Of all the reasons people give for not being able to start a business, the most common by a landslide is not having enough money.

But the truth is that you can get to work on your business and your goals even if you don’t have any money at all.

That’s what this post – and the Flipping Challenge – is all about.

What is the Flipping Challenge?

The Flipping Challenge is simple:

Make $1000 in 90 days, starting with nothing.

To get started, you pick 5 items you already own and sell them on either Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist. You then use the proceeds from these 5 items to start buying, with the goal of making at least $1000 in 90 days.

This is a challenge that goes out to anyone who wants to accept it, and specifically to anyone who is waiting to start a business until they have more money. Since introducing it earlier this year, hundreds of people have already accepted the challenge, and I hope you are next.

The best place to learn more about the challenge and how to successfully flip things is my course Flipping for Profit. It is a quick, text-based course that is packed full of helpful information – plus it only costs $25.

If you don’t have the cash even for that, pick something off your shelf and sell it, then use the proceeds to enroll. With that being said, the course is not necessary to accept, participate in, or complete the challenge.

This challenge can be started anytime, there is no fixed start and end date. Just whenever you do start, your goal should be to reach $1000 in 90 days.

Why take on the flipping challenge?

Like I said above, not having enough money is one of the main reasons people claim they can’t start their business yet.

So they wait and wait and wait, sure that one day they will have an extra $10k to invest in one of their ideas.

As you’ve probably heard before, ideas are a dime a dozen, and execution is what really counts when it comes to business.

The flipping challenge is an invitation to stop delaying and start executing. You may be starting small, but those first 5 items you pick can turn into $1000 very quickly. And that $1000 can be leveraged into more and more inventory, and before long you have a business that is generating a very nice monthly profit.

The odds that you’ll have a successful business in the next year are much, much higher if you use this challenge as a launching pad compared to sitting around and hoping your bank account magically balloons.

And if you still need another reason to take on the flipping challenge, it’s also a lot of fun.

Getting Started

To give you some inspiration (and someone to compete against), I’m having someone who works for me take the course, complete the challenge, and write a weekly blog post detailing everything he is doing.

To make it fair, I’ve picked someone who has 0 experience with buying and selling. His name is Dylan, and he helps me on this site with overall strategy, SEO, building out the pages, and other things like that – but nothing related to selling.

With all that being said, let’s get started…

Flipping Challenge Day 1

Hey everyone, my name is Dylan, and I will be your test dummy for this flipping challenge.

My current experience with buying and selling stuff online consists of:

• When I get sick of junk, I list it on Craigslist
• In middle school, I had a bulletproof plan to wholesale PS2s to sell on eBay (surprisingly, Sony said no)

Ryan convinced me to take on this challenge because I represent the perfect test case: someone who is more or less clueless when it comes to this type of stuff. I do consider myself an above-average haggler though, and I like looking for good deals – so I’ve got that going for me, which is nice…

For the next 90 days, I will be posting an update every Friday that includes all the details for what I’m buying and selling, with the goal of making at least $1000. I will be following his new Flipping For Profit course that he mentioned above as a guide but will not get help from him directly.

Today is officially Day 1 of my attempt at this, and I have already gone through the intro lessons in the course and picked the 5 items I will be starting with.

The course gives 3 rules for these first 5 items:

• The combined value of the items should be at least $100.
• You have to estimate the value of each item on your own.
• The items need to be in different categories.

With that in mind, I picked the following five items from my house to sell:

1. A 63” plasma TV from 2011 that doesn’t work right
2. A lightweight plastic bed frame for a queen bed
3. An 18-speed purple bicycle
4. A double stroller
5. A pair of brown Chaco sandals, size 12

From what I can tell, these items meet the criteria I mentioned above. They are all in different categories, and I estimate the value of the lot at over $100. I’d be happy to get $50 out of the TV, $20 from the bed frame, around $40 for the bike, $60 for the stroller, and $30 for the sandals.

That’s a total of $200. I don’t know if I’ll actually get this much, but there is plenty of wiggle room here so I should easily reach the $100 goal for these first 5.

Update: I completed the challenge! I ended up making $2457.90, and that doesn’t even include the inventory I still had at the end of the challenge. Click here to get more details, including my best items.