Start Yours

In the world of TikTok, genuine content reigns supreme. Unlike other social media platforms, users often favor raw and engaging videos over highly edited and curated posts. This stark difference in content is what makes TikTok special, and gives creators a connection to their audience that would be hard to find anywhere else. Many businesses are thriving on TikTok and their posts are leading to ongoing sales.
In this episode of Start Yours, Aleisha is joined by Oberlo TikTok master Neal Chauhan who shares a helpful update on how you can use TikTok to build your business. The biggest creators all started from the same place you did, and over time, we're able to amass an incredible following. Nothing happens overnight, but slow and steady growth can work miracles. To get you started, listen to the episode and take note of ten of Neal's favourite growth hacks to master TikTok.

In this episode of Start Yours, Aleisha speaks with Bryan Clayton, founder of GreenPal. Bryan built his lawn mowing business from the age of 16 to a $10M a year business before a successful exit. Then after a brief retirement, he decided there was more to do and decided to convert his experience and passion for business into a whole new company. Bryan went on to launch GreenPal, a $20M a year business that connects homeowners with local lawn care professionals. GreenPal has been called the "Uber for lawn care” by Entrepreneur magazine and has over 100,000 active users completing thousands of transactions per day.
Bryan‘s interest and expertise are related to entrepreneurialism, small business growth, marketing and bootstrapping businesses from zero revenue to profitability and exit.

Taking the leap to start your own business can be exciting, scary and a new challenge for many budding entrepreneurs but how much money do you need to earn before you ditch your day job? How do we plan for success (while also embracing the possibility of failure?) and what a healthy risks when it comes to launching and sustaining a business?
In this episode of Start Yours, Alesha is joined by Certified Financial Planner, Fiona, aka The Millennial Money Woman, who shares her insights and tips about how you can plan for your financial future as an entrepreneur while still feeling spontaneous with your business choices and ensuring that you have a plan and a financial runway to help boost your chances of success and reducing financial and mental stress.

Kamil Sattar went from failing grades and working two retail jobs to making 7-figures with dropshipping. Now he runs a successful Youtube channel, Ecom King, where he helps aspiring entrepreneurs build successful e-commerce businesses.
In this podcast, Kamil shares his expert advice for dropshipping on any budget. Whether you’ve got a few hundred dollars saved up, are bootstrapping it with no budget, or are ready to invest a few thousand dollars.
Keep listening to learn how to find a marketing strategy that works for your budget, how many hours a day each strategy will take, and how to make sure you don’t waste your investment.

How do the stories that we tell in our advertising and marketing copy lead to sales?
Does putting pressure on our customers by making them feel like they must buy now, actually work against our success?
How do we create a brand that has integrity and is profitable?
On this episode of Start Yours, Aleisha speaks with marketing expert Amie Finlayson, an online business strategist and host of the Good Authority Podcast. Amie shares her thoughts on growing an online business that doesn't have to compromise your values or manipulate your audience and how to structure your business in a feel-good way with the tools to make your marketing ethical, effortless and effective.

We're always being told that we should be multitasking to get things done but really is doing 50 tasks at once helping us or dragging us down?
In this episode of Start Yours, Aleisha is joined by renowned productivity expert, speaker and best-selling author, Dave Crenshaw.
Dave provides a solution for the chaos of distraction that multitasking creates―and a way to combat the temptation to constantly switch between tasks.
We talk about remote work and the befits of strategic procrastination, how to harness our attention and Dave provides us with easy-to-follow instructions to start practising better habits...now!
A winning episode of the show, no matter your working situation.

If you have ever considered launching a digital product (or an add on product that boosts your physical products sales), then this is the episode of Start Yours for you.
Our guest, Dan Henry went from a broke college dropout who delivered pizza to creating a 10 million dollar online business. Now he is an 8 figure earner and a Wall Street Journal, Amazon, and USA Today Bestselling Author.
During his early business journey, Dan accumulated $250k in IRS debt which in turn motivated him to create his first education program in an effort to pay off the debt but ended up earning 15 million from that business.
In this episode, we'll share how to create a digital product, how to choose a price point and how to scale.

