exposing my failures... #business #sidehustle

I've made a few videos speaking about business ideas I've pursued which have gone well, so, to balance that out, here are five of the biggest failures I've had. The first one almost got me excluded from school. When I was 12, a candy necklace craze took over because if you pulled the elastic tight and bit the sweets in half, the remaining half turned into a sniper bullet, and kids were pinging them at teachers' heads. The school banned them and got the local shops to stop selling them, so I bulk bought them off eBay and sold them to other kids for five times the price. It was going good until someone snitched on me and the head of year threatened me with suspension. Looking back, I’m just sad this was stifled because I was on my way to becoming the next Willy Wonka. When I was 19, I tried starting a cake business, selling them to cafes and making birthday cakes. I gave up quite quickly. I just severely underestimated the stress of writing 'Happy Birthday' in cursive using buttercream. Lesson learned here: don't try and turn everything into a business. Some things are better left as hobbies. In 2015, having never even grown a moustache in my life, I decided to start a beard oil company. I bulk bought massive amounts of beard oil, decanted it into hundreds of little bottles with my logo on them, then tried to sell them on Amazon. Long story short, nobody bought them and I had to basically give the bottles away for free. Lesson learned here was, actually do some market research before pursuing a business. And then we have the Instagram page regrets. In 2017 I built up several pages to 500,000 followers and eventually sold one for $25,000, which sounds good, but knowing what I know now about how much you can make from brand deals and digital products… $25,000 for 500,000 followers was a poor deal and in terms of potential, was probably one of the more expensive lessons I’ve learned. Let me know what your biggest business or side hustle failure was down below.