 In this podcast I'm going to be speaking with Abbas from Ecom Brothers and this guy in just three years was able to build a Shopify dropshipping monster going from zero to over twenty million dollars in sales and this guy is one hundred percent transparent and he's going to reveal all of his truths, all of his secrets into how he was actually able to do this. This is a podcast that you do not want to miss so let's waste no more time and get right to it. Please tell me a little bit about yourself and what made you actually want to start your own online business instead of the normal nine to five working in an office job? Yeah, so I started like three years ago, like in 2020 with dropshipping with Ecommerce back then I was still a student actually but what happened was when the when the lockdown happened you know and I think almost all countries and like everything started to close down for for me and my brother like we saw an opportunity okay you know people they still need to buy their stuff online or like they still need to buy their stuff but now they can do it offline so they have to do it online now so that's where we actually like okay maybe there's an opportunity to you know start doing something but yeah it was like March March April 2020 it wasn't actually dropshipping to to begin with it wasn't like we start with some some course or whatever it was actually my brother he had like an ID and he just posted on Instagram and you know he started getting like some some people in the DM that wanted to buy the product and it was actually like sort of customizable products so first like he had to order from China then like you know receive that home repackage it ship it and then you know that's where the first like sales came in but it was like something very small but then I think in the summer of 2020 like we learned about this whole drop shipping game let's say and yeah that's that's when you started I think that the first few months it it wasn't something to be proud of you know in terms of like sales revenue I think the first five months would it maybe like I did maybe five or six hundred euros with with the with the drop shipping so I was focused more on the drop shipping card and like my brother he was focused on the sort of brand we started you know but yeah as I was saying like 500 or 600 euro the first couple months and then we started to go to like these econ meetups you know so like we're from the Netherlands and there's a lot of like meetups event these kind of things that that happened so yeah we started to go and like you know we met our first few people that were successful in drop shipping and from there on you know like we learned from these people became friends and grew together and I think in the like since we started three years ago until now we did over 20 million in so the first bigger part was was drop shipping but around eight nine months ago we switched to building our own brands and it has many reasons that you know we can go deeper into into it later in the video yes yes we definitely will yeah it's a very good background that you gave by the way you so you mentioned like starting around march april 2020 which is exactly when the coronavirus the the pandemic started hitting the whole world and at this I want to also ask you like what you did up until that point so you know you can answer that next but when when that actually hit you decided you saw that there was like an issue now with the world the world is now going to need plenty of things that maybe they didn't think that they need before now we're entering some kind of a crisis and here you realize that there's a lot of opportunity when the whole world is kind of going down and everybody's going into lockdown everybody's afraid everybody is seeing that their opportunities are fading away while you're seeing the opportunities coming in which I think is great because you're actually able to hit the hammer you know at the right spot being at the right time at the right spot at the right time so but what were you doing up until the pandemic let's get a little bit of that background yeah so before like the the pandemic started I was still a student in university in Delft so it's in Netherlands I was I was studying I was studying electrical engineering and so that's like where what I was mainly focused on in that period you know it wasn't so much business or entrepreneurship for myself I knew like I didn't want to go the path of you know like getting a degree to to go have a job for me it was more like I want to acquire some skills in the engineering and without going too much into detail I wanted to help let's say that the people from where I originally come from you know so I'm in the Netherlands I was born there but at the same time my parents they come from Iraq you know and Iraq isn't doing as well as for example Europe or Western Europe in terms of like their infrastructure with energy and electricity right so for me it was more like and that's what my father always was saying to me like become skillful like learn important stuff and then go and and help yeah your your origins your roots let's say so I was more on on you know getting a degree to to then make different moves not so much like getting getting a 95 job but I didn't expect this also to to happen you know like it it switched very quickly from like okay I was still a student then lockdown came okay what are my plans next and you know that's how I brought into e-commerce let's say and grew it and grew it and then yeah just like never look back you know just just keep moving moving ahead interesting so you started as a student in electrical engineering in Netherlands and is that a path that you chose for yourself or was that a kind of a chosen path for you or kind of like choosing together like you know learning electrical engineering yeah so I wouldn't say like I was born with a passion you know for for electrical engineering I think I think that's you know maybe some people do have that you know I met I met people on the during the study like they're very passionate about their subject for me it wasn't like that you know but my father he's an engineer and also like a businessman you know like both worlds and and he built businesses out of his engineering knowledge you know and I think that was very impressive to to to see and you know I wanted to go sort of the same path he followed in his in his life yeah it's interesting so you so you start off as a a student electrical engineering just so that you can get something so that you can start with something and maybe build off more things off of that and when the pandemic hit that's when you realize the opportunity we already mentioned that and that's when drop shipping actually took off so now let's start to get to the juicy questions I think the background is really important but now let's get to it so what made you choose Shopify as your true as your you know chosen platform for dropshipping we have many platforms today right ebay facebook marketplace wix will commerce Shopify of course etsy and others so why Shopify I think I think Shopify is the best to to build your own website you know like if you are going to sell on on ebay or like amazon let's say you're you're sort of helping their company grow instead of like your own brand website and and whatever and it's much easier to to scale and you have a lot more freedom flexibility and you build your own thing you know that you can scale nobody's saying to you like okay you have to adhere to these policies and you cannot change the prices and you're limited and it's a very slow process I would always always start with like building your own website and it doesn't take long you know like with with Shopify especially like in in this you know in this period there are so many tutorials online I think you can in a few hours you have your first website running it's not complicated you know so I would always just go go with that definitely like it's it's not a