The Power of (Free) Posting

The Lazy Poster was founded by a young entrepreneur who started flipping phones in 2013 (This was the Craigslist era). He lived in a small town so he had to post in two different counties, one located thirty minutes north, the other was located 30 minutes south. His whole business depended on the fact that people could see the ads he was posting every morning before covering a 100 mile radius: buying and selling every iPhone, Samsung, iPad, and Macbook he could get his hands on.

 

At the end of 2014 he was able to leave his job and pursue his “side hustle” full time. Each morning he would get up as many posts as possible until it was time to go meet someone. In 2015 he profited his whole 2014 salary in the first 3 months and never looked back. He was driving 5-6,000 miles a month and having the time of his life. In 2016 he was able to enter his first storefront 50 miles north of his hometown, but because he never stopped posting in the southern county he was still also meeting up with customers an hour south of his store, essentially having “two” locations, one brick and mortar store and the other was his “car office”.

As the business grew, inventory grew, and the posting that took 2 hours, was now taking 4-6 hours and many times left incomplete. Sometimes it could take a whole week to finalize 1 campaign (yikes). As time went on, no matter how much he posted he started to realize traffic was no longer growing. That’s when he noticed customers were shifting from the Craigslist platform onto Facebook Marketplace, OfferUp and LetGo (before it was purchased by OfferUp).

These platforms were interesting because they enabled buyers and sellers to have profiles which offered more security and less anonymity. The caveat was they were algorithmic, especially Facebook, which meant when you posted you never really knew what time it would appear and who it would be seen by. Many of his ads were being ghosted (FB was a lot less seller friendly in the beginning), and he still had to make time to post on the 3 other platforms, manage the storefront and still drive around to meet people. He either needed more time, more fingers, or some secret way to clone himself.

Fast forward to 2019 he met a developer (or a magician, still trying to figure that out). This dev introduced him to the world of automation and things were never the same. This was the same time Facebook marketplace introduced shipping and was becoming slightly more seller friendly. Being able to use the software allowed him to leverage multiple profiles to increase his sales channels online. By increasing sales, this increased the quantity of the products he needed to buy, which led him to meeting more quality bulk wholesalers in his industry and getting better prices, which eventually led to him becoming a wholesaler himself!

Fast forward to the end of 2021, not only did his business survive the pandemic but he achieved over $1,000,000+ in sales in a year for the first time! That year he also opened a brand new store (located in an office building so there’s no walk in traffic) and was able to make it profitable immediately through ONLY posting on Facebook Marketplace and OfferUp.

The moral of the story?

Never underestimate the power of posting.