Written by: Jophiel Silvestrone
Jophiel Silvestrone has written 326 posts in the Tech Blog.
Jophiel grew up on a ranch in Paradise Valley, Montana near Chico Hot Springs. Working on the ranch instilled work ethic and self motivation. Filled with this drive, Jophiel started mowing the local school's yards twice a month throughout the summers, at the age of 12. He moved to Billings in 2004, where he has been deeply involved in the local business community ever since. A serial entrepreneur, Jophiel has ran multiple businesses in our local community. The first business, a janitorial and carpet cleaning company, founded in 2005, has employed over 50 locals. Moving on to the media industry, Jophiel and several partners founded Green Directory Montana in the spring of 2007. Green Directory's sustainability ranking software awarded points based on sustainable or "green" actions. These points counted towards a business's total "Green Score," which in turn ranked them against other businesses in their category and throughout the entire site. It also featured a limited edition print version distributed annually. A business acquisition allowed Jophiel to focus on new projects, and a few close business colleagues and Jophiel started Rocky Mountain Mr. & Ms. Magazine, a lifestyle publication for men and women in the Magic City. After a year and a half at the helm of RM3 Magazine, the business was purchased. He now runs a web development company SkyPoint Studios and fathers his son Jaoquin, who plays football, basketball, soccer, and is learning snowboarding from his dad. Recently, has expanded to locations in Havasu, Arizona & Vegas. SkyPoint Studios is a market leader in both Billings & Havasu and Jophiel is working on building that same level of market dominance in Vegas. Specialties: Extensive experience in online and offline business. Especially savvy at WordPress, and operate several sites, one example is the blog: skypointwebdesignbillingsmontana.com/tech-blog. Check out skypointwebdesignbillingsmontana.com for the latest projects from SkyPoint Studios.
Unrealistic Online Business Pitch
Not sure if you seen it, but recently I have seen a ton of ads by a quick talking guy on YouTube trying to convince the viewer that they can hop right in and start their own online business very easily.
His idea is that you go to Walmart and buy something for $10 and then turn around and sell it online in your store for $30. He recommends buying a Shopify website to do this on.
He’s very convinced that this is an easy thing to do and that you’ll have sales right away. He pulls up examples of people have gone through his course who are supposedly getting sales within the next several days after the class.
Let me explain to you why this is not a good idea. Now I can’t say it’s a bad idea for everyone, but I can say it’s a bad idea for the majority. You see, it’s extremely difficult to get people to come shop a brand new website who have no idea about it.
Especially if you’re not planning on putting any money in the marketing at all. Your website will be like a desert and no one will be coming through that thing to buy off of it.
Why should they? Especially since you’re taking an item that they could have bought themselves at Walmart for $10 and trying to sell it to them for $30.
Now if there wasn’t any start-up cost involved (including whatever he is charging for his “master” class), this might not be too bad of a wait and slowly build type of strategy. But unfortunately, Shopify is a very expensive shopping cart solution that I wouldn’t recommended to anyone who doesn’t have a currently established business with cash-flow.
Shopify websites can go for around $80-300 a month and will be a contract that you’ll be stuck in, not to mention other cost like domain registration and any type of marketing like Google AdWords or Facebook ads that are required to get traffic to the website.
Now this isn’t to discourage people from starting online businesses, I’m simply here to bring the voice of reason. It bothers me when evangelicalist-like people like this on YouTube just want to sell you a business idea claiming that you’ll be rich overnight if you just throw up some products on a Shopify website and call it a day.
There is so much to a successful online business and it does not involve just simply picking up products and selling them on your own website in a couple days when you have no experience.
The road of online business is littered with people who thought they could do this and have failed over and over and over again. Yes, I’m in the business of selling people websites, but I only am interested in doing that if they can be successful.
A client of mine who is successful with their business represents a long-term sustainable relationship with my company, and that’s what I’m looking to build. Plus, I care about people and that’s why I do what I do, so it’s important to warn people of these get rich quick schemes that can come to the web design world.
So the next time you hear someone trying to hype you up about how to do your own online business when you have no clue how these things work, either do your research and work on it for the long haul or simply avoid this blasphemy.