comment below telling me what do you think is the biggest mind-shift change that you ever had in your e-commerce journey. I promise you I'm gonna read all of you guys' comments. Until then, have an amazing day. Until next time.