Day One: Building a Business From Zero
Transcript
What We Cover Today
This is day one. Zero dollars, zero customers, zero products. I’m documenting every day of building this business and teaching you everything I learn along the way.
Today’s agenda:
- Business licenses and how to get one
- Setting up a business bank account
- Making your first dollar online with eBay
Business Licenses: The First Step
If you want to take yourself seriously, you need to get an LLC. I’ve pulled together links for every single state’s small business website on my State-by-State Business License Guide. These are free government resources that walk you through exactly what you need.
Key points:
- Usually costs $50-$100
- You register as a “registered agent” (this puts your info public)
- You can pay a company to be your registered agent if you don’t want your info out there
- Don’t pay hundreds or thousands for this - it’s simple to DIY
- Some cities require their own business license too (I have both state and city)
Your state’s business website will walk you through getting an EIN and FEIN - it’s all online at the state and federal level.
Business Bank Account
Once you have your business license, you can open a business bank account. They’ll ask for your EIN/FEIN information.
I recommend BlueVine - you can set up an account in about 15 minutes. I have multiple BlueVine accounts because they’re so easy to use.
Critical rule: Keep your finances separate. That’s the whole point of the LLC. Don’t co-mingle personal and business funds. And don’t spend out of it yet - build your bankroll first. Don’t even think about paying yourself.
Why eBay?
Even if you don’t want to be a full-time eBay seller, this is a solid way to get startup capital without going into debt, borrowing money, or taking a second job. I’m just trying to get my first $1,000 to fund my actual business.
For the complete system, check out my eBay Best Practices Guide.
The eBay System: Quick Reference
Target $50 Average Sale Value
If you post a $75 item, balance it with a $25 item. If you have five $10 items, bundle them as one $50 lot. This is a monthly average target.
40% Profit Margin
eBay fees run 10-20% when you factor in taxes, shipping, and promotions. Aim for 40% profit margin to walk away with 15-20% in your pocket.
50% Sell-Through Rate (Monthly)
- Below 25%? Nobody wants your items or they’re priced too high
- Above 75%? You’re selling too fast - raise your prices
- 50% is the sweet spot
List $300-$350 Per Day
That’s only 6-7 listings if your average is $50. eBay rewards consistency. When you do this daily with a 50% sell-through rate, you’re looking at $100-$200 per day after 6 months.
Never Below $20
Minimum price for any listing. Lower than that and you’re wasting time or losing money.
Free Shipping Always
Your goal is “fast and free.” Ship within 24 hours if you can (I do 3 business days because life). Roll shipping costs into your item price - buyers filter by free shipping.
How to Price Items
Example: Book from thrift store
| Cost | Amount |
|---|---|
| Item cost | $12.00 |
| Shipping materials | $1.50 |
| Shipping label | $5.50 |
| Total COGS | $19.00 |
COGS = Cost of Goods and Services (your total input cost)
Add 40% margin → $28 listing price (free shipping)
Important: Before you buy anything, check sold listings on eBay (not current listings). Filter by “Sold Items” to see what people actually pay.
Sourcing Inventory
When you run out of your own stuff to sell:
- Thrift stores (learn their restock schedules)
- Garage sales, yard sales, flea markets
- Church and community sales
- Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist
- Discord and Reddit communities
For the full breakdown on sourcing, check my eBay Sourcing Guide.
The key insight: Become a member of the community you’re selling to. If you love what you’re selling, people will bring things to you. Don’t be a scalper - build a slow, stable, honest business with integrity.
Long-term success requires building your own network: your own website, social media presence, and pipeline where people bring items to you.
Transcript
Hey, my name’s Matt. I’m building a company. This is day one. I have zero dollars, zero customers, zero products. I’m going to run you through every day of building this business out and hopefully teaching you as many things as I possibly can along the way.
Let me start with this. We’re going to focus on business licenses today. I want to briefly touch on that. We’re going to cover how to get a business bank account if you don’t know anything about doing that. And then we’re also going to cover how to make our first dollar online with our own business.
And it’s something you’ve probably all heard: eBay, baby.
