Side Hustle Entrepreneur

My experience in building an online business using Shopify and an MVP approach

The Problem

Stupid is the qualifier I would use to describe it. Not significant, not transcendent, nor even probably relevant. Yet, still a problem that found its roots in one of my deepest core beliefs: that anyone who works hard and makes smart decisions can be successful with money. How to measure success? A net worth of a million dollars.

My problem: how old will I be when I become a millionaire?

I found plenty of online calculators to determine my net worth today. It’s not that hard to calculate: Assets –Debts = Net Worth. But how do I project my net worth into the future, to find that $1,000,000 mark?

Assets –Debts = Net Worth. But how do I project my net worth into the future, to find that $1,000,000 mark?

An easy Google search turned up plenty of calculators that calculate the future value of money, and almost all of them centered around how much I currently had in retirement savings accounts. They didn’t take into account my home value rising, my debt decreasing, my income rising, and thus my savings rate, increasing.

And I had other questions as well, like:

• What simple changes could I make today, and how does that affect my financial future?
• What’s the opportunity cost of a decision I’m making, such as to buy a new home or not?
• Will I have enough saved for retirement? What kind of lifestyle can I expect in retirement?
• Will my savings ever grow to a point where I can live off the interest and allow the principle to keep growing?

All of these questions had some calculators for them. But none could take all the different variables and project the future and tell me how old I would be when I reached millionaire status.

The Solution

So I built my own. I built a Millionaire Calculator.

I used a simple Excel spreadsheet to start, transferring back and forth with Google sheets. The solution isn’t elegant, the first version was hardly usable, and it’s still nothing to gloat about (except in an article . . .).

I spent several hours tweaking formulas and formatting. I learned how to calculate mortgage payments and early pay off amounts, and how that reducing the interest paid, and how to put that money that used to be going towards my mortgage to boosting my investing rate.

I built the spreadsheet. When will I be a millionaire?

But I built it. I built it in a spreadsheet. When will I be a millionaire?

47.

I’ll be a millionaire when I’m 47. My kids won’t be old enough to move out yet. I also learned:

• When I’m a millionaire, I’ll have almost $200k in mortgage debt still. I should pay that off faster.
• If I manage to pay another $200 towards my mortgage every month, I’ll shave off 5 years on the mortgage and save $34,000 in interest. That’s $34k less to the bank that I can turn around and start investing.
• I can retire at 55 and live on the exact same income I have today, and my savings will continue to grow.
• Actually, when I’m 100, my net worth will be just shy of $8,000,000, in today’s dollars.
• If I can eek out an additional 3% into my retirement contributions, I can be a millionaire one year earlier.

I had answered my own question. But then, I had an idea.

The Idea

What if someone else wanted to know their financial present and future, and know when they would be a millionaire? What if someone could change their whole life with a little bit of knowledge, and set themselves and their families up for a better future, a quantifiable better future? Financial gurus like Dave Ramsey are helping millions of people to change their lives. What if someone else had the same question I did?

And what if they were willing to pay for a product that would help them find the answer?

I could make an online store, and charge a small fee for customers to download a copy of the spreadsheet. An online business idea was born.

What if . . . ?

The Inner Critic

So I made an online store, sold the Millionaire Calculator to millions of customers, and now I’m sittting pretty on an island. Right? Nope!

A year passed. A year. I had a product that I liked. A few friends had given positive reviews. I occasionally toyed with various ecommerce platforms. But my inner critic kept saying things like:

• No one will buy that. Don’t do it.
• If anyone buys that, they’ll hate it. Don’t do it.
• If they don’t hate it, they’ll find a bug. Don’t do it.
• If they don’t find a bug, they’ll find some way to sue you, and then you’ll be destitute and ruined for the rest of your miserable life. Don’t do it.

Okay, (slight) exaggeration, but I came up with 384.5 reasons why not to do it (Here’s a couple more, perhaps your inner critic has said these: You don’t have time. You don’t know what you’re doing. How much money will you waste on this? The timing isn’t right).

I came up with 384.5 reasons why not to do it. And only one reason to try it.

I had only one reason to try it: what if my solution could inspire one person to change their financial life and start making changes for a better future? But for a year I did nothing. I let the inner critic get the better of me.

The Plunge

I blame Dave Ramsey.

