• 2 months ago
Alibaba.com is sourcing made simple. It's the easiest way to connect with suppliers, create products, and turn your business dreams into reality.

”My Way” tells the stories of four entrepreneurs who utilized Alibaba.com's capabilities to create, launch and grow their dream businesses.

Self-described lawn care enthusiast Andrew Laplante wanted a less messy, more efficient way to spread peat moss around his property. And when he couldn't find what he was looking for online, he resolved to develop a tool that would solve this problem for himself and for countless property owners.

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Transcript
00:00It makes this process so easy.
00:04It's going to be the land.
00:06If you guys have any questions, comments, or concerns...
00:08I'm almost embarrassed to admit this, but I was checking daily.
00:14The video took off.
00:15The numbers started to skyrocket.
00:20And then...
00:23It hit a million views.
00:25When I saw it hit a million views, that's when I knew.
00:30We were going to be successful.
00:38I've always felt like I've been an entrepreneur at heart.
00:41I've always had an entrepreneurial spirit.
00:44But I never felt like I had the resources to do anything with that.
00:55Yard work was always a hobby of mine.
00:57We bought our first house in 2009.
01:03We wanted curb appeal, so we started to plant grass.
01:06I started to educate myself.
01:08My wife would help every year planting seeds and putting peat moss down on top of the seed to protect it.
01:19The grass started to look nicer and nicer throughout the years.
01:27After several years of putting peat moss down, she came to me and said,
01:30there has to be a better way.
01:32She was right.
01:33Peat moss is messy.
01:36So I did some research.
01:38I found the peat moss spreader online.
01:41It ended up doing the job, but not as well as I would have liked.
01:45They overcomplicated it, and it was very poorly engineered.
01:50I wasn't going to accept that.
01:51I felt like I could do better.
01:54So that's when I reached out to manufacturers through Alibaba.com and leaned on their resources.
02:01I submitted an RFQ, a request for quotation on Alibaba.
02:06The RFQ process just really made everything so simple for me
02:10because it gave me the ability to narrow down the manufacturers
02:13based off of their years of experience, based off of their star rating,
02:17based off of if they have trade assurance or not.
02:20Suppliers got back to me so quickly and worked under the specifications that I wanted for this product
02:26because that was really important to me, to make a better product.
02:31I didn't want to compromise.
02:34No other place out there allowed me to find so many qualified suppliers
02:39who would work with me and allow me to customize my product.
02:43I founded Lanzi with one product in mind, and that was a peat moss spreader.
02:47The culmination of this product and discovering Alibaba.com, that's what fueled this fire.
02:56I had someone on YouTube I followed, a lawn care influencer.
03:01So I reached out to him, knowing that he put peat moss down.
03:04I said, let me send you a product.
03:07We sold out within a week.
03:09We already had another container on the way.
03:11That container arrived, and we unloaded it.
03:14We wanted to make high quality products, but we also strive to educate the customer as well.
03:19We've always had a desire to help people,
03:23and Alibaba.com made it easier for me to do it my way.

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