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Comment by fxtentacle | Hacker News Reader

I used to sell extra naughty bikinis online, in addition to being a consultant for distributed real-time machine learning.

People had a hard time combining the image of a nerd in the basement with that of a flashy sales guy surrounded by models. So I usually didn't mention the bikinis to allow me to charge full nerd pricing for my coding.

This site project brought in roughly €500 monthly with almost no work, because I was renting space in a fulfillment center combined with shopify and a marketing contractor.

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That’s quite interesting combination.

How did you charge the marketing contractor?

I wanted to reached out to marketing contractor but haven’t had much information

Thank you!

The marketing contractor charged me. The way it worked was that if a new email or WhatsApp message or Instagram PM came in, he would get notified and work on it. And he measured the time for each task and then billed me for his time. Since it was usually only a few minutes for each work task, that only summed up to a few hundred $ per month.

As one example of the kind of tasks he handled:

Prospective customers could send in their measurements via WhatsApp and he would then look up into our internal measurement tables to determine which bikini size to order.

Or we would get collaboration invites from Instagram Influencers via PM or E-Mail. He would check their follower counts, bot ratio, etc. and then use an (internal secret) Google Docs to calculate the estimated value for us. He'd then use that to either decline or determine how generous our promotional gift would be.

Nowadays, the concept is called VA = Virtual Assistant, for example like what https://timesvr.com/ offers.

Thanks for your detailed answer! That really helped me learn about it.

All the best with your side business (and all)!

Glad to help :)

I got started with my endeavors from people explaining things to me on programming IRC channels, so despite its bad reputation, advice from random strangers on the internet can be good advice.

As for this particular project, I stopped it when I ran out of bikinis and couldn't buy more at the same conditions anymore. At the same time, competition from China was also arriving in the form of dropshipping. I could have switched suppliers to reduce my purchase costs and remain competitive, but selling a high volume of cheap products is a lot more work than selling a low volume of high priced items.

Oh well, since it was your side-project so I guess letting it go wasn't hard. But you got the core idea of selling online :)

How did you find your marketing contractor? What were they doing?

I met the marketing guy through a business brunch that the DC (a club for online marketers) was organizing every 2 weeks in Saigon back in 2015.

What he did was mostly to reply to whatsapp messages and to grant free bikinis to Instagram influencers.

One particularly good angle was yoga teachers. They'd usually be doing retreats at exotic locations and posting inspirational photos multiple times per day. Plus the yoga teachers that are popular on Instagram tend to be extremely attractive girls doing slightly suggestive poses. So that was a great fit for my bikinis.

And you'd be surprised how cheap Instagram influencers are. There's so many people who want to be famous that it's 100% a buyer's market.

I guess it all makes sense once you spell it out like this, but I suppose that for the long tail after the really popular influencers, it really is a buyers market. Did you use any influencer marketing platforms to manage your influencer representatives, or did you do it pretty manually?

I believe we didn't use any platform, but I'm not entirely sure.

The marketing contractor organized a list of Instagram handles, follower counts, and email addresses. I don't really know from where, but my guess would be that it was from his marketing buddies. I mean it wouldn't make sense for an agency to just grant us direct access to all of their members.

He then initially emailed some of them manually. After our brand became more popular, we sometimes received offers via email or pm. He would then determine the value for us and reply accordingly.

how did you find a manufacturer and the right number of SKUs?

I paid an Italian guy experienced in the fashion industry. He organized all of the bikinis for one upfront purchase price, which also included service fees for him.

But that was a pity later on when I ran out of bikinis and didn't manage to hire him again.

This guy sounds like the key angle on your business. How did you find him in the first place?

Really interested in this question - am looking at a particular clothing niche and wondering whether to just get a run of cheapy print-on-demand clothing, or look for a batch of better quality custom produced stuff.

It's like $12 per print on demand versus $2 per screenprinted ahead of time.

Plus screen printing tends to have much stronger colors and feel more valuable than the offset printing used in on-demand production.

I'd suggest a Kickstarter to finance a 100+ shirt bulk order at $15 per shirt. That way, you have good profit margins and good quality.

Yes, when he couldn't broker another delivery, I stopped selling. He was crucial to the business.

I knew him through a shared friend. I lived in Asia for some years, and that's where most westerners go if they want to create a manufacturing business.

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