Short answer is no. Because of the bank transfer time and potential refunds, you will need some operating cash. However you can start with affiliate marketing, and without any major site modification, switch to dropshipping later.
Whatever the product may be, you can always refer people to another vendor and build up your cash reserves that way. And when you have sufficient funds, you can switch to full dropshipping model.
Good thing is that your website and your content can stay the same. And the people who come to your website to purchase specific item don’t really care whom they’re buying from. So switching to buying directly form you instead of your affiliate partner is just one click difference.
BONUS: Focus On The Traffic
Whatever the product or the monetization method you choose, they all depend on one thing: website traffic.
And the more traffic you have, the more income you’ll generate. Even if you don’t have the sales process optimized, more traffic will solve more income problems.
Best Form Of Traffic
Not sure about you, but to me the traffic from social media seems like a full time job. And all the time I’m wondering when will I get to work on mu business when my whole time is spent on creating posts on social media.
What’s even worse, the moment you stop posting, your traffic will start to dwindle.
So my preferred method is blog.
You can write whenever you want (or have the time). Also, your content works forever and the older it is, the better it works. (and the more traffic it brings)
And you are never penalized for taking a break in your posting schedule.
To me, that is an ideal traffic method for any small to medium business.
How To Get Web Traffic?
Obviously, you need to write content, i.e. blog posts. But without the correct keywords you will not get ranked on search results pages and you will not get any traffic.
Most people try to rank for the same keywords which makes them extremely competitive so they don’t get any traffic either.
The only way is to use the keywords very few other people use. In fact, I prefer to use keywords that even the professional keyword tools cannot find. And some of them cost up to $400 per month.
So when I have these keywords then showing up on search results is fairly easy.
If you want to know how to find these keywords as well, then check out this SEO book.

Senior Software Developer with experience in Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and search engine algorithms.