Our most listened to episode of 2020...so good we wanted to play it again!
In this episode of Start Yours, we delve into the ins and outs of print on demand, from production to product sourcing, customer service to making sure that your products arrive on time to your customer. Done right, print on demand can be a great way to run an e-commerce business without having stock on hand.
Aleisha's guest is Sarah Chrisp the founder of the very popular Youtube channel, Wholesale Ted. Her content focuses on case studies on successful eCommerce stores, tutorials, product sourcing strategies and focuses on lots of hints to launch your own enterprise. She’s an absolute gun when it comes to print on demand and in this episode, she shares everything you need to know to start or improve your print on demand store.

This episode of Start Yours, Aleisha speaks with Mike Zeller — a business architect who strategizes with entrepreneurs on finding your zone of genius, creating an irresistible Offer and how to fuel your momentum.
Mike works with his clients to pinpoint their deepest purposes, greatest gifts, and highest potential to serve and influence the world and in this interview, Mike shares how you can tap into your very own zone of to build a sustainable, highly-successful business while removing unconscious emotional blocks that may sabotage progress.
By the end of this episode, you will be searching for a mastermind group to join and reflecting on who you surround yourself with and how that could affect the success of your business goals.

2021 is right around the corner and you're ready to start your eCommerce empire. But, what kind of Shopify store should you build and what should you sell?
Some of the best eCommerce business owners swear by the branded-niche model: A Shopify store that sells products in one niche and caters all of it's branding and content to one audience.
That's why in this episode of Start Yours you’ll learn about 21 high-potential niches to start selling for 2021.

It took Andreas Koenig and Alexander Pecka three tries before they finally found success with dropshipping and boy did they find success! Their online pet business has just hit an annual turnover of $10 million. In this episode of Start Yours, Alexander and Andreas share their secrets to scaling, how they work together as a team and what it takes to build a dropshipping business and brand from scratch that is now a big player in their niche.

You’ve heard the saying, “you need to spend money to make money.” Is it true? Not today! In this episode of Start Yours, you’re going to learn 15 ways to make your first sale without spending a single penny on marketing or advertising.
Facebook ads are the gold standard when it comes to advertising for dropshippers. But advertising on Facebook is hard to learn and costs a lot of money. As a new dropshipper, you’re just looking to get a taste of success before you dive into hour-long Facebook ad courses.
That’s why in this episode, Magda and Jessica will share a bunch of ways for you to learn how to use viral Tweets, Facebook groups, TikTok compilations and more to get your first sale for free without any marketing experience.

Being an entrepreneur means that often in the early stages of running our businesses, we have to wear a lot of job hats. We find ourselves doing everything from social media management, to product photography, customer service outreach to website design. It’s great to have skills and use them but also, so many of us find ourselves stressed and overwhelmed by menial tasks when we should be focusing on important aspects of the business like scaling and product sourcing.
In this episode of Start Yours, Aleisha shares 4 easy tasks that can be affordably delegated and will give you extra breathing (and creating time) and help to make sure that you are focused on the tasks and jobs that matter the most.

Did you know that you can use Facebook as a search engine to source winning dropshipping and ecommerce products?
In this episode of Start Yours, we share the easy steps to using Facebook to search for hot products and then we share three easy tips to help improve your advertising listings, that you can update and change your current advertising today, to make a BIG difference.
All that and more on Oberlo's Start Yours!

The path to dropshipping success and profits is not always clear and for many merchants who are new to the business, it can feel overwhelming, especially when there are so many 'get rich quick' messages out there that promise easy wins but then often disappoint.
Our guest today is Daecian Sparkes-Young, a successful Australian dropshipper who is passionate about educating new dropshippers and helping to change some of the attitudes towards dropshipping and the industry. Daecian shares his philosophy about consistency and how to increase sales, his commitment to building a reputable brand and how his devotion to building a business that he is truly proud of (and that has longevity) is far more positive to him that quick wins.

There are a lot of myths about dropshipping out there. These dropshipping myths can leave people feeling overwhelmed, frustrated, and disappointed once they take action. In this episode of Start Yours, we’re going to debunk the dropshipping myths and lay out all the facts so that you know what you’re actually signing up for in running an ecommerce or dropshipping business. So let’s find out if dropshipping is right for you and bust some of the most common myths.