maybe it's slightly but no it's way better you know definitely go with both Shopify and I'm not a Shopify ambassador by the way so I agree that like the things you said about Shopify about you're actually like the owner of your store and if you're like trying other places like ebay then ebay is the owner of your store and if you do anything against the rules or policies they'll just say no no no and now you don't have a business well no matter how much time you worked on it and I think that that's one of the biggest takeaways on working on Shopify is that you're actually setting your own rules and no one's telling you how much you can list on the first day and no one's telling you what you can and cannot sell of course if you're not like selling any knockoffs or trademarks so you know there won't be any problem there are no limits and you can do whatever you want and when the customer buys from you you're actually like getting their email address where and you know in other marketplaces they're going to keep the emails to themselves I think that's another huge advantage to Shopify you can actually collect their email addresses and then you can use that for marketing promotion tools and more which I'm sure that you're also doing we're also going to get into that but I'm just jumping ahead of myself you mentioned in the beginning you were trying out all different types of opportunities after the coronavirus hit right so you were you you realize that there's a golden opportunity here you didn't know exactly what but here is where you actually started your search on what is something that I should be doing that can you know that can also turn into a business opportunity and help other people and so forth and so what you did here was you said that your brother started a po d trial like print on demand on instagram um guessing that it wasn't like no no it was actually necklaces you know um necklaces so it like custom custom customized necklaces these customized necklaces you know and there's a whole story like why and and you know but uh to to keep you sure yeah that's where we started with um uh but yeah what was your question again that like what what what what happened from there so he started that was it successful not successful and what was the next step yeah yeah so it was like low key success you know I think looking back it was nothing but I think at some point you know in the first few weeks it did like maybe 10k in revenue you know or like 5k in revenue I don't remember exactly but that was already like something huge you know especially like where we come from you know immigrants like you don't really see money that that often in in where you grow up so that was something like good but there wasn't much profit on it you know like uh you have these kind of rules like DAT um what I was saying like you order it and then you resend it to your customers like X or shipping fee all these kind of things it turned out like with the revenue it was all lost you know so and there's a lot of like you were ordering from your supplier to your house and then from your house you're shipping it to the customer so a lot of logistics uh long shipping times and that's also probably something that uh um brought you you know took you away from that business model so what actually brought you into drop shipping like where did you hear about it yeah so so what it was like okay um my brother he saw like there is a way like you know you can advertise on on facebook and uh once you start doing your research you also get hit by by uh these ads you know about drop shipping or whatever so it's very easy to like know like which touch points are there with with uh let's say this this industry and then you just do your research and like okay you know you launch your first campaign um uh and then you realize okay maybe there's an opportunity to to sell everything instead of just focusing on on one thing and that that's how you know like you see okay other people are selling maybe this product so what I was doing like okay try and build a whole store for it but every time you know it it takes time that you need to prepare the creatives and everything so eventually we were like okay let's just have one website and try to you know just have a product page prepare it and then and then push on that page you know so it was like very uh step by step it wasn't like okay I wake up and I have to do uh general drop shipping and test as many products it was just like okay what is this guy selling what is he selling and you know just yeah researching and testing from seeing what other competitors are doing so what I like about here is that you joined with your brother so this is something that usually I don't see that happening often it's usually I'm talking with uh or I've experienced with solo entrepreneurs and you know everybody's like working with themselves and maybe they have like virtual assistants and that's where that usually ends so in your case you actually have your brother working with you and that's why you two call yourself the econ brothers which I think is great what made you actually think that you know starting a business with someone you know and love is a good idea and you guys won't end up like fighting on what you know you think is right for the business and you know that can lead to other things yeah that's a good question like I would say it's natural natural for me like I've grown up doing always things together with my brother you know like the the first money we make it's it's it's together the the first thing we try if we fight like if my if my brother has a fight with a person I always join same way if I have a problem my my brother joined like we always have each other back and and that's how we how we grew up you know like my my father raised us uh this way and I don't know any better you know so when I I meet people in like the industry and and e-commerce and like maybe after a period of time I realized oh you do have a brother like where the fuck is your brother you know like I should be like if you know me then you know my brother and and if you know my brother then you will know me like it's it's uh and why wouldn't you right you know yeah I think that's great I have three sisters and everybody's doing their own thing like there is no yeah I have a sister I have a sister but it's different you know it's different like my sister I love her very much but it's it's it's a different dynamic than than uh my brother you know and if if I had another brother then it would be the three econ brothers yeah definitely would be three econ brothers it's very interesting look it's very interesting that you teamed up with your brother and it's also someone that you can trust when you have a business partner the number one thing is trust right you can love each other you can hate each other but you need to trust each other otherwise you know something probably bad is not it's gonna happen sooner or later and business is trust and I think that there's no one you can trust more than a family member more than a friend more than a colleague and more than I don't know a friend of a friend of or a family member this is like the biggest trust that you can gain and you already got that so I think that's great okay let's move on to more questions about dropshipping so product research how do you find what products like how did that I understand that you're looking at competitors and you're seeing what they're selling and then you're trying that out for yourself how what other product research methods do you have to the ones that actually were able to find you the winning products not the ones that you were like practicing with in the beginning yeah so so you have to see like what is what is selling currently in the market you know like don't go and think of a product oh yeah maybe I like this product so I want to sell it that that's good right you have to sell what people are willing to buy and the best way to know if people are willing