There's no such thing as a free watch (2017)
I love this! I commented on this article about my own experience starting a &quot;watch business&quot; when it was originally posted about a year ago and it seemed to get a decent amount of votes and attention so I figure I&#x27;ll re-post it below:<p>[original w&#x2F;comments: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15158422" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15158422</a>]<p>-----<p>So a few years back I started a watch company in a similar way.<p>I think I was actually one of the first to do it, since when I started I couldn&#x27;t find many competitors. I tried a million kinds of promotions, from &quot;free, you just pay for shipping&quot; to offering people discounts and referral codes.<p>I actually created my own watch designs (well, modifications of the face, case, and strap with the same Chinese movement.) Some of my improvements started to be used by the manufacturers.<p>I&#x27;m not at all invested in it anymore: I left the business after selling a substantial, but not massive number of watches and finding that it wasn&#x27;t terribly profitable if you included the cost of advertising, shipping, and (most importantly) my own time.<p>My own &quot;watch company&quot; was more real in a few ways: watches that I did in fact design myself, shipped from my address in the US, and the quality of the watches was actually quite good. To this day I wear a watch from my company and it has held up to an incredible amount of abuse. I say this as someone who (used to) collect watches. I also was upfront about the cost of shipping and the watch itself - I might have, for example, a banner that says &quot;Free 3-Day US Shipping&quot; and then the price of the watch would be clearly labeled as $20, so people would know that they would only be paying a total of $20 for the watch. The prices varied a lot over time, from $10 to $40 per watch, but surprisingly my profit was never huge even though I only spent about $3 on the watch itself and $7 on shipping.<p>If anyone&#x27;s curious about the whole thing (and lives in the Netherlands) I still have hundreds of these watches and I&#x27;d be happy to sit down over a coffee, tell my stories from the business and show the watches. (My email&#x27;s in my profile.)<p>----<p>A few comments I&#x27;d like to add now, in 2018:<p>1) the watches (mine &amp; that of other &quot;companies&quot;) are of a surprisingly high quality in many cases. Not always, but often. For example, my watch has survived everything from bilge fluids to boiling water and it&#x27;s the same cheap one I sold. Definitely far more durable than a comparable mechanical watch. I can see myself still using this thing 10+ years down the line. Furthermore, it actually does look classy and I get compliments on it. Most of the time, if you buy a cheap $3 Chinese alternative to something that&#x27;s normally 10-1000x the price, it is neither beautiful nor durable.<p>2) The unexpectedly high quality of the watches is what fueled the explosion of sites IMO. You don&#x27;t see &quot;free earbuds&quot;, &quot;free clock&quot;, or &quot;free keyboard&quot; sites, despite the fact that all 3 of these things are available for under $5 shipped from China. What I think happened is that people bought a watch on a whim, then it arrived and they realized &quot;wow, this feels like a premium product!&quot; Which it did! I was blown away when I first saw the quality level and instantly thought I should start a business. I suspect hundreds of other people had this same &quot;eureka!&quot; moment. When you get a $5 Aliexpress keyboard, it feels and looks like it cost $5 to make, and it excites nobody. Furthermore, Amazon makes a $13 keyboard with great reviews, and being Amazon it ships with Prime instead of &quot;30-to-infinity day slow-boat-from-China shipping.&quot; Meanwhile, these watches felt like they cost at least $20 to make, and the only competitors for classy analog watches would be $50-100 or so, but they cost $3 (drop)shipped!<p>3) I highly doubt anyone made much money. When I started, dropshipping was not a thing the manufacturers offered (probably the reason why I was one of the first.) When manufacturers started offering dropshipping, these &quot;businesses&quot; exploded because you could suddenly run them entirely behind a laptop. The problem, of course, was that the number of such &quot;companies&quot; exploded, all competing for the same customers, Facebook ads, Google results, &quot;underground marketing&quot; spots, etc etc. That led to people getting a bit suspicious. If you saw one ad for a cool watch, maybe you were interested, but if you saw 20 in a week, all suspiciously similar, you&#x27;d think something&#x27;s up.