Suitcases iPhones and Gopnik in Butovo: how we almost went broke on Apple products

Bes lured us.
We created MadRobots to bring the best innovative gadgets from all over the world to Russia. And they went down to the fact that they began to trade banal iPhones. They paid for it - as all those who follow the crowd and betray their ideals pay in the end.
Last time I told you how I started investing on Kickstarter, I got carried away with the “Internet of Things” and eventually found my happiness, leaving my job at Panasonic and starting a business.


After the post was published, a squall of letters and comments struck me. Many were inspired by the story of my search, which ended with a classic happy ending.

However, the path to any happy ending (which for us is only a prologue) leads through a series of dips, mistakes and tragicomic scenes. And our case was no exception.
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Today I will talk about our most (so far) dramatic error - an unsuccessful attempt to make money on a product that, according to the myths of ancient Greece, has enriched more than one Russian Internet seller.

In the fall of 2012, I was still working at Panasonic, but we already launched the site and even hired one employee, preparing to sell miracle gadgets in Russia, in which we invested about thirty thousand dollars. However, with our orders came a hitch, there was nothing to trade. There were long months before we received the first gadgets, and the New Year was already at the nose.

At the same time, one of the founders of MadRobots, resting in the Dominican Republic, met a guy from Kazakhstan who was engaged in the wholesale of auto parts in his homeland. A new acquaintance complained that things were not going very well at the car market, so he had to arrange sales of iPhones.
We thought it was a great success - to meet a man who can provide a supply of cheap iPhones. And although not for this we started MadRobots to sell smartphones, we decided that this chance should not be missed.
The Internet is full of stories about how people made a fortune on Apple products. So many people are trading in them - are they not fools? And we are not more stupid than others. We will generate cash flow, we will wage the employee’s salary, we will gain experience - and there our miracle gadgets will arrive, and we will live!
What can I say. Experience we typed.

Alive and healthy

To begin with, we decided to purchase a batch of one hundred in Kazakhstan. Only we had to drag her to Moscow by ourselves. We did not plan to become shuttles, but when we contacted the courier service, they said that the cargo is expensive and we need to insure it. Insurance cost more than return flight tickets.

The iPhones are compact, all one hundred pieces can easily fit into a suitcase. Therefore, we took cash and together with a partner flew to Astana to exchange a pack of currency for a suitcase of iPhones.



What did we think then, trusting a fellow from a resort and going to another country with cash in hand, I do not know.

If we were given a head-on and taken away the money, it would probably be a fair punishment for our stupidity.

But for some wild luck nothing like this happened to us.

The guy met us at the airport, took him to his “Lexus” to the hotel, where we got a room, and there we quietly exchanged money for goods. (However, it later turned out that the price was not the lowest; later we found a place where iPhones could be received cheaper, and right away in Moscow and without any adventures.)

There were a few hours until the return flight, so I decided to relax and ordered a massage right at the hotel. From here begins part of a short but enchanting story. An elderly masseuse came. We descended the stairs, on the railing of which the carpets were dried, and found ourselves in a dark basement.



In the middle of the basement was a billiard table. She laid me on him. It was the most unusual massage in my life.



At the end of the session, my aunt said that I need to stand on my head - this is useful for the spine. And for greater persuasiveness, he immediately demonstrated how this is done. Next to this very table. With this act she completed the phantasmagoric picture of the evening.

So, we returned home, alive and even partially welcoming, anticipating how we will now start selling super-run goods and golden rain will fall on us. And then - a surprise. It turned out that no one needs our iPhones.
Of course, we registered on Yandex.Market. Established the average market price. But no one bought them from us. In the first weeks, we barely sold two dozen devices - and then mostly to our friends and acquaintances.

5000 rubles per customer

It turned out that we entered the market at a time when the rush to the recently released top five fell. Everyone who wanted to buy it, have already done it. The demand was much less supply, and we had a lot of competitors - more than in other categories of electronics. IPhone sold three times more shops than, for example, cameras.


90 stores that sell the popular camera against 332 selling new iPhones.


And many of them knew only one way to attract customers - to reduce prices. When we bought a batch of 25 thousand rubles in Kazakhstan, the lowest retail price in Moscow was 28 thousand rubles. But she fell every couple of days, and soon buried in the figure of 24 thousand rubles.