Actually, his financial advice was probably the inspiration that started me on this whole journey. While listening to a random episode of the Dave Ramsey Show podcast, I thought, “What the heck, what have I got to lose?” I was feeling resolute, so I had to act fast (see “Inner Critic” above). I got on Shopify that night, signed up for a free trial, and created my first store.

The store is pretty simple. A home page and one product page. I wrote some Jobs-to-be-Done language in the descriptions and sprinkled calls to action throughout the store. I played around with the theme for a bit. I asked a friend who had user-tested the Millionaire Calculator for a short testimonial. In a couple of hours, I had a live store.

I had started an online business. Life goal complete. Except I didn’t have any customers yet . . .

The First Customer

The next morning, twelve hours after setting up the store: no orders. I texted my best friend and said: “Starting an online business is easy, getting customers is hard.” I had no market presence, no branding, no email list, nothing to jump start. I had planned to make a YouTube video, so I did. I hadn’t planned to make a pin on Pinterest, but it didn’t seem like a horrible idea, so I did. My first pin ever, too.

Starting an online business is easy, getting customers is hard.

Still nothing.

Then I thought of my LinkedIn network, and hesitated again. That inner critic reared his ugly head: “Don’t shamelessly promote yourself on LinkedIn, that’s just rude.” My friend said: “Go for it.” So I did. This was my post on LinkedIn:

Fast forward a few hours. I checked my orders page. Still nothing. I sent this message to my family group text:

Then I refreshed my orders page.

BAM! I had one customer!

I literally jumped out of my chair. I couldn’t believe it. My product was out in the wild, being used by a person I had never met. My heart started racing — and then stopped dead when I read one word in the status column: “Unfulfilled.”

Now what do I do?

I had been so consumed in building the product and the store, that I never thought about how to actually get the product to the customer. I had completely bombed my fulfillment strategy.

My mind went frantic. My first customer had paid me money, and I hadn’t delivered. I had two problems: how do I deliver to the first customer and how do I deliver to future customers? I’ll tackle the first one first. I had the customer’s email address, so wrote a short and positive email and provided a copy link to the spreadsheet so that the customer would have their own copy of the product. But I couldn’t write every customer manually. Besides, wasn’t this a file that could be fulfilled automatically, isn’t that the power of software?

My mind went frantic. My first customer had paid me money, and I hadn’t delivered. What do I do now?

Then I entered into a flurry of Google searches and Shopify apps. A few searches later I found a plug in that could do automatic fulfillment and collect payment, all without any human intervention. Install, configure, done. Now I was set.

My marketing efforts were less than stellar. My planned YouTube video drove no traffic. My unplanned, scrambled pin on Pinterest drove no traffic. Yet my unplanned, waffling, hesitant LinkedIn post drove 100% of my customers. Goes to show that you never know what will actually work until you try it.

You never know what will actually work until you try it.

The Learnings

Here’s a few things I learned:

• Shut up the critic and just do something. Your inner critic never knows what a viable business opportunity is until you just try it.
• Invest as little as possible to learn as much as possible. In this experience I used a free Shopify trial, with the cheapest plan selected; free stock images; and personal accounts to do free marketing.
• In retrospect, I should have created an even smaller minimal viable product, such as a landing page describing the product and soliciting emails, to validate the market need before building the store or preparing the product for wider use.
• Starting the online business is easy, getting customers is hard.
• Content. Content. Content. Your online business needs to bust out content that drives customers back to your store. But it has to be the right content in the right platform. In my case, LinkedIn.
• I learned so much about how developers build software applications, and how easy it is to build a monolithic architecture when the product is small and data is few, but as things grow the architecture becomes unwieldy. Then I learned the value of micro-services and making calculations elsewhere that could drive data back to the user.
• The first version of the spreadsheet made sense to me,but then I tried to walk a few friends through it and they were totally confused. I learned the value of user design and experimentation. I made one place for user-inputted data, a few friendly copy things, all trying to make the spreadsheet easier for me to use.

The Next Step

I won’t say that I’ve validated a market need for the Millionaire Calculator, or at least my solution for the need if it exists. But the experience and lessons learned have bolstered my confidence in creating a side hustle online business. I wish you luck in your side hustle entrepreneur journey!

And if you want to know when you’ll have a net worth of a $1,000,000, check out the Millionaire Calculator—enter code Medium at check out for $2.00 off. (Yes, I did that. Shut up, inner critic!)