Me (23M) and my brother (26M) are trying to start up an E-Commerce business and I have done most of the work on the first product from building the landing page, setting up the shopify to editing the videos and he only did an excel sheet of potential products and a couple profile pictures for the tik tok which we didn’t use

We are thinking of changing the products but I’m telling him that this can’t work if we don’t put at least one day of the week to see each other face to face and talk ideas and he says he can’t because his schedule is full and he wants to talk all business through the phone because he says that either way we would discuss the same ideas through the phone and face to face which i disagree, in person we get more done in my opinion and he also wants to buy 2 of the hero products so he can make videos by himself in his house and i do videos by myself of the product we are selling, I’m telling him that we need to produce all the videos together and he says that it is not necessary and i don’t agree with that, business partners need to see each other constantly specially when our whole selling strategies are through video creation of the product

I’m thinking of telling him that I prefer to keep the business off the table and go on our separate business paths so it won’t damage our relationship as family

Any feedback on this?

  • longhorn2118@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    So I have a business partner. I met him in a Facebook group. We’ve been partners in our digital marketing agency for 4 years now.

    He lives in North Carolina, I live in California. I’ve NEVER met him in person. Never. But I talk with him on the phone every work day multiple times a day.

    It’s definitely unusual, and we recognize that, but it’s working and we don’t want to fix something that isn’t broken. We do over a million a year in revenue.

    It’s 2023, so distance is not an end all. But if you don’t trust your brother on his own, that’s another story. My partner and I both carry our weight which is why it works.

    • XTJ7@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Had a business partner with whom I met up face to face regularly. He was supposed to do the sales and help getting a market fit due to his experience and contacts in the industry.

      I designed and built the app, set up the server and infrastructure, bought the domains etc. But despite his father owning a large company in that industry, he couldn’t even get them to use it for free. Not because the app didnt work, we tested it and everything worked fine. It was even in use at his fathers company for a short while as we temporarily had a customer relationship manager who pushed for it. Once she left, it all fell apart and my partner did basically nothing but talk out of his ass.

      I ended up scrapping the thing and focusing on an industry where I have experience and contacts, but the lesson is: face to face contact doesn’t do shit if your partner isn’t willing to get the job done (he seems to have been excited at creating something but far less excited with actually running it).