how i made $2.97m in 6 months dropshipping (case study + product reveal)

You'll never believe this, but this store actually made me almost $3 million in the space of six months. Six months is all it took. And you guys might be thinking, wow, Nate, this is a good success. You must have learned a lot from this. Yeah, I learned a lot from this store and this product, which I'm going to be telling you guys in a second what it is if you can't already see it. But there are a lot of things that I actually did wrong. There's a lot of things that made the store, as you can see, fall off. It completely dropped off. And now I have built another store that is doing, you know, similar revenue, but this store is a lot, much more long term. But first, I want to tell you guys about, you know, what worked well for the store, how I found the product and everything. I'll tell you all right now. So let's get straight into that and the. The way I found the product. To be honest, guys, it was straight off of Kayla Data. So I went on to Kayla Data, and at the time, it was, you know, a year or so ago, and one of the top products was this cheese grater, right? This is actually the product end up running. And if you guys come in here just to show you guys, let's see if it's still up, this is actually the ad that like printed like probably 2 million of those sales. Was this ad. It was variations of this ad. And that's crazy, right? You're like, wow, you can really Kayla rip to this much revenue. Well, it's kind of true. I would say it's not as likely nowadays. Like, ripping Kayla now is not the same. But now I've realized how much this kind of hurt my journey, which is kind of weird to say once you've made $3 million in six months. Right? But before I talk about that, this is what the site looked like. This is the site that made me these first seven figures in E Comm. And as you can see, nothing too crazy, but just a nice overall site. And if we go back here, a good average order value. All the orders were just upfront orders. A good basic store. This looks like a really good store. But if you look at the returning customer, 1.72. That is not how you run a business long term. That is what I'm basically going to be telling you guys about today. And what I've really learned from this journey, if we go over here, this is exactly what I've learned. I've learned that from that store. Like, yeah, sure, it made me you know, a decent chunk of change in the time being and it was a good first product. But imagine if I was able to run that store long enough and consistently enough to scale it. Like, yeah, sure, I scaled it at the peak to, you know, a million, over a million dollars in a month, but I couldn't exit the store. And the reason I couldn't exit the store is because it fell off. And the reason it fell off was because of this. Because ripping Kalo is a trap. Because you guys need to understand that ripping Kalo deprives you of the number one skill in E Comm and that E Comm is direct response. Direct response is by far the most important thing to learn in this game. And once you're just ripping and relying on Caleb reps and just stealing content from places, you don't learn the foundations, you don't learn the fundamentals of what actually makes a good ad, what makes a winning ad. And so that is where I was, guys. I, I hadn't had these winning ads from Kaylie Ada. You know, I did edit them a little bit, you know, I changed them up. I mean, maybe like swapped some hooks or anything, but I didn't create any brand new concepts that actually did anything. And that is why the store fell off. And so that is why ripping Kayla is a trap. Span testing products I believe now is dumb is also a trap. And then at this point I didn't even have a team. I had like maybe one customer service va, maybe three at the time because we were doing so much volume. But like, I didn't have a team. I was doing everything myself. And so this past year I focused on building something that lasts. I focused on putting my energy into something that, you know, over time is just going to continue to grow, that I'm going to get a bunch of returning customers. It's not one big pump and dump, not one lucky winning product. It's something that I actually have learned the skills to build and to sustain into an actual business that makes money long term and a business that, you know, you can exit for, you know, hundreds, if not millions of dollars. And so this is what I'm doing now, what I'm doing now and what I'm taking advantage now is something called LTV maxing. This is not actually what I'm, I just like the maxing, you know, terminology, I think it's funny. But basically it's focusing on the future. And so now I have figured out a strategy that allows me to, you know, make profit, maybe less profit up front. Than I usually do, maybe break even up front. But over the long period of time, I'm profitable. As you can see, my returning customer is ridiculous. It's because I learned this strategy and now I've also learned all these things about team building, about building a team around me. And so now I'm not working all day on my business. I'm not slaving away editing ads, I'm not emailing customers, dealing with all these issues. I have people under me who do that every single day. And my job is to make sure they're in line and then think of ways we can move the business forward. Maybe a new advertising channel, maybe moving on to Google Ads, Maybe all these different things. Before it was just me and this one dude. I just had the one singular me and then one or maybe two customer service reps. And that's crazy to think how much I scaled off that. But now I have, you know, three huge, you know, very important team members that manage all these people underneath. And this has led to me being able to actually run more stores. And as you guys can see, this is a screenshot from one of my stores right now. As you can see, it's. It's the past year, February 17th to February 16th, 2025, the day I'm filming this. And I started this store around April. And as you guys can see, it has been exponentially, almost, maybe not maybe has linear growth, but it's going to continue to go up and up and up because I've built the foundation I built on a solid rock. I understand, you know, how to build an actual business. And this business is so much better because I have a much higher ltv lifetime value of my customers. Most people, most of you guys right now, you guys are just stuck ripping products, looking on Caylo data, spam testing, hoping something works. And then when something does work, yeah, sure, you might make a couple thousand dollars, maybe make $10,000, but eventually it's going to fall off. Eventually you're going to run into creative fatigue. Your ads are going to stop working. What do you do then? Then you have to find another pump and dump. That doesn't sound. That sounds like a trap to me. So what? The real thing that I focused on doing this year was actually building a real business that sustains itself, that has team members, that has a players, and they're building it, creating it, maintaining it every single day. And that is why you see the numbers you do over the period of time. And so now that I have all this, you know, I even have time to do other stores, to focus on other things, to, you know, make YouTube videos, do everything that I love to do, to travel, to do all these different things because I'm not in the slave. I didn't build myself, you know, just a bigger job, like a job that pays more. I made myself a company that runs on itself. So these are the things that I learned this year. And you know, you can stick to the old way of drop shipping, ripping off K L E data, just finding a product, hopefully running up, it's running up. Or you can build a real business with a real backend, with very fast shipping, with a good customer service, with a good product that will scale and that you can exit for millions in the future. So that is what I learned. And I know a lot of you guys are stuck in that kind of process. And so if you guys want one on one help on how to do this or if you even have a store, so that is like, you know, my cheese grater store basically where you're not, you're just ripping off Kayla. You don't know what you're doing, you don't have the ltv, you don't, you don't know how to make new winning ads, etc. Then I can help you guys do that. And I am opening up a coaching program for the first time in my life. I've never done this before. I've been super hesitant on it because I know of how many bad gurus are out there. But you guys see the numbers on the screen. I know what I'm talking about. And I've learned so much over this past year. And I have a business now that is generating me, you know, six figures a month profit without me having to do much work on it. And because of that, I'm able to give back to you guys and able to give, you know, my expertise and help other people grow and then also start other stores. I just started another store last week or something and it's already about to do like 1k days. So like it's something that, it's a skill that I have down. I've learned. I have so many friends who do it as well. And so I know what to do. But anyways, thank you guys for watching. If you guys are interested in that, you can join the wait list down in the description. No pressure though. If you guys don't want to do it, don't do it. I don't care. I'm not looking like for you guys to buy that or to even like be interested in it. It's only for the people who are called to do it or want the help from me. So that is it. Hopefully you guys enjoyed. You guys know what? My winning, my first winning product was pretty interesting, right? But that's pretty much it. So hopefully you guys enjoyed the video and. Yeah, peace.