By 2019, the entrepreneurial internet had decided that dropshipping was the answer to every problem Leo had. He watched the YouTube gurus men with perfect teeth and rented Airbnbs, their thumbnails showing them pointing at graphs that went up and to the right and felt something like hope stirring in his chest.
He took the $200 he'd saved from months of app earnings and bought a Shopify subscription. He found a supplier for "ergonomic laptop stands" on AliExpress. He built a website with a name he thought was clever LiftTech and a logo he'd designed himself in GIMP, which looked like something designed in GIMP.
He ran Facebook ads. $5 a day. He watched the metrics like a man watching his own surgery.
Day one: zero sales.
Day three: zero sales.
Day seven: zero sales.
He changed the product. Now it was "minimalist phone wallets." New ads. New images. Same zero.
He changed again. "Sustainable bamboo toothbrushes." The market for sustainable bamboo toothbrushes, he learned too late, was saturated by people who actually cared about sustainability rather than people who were just desperate to sell something.
And then miraculously a sale.
$24.99. Someone in Austin, Texas, had bought a bamboo toothbrush. Leo's profit margin was $3.42 after product cost and shipping and ad spend. He felt a joy so intense it was almost painful, the kind of joy that comes from seeing a single match flare in total darkness.
He processed the order. He contacted the supplier. He sent the confirmation email.
Two weeks later, the customer left a review: "Took forever to arrive. Toothbrush is fine, I guess."
Three stars.
The second sale never came.
Leo kept the Shopify store open for six months, changing products every few weeks, chasing the algorithm like a dog chasing its own tail. Phone grips. Phone cases. Phone stands. (Phones, he realized, were the only thing people seemed to buy online, and everyone was already selling everything for every phone.) A gadget that claimed to clean your phone with UV light. A pop socket with a picture of a cat wearing sunglasses.
He made $47.22 in total.
The subscription cost him $29 per month. By the time he closed the store, he was down $174 in net losses.
He sat in his chair that night with a Black Ram in his hand and stared at the dead monitor the one that hadn't worked in almost a year and tried to remember a time when he hadn't felt like a ghost haunting his own life.