Many people think starting an ecommerce business has to be a full-time gig.
Sure, there are many things you have to do to get it up and running and even more to maintain it after it's launched.
But that doesn't necessarily mean having to ditch your day job. Sometimes, starting small can have its benefits.
In today's episode of Start Yours, we're joined by David Gaylord. David's one of the three founding members of Bushbalm.com, a highly successful daily skincare and ingrown hair prevention product line, as well as a Shopify employee on the operations team.
David and his partners started small and set up systems and automated where they could. And as you'll hear, there are advantages to their strategy.
Last year, they hit their very first million in sales and are hoping to repeat this feat in 2020.
If you have a winning idea, are thinking about developing your own product, or maybe white labelling something that's working for you, then this is the episode to listen to because we'll be diving into all of that and getting juicy tips and insights from David.
We hope you'll consider subscribing to our podcast and don't forget to check out the Oberlo blog for more content.

Back in 2015, Pierre Emmanuel leaped into the unknown when he and his wife relocated from France to the United States.
After discovering some of his clients were dropshipping using Oberlo and Shopify, Pierre decided to try it out for himself.
It was a match made in heaven.
Over the next few years, Pierre built his store, which is in the problem-solving niche, to the point of making over $1.6 million in revenue. The success has allowed him to provide a more comfortable lifestyle for his wife and his young son.
In this episode of Start Yours, we dig into some of his biggest dropshipping challenges, the techniques he used to grow his store, and how he finds his winning products.

We're going to be straight with you: Starting an online store is not easy.
Expect mistakes, frustration, more mistakes, and more frustration.
But the good news is, if you can persevere through it and, success will be greeting you at the end of that tunnel.
Having spoken to our fair share of successful merchants and heard their stories, we know just how hard it can be.
While there's no easy road to success, there are mistakes you can avoid. In this episode, we're joined by Oberlo's very own social care advisor, Gurj Singh.
Gurj has collated a list of the most common things to avoid when you are launching a new brand. Together, we dive into sourcing products, creating a website, customer care, and the importance of transparency and communication.
If you're just starting out or aspiring to become an ecommerce business owner, this will be a knowledge-filled and practical episode for you so definitely tune in.
We have plenty more of such episodes and if you're interested, subscribe to Start Yours so you never miss a single one.

How do I start marketing my business?
Is Facebook or Google a better platform?
What about influencer marketing?
How much do I need to spend?
Whether you already have an ecommerce business set up or are looking to start one, you will have asked these questions at one point or another.
In this episode of Start Yours, we go full-on into marketing and cover everything from the basics to influencer marketing and building trust. And to do that, we're joined by Erik Huberman, a premium marketer and the man behind Hawke Media, the fastest-growing marketing consultancy in the US that's been valued at over $75 million.
He's got some big names in his clientele list, as well as start-ups and everything in between, including ecommerce businesses.
Keen to grow your business? Then tune in now for Erik's marketing tips and information.
If you enjoy the podcast, we hope you'll consider subscribing. Also, don't forget to hop on over to our blog for more ecommerce and entrepreneurship content.

Some people are born with a love for the #hustle but like a lot of us dropshippers, Harry Coleman has worked really hard to hit the highs of ecommerce success.
In this episode of Start Yours, Aleisha shares Harry's story, from working a day job as well as building his empire (and taking naps in his car at lunch to survive) to becoming the owner of three stores, and the manager of up to 10 staff. His stores combined to generate over $5 million revenue in 2018!
Listen to learn Harry's tips for million dollar success and check out the accompanying blog.

The holiday shopping season may not be for another month, but as an ecommerce business owner, whether you have it as a side hustle or are running it full-time, this is the time of the year you definitely do not want to miss out on.
To guide you through that, we're joined by Oberlo's very own Magda Kuzminski, a marketing expert on our team. Magda is going to go through, step-by-step, what you need to do to successfully prepare for your Black Friday marketing campaign. She will be dropping valuable, insightful, and practical knowledge bombs so if you're looking to boost those sales, this is one episode you want to tune into.
Enjoying our podcast? Do subscribe so you never miss out on the latest episodes.

