How One Person Turned $8,000 into $1.3 Million: Stories Like This Happen Every Day in Global Ecommerce
Stop listening to success stories and start doing. Understanding the difference between making money and building a business.
What This Article Covers
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For those preparing to start a business, side hustle, or make money: It took me two years to understand the difference between entrepreneurship and money-making: Time is a friend to entrepreneurship but an enemy to money-making. Choose what suits you and stop overthinking.
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For those trying global ecommerce: Global ecommerce is about making money. If you're going to do it, stop talking and asking questions. Just do it quietly and find your own small gold mine.
Understanding the Difference
It took me over a year to realize the distinction between these two paths.
Money-making businesses often have something "shady" about them—whether it's the information gap value in the business content or the sense of honor in the business itself.
Entrepreneurship is the opposite. Your business content has no so-called information gap—it's all about real skills and resources. You don't want to hide anything; you want to be open and transparent, even wanting more people to see what you're doing, because that's how your entrepreneurial value grows.
This was one of the reasons for my pain and anxiety throughout the second half of last year—I couldn't even understand what I was anxious about. Until I slowly figured out what I was actually doing and what I really wanted; until I understood the difference between making money and building a business. This led me to make a decisive business transformation attempt at the end of the year.
Global Ecommerce, Personal IP, Knowledge Monetization: What Do I Really Want?
Specifically, What is Money-Making?
The global ecommerce independent store business direction is honestly almost entirely about making money.
Whether it's global ecommerce itself—this business inherently contains too much speculative work. Anyone who knows the industry even a little would look down on us: "Global ecommerce? Isn't that just a bunch of copycats, plagiarists, and non-deliverers?"
And everyone wants to hide their best-selling products, materials, industries, and categories. Even in global ecommerce derivative businesses, the tool sellers or knowledge monetization bloggers want to completely anonymize themselves, lurking on various social media platforms.
Specifically, What is Entrepreneurship?
Self-media personal IP and knowledge monetization entrepreneurship—this industry has no information gap, right? And it's been the same old story for years. I openly put all my free and paid content in front of everyone.
But putting these two together creates awkward contradictions. For example, I'm afraid of revealing my store information (even though it's already been revealed), which prevents me from properly recording many tutorials, or even giving up on them entirely. Or I face constant mental switching—carefully maintaining an identity while handling ecommerce work in the morning, then transforming into "lvsao" to write content in the afternoon. It's quite割裂 (mentally exhausting). And this extends to my overall business focus and future development direction. It's all contradictory.
Money-Making: Time is Your Enemy; Entrepreneurship: Time is Your Friend
Remember the story that went viral recently about the Li Auto owner who turned 8,000 yuan into 1.3 million?
This is absolutely a "money-making" story that every global ecommerce person should read. It's also the "product selection truth" I've emphasized countless times:
As long as you take a user perspective, find pain points you can genuinely feel yourself, then figure out how to spend some cost to provide a solution and bring it to market, there will be countless customers like you willing to pay for it.
Getting a bit off track. Back to money-making and entrepreneurship.
This car owner's story is actually the story of countless global ecommerce individual sellers making money. They discover a low-barrier opportunity, quickly solve it with minimal cost, bring it to the international market, and make a fortune. By the time latecomers discover it, they've already moved on to the next battlefield.
And the reason this friend dared to share openly, as everyone can see, mainly has two points:
- This friend wasn't focused on car products or related ecommerce business; this wasn't his established career.
- His refrigerator shelf was already squeezed out of competitive space.
But fortunately, when one door closes, another opens. His sincere sharing brought him explosive instant traffic, laying groundwork for his self-media career—for better or worse.
His example shows that making money requires keeping things hidden. Even when he didn't hide, industry peers quickly copied him. If he had shown off earlier, he probably would have exited long ago.
You can see: Making money is a race against the narrowing of information gaps. Time is your enemy.
Entrepreneurship, on the other hand, makes time your friend.
You Hear Money-Making Stories for Entertainment, But They Won't Make You the Protagonist
Through this example, I want to extend to global ecommerce and even all industries.
In global ecommerce, I've repeatedly emphasized: Stop taking those "xxx store made xxx million in a month" stories from拆解 (breakdown) bloggers so seriously.
The car owner turned 8,000 into 1.3 million. Are you tempted? Go ahead and try it, see if you fail.
And all those "money-making stories," "money-making IPs," "money-making podcasts" circulating on social media. Even success stories from group chat members in various communities.
Stop just listening to stories! Try doing things quietly! Eventually become the protagonist of the story!
Looking for Protagonists to "Brag" Together
Despite this, I still hope many real community members and practitioners will share their success or failure stories about entrepreneurship or making money.
It could be your pitfall experiences with global ecommerce independent stores, your product explosion stories, or your journey from 0 to 1.
Real stories are always more valuable than successology.
Frequently Asked Questions
Final Words
You've listened to the essays, read the actionable tips, dreamed the dreams, and drooled over the possibilities. Now it's time to focus and start working, right?
Time is a friend to entrepreneurship but an enemy to money-making. Choose what suits you and stop overthinking.
If you're doing global ecommerce, remember: Stop talking and work quietly.