to buy is if it's already selling like there is no problem in competition it just means the market is already there you know you can tap into the market and right if you are you know skilled in in advertising or not even if you just launch and you see like okay am I profitable you know this product is already selling so I can you know very easy I can see why it's selling so I can do something similar you know you don't need to copy one-on-one but you know with chat gpt there's a lot of ways to to uh uh you know rebrand something as your own and launch very quickly um but yeah and it could also be a similar product it doesn't have to be one-on-one exactly the same product it also be it can also be something similar definitely definitely but don't go like this wasn't the beginning I remember I just tried a product I think oh yeah this is a very smart product or maybe people want this at the end of the day you need data to prove that the product is selling and if you see already it's selling at somebody else well that works you know so that's uh yeah that's definitely the the best way you know so a lot about by the way those who are joining us and you're new and you're still wondering what we're talking about what are these online stores we're talking about the dropshipping business model so dropshipping is a business model that allows you to sell things on your store to sell products without actually holding them in stock it means that you're not putting any money in inventory there are very very low upfront costs of starting this business and pretty much anyone can do it with just a little bit of knowledge and tools and the right resources and the right structure so this is the dropshipping business model once you get in order you go to your supplier's website you purchase the product you send it to the end customer and you keep the profit between the selling price and the source price and this is actually what we're talking about right here so ecom brothers abbas from ecom brothers brothers is doing it on Shopify and now we're going to dive a little bit deeper into that so we talked about why Shopify we talked about your come-up story now I want to talk about we talked about product research next is your suppliers so you know you're doing your product research up until this point you haven't looked into suppliers now that you found your product how do you know like who your supplier is going to be and how do you find suppliers to work with yes so it what we do is we work with with agents you know so you have people that are very experienced in they have a very big network with factories in china you know so they are like people in china and they have very big networks and if you send them a product in 24 hours you get a quotation like okay it's going to cost you this much and if we ship it for you then it's also going to cost this much so this is the total price but that's the best way like you don't go and sell something from aliexpress or whatever because you don't like you need to work with trusted people you know people that deliver fast and deliver quality so yeah if you just work with a random supplier on aliexpress it's it's going to create a chaos you're going to get banned on your payment providers banned on your you know advertising account so it's just a mess okay the next question that many people i'm sure are wondering right now is how do you actually find these private agents because everybody's you almost everybody 90 percent of dropshippers start with aliexpress because it's easy it's convenient they're drop shipping friendly they support dropshippers and there's just a lot of items there and it's cheap and we know all the reasons but how do you actually jump from aliexpress to these private agents and do they work with new dropshippers who just got started network it's you you get this from your network you know like if you don't talk to people uh then you won't know who is who um but i mean yeah if people need need help with the agent they can shoot me a message on insta and i can uh you know send them my agent that i work with they work with small dropshippers big dropshippers it okay that's cool that's already a freebie for anyone who's listening if you guys are listening to this on spotify apple podcast or anywhere where you're not seeing the visual video of us actually talking then you won't be able to see go to our youtube channel on youtube.com slash auto ts find this video search for econ brothers and you'll find this video look below the video i'm going to leave the link to his uh to abbas's instagram uh channel so that you all can spam him and ask for the private supplier and uh he will help you with it and this is it this is networking this is exactly what abbas is talking about this is one of his one of the uh pads that he took along his adventure when he started on e-commerce he went to e-commerce meetups as uh as mentioned earlier in this uh uh meeting and that's how he actually found the connections especially the suppliers and i'm sure more things that we're going to talk about okay so there's a golden nugget for everyone now here's a little uh here's a little tip i didn't send uh econ brother that didn't send abbas the questions that i'm going to ask him in this interview so the next question could be a little bit problem problematic and i already told him that if there's a question that he doesn't like he doesn't have to answer so he's unprepared for all those all of the questions in this interview and my next question is can you share a little bit about your average monthly revenue and profit percentage okay so you want to talk to me you want me to talk about numbers so as i would say my lifetime since like uh we started three years ago we did over 20 20 million in revenue wow with with a group in three years right yeah so this is like from starting like with no knowledge nothing up until this point it's around three years and uh and which is that about around i would say like people in the industry they know like a typical good profit margin so uh people can do that so it's around there it's around the typical profit margin yeah definitely definitely but like a lot of things happen in the way you know like you get holds these kind of things or okay let's just put it this way without actually talking about the real number it's it's not less than 20 right no no definitely okay like i just want to make that clear to anyone who's listening because i this is only i go over over and over time and time again because i see a lot of people who are starting off and they think that they need to kill the competition in order to make their first sales so they're going to become like the cheapest sellers in the market and you know they can even lose money they can sell on zero percent five percent ten percent like really bad numbers just to get their stores started and i really don't think that it's uh needed i i'm glad that some people think the approach of like okay you want uh lifetime in lifetime of your your customer you can be profitable like the first sale that's that's bullshit especially like you're just starting focus on being profitable the the first skill you know and if you do your marketing well then you can get profit margins of like 35 40 percent even 50 percent if you do it bad then you you know go to the lower either like 15 percent so you have to uh um like it doesn't just have like you always have to monitor like what's your profit margin and then like skill up or skill down uh accordingly like you don't want a lot of revenue and then like five percent uh profit margin right right so there's no reason to profit low even when you're just starting off even if you're just trying to get your first few sales and reviews there's no reason to sell at a low profit especially because this business model is easy and doesn't require you to try to kill the whole market you're not going to get anywhere from that yes i'm also about to hear it from you so my next question