Editor’s note: This article was first published in March 2014. All figures are as of that month: Cardwell aged 21, over 100,000 Facebook fans, sales above $100,000 a month, and $1.1 million in revenue since 13 December 2013. Facebook’s page-reach and advertising rules have changed since.
Ben Cardwell, 21, was working part-time at a petrol station while finishing his studies, but he decided to take advantage of Facebook’s millions of users, and he is now generating around $1 million in sales through Facebook, according to Business Insider. The truth is that his business idea is within anyone’s reach.
Cardwell’s idea was to earn some extra money using new technologies, so he started out selling clothes and electronics through TradeMe, New Zealand’s version of eBay.
Sales were slow to take off, so he created a Facebook page to show his friends and contacts on the social network the kind of clothes and products he was selling. He found that lots of his contacts liked his posts and shared his products, and before long he had a legion of fans on his page, Deal Man.
One night he sold $800 worth of goods, and he saw before his eyes the chance to start a big business using the social network.
In August 2013, Cardwell got serious and created his own online store, Dealman.co.nz, a very simply designed shop built on the Shopify platform.
He began posting consistently, uploading his products to the Facebook page up to seven times a day. His page soon reached 100,000 fans and sales were already above $100,000 a month. The young entrepreneur quit his job at the petrol station and even dropped out of his studies to devote himself fully to the business he was building, which was going from strength to strength.
But Cardwell fell victim to Facebook’s algorithm and to a change in the rules of the game: Facebook decided that page posts would no longer reach all of a page’s fans. Cardwell realised that his more than 100,000 fans were of no use to him if his posts only reached a small percentage of his own followers.
Sales began to slow down, because his products were barely reaching his followers and potential buyers.
Cardwell started to despair. He had left everything to devote himself to this business, and now that business was going downhill. The young entrepreneur thought about writing to Facebook to complain and tried selling on Twitter and even on other social networks, but nothing worked.
The only reality was that if Cardwell wanted to reach his potential buyers, he would now have to pay for it by buying Facebook ads.
At Christmas 2013, Cardwell decided to buy Facebook ads, and he reached his followers again, pushing his sales back up, although with the added cost of having to pay to reach his customers.
From 13 December until today, according to Business Insider, Cardwell has brought in $1.1 million in revenue, which is not bad at all for a former petrol station attendant.
As we can see, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel to build a profitable business today if we know how to take advantage of technology and the millions of users connected to one another on social networks. People just have to like your product, and statistically, a percentage of them will be willing to buy. All you have to do is find a way to reach the people who might be interested in what you sell.
Further reading
Featured image: Michal Klajban, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