Oberlo has already helped dropshipping merchants find and sell over 85 million products around the world. One of those merchants is Tim Kock. We set Tim the challenge of building a dropshipping store from scratch and making $10,000 in the first month.
In this episode of Start Yours, David joins Tim to talk about his journey: from how he selected his product to the biggest challenges he faced and how he overcame them to get his first sale. And then a whole bunch of sales after that.
How I Made $8,873 In 31 Days Selling Sunglasses: Check out the accompanying Case Study blog and be sure to subscribe to Start Yours to hear all of our episodes and catch up on the back catalogue.

When most people think about marketing on Instagram, they think about ads or influencers. But not Kamron and Varun. The high school friends and business partners leveraged Instagram in a lesser-known, different way to run their business to success: niche pages. The teenage duo joins us in this episode of Start Yours to tell us how they made $30,000 of revenue in three months using Instagram niche pages.
Despite their young age (year 11 and 12 of high school), they have a bunch of entrepreneurial experience under their belts and dropped plenty of knowledge bombs during our chat. The fact that they did it all while juggling school makes it all the more impressive.
If you're looking for tips on how to buy, build, and use Instagram niche pages to grow your ecommerce business, then this episode for you. It's also full of entrepreneurial inspiration as Kamron and Varun also talk about their motivations and mistakes made along the way.
We hope you'll enjoy this episode and that you'll consider subscribing to our podcast.

Thinking about getting in on the trend of video and live streaming for your business and not quite sure how and where to begin?
If you've got questions like what you need to start and what video content you should put out swirling around your head, then you've come to the right place.
In this episode of Start Yours, we welcome back our very own video guru, Neal Chauhan, the brains and face of Oberlo's TikTok channel.
Together, we dive into the potential of video content for your business, production values, what platform you should be on, the gear you need, and some tricks and hacks to get you started with producing videos to grow your business.
If you enjoy our podcast, we hope you'll consider subscribing. Our Oberlo blog is also full of valuable insights and information you need to start and supercharge your business so hop on over and check it out.

After a couple of false starts creating a dropshipping store, this episode's guest, Tze Chan, stumbled upon a winning dropshipping product niche and has been riding the wave of success ever since.
Tze shares how he sourced his product, how he knew he was on to a winning niche and the step he took to make his store stand out, including writing winning copy and tweaking his product photography.

If you are starting a business or ecommerce store, do you need an email list? How do you go about building a list and what is an email funnel?
In this episode of Start Yours, we speak to Andrew Roach who manages Oberlo.com's email communications about email best practices, offers and most importantly ensuring that your email communication with potential customers provides value to their experience and customer journey that makes them want to invest in your product or service. .

There's no denying TikTok has taken over the social media scene (and teenagers' lives) by storm.
As an ecommerce business owner, you should already be on the platform and taking advantage of everything it has to offer because, well, tick-tock, time is passing you by and every second you're not on it is wasted potential.
But what makes TikTok stand out from other social media sites and how should you market on it?
To answer these questions and more, we're joined by Oberlo's very own TikTok master (@Oberlo) Neal Chauhan, who will let us in on some trade secrets of his.
If you're looking to understand this latest social media phenomenon, you're going to want to tune in to this episode.
We hope you enjoy the podcast and if so, do subscribe!

Before John Lee Dumas launched Entrepreneurs on Fire, he was… miserable. John had what from the outside looked like a nice shiny job in corporate finance, but on the inside, the whole scene was driving him nuts. He felt trapped, and to break free, he jumped into the deep end and started a business whose sole purpose was helping other people start their business.
The first 13 months of this project were pretty underwhelming, as he’ll explain, but he kept at it, kept at it, and eventually… ka-ching.
John now makes six figures a month from Entrepreneurs on Fire, and he joined us to talk about that success, sure, but also the self-doubt that used to haunt him, the morning routine that does religiously to keep his inner game in check, and how he knew it was time to ditch his steady, stable life and launch something of his own.

When Vlad moved from Ukraine to the United States, his end goal was to start a business but the steep learning curve and time-consuming process meant he needed to secure a job to pay the bills while he worked it all out.
So he did. He got a job at eBay, one of the biggest tech companies in the world.
When he finally had enough money saved up, he quit – a decision that many thought was crazy – and launched his own business. Today, he's the proud owner of a business (not his first) that brought in over $200,000 in sales last year. But this success isn't without its ups and downs.
Vlad joins us in this episode of Start Yours to share with us his journey to success and the lessons he's learned along the way. If you're just starting out and need some insights on finding dropshipping success, you should definitely tune in.