is about yours you also mentioned it about creating a brand so this is something that's a little bit difficult when you're dropshipping because you know how you're dropshipping so you're like you're always ordering one unit from your supplier so if you're ordering one unit and you reach out to your supplier and you're like hey can you please put like a cool box with my name and my logo it's going to say no because you're only ordering one unit and it's not going to be cost worthy to do that to manufacture just for one so if you want you can order 50 you can order 100 and then i will you know brand those boxes for you and you will pay for them up front but now you're not dropshipping anymore so how exactly do you combine dropshipping and creating a brand for your business creating a huge brand presence at the same time how does that work i would say the difference between like building a brand and doing dropshipping is having a little more patience you know a little bit more patience in terms of you know like when ordering stock it takes time when when you know like things when building a brand it takes a little bit more time to to get your momentum like with dropshipping you can very easily just test 50 products in one week see what works and then scale that up and your your agent or your supplier or whatever they they take care of logistics so it's a lot quicker but yeah like i think a lot of people when when they go build the brand after learning the skills of like marketing building a team skating up you can take all those all those skills and and and build your big brand but the issue is people don't have patience you know so they don't see they see the brand is not profitable or like no sales in the first couple weeks that that's like a no go if you yeah because you're very like you can do very high numbers the first day the first two days you know if you just pump in ad spend so uh i think yeah like a lot of like i saw a lot of big dropshippers they try the transition and then they feel and they go back but i don't think that's that's a good move you know like use dropshipping as your vehicle to learn everything about e-commerce and then move on to to build things that can uh are like more sustainable you know if you if you do like high volume you will see it's it's always like a lot of like up down up down up down some ad account get banned uh a payment provider for some reason they they hold your money you know these kind of things happen a lot a lot definitely like when you are high high volume if you want to make like an extra 5k or 10k a month by all means uh not not gonna you know but if you want to scale like 1 million 2 million 3 million in one month but it's you're gonna yeah expect expect those road bumps but they're all manageable it doesn't mean that that's the end of your business that's that's that's one and two like you said so use product use dropshipping for product research and then use uh creating a brand and uh and and a brand identity and all of that once you actually find your winning products and then what and then you would uh use them what in a warehouse like purchase inventory put them in a warehouse and and um and brand them and then ship it out from your own warehouse or do you continue dropshipping just with uh just with maybe I don't know putting like a store logo and like uh making your store look branded but not actually like branding your packaging so do you do both or do you like do you play around with that or what no no no so what what we do is actually okay we we test in the beginning okay is there uh so let's say we were on a brand product this is the people that are listening like this is good sauce you know uh what we do is okay we validate the product first you know we we launch some ads see okay there's potential here it's not great results but for us like with time you get an eye like okay this product has potential or not potential yeah then we you know figure out uh what's the best quality get the best pricing these kind of things and then just you know go with it I'm buying bulk uh you know five thousand ten thousand twenty thousand pieces um but this comes because we have experience with this is an advanced tactic this is an advanced strategy if you're just starting off use product use dropshipping like we said for product research you see what you to find your winners and then move on to what Abbas is mentioning yeah yeah definitely so like at this point we were at like two years in game you know like the first couple months nothing but then like after that we doing a lot on high skill so you get an eye and a feeling like okay this product is going to work of course like you you should have a branded website if you if you want to have a brand but I think also like why not just buying bulk like it's cheaper um yeah just wait like two three four weeks whatever but I mean I mean why not you know like it's it's an overall better customer experience um and you you get the benefit and then the stability of having these things uh in check let's say this is what we what we would call the hybrid dropshipping business model where on one hand you're dropshipping you're testing our product you're seeing what works you're testing the market and on the other hand on the other half of your business you're actually buying bulk and the items that are working well for you that are selling well in dropshipping that you actually have experience from and then you're making more sales because you bought them in bulk you're paying a lower price and you're even shipping them faster to your customers and this is the uh long time of value for your business which I think is great this is the hybrid model I want to make it very clear like so so people don't uh misunderstand me um definitely if you're a beginner like don't think about buying bulk like it doesn't make sense so so think about it this way like let's say you buy 10 000 pieces of a single product and it costs you whatever four dollars so you spend 40k uh and like your your budget isn't unlimited you know like you spend a lot of money into inventory but what's the added value for a single customer does he care that you have millions in stock he doesn't care he just no single product so especially if you don't have the the ability to so the reason I buy in bulk is because I want to scale faster but it doesn't mean like you have to solve the book definitely like the first uh just just start selling because you want to be able to come back if you made a mistake you want to be able to come back and and continue building your business and if you spent 40k on inventory and you didn't make enough sales to make up for that you won't have you won't be able to come back from that because you put pretty much all you have on that one product that didn't really work for you definitely so I I have actually one one one person good drop shipper you know they did made some money made a couple hundred uh uh k like in profit so what he did was like okay he thought he was you know very experienced so he dumped actually like all his money in inventory for his brand you know he wanted to level up go from drop shipping to to you know having stock um and it fucked him because he couldn't sell it so we had to go but so he did have experience and he still messed up because he still bought the wrong product why do you think that happened well I think I think uh I don't know the exact details you know I don't it's like it's painful subject yeah I mean but I assume it's like uh maybe he made the mistake or like thinking the product is going to work without actually validating yeah so the vetting thing the vetting probably didn't go to offer maybe he didn't check it enough and he didn't check the target audience well enough but the the biggest mistake here it's not if you research wrong that's fine but you have to make sure that you have enough space to come back in case you made a mistake and that one didn't work for you and that's why I'm you