Having calculated the economy of some stores, I realized that it is simply negative or zero at best - even if they buy phones somewhere cheaper than we do. Something could be earned on accessories, selling for 500 rubles a film that cost a dollar in wholesale, but this did not change the picture in principle.

Margin on the market simply could not cover the costs - and they have a lot of them from the iPhone merchant. Some devices turn out to be defective - and you cannot return them back to the “gray” wholesaler. At the same time, couriers delivering goods are often attacked - they are simply robbed (for someone, an iPhone is a cool gadget, and for someone it's just a bucks item).

Once, a whole gang of Gopniks ran around our Butovo behind our courier (the guy turned out to be a battle, and he managed to slip away).

Sometimes the “buyers” themselves ran away with our goods. One of them just picked up the phone, immediately jumped into the car - and hit the gas. Only he was seen. Our courier service "lost" our other phone upon delivery to the regions - and simply refused to refund the cost.
An example of an information letter about the next courier robbery from a wholesaler selling Apple equipment:



Real entrepreneurs never lose heart, do they? Others sell iPhones, we thought, so you just need to understand what we are doing wrong.

We are not as advertised! Having made such a diagnosis, we turned to an agency that placed ads on the Vkontakte network and promised us almost fifty applications a day.

Here it is, the magic pill, beginner traders thought, and bought two more "iPhones", not having time to sell the first one.

The agency really provided us with a lot of applications, and at a price that seemed to be quite acceptable - two to three hundred rubles per application. But these were all people who pecked at an ad for the “iPhone for 30 rubles a day.”


Once on our website, they filled out an application for a loan in partner banks. And here the scheme failed. Someone refused, someone was not satisfied with the real conditions of the bank, someone just wondered about buying ...

When we calculated the economy, it turned out that, taking into account the failures, each attracted buyer cost us 5,000 rubles. We traded at a loss.

Toys for adults

Fortunately, an acquaintance of one of the partners MadRobots opened a new point in the electronics market and was just looking for suppliers of iPhones. We have come to each other at an opportune moment. And we even thought that at last our enterprise was lucky.

However, it turned out that because of a banal error and inconsistency, our partner agreed to sell the goods at a price that was a thousand rubles lower than what we paid in Kazakhstan. And so we again sold most of the party at a loss.

Instead of getting rich on iPhones, we ended up losing about half a million rubles.

Reading this note, you probably think: "It is contraindicated for you to do business in lobotryazh - and where did they just get two hundred pieces to buy so many iPhones?". But sometimes the problem is not in abilities, but in attitude and in the conditions in which a person puts himself.

It is terrible to take this and immediately risk your capital, your usual way of life, and the well-being of your family. Therefore, like many new businessmen, we tried to promote our company, combining business experiences with the main work for wages.

It didn’t lead us to anything good. It is impossible to enter the market and, just like that, to sort out a primitive, as it seems at first glance, business (after all, even schoolchildren are engaged in trading iPhones!). In fact, it turns out that this market is complex, highly competitive and low-margin - and only those who deal with it professionally earn it.

Now I understand that, trying to sit on two chairs at once, you are programming your failure in advance. Not only because you simply do not have enough time. But also because you will not be afraid to lose.

For us, MadRobots was at first entertainment. My welfare was guaranteed by the Panasonic social package, and I was rather frivolous about our entrepreneurial experiment. Financial losses seemed to me some kind of virtual. It was gambling.

Moreover, we understood that we were not playing at the last — which means that we can allow ourselves in a fit of feelings to even put all the chips on zero.

If the present and future of our families depended on MadRobots, we would consider every penny, go to the bottom and, I think, would not allow such glaring blunders.

Bad experience with iPhones has become an important lesson for us. We realized that you can not play merchants, and since you took up your business, do it with full immersion.

Six months later, I decided that it was time to tie. It's time to work on yourself twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I quit, and we focused on unique gadgets, trying to conclude exclusive supply agreements with the developers. After that, for a couple of months MadRobots grew stronger than in the previous year.

As a result, we were able to establish a profitable business selling unique devices. MadRobots monthly turnover reached 3 million rubles - and it grows further. We have an ambitious development strategy that goes far beyond "just an online store." And we believe that we can realize it.

And trade in iPhones, we now recall as a nightmare.

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