I did that with 250 skate boards a few years ago. Got them for £8 each and sold them on eBay for £29.99 delivered. They all sound in about 6 weeks, missus wasn’t impressed with the full garage. I remember the truck pulling up and I hadn’t thought how much space they would take lol.
You need to earn £10k in 3 months as a side gig, how would you do it?
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I did that with 250 skate boards a few years ago. Got them for £8 each and sold them on eBay for £29.99 delivered. They all sound in about 6 weeks, missus wasn’t impressed with the full garage. I remember the truck pulling up and I hadn’t thought how much space they would take lol.
This is the most realistic option. Buy a big lot of some crap from alibaba, shift it on eBay. Not easy money by any means, but pretty reliable if you're sensible about what you buy and the margin you expect.
Wasn't there quite a novel post on this forum about a bloke buying a pallet full of jeans from China..?
Soldato
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Matched betting, but to hit a 5x return in 3 months would be tricky. Good bank though so if it is possible it'd probably still work out as a full time job or equivalent.
I read an article back when I bought my desk about a guy trading office furniture. Turned out he'd started a business effectively by scraping a few grand together then travelling to China and finding a supplier of office desks. He paid everything he had to fill a shipping container and then sold them on Ebay with a large mark up. Within a pretty short period of time the business was massive, he was talking about the challenge of upscaling the operation on an almost constant basis. He put the work in but there was an aspect of right time right place about it too.
I read an article back when I bought my desk about a guy trading office furniture. Turned out he'd started a business effectively by scraping a few grand together then travelling to China and finding a supplier of office desks. He paid everything he had to fill a shipping container and then sold them on Ebay with a large mark up. Within a pretty short period of time the business was massive, he was talking about the challenge of upscaling the operation on an almost constant basis. He put the work in but there was an aspect of right time right place about it too.
Basically this, make yourself available 24 hours for a pump and dump.
Match betting at 4k profit a month would be impossible IMO without there being an element of gambling involved. 6k would be doable at a push if you pumped serious hours into it.
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Watch breaking bad and then get back to us 
Soldato
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Realistically? Work my *** off outside of work doing Deliveroo and Uber. I know someone who does Uber on Friday and Saturday nights only - by nights I mean 8pm-8am - and reckons he earns an average of 2.5k a month whilst leasing.
Only need to earn 8k as both are basically free to start.
Only need to earn 8k as both are basically free to start.
Associate
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I guess things like Uber is really location dependant. Perhaps in a big city like London or Manchester it would pay well and you would be less likely to pick up undesirables.
Where I live you would be putting your life into your own hands working weekend nights.
Soldato
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Yeah this is in Bristol. He said roughly 8-11 it's couples going out for dinner and back again, 11-5 people going out clubbing and back again, then 5-8 a bit of club-stuff but mostly airport runs or weekend commuters.
it isn't like other minicab firms - users get rated after each ride and their average rating is available, you can opt to just not pick up the bad ones
I'd suspect that if one were to actually assault a driver and it was reported then they'd just be banned from the app
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Soldato
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This.
I'm not keen on the idea of gambling, I wish I had pursued crypto years ago when I first heard about it!
I looked into uber a while back, but you need a 4 door car and I drive a coupe, so that ruled that out. Things are too volatile and risky with Uber right now for me to consider investing money in a car just for that.
Okay, so a month after starting this thread I've got an idea for a new business.
I'm not sure if it'll work or scale quickly enough to make what I'm aiming for in 2 months, but I think it's got promise if it's executed well.
It's nothing revolutionary or new, and comes down to buying and reselling products at it's most basic form, but my spin on it hopefully adds value for the people in the niche I'm targeting.
Margins aren't great, so I'll have to see how things go to see if I can get the pricing to work.
I've spent all my free time when not working the last few days getting to grips with and doing research on various ecommerce software and researching suppliers.
Next step is get get a minimal working website up and running and approach some customers to get their feedback and see if I can validate the idea. Finding it a bit tough to balance all my time and move as quickly as I like though. Doing all the research, reading, and learning new software on the side can be draining. The promise of potentially creating something that may work is exciting though.
I looked into uber a while back, but you need a 4 door car and I drive a coupe, so that ruled that out. Things are too volatile and risky with Uber right now for me to consider investing money in a car just for that.
Okay, so a month after starting this thread I've got an idea for a new business.
I'm not sure if it'll work or scale quickly enough to make what I'm aiming for in 2 months, but I think it's got promise if it's executed well.
It's nothing revolutionary or new, and comes down to buying and reselling products at it's most basic form, but my spin on it hopefully adds value for the people in the niche I'm targeting.
Margins aren't great, so I'll have to see how things go to see if I can get the pricing to work.
I've spent all my free time when not working the last few days getting to grips with and doing research on various ecommerce software and researching suppliers.