know talking about this point again so he put all his budget on that product and then didn't leave room for mistakes so put half that budget so that you can use the other half to come back in case that doesn't work for you you don't have to scale up to the point where you you will risk it and sort of to interrupt you but I would use like no budget for inventory like don't think about like inventory is the least added value for your business right like learn like you're investing in all your money in building out a team tries many things with with advertising you know there's a lot of different ways you can advertise try things with influencers spend all your money on those like inventory it's there is nothing there is no added value like maybe you get a couple extra days faster shipping but if you communicate with your customers it's not it's not a big deal like don't spend your money on oh it's only like at the point where things are going you can you can start if you want you know if you want to do something long-term with the product and you know differentiate of course go go go make your move but you don't need to to buy and book no you can just otherwise there's going to be no added value and you're just spending money and you could have done it with dropshipping without spending the money and testing out even more products definitely like for sure it's definitely in the beginning a wasted wasted money you know especially in the case yeah definitely start off definitely start off drop between don't even think about you know a lot of people want to make money quick right and that's the whole thing so they're like wait if i can if i can buy inventory and i'll make sales quicker which is not the case you have to do your research but and then they're thinking okay so let's just do that right let's just put money and scale faster and get money faster and that's just not the way to do it start dropshipping it's the best way to test the market it's the best way to find winning products and like you mentioned in the beginning don't try to guess what the next sell will be or what your first sell will be because you'll probably 99.99999% you will not know what products you're going to sell and you will not be able to guess what products are going to sell so that's why you're going to test the market you're going to see what your competitors are doing just like you mentioned Abbas one thing that we didn't talk about is marketing so we talked to like a little bit but what are you like your marketing strategies what are you doing for marketing are you running ads is it email campaigns is it blog pages is it a little bit of everything yeah um so so this is the the way we work so let's say you have a product for for ten dollars you're shipping product including everything ten dollars and you sell it for forty dollars so you have this thirty dollar margin you know right you sell for forty then you know like you have v18 whatever um uh but you know you have to find out okay what's what is your margin what is your margin and then you you go and run ads facebook tiktok whatever um and your cost per what's your stop what's your stop point for that type of product yeah so so like if you have thirty dollars as a profit margin to to spend and you're getting twenty dollars on average for a customer then you're profitable like this is what it comes down to and you can go into marketing and and think about all the thousand different metrics and you know the scroll stopping and then the three percent uh you know watch time video yeah all this kind of things like it all comes down to are you profitable or not you know are are you okay with with five dollar profit on on the product after everything gets gets stripped away from the revenue okay you know otherwise you know maybe scale down maybe try new things but it all come down so like are you profitable um so yeah with with and it doesn't matter like which which marketing channel like you can do facebook you can do tiktok you can do google um are you profitable Pinterest also we did a lot of things on Pinterest are you profitable at the end of the yes or no um um but then it comes down to like okay what make how can I become more profitable or like uh you know then you learn about okay making good creatives uh better marketing but the best thing is just see what is working for other people and learn from that very quickly if you're gonna you know that's probably gonna be one of the biggest advice that you're gonna get in your dropshipping game no matter what level you're on if you're checking out the competition and you're learning from them and you're acting upon their best practices not copying and pasting you're gonna make it unique to your own store you're gonna maybe have a different marketing angle different target audience but this is how you're gonna make it and uh and yeah it's definitely checking out the competition but what about like are you is it only uh pay per click ads for you like it's just pay per click uh campaigns in all types of different social media channels is that what it comes down to for marketing for us we mainly scale on uh facebook facebook instagram you know but it's the same same and together um and then we have you know like especially if you're doing a brand uh all the channels become become important but most of it comes from facebook um uh and it's just based on it's a pay per click that's that's google have you tried tiktok yeah definitely definitely like we scaled a lot of tiktok um uh also we did a little bit of tiktok organic but it's not uh uh we like to be able to control how uh how fast we grow you know like with with there isn't you'll see or it's low key like with if you run ads like you can build a money printing um machine basically like it's if you're profitable then you can just scale and scale hard like you can go from like the first day 100 euro in revenue um and if you scale fast you can do 10k the next day if if you know how to scale but it all comes down to like are you profitable yes then we increase the budget or we launch more campaigns and we scale harder so so another question about marketing so when you do do the marketing on facebook ads which is your your bread and butter for marketing do you make like what three ad copies per product in the beginning just to test it out and then putting like a certain budget for each one changing just a little bit of the first few seconds on the creative and are you creating your own videos too how does that work the details that say I think details they change with time um I think the most important thing is to just test like go spend actual money like put in a budget and and and see what happens and and learn to read the metrics and and figure out if you're profitable like for me to say like you have to do three ad copies with five call to actions and these it's not science it's not like no definitely then I think also like with with iOS 14 like which happened some time ago um tracking it it's it's not what it used to be you know so you just have to figure out like are you profitable but definitely like how do I say like test out you know see see a strategy on youtube okay test it out doesn't work you know but keep things simple you know like you you can you can spend hours and hours hoping to improve 3% but what if you just launched a new product and it became the big winner of you know Europe whatever look I have where we are nearing towards the end but I have some more juicy questions so stay with so stay with us everyone was listening so like you said best practices also in marketing test see what's going on I couldn't get the right numbers from you many people like to hear numbers they want to know exactly what they need to do and then they're going to try exactly that but I completely understand and I also agree with you that there is no exact math to this there's no exact science and you have to test it out and you know what to test out by just seeing what other people