This is not going to be some flipping junk or garbage. It’s not going to be a course. Never have a course. Never have a cohort. Never have anything like that. It’s just going to be daily videos of what I am actually doing to get my business going.
The best way to get money when you’re starting and you don’t know what you’re doing - you just know you want to do it and you’re going to need money to do it - is eBay. Sell your old stuff. Sell the stuff you don’t want anymore. If you don’t have anything to sell, you can always go to thrift stores, go to garage sales, buy something to flip.
Even if you don’t want to be a full-time eBay seller like me - my eBay selling is not my long-term goal. I’m just trying to get enough capital, which is money that you can use to spend to fuel your business. We really need to start thinking about money as fuel. That’s probably going to be the first paradigm shift if you want to start your business.
Money may seem unable to obtain. It might be like an enigma or it might just be this thing that you show up to work and get. But you have to understand that money is fuel and we need to use that fuel to keep our business alive.
I’m going to cover the tips and what it takes to be a full-time eBayer just to be thorough. But I’m really just trying to get my first thousand so I can have that nest egg to bankroll my actual business.
Really, even if you want to build an app, if you want a startup, if you want to do any kind of business, eBay is a really solid way to get money to start it without going into debt, without having to borrow money, without having to take on a second job. And it’s very easy to be successful with it alongside your day job.
Quick Setup Basics
You need a business license. If you want to take yourself seriously, you need to get an LLC. I have on my website all the links for every single state small business website. These are free websites that help you through what you need to get a business license in your state.
This is different from state to state. Usually it’s $50 to $100. You register as what’s called a registered agent. This does put your contact information and address out into the public world. If this is a problem or you don’t want to do it, you can pay a company to be a registered agent. But you shouldn’t be paying these services thousands or hundreds of dollars to register your company.
You either want a registered agent or you just want to do it yourself and pay that business license fee that’s either $50 or $100 in most cases. Then in some cities, you’re going to need your own business license for that. I have a state license and then I got a city license. To get my city license, I had to actually go into the courthouse, but it only took like 20 minutes.
That’s going to be your first hurdle where your brain is like “I don’t understand this, I don’t know what I’m doing.” You just have to push through it. If you can’t get your business license and you can’t figure your business license out, you’re not going to be a successful business person. So start there. Get your business license.
Then you can go and get a business bank account because they’re going to ask you for the information that comes with that business license - an EIN and an FEIN. Your state’s business website will walk you through the specific steps to get one of those. It’s all online at the state and federal level, very easy to do.
I would recommend BlueVine. You can get a BlueVine business bank account in like 15 minutes. That’s what I did today - set up BlueVine this morning for 15 minutes.
You want to keep your finances separate to protect yourself. That’s the whole point of the LLC. You do not want to co-mingle your bank account personal funds with your business bank account. Keep it separate. Keep it that way for a while. And you don’t want to spend out of it. You’re going to want to keep building up your bankroll. Don’t even think about paying yourself yet.
The eBay System
The key is it’s very easy to sell on eBay. Let me run through the theory and the tips.
Number one: $50 target for average sale value.
If you post an item for sale that’s $75, you can post another one for $25 - you’re going to average out to $50. If you just keep posting $50 auctions, if you have five items that are $10, don’t post them individually. Post them together as one lot for $50.
The reason you do this is because our profit margin on eBay is 40%. eBay has a ton of fees - they’re around 10-20% by the time you calculate in taxes, shipping, and their promotions. So you can bank on walking away with 15-20% if you aim for a 40% profit margin. This will cover your eBay fees, shipping and handling materials - all of it.
50% sell-through rate monthly.
You can check these metrics inside of your seller dashboard. If you see that your sell-through rate is 25%, nobody wants your items - maybe they’re priced too high. If you see that your sell-through rate is 75%, you’re selling too fast. Your prices are too low. Take your prices up higher so you sell less and get back to that 50% mark. That’s the sweet spot to let you know that your prices are good and your products are in demand.
List $300 to $350 per day in listings.
If your average sale value is $50, this is only 6-7 listings. And never below $20. Don’t ever come to me with something under $20. The minimum price you want to sell something on eBay is 20 bucks. Anything lower and you’re wasting your time, you’re probably going to lose money on it, or it’s going to sit forever.
