For a long time I have been thinking of starting my own business, but until recently I never committed. I had so many ideas and just when I was finished with the project I scrapped it. But now here I am, starting my own business — an online store.
Every beginning is hard and may I say stressful. Even before I did my market research I said to myself that I won’t have any expectations at all and just try. But oh boy is that hard to pull off. Especially after you do your market research and hype yourself up more than anything else. So I checked multiple sources to see how many people are looking for a specific product, what is the availability which was very low or none on most products, which is perfect right? Yeah it is, once you start getting to your customers and start selling. But at this point we are not there yet in this story.
So like every other guy, I suppose, I talked to some of my closest friends and they all immediately jumped on the hype train and thought this was a genius idea. Maybe they are right, well quite probably they are, but not quite yet.
The golden rule
There is one golden rule and it is: “no matter how good your product is, it won’t sell unless people who want and/or need it know you exist and they can get it at your store. Now this is the part where reality kicks in. I have built my own store, luckily with zero costs, because I’m a developer and can do it myself, but still, owning a company alone has some costs and responsibility. We don’t want to bleed money after all.
So what now, of course social media can help or it can be a money pit. So I have experimented with different Ad campaigns, multiple Ad sets to learn what works and what makes people click. I got a pretty sizable audience in the first month before launch and I managed to pull higher engagement than other similar accounts which are in related fields. So everything is sparkly, but again, we are not selling yet. But what we are doing, is hyping us up and forgetting to not expect much at start and grow the business slowly.
Moment of truth
So the moment of the official launch came and I was expecting a madhouse. As a developer I even went that far that I did multiple stress tests just so the store wouldn’t crash. It didn’t and there were a lot of concurrent visitors. But one big, not big, HUGE problem. There were no sales. And trust me that hurts. It hurts harder than stepping on a lego. I seriously started sweating because for the first time in, I don’t know how long, I felt lost. I had no clue why no one was buying. And so days have passed and still no sale.
Ok, time to stop feeling useless and time to prepare a plan on how to salvage this. Figuring what is the problem, is it the price, is it the product, is it that the target audience is wrong? -Well better figure it out quickly since at this time all we are doing is burning money. It took us 1 week to make our first sale and trust me it was an emotional rollercoaster. Not so much because a fresh business isn’t booming on the first few days, but because I felt like I failed myself. I kept having doubts in my own product.
Always believe in your product!
I felt a little bit disappointed in myself and in a pretty low state of mind, especially because I let my emotions get the better of me and let the hype stray me away from my initial plan. It took me days to get back on track and be in my old state of mind. I felt optimistic once again. At this point the business is self sustainable so I’m not bleeding any money, which after a month is pretty good in my book. To be honest I expected to bleed money for a few months before I would decide to continue or end it. Of Course one month means nothing and it can still change for the good or the bad, but I am calm and collected. I’m believing in my product with many changes coming up and multiple plans ready to execute.
At this point I’m not expecting anything and I’m working on this business out of pure passion. I think that this is the right path and if by chance it grows to the point I can do it full time, I will be more than grateful.
Well actually I am lying, it’s not that I’m not expecting anything at all, I’m just confident that I can do it and I know I will, so this is just the start of the journey. And I like journeys, especially this one, because I have full control of where I am going.
Yes starting your business is stressful, but it brings inner peace and if you ask me whether you should start your own business or not. I would say, do it. I don’t recommend getting in debt, but if you can, just try. If you don’t try you will always live with regret and that is worse than any “feeling a little down” day when things go wrong. Everyone has days like that, so stand up, dust off and get on with the hustle!