are doing so this is the formula that we all need to start with and practice with and gain experience with in order to start getting the data and the feedback and then we know what we need to work with we know what starts to work and how to move forward from here so as a seasoned professional in the drop to being space what are some of the common mistakes and pitfalls since you're doing a lot of networking with other people and I'm sure that you're doing networking a lot with successful people but even they I mean everybody has mistakes that they make along the way even you I'm sure so what are some of the like common mistakes and pitfalls that you see that most people are making when they're starting off and what tips can you give to avoid those mistakes by the way like for people that are listening you know I think the the principles that you know we discuss Liron and I think the prince you can already build like your seven-figure business very easily you know like the principles of seeing what what is working for other people you know having a network which we're going to talk about more you know moving fast like it doesn't need to be perfect just do it like like it's not it's not rocket science just just do the thing and work harder than other people you know like most people are like pretty lazy and there will be people that when they hear the story they think like oh yeah I don't believe it you know how can a young person make like okay fine you just I you don't need to believe me I'm just it doesn't make it not true yeah yeah like like things happen you know like billions of dollars flow every day in the economy and you're not like just start getting in the market and and learn from it um but what was and best practice is the way to do it sorry for interrupting your way I just had with a lot of things that you're saying yeah definitely but what was your real question again like about networking with so yeah one of the biggest mistakes that you see people make which is this is probably one of them right one of the mistakes that people make in the beginning is that they're lazy they're looking for an exact figure some of them won't even look at what other people are doing some of them don't even know that the competition exists or they know but they don't want to look because they want to like you know go with their own path this is one of the biggest mistakes right you're not getting the knowledge you don't know the structure you don't know what to do and then you're you're going to ebay or Shopify you're starting a new store and you don't know what the next step is or you made a store you upload a product you got a sell and now you don't know what to do with that sell like what do I do now and I see a lot of these examples but what are some of the examples that like you know just mistakes that people make from the beginning and what they should do to avoid it as you can think of any I think I think the the worst is that people are just slow people like very very slow like they think about you mean not taking action like learning but not doing anything about it yeah definitely like there is no point in just learning and consuming content and then not doing anything but I mean you get sort of closer to you go but yeah you have people like I remember like so so we did like a podcast in the Netherlands with I don't know if you know him Joshua Katz so he's a good friend now but he had like this dropship academy which was like sort of a community you know in the Netherlands and people got to know each other so we did like a podcast and through this podcast we had like people you know reaching out to us oh yeah brother like can you help me I'm already doing five years in e-commerce but you know didn't work out yet you know I I'm still working my normal job and I'm thinking to myself like how the fuck in five years like it took me five months to to make like become profitable and from there it was just like making good money you know like if you wanted you will get it very fast but because he didn't yeah I'm thinking he didn't want it like he wanted he didn't maybe he wanted but he didn't do enough like like people people say they wanted but then they also want to watch the whatever I don't know yeah they want to with their friends they want to all this like bro when I when I saw the the opportunity and like first I see the first time see profit but I didn't sleep like I had maybe six months there wasn't a single night where I slept during like I sleep maybe from whatever like afternoon 12 p.m. to like 4 4 p.m. you know like get three four hours sleep during the day the whole time just working because I want to be that's what we call passion and passion will usually bring you to your success because you won't mind the failures along the way but the other people the slow people that you're talking about the ones who are not moving fast enough they're just not that the passion is just not there enough because if the passion was there they would sacrifice everything else in order to make this happen and not just wait for someone to find someone who succeeds at it and then ask him how he's doing it and it's also the same for me I mean I've been drawing for over six years now like a few years before the pandemic started and it's the same like that when I was starting up people are like yeah I heard it's dead or many other things like how can you sell something if they can just go and find the cheaper price and all these are the things that people usually say that the questions the the negative questions that they usually ask in the beginning and a few years later when I became I mean I became successful on my first year and maybe three months but a couple years after I was you know still doing it every day passively without putting any time into it because I'm good I'm comfortable with what I have so far those same people from a few years back come to me and they're like hey so I see that it's working for you can you show me how to do it I'm like no I mean I'm not looking to network with you anymore I need to network with people who are at my stage and are at my level and you know you're a little bit too slow so that's a nice example for for the slowness that you're talking about like for me it's not even so much about passion that I'm passionate about doing drop shipping like as I was saying I have a background in electrical engineering you know like selling some bullshit or some basic products online like it doesn't excite me and there isn't much sort of it's not like mentally challenging it's not like some intelligent or like complex subject that I have to understand I am the feeling of success the feeling of money pouring in my whole life I always work hard with whatever I'm working at the time you know like if it's if it's my study and I need to understand the subject I work my ass off and and then it you know with the money I work my ass off like and it's a competition if you're the slow guy you're going to lose you know if you say I want to I have many like like you know cousins or friends or whatever I tried to help you know like when I saw this opportunity of money and what I was saying like my background there isn't money in my background like people don't drive a nice car don't have a good house these kind of things so when I saw what was working for me it's like this escape to a new world like a new a new life you know I don't need to steep I just go work work work work you know build team launch more do more whatever but then I also try to get my people from my you know where I grew up with I try to get them involved like go do this go learn this go there is opportunity there's money and and then I realized oh I I know why it won't work for you you're fucking lazy they don't want it enough yeah you're not stupid I have I have like I think the more dumb you are the more money you even make like it's not about intelligence you know it's just about yeah like you're lazy ah you wake up at this yeah