When you’re posting this every day, eBay sees that you’re serious. You can do all this for free - you don’t have to pay for an eBay store. You can list like 10,000 items without having an eBay store.
When you’re posting this every day, eBay is going to show your listings to more people because they know that you’re consistent. If you’re listing this per day and you have a 50% sell-through rate, you’re going to make $100 to $200 a day just by showing up and posting $350 of listings. That’s pretty cool.
When you’re starting out, including packing up your items and driving to the post office, this will probably take you two hours a day. Right in that sweet spot of doing it after work or before work.
Free shipping always.
Your goal is to have your auctions show fast and free. Ship within 24 hours, same business day if you can. I personally ship within three business days because I have a ton of kids and work to do.
You’re not actually shipping things for free - you’re rolling the cost of shipping into your profit margins. It just looks like free shipping. Humans are still pretty much apes - if we see free shipping, we’re happier. People sort by free shipping. They sort by lowest cost with free shipping.
How to Price
You source an item from the thrift store. Say you buy a book of William Blake poetry for $12.
- Item cost: $12
- Shipping materials: $1.50
- Shipping label: $5.50
- Total COGS: $19
COGS is Cost of Goods and Services - your material cost, your input cost. This is how much you paid to get this item made and out the door.
Our cost is not $12, it’s $19. This is how we offer that free shipping - we’re not actually offering free shipping, we’re just making them pay for it in one lump sum.
When you add 40% to this, you get around $28. That’s our item - above our $20 limit, right around that 40% margin. That’s what we post on eBay. We know that if we sell this, it covers our shipping, taxes, eBay fees, and we walk out with at least 20% profit.
How do you know you can sell this item for $28 before you spend that $12?
You price out using sold listings. Do not just open up eBay, search for your item, and see the current listed auctions - those are meaningless. You have to go into the search filter and put in sold auctions. That way you see the true value, what people are actually paying for, what the demand dictates.
Sourcing Your Inventory
If you’re like me and just want to sell a bunch of stuff on hand to get money, this might not be as important. But if you find that you like this, you have to source products. You’re going to run out of what you have on hand.
You’re going to be constantly going to thrift stores, looking out for garage sales, yard sales, flea markets, community and local church sales. There’s actually a lot more of those around you than you’re probably aware.
They’re drying up because everybody and their mother is flipping on eBay now. This is a pretty old and tired strategy, but hopefully with these tips, this is what helps you rise above.
You have to know your local thrift store timings, go a bunch, talk to the workers. There’s ways you can game the thrift store system - find out when the new stuff comes in, when the hot stuff comes in. You have to network.
During cold months, you can use Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, Discord, Reddit communities. You have to become a member of the community you’re in, and you kind of have to niche into something specific.
When you niche into a specific thing and you become a member of that community, if you truly love what you’re doing and love the things you’re selling, people will come to you to sell their things.
That’s the difference between being a leech reseller who waits in line to buy something with the intent so a true fan doesn’t get it so they can sell it for 5x on eBay. You don’t want to be one of those people. Those people are terrible. They’re not true businessmen. They’re going to crash and burn with a ton of inventory and lose all their cash flow.
You want to build a slow, stable, and honest business with integrity. You have to network. You have to become a member of your community and actually supply a service by finding, refurbishing, cleaning up, and putting items back out to the community you’re in.
If you really want to take this to 100k full-time, you’re going to have to have your own website, do your own social media thing, establish your own pipeline where people are bringing their things to you to sell. Thrift stores and garage sales are going to dry up - you can’t solely rely on those to get the volume you need.
Scalping isn’t going to last long term. It’ll get you some quick hits, a quick boost of dopamine, but at that point you’re essentially just gambling. It’s not a long-term play.
Final Thoughts
If you follow these rules, you’re going to be successful. It’s a numbers game. It’s that simple.
My goal is to share 20 years - almost 22 years - of business experience in sales, marketing, and software development with as many people as possible. I’ll never have a course, never have anything like that. I’m just going to do it all here, show you what works, show you my failures too.
It’s going to be daily vlog style like this of just getting it done, showing up every day.
Thanks for watching. Subscribe. I’ll see you tomorrow.