Next step is get get a minimal working website up and running and approach some customers to get their feedback and see if I can validate the idea. Finding it a bit tough to balance all my time and move as quickly as I like though. Doing all the research, reading, and learning new software on the side can be draining. The promise of potentially creating something that may work is exciting though.
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If your margins are thin, all it will take is a bad RMA or a lost in post to wipe out any profit from 10's of other orders so you need to gamble what the cheapest method of post is and the acceptable loss of parcels to justify sending using the cheapest method rather than everything tracked.
Setting up a website full of "products" online and hoping products will move doesn't work unless you have cash to throw at advertising, then because you're not stocking the products you're relying on supply chain to pick/pack/post (additional cost) and you're a middle man that will be contacted to handle any issues.
Even if you manage a 10% profit on a £20 product once everything is taken into account (assume £12 buy price, £4 postage + packing, £2 towards development and payment processing), to get £10k in cash at the end you'd need to shift 5,000 units but your £2k startup would only allow you to buy 100 units, but those 100 units would have to sell every working day to achieve that level of income you'd need and if you're importing you can't get stock in that quick. Also trying to pick and pack 100 orders in a day is very time consuming so either your system needs to be really automated and integrated with other systems or it really won't work. At those figures you'd be turning over £100k, VAT registration, keeping good accounts.
Don't expect any return in 2 months, in fact to make it work with this level of investment I wouldn't expect any for years unless the margins can be boosted.
Setting up a website full of "products" online and hoping products will move doesn't work unless you have cash to throw at advertising, then because you're not stocking the products you're relying on supply chain to pick/pack/post (additional cost) and you're a middle man that will be contacted to handle any issues.
Even if you manage a 10% profit on a £20 product once everything is taken into account (assume £12 buy price, £4 postage + packing, £2 towards development and payment processing), to get £10k in cash at the end you'd need to shift 5,000 units but your £2k startup would only allow you to buy 100 units, but those 100 units would have to sell every working day to achieve that level of income you'd need and if you're importing you can't get stock in that quick. Also trying to pick and pack 100 orders in a day is very time consuming so either your system needs to be really automated and integrated with other systems or it really won't work. At those figures you'd be turning over £100k, VAT registration, keeping good accounts.
Don't expect any return in 2 months, in fact to make it work with this level of investment I wouldn't expect any for years unless the margins can be boosted.
Yes, that has been a concern of mine, VAT really eats into the margins. However the reason why I think it might work is the ability for this particular idea to scale in terms of the eventual number of products capable of being listed on the site.
It's got a couple of ways of generating revenue. Some with low margins, some with higher margins, so if I can get people on the site for the low margin items, hopefully I can make some money with the higher margin items.
I've got pretty good access to a portion of my target market, so I'm not too concerned about marketing yet. If I can get the prices right and make the website flow as well as I envisage and work well with the value add features I'm thinking, then I'm hoping word will get out.
Most of the products I will not be stocking personally or doing any of the packaging and shipping. It will all be fulfilled professionally elsewhere to begin with, so I just have to work on getting the orders in, placing the orders with suppliers, admin and CS.
Many of the products I don't have to pay for until I order them, as they're being drop shipped, so my money isn't tied up in them. So it costs me nothing to have them 'In Stock', it just costs my time to generate them and administer the shop.
I agree it will be a very tall order to shift enough product to hit my goal in 2 months. Luckily as this shouldn't be too capital intensive I've still got a little cash to play with in case I think of any other ideas or encounter any other opportunities in the mean time.
Time is my main adversary right now seeing as I can only work on this part time and I think it will take me another week or two to get the website to a point where I'm ready to start promoting it.
It's got a couple of ways of generating revenue. Some with low margins, some with higher margins, so if I can get people on the site for the low margin items, hopefully I can make some money with the higher margin items.
I've got pretty good access to a portion of my target market, so I'm not too concerned about marketing yet. If I can get the prices right and make the website flow as well as I envisage and work well with the value add features I'm thinking, then I'm hoping word will get out.
Most of the products I will not be stocking personally or doing any of the packaging and shipping. It will all be fulfilled professionally elsewhere to begin with, so I just have to work on getting the orders in, placing the orders with suppliers, admin and CS.
Many of the products I don't have to pay for until I order them, as they're being drop shipped, so my money isn't tied up in them. So it costs me nothing to have them 'In Stock', it just costs my time to generate them and administer the shop.
I agree it will be a very tall order to shift enough product to hit my goal in 2 months. Luckily as this shouldn't be too capital intensive I've still got a little cash to play with in case I think of any other ideas or encounter any other opportunities in the mean time.
Time is my main adversary right now seeing as I can only work on this part time and I think it will take me another week or two to get the website to a point where I'm ready to start promoting it.