you you're not even you don't want it I don't text you about it anymore you just stop yeah that's amazing I have two friends exactly with the same exact story so there were two friends that I did take along with me even a couple years after I gave two free you know I taught them for free the rest I said no because like too much was starting to come you know my way but there were two that I did accept and the ones that I did teach and they were able to do it they started their stores they did product research they made sales they made profit and when the time came to scale they just got lazy and they just at some point they just kind of they're like hey you know what you can just take my stores like I don't I don't know like I just don't feel it you can just take it and I'll are you kidding me give me your stores like now and I took them and you know I did what I did with them and I will do the same thing over and over again so I realized then that there is only a limit to how much you can push people right to do it because they have to want to do it themselves and sometimes they think they want to do it and then when they get into it they're like oh I have to give customer service I don't know like I didn't think about that before and you know all these like stupid reasons for all of a sudden like dropping out now they weren't making thousands of dollars a month they were making a few hundred at the most but you know from here you're already making money so why not scale from here so that's what gets me excited but it didn't get them excited so we can't expect everyone to have the same level of passion maybe not for the model but for the feeling of success and the money that we get from it but yeah that's that's one of the things that's one of the tips one of the common pitfalls that we're seeing yeah but do you like any yeah go ahead the reason like I you know like sometimes do this kind of interview it's not for the people that I'm not here to convince people like oh yeah you should take action in your life like I don't care if you don't want to go go fuck yourself I don't like I literally I don't care the the reason I do this is I know there are people that will listen and and for example young or older whatever but they they want to get inspired you know like they want to see people because that's what worked for for me also you know like her hearing these kind of interviews where people actually made it you know they they and now you're being interviewed yeah and and they actually made it because they put in the work I do it for for these people you know so everything here is true like he uh uh econ brothers abbas is not like there is no partnership between us there is like no affiliate links there's like nothing it's just he he just wanted to come on to the channel and and and pour his value because that's what he likes to do which I think is completely amazing and it's one of the things that I stand for in our content and you know I couldn't I didn't even think twice for this interview I'm really happy that you did it by the way thank you brother I mean your information is really rich thank you well what would be nice like after you know one year people say oh yeah I saw this interview you know it helped me gave me extra boost and and you know this is it's worth it when you get that yeah it's a good feeling it's a good feeling to know that you were actually able to help someone who actually was able to succeed and they're taking their business seriously and they didn't close it down like a year later because they got lazy I think it's an amazing feeling many people that do this you know many people do and maybe many people don't by the way the successful people from my experience they usually stay quiet right so people who are succeeding and there's tens of thousands of them you don't hear from them you do hear from the tens of thousands who didn't succeed because people who are failing and stuff not just in this but in anything in life they like to cry about right they to complain they like to go online they like to write posts when people are successful at life like you're probably not going to hear about it that much because most of them are quite with their success and that's why I'm glad to have people like you who are actually you know able to speak openly about it and without asking for anything in return just giving pouring out the value out there and giving it to anyone who just wants to come and grab it so I think that's great that's great by the way for for me like I try to live on my in my bubble like only you know people that are making moves that are successful that are not lazy that that you know like because if you are with lazy or negative people it like it affects you also you know it affects you super like my right like everybody I see they are making moves they don't talk about I don't feed it or like it's it's this bullshit I don't see it in my daily life you know I'm very like okay these sort of people I network with this the the people I want which is the importance of networking which takes us back to the beginning of the interview we talked about networking this is what brought you up and this is one of the most important things so when you are doing it do it with people who are at the same level as you or at a higher level than you and you can also contribute contribute something to them so they would let you you know into their network too and that way you're going to build the best network that you can but if you're going to build a network with people who are not at your level and they're all lazy but you know you're kind of giving them an opportunity to learn something from you that's not networking that's just you being a mentor and wasting time on other people so it's definitely networking with the right people which I have I have people like management they're they're far above you know far above and I have people like lower it's it's not like I only need to talk with people that are higher otherwise I don't know it's not it's not like that but I mean these negative around the same level I mean you wouldn't that work with people who haven't started e-commerce right what are you gonna learn from them no that's that's not networking that's not networking because they there's nothing to to talk about let's say somebody has I don't know he owns what how many stores or whatever in in book area I don't know like some like it's okay why did it work for you you know like these kind of things are always interesting to learn but I'm talking more about like okay these negative traits of people you know like a lot of people are like to complain like to be lazy these kind of people I stay away religiously you know that's like you don't have to be higher otherwise I don't talk no no definitely like you know yeah yeah yeah even if you are like you have less money or whatever it doesn't matter because you know some people have a solution for some problem and that makes them very valuable you know like I have a lot of solutions in my business like especially if you want to do like e-commerce on a high high scale you're gonna encounter problems that you didn't know existed you know but then you need solutions and and how are you going to come up with solutions it's not on google it's it's not on google like you have to talk with people and and you have to give value and get value back you know so that's why your network is very important that you have people you know that you're able to talk to because that's where like I switch I'm like okay how the fuck do we end up here I don't know but you know this guy he told me it works so yeah let's just move with it that's that's very important you know but it's not so much if you're higher I talk or if you're lower I don't talk none it's like everybody has value in his own way but negative yeah just don't bring negative don't bring negativity to the network and don't be a person if he's like a snake you will detect these things right