In this episode of Start Yours, the top 10 questions about dropshipping marketing.
Questions like, how much money should I spend on marketing?
How much does Facebook Ads cost?
How many products should I sell?
We sourced these questions directly from you. From entrepreneurs, from dropshippers, from people who want to know more about how to market their businesses.

Launching a new project or business in the midst of the pandemic isn’t everyone’s idea of fun but serial entrepreneurs Shannah and Jeff Game saw it as their next big challenge, setting out to create the Money Mindset Journal - a journal to help cultivate a healthy money mindset, set intentional goals, and achieve your dreams.
In this episode of Start Yours, we speak with Shannah, who is a Certified Financial Planner with an MBA and host of Millenial Money Podcast about launching a Kickstarter campaign to finding the right suppliers to make the product come to life.
We guarantee that you will feel motivated and ready to take the leap into your dream project or business after hearing Shannah share her story and what is next for her business and products.

When it comes to running their dropshipping business, Yuliya Chernykhovskaya and Mike Pavlou are committed to doing things differently.
This entrepreneurial couple from New Jersey are the owners of an accessories ecommerce store, built using the dropshipping business model. While building their business, they’ve made a point to ignore much of the traditional advice for dropshippers.
And the results so far? Pretty exceptional.
They’re only a year in, but so far they’ve had over 10,000 orders and built a band of 40,000 loyal followers across their social profiles. Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned the $200,000 they’ve made in sales revenue.
It’s clear that whatever Yuliya and Mike are doing, it’s working. We hope you enjoy the episode!

This episode's guest is hoping to graduate with his engineering degree in the near future, but study isn’t the only thing taking up 22-year-old, Cole's time. He’s also managing an ecommerce store that’s made over two million dollars in sales since March 2019.
After hearing about ecommerce and dropshipping when he was just 18, Cole quickly became obsessed with learning how to sell online. But his multi million dollar store was no overnight success, it came after some big failures and lessons learned.
Cole shares some of his winning techniques, the importance of mentorship and his plans for after graduation.

When Emma Reid first got into ecommerce, it reminded her of one of her favorite pastimes – video games. It was addictive, exciting, competitive, and tons of fun. Especially the money: One of her stores generated $500,000 in revenue in just 1 year.
But then things fell apart. Emma’s supplier botched hundreds of orders, she was slammed with angry emails, and over the course of a month she lost $10,000. After that she was fried, burnt-out, game over. She shut down the store and hit pause on the whole thing.
She joins us on Start Yours to explain what went wrong, the lessons she learned, and what she’s doing differently now that she’s back to running another online store.
We hope you enjoy the podcast. If you do, please consider subscribing.

In this episode of Start Yours, David Vranicar looks at how to keep the momentum going when building on your goals and hustling, without feeling the pressure to get sucked into the world of fake gurus and get rich quick schemes that often over promise and under deliver.
Our guest is Mario Nawfal who’s Instagram bio sums up his career in one sentence… ‘He has made and lost millions many times over’.
Mario started his first e-commerce business when he was a finance student with $300 in his pocket in 2012. After going door to door selling blenders, he came up with the idea of ditching the in-person hustle and selling them online. From there, his first company, Froothie Australia was born.
Mario propelled Froothie to $1m in year one and over $10m in year two, all bootstrapped!
Mario has a lot to say about so-called e-commerce gurus and investing in programs that can cost you time and money but not propel you in the direction you want to be.

If there's one thing many entrepreneurs don't consider when building their business is the importance of failing faster.
It may sound counterproductive, but as you'll find out in our latest podcast episode of Start Yours, it's anything but.
It's the mentality that's propelled dropshipping mega couple, Shishir and Namrata, to creating a successful $800k business... while balancing a full-time job.
In this podcast episode, they take us behind the scenes of their inspirational dropshipping success, share with us some tips, and present The Dropshipping Council.
Whether you're a budding entrepreneur or a seasoned one, there are definitely handy takeaways for you so tune in now!