Products I loved while creating a business
One of the OKRs that I set for myself this year (yes, I have OKRs for myself, that is a topic I have coming in a future post) was to create a business that generated $1000 in revenue this year (notice I said revenue, not profit). The goal wasn’t to create a business that would replace my day job, but instead have a reachable enough goal that motivated me to create something outside of work that would act as a forcing function for me to learn a new set of skills.
This post is about my experience while starting the business, but more importantly, about the products that helped me do so (and a couple of feature requests).
Setting it up
I didn’t want to invest a lot of capital in starting a business, because I knew that I wouldn’t have a lot of time to invest in it and I wanted to limit my downside, so I decided that dropshipping was the way to go for me. Relatively low capital required, but a lot of exposure to ads, marketing and ecommerce, which is exactly what I was looking for.
After a few weeks researching products and debating different options, I decided to go with a clothing brand. The store would focus on apparel with funny and mean sayings in them. Sayings that you didn’t mean, but you actually kind of did, like “sorry for the late reply, I didn’t want to talk”. I named the brand “JK (kind of)”.
With a brand in mind, I hired a designer in Fiverr to create the logo, and I was very happy with the results! Then I went to Shopify to start the business.
I had heard about Shopify in plenty of podcasts, especially about the fact that they position themselves as a platform that others can build on top of, and I have to say, WOW, I was truly impressed. I think they do three things extremely well:
- Guide you through the initial stages: They give you working themes/websites so you don’t start from zero, and checklists so you set up your store right.
- Out the box integrations with the big ad players: You can integrate with Facebook and Google easily, and your products are synced across the platforms so maintaining it is not a hassle.
- Provide you with a marketplace full of valuable (and mostly free) apps: The Shopify App Store is filled with apps for with all the components that ecommerce business needs, reviews, free shipping bars, pop ups for discounts, you name it, they have it. Most of them are free or have free tiers, so you are able to set up your store without spending too much money.
I leveraged Shopify’s integration with Printify and Printful, two of the top print-on-demand services in the Shopify App Store, to create the shirts and hoodies for my store. I also ordered some samples so I could judge the quality of the product I wanted to sell.
Shopify’s focus is on automating as much as possible from the business, and ensuring you spend most of your energy in creating an attractive site, with valuable products and great marketing material; and they do a fantastic job at it.
Huge shoutout to Canva as well. Since I needed to create content for the site and social media accounts, Canva was my savior. I was able was able to find royalty free pictures in Unsplash and edit them in Canva. The free tier had everything I needed, it even includes frames for the posts in the different apps (Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.) so you get the formatting right from the get go.
Getting traffic
By now I had a website, products published, and content for my social media campaigns. Now I only needed traffic. Looking back, I honestly thought that the hardest part was behind me, I had spent a couple of weeks using all my free time in setting up the website with all the products and registering an LLC to ensure everything was in place for my launch. I thought that by running a few adds, sales would easily start to come. I was wrong.
Setting up the ads for the store was much harder than I thought it would be. From a product perspective, it was surprising to see that Google’s and Facebook’s platforms are not as intuitive as I expected them to be. I definitely don’t have all the historical context for how they got to where they are now, but I imagine that because they pretty much share a duopoly on ads, there may not be enough competition forcing them to improve the experience.
Google was the hardest of the two, setting up a campaign was pretty difficult because there is little guidance on how to make a successful campaign or what works best for your industry. I was expecting guides on how to set up a good campaign, since by creating good ads, users are more likely to click on the ads and the platform becomes more valuable for both parties (merchant and user). Instead you are shown forms with many fields to fill out and little help while you do so.
Facebook ads were a little easier. Although there aren’t any tutorials, the product is intuitive enough that you can figure it out after a few minutes. I really like how they show you previews of how your ads will look and let you edit/crop as needed. They do an even better job in the ad analytics, showing you the demographic of who clicked on your ads (age brackets and gender) and the platform in which they did (Facebook or Instagram), with the cost per click for each. My only piece of feedback would be that they have two different experiences where you can create ads (or rather, at least two), which was confusing (when should I use one instead of the other?), but once you bookmark both links you should be set, if you can’t find an option in one of the experiences, you go to the other one.
As with everything, practice makes perfect (or at least, it makes it better), here is the first ad that I ran on Facebook, with the latest that I ran. Even I am shocked that people clicked on the left one.
Getting sales (or not)
Although a good ad makes your cost per click lower, if you spend enough money on ads, you will certainly have traffic. I was spending about ~$30 a day and getting around 100 daily visitors, but no sales, even when users spent 2+ min on the site looking at the designs.
I knew something was not working, otherwise I would have gotten a sale outside of friends and family by now. I also knew that I needed to talk to real customers, because my friends and family would have a bias and prior context. So I decided to post on Reddit to get some feedback from actual users, and three things surprised me:
- The amount of traffic that it got. I had 700+ visits on the site the day I posted, and (unfortunately) no sales. I would have never thought that a single post on Reddit would produce that much traffic. It was great to see the power of social media first hand.
- The amount of mean people online. I always knew this to some extent, but it was my first time being on the receiving end of it. Some people say unnecessarily offensive things when they are behind a computer and an anonymous alias. It explains a lot of the mental struggles that the new generations have and continue to go through.
- How helpful some of the feedback was. Behind the mean comments, there were some very helpful ones. I even messaged some users directly and got some feedback on how to make the designs better and the site more intuitive. Applying PM 101 and talking to customers to understand where they were struggling is one of the most important things that I have done for the project so far.
So, what now?
I am still not in a place where I want to be with the store, and I am still struggling with sales, but I am grateful to have learned so much to get to this point. The next thing that I am going to try are the AI tools that are capturing so many headlines to improve the site and products. I will continue to iterate to find product market fit and I’ll share the learnings here, with the hopes of motivating others to try something outside of their 9–5 to learn more skills.
I leave you with my awards for the best products so far, my wishlist for features and a link to my site.
Best products
- Shopify Theme Customizer: Hands down, the best product so far. I take my hat off to the Shopify employees, they have done an amazing job so far and I am bullish on where they will take it.
- Canva: I am not an experienced designer by any means, but Canva felt like PowerPoint on steroids, and it helped me create the material I needed to have social media content and make my site look better.
- Shopify apps: I am cheating here, but there were too many awesome apps that I had to recommend a few of them, so here they are: GLO Color (better layout for your variants), Track123 (customers can track orders), Hextom (free shipping bar) and Rivo Popups (discount pop up)
Wishlist
Here are some features that I wish some products had:
- Getting karma in Reddit through games: There were many cases where I could not post in subreddits because I didn’t have enough Karma, even though I use Reddit every week. I understand now that they do it to prevent bots from spamming the site, but there must be a way to remove this barrier for people that use the platform often, but don’t post. Something like earning karma through games would be a good idea to keep the bots out, and allow users to get karma when they need it.
- Leaderboards for successful Google and Facebook ads: A leaderboard would show users what successful ads look like, and it could even represent an opportunity to gamify the ad platforms in a way that leads to higher spend by merchants. To motivate merchants to make their ads public, Google/Facebook could offer prices for the winners. This would benefit smaller and less experienced merchants, since they can mimic a strategy that is working, which at the end helps the consumer too since they see better ads.
- Image editor for Google’s Merchant Center logo: This one is a bit of a pet peeve. Even today, I have not been able to upload my logo to Google’s Merchant Center. It always gets rejected for some reason (background is not clear enough, dimensions are not as expected, there isn’t a circle around the logo, etc.). I am sure that Google can create a system where you upload an image of your logo and they allow you to edit it and crop it so it shows up correctly in their different platforms.
Until next time!