so just don't throw those people yeah gotta put on those snake detectors so network with the right people stay away from negativity and make sure that if you are joining a network of people who have a lot more experience than you that may try to think of what you can contribute to that you know you can also contribute to that group and I think yeah I think it's one of the most important things here so yeah it's not the whole looking up and looking down it's just avoiding the negativity and networking with the right people it's all great advice it's all great it's important like move move move with speed like you always have to like don't go and yeah like don't go and think about building a website like actually go build like if you haven't started after this interview like watch the full interview there's more info go actually build the website in one day you can launch like it doesn't take long doesn't take a month doesn't take six months you can do very fast you have to take your first step and then take every step after that so every day you need to have some kind of a goal of an action that you're going to take not just something you're going to learn but an action that you're going to take take one little action every day today I'm just going to sign up for Shopify tomorrow I'm going to work on product research the next day I'm going to uh I don't know upload my first product from the product research if you take action every day you're definitely definitely going to be on the road even the the first actions that you're going to take are not going to make you rich but they're going to help you learn the way so that you can continue going and growing from there so yeah I'm going to fast like I wouldn't sort of um like just start build the whole website on one day on day one like you can you can accomplish everything in in one two days to learn the whole the whole thing like it's it's not uh don't think okay in in two weeks I want to have my website no you have it in one day like people advertising without logos they are they are making sales yeah logos yeah like yeah that's speed because that's also one thing especially with like with with internet money like opportunities they don't like there there's a window of opportunity you know like things that um uh work now won't work in a couple months right if you don't make the most out of it at this point the opportunity will go away and with crypto for example it's always like okay if you didn't buy early then you're fucked you know so so like move with speed don't think about it too much but just move move move and if you have a brother if you have a brother it works to do it together but I mean it's from my experience you know like if you have a lot of um uh beef between your brother and you you can't get along because people like ask me you know like I'm not I'm not very close with my brother uh but um you know like I'm successful and he works normal job then I think yeah I don't know how to fix that to be honest it's like uh let's say you have a glass and it's broken are you going to fix the original glass like it doesn't work like um but if you have go go full with your brother like I have all my money everything we own it's it's all together there's no oh he has to spend not separated I spent 50 no we we we built as a family and by the way if you're uh of course a female listener then we're talking about siblings so you can do it with your sister or do it with your brother you can be brothers and sisters and maybe even do it I would love to hear about this yeah I have I have uh good relationship with my sister you know um I as I was saying like I try to involve but I I feel also like okay maybe it's it's just not it was yeah like not for you but for anyone else yeah like you have your brother and he takes care of you like um as I'm supposed to so I I don't push on her if she doesn't want to I just let her like be be uh yeah a good sister I'm not gonna I asked for like the best advice and the best tips that you can give to finish the interview because we gave more than enough juicy golden nuggets in this interview so do you believe that Shopify is here to stay is Shopify like your platform of choice for the next five uh years or do you think that something else is probably going to take its place yeah so so by asking it's not like um I'm not here to decades in like uh in e-commerce like we're we're making moves in in other industries um but you know as this interview is about e-commerce like what's the alternative like who who's other which other there are some more trying but even if it's in five years uh it's going away like who cares make the money now and and get your family get get your your mother to retire if they want to move to a different country help them with that like who cares about five years if if Shopify is still not just because you need to learn to adapt anyway no matter what happens you need to learn to adapt like you said earlier I don't even have five years in in history in terms of like that's amazing in e-commerce making making good money yeah definitely yeah I think the first encounter with with drop shipping actually it goes back to maybe when I was like 12 13 years old so I was playing like FIFA and and if there's time for the story otherwise you just skip it yeah a few minutes you can go for it yeah it's a very short story but yeah it was funny like um I don't know if you ever played like FIFA the FIFA Ultimate Team of course of course you get these coins you know these coins and there was like a point where people realized okay you can you can sort of buy these coins you know like you don't want to play a lot so you want to you stack up and there was this Chinese random website my friend told me about where you can get like certain amount of coins for very cheap you know like one euro or 90 cent so then I used to go around like my friends yeah I can hook you up with this much it's called drop servicing so you're drop shipping the service that you're getting from someone else and just marking up the price for it that's amazing by the way I call it I call it just just making money you know but it's so people I remember one friend he bought for like 10 euros and then he had to list his cards and the story gets to him but it's funny you know like I think also with a lot of people that you know do business entrepreneurs they sort of have these stories you know like it's never the the quiet guy that never tried nothing you know like make it in business like they're also a little bit troublesome as a child I think you can also be a quite successful person but you can also be a trouble someone look I can't ask more questions because we're really out of time but I was from the econ brothers everyone I'm gonna leave once again if you're listening to it on Spotify on Apple Music or Apple podcast or anywhere else where you're not watching the video go to youtube.com slash auto DS search for econ brothers and you'll find this video below the video I'm leaving a link to his Instagram channel if you want to ask him any questions if you need any advice he's there for you and I really want to thank you for this interview because once again it was super spontaneous you didn't know what questions I want to ask you you went through with it really really well I can see that you have tons of experience in this field and we were maybe just scratching the service but the advice that was given here is more than enough for anyone to understand the structure that they need to go to through to start the right way and to have a formal structure of what they need to do and how they need to do it right so again I really want to thank you Abbas it's been great having you here today thank you brother thank you it was great and if people want to want to follow me on Instagram that's that's fine you know click on the link below this video at econ brothers so you'll see me you'll see my brother so add econ brothers for anyone who's not watching the video