I Made a Personal Business Because I didn’t Want to Cross the Street
How laziness helped me create an income of thousands of dollars a month
When I was at college, in every building, there was a food vending machine. So every time I got hungry or thirsty in class, I would go down for a bottle of water or juice and some cookies. I even had a shopping routine, some days cookies, other days chips.
Then I finished college and started working. The place where I started working is a building with several companies: two banks, a computer store, and a pharmacy on the first floor, a dentist, an insurance company and glasses stores on the second floor, a beauty salon and clothing stores on the 3rd floor and the programming computer and a law office in the 4th floor.
In my first month of working there, I realized there was a problem. There was no food place in the building. I had to go down to the first floor to have a snack, cross two streets, turn the corner, and go to a bakery shop there.
Twice a week, it would not be an issue to do that tour. But when you are a programmer, and you are stressed because you have to deliver a code or there is a bug in production, you cannot afford to occasionally go down for a pie, and to be honest, I was tired to do this daily. I missed my college vending machine.
The beginning of my personal business
After 6 months of working there, I had the idea to put the vendor machine. I had enough savings to start; I just needed to do some research. For this, I went back to the university and took some photos of the food machine to have ideas of what to put inside and the prices. Also, I checked the number on the back of the machine to investigate how much it would cost me one of them.
Then I went to a store that sells wholesale products and wrote down how much each unit of the things I was going to put in the machine cost. On average, I could earn a dollar for every 4 products I sold.
The space on the first floor next to the staircase would cost me $ 75 a month. The machine was going to cost me $ 2,500. So if I wanted to recover the money for the machine in 2 years and pay the rent for the corner, I must sell $ 180 per month.
If 4 products were 1 dollar, then 720 products were the $180 I needed for the month. That means that I had to sell 24 products per day to meet that goal. The company where I worked had 60 employees, so if at least half helped me, I would be able to do it.
To be honest, at that moment, I didn’t think that the machine was going to leave me much more from there. I just wanted not to have to cross the street again for a snack.
An entrepreneur is born where many people have a need.
But what I did not think was that this was not only a need that I had, there were more than 10 companies in that building, and they all had to cross the street for food.
How the machine goes in the next few months
I started on Monday, June 3, 2019. I put all the food at 7:00 am. When I came down at 1:00 pm for a bar of chocolate, I could not believe it, almost about 60% of the machine had been sold.
It was payday, and the banks were full of people who had money that day and were tired of doing a line. The things that ran out by mid-morning were water and sodas. Also, people were also looking for potatoes and juice.
I was not prepared for this. I had bought food to fill the machine daily. But there were specific days when I would have to fill in two and three times a day.
I also started a plan to verify what people bought depending on the day. For example, on Fridays, many people go to the dentist, and after cleaning, people only wanted yogurt, juice without sugar or water. On the days when the banks were more full, I filled the machine with soda, chips, and water because people got very tired of standing in lines.
In my first month, I was able to earn $ 650. And in my second month, $ 780. People loved the idea of having everything in one single building. It not only solved a problem for me but for everyone who had personal diligence in the building.
I began to organize data depending on what was bought more to offer those products on my machine. And I also started buying food directly from suppliers, so I could earn more money.
After 6 months, I decided to buy another machine for the building where my best friend worked. I was in charge of buying everything, and he was in charge of filling it out twice a day while he worked in his office.
I was already making around $ 1400–$ 1600 in January 2020 with the two machines. And after the pandemic, I am planning to continue expanding.
It all started because I wanted a cookie without having to cross the street. Now it is a small personal business, and I want to continue growing. When you think something is good enough to solve a need, then do it.
Sometimes we believe that we are the only ones who need something until we start selling it. If you think you can make someone’s life easier with an idea, then it may be a business.