What I learned blowing up a 7 figure ecom store

In 2019 I launched a personal planner business, Boss Personal Planners, that started out as a paper planner business.

I took templates I used in the past, made them more professional, had sample planners created, launched a Kickstarter with mild success, and got ready to start the business.

While waiting for the paper planners to arrive, it took about 2 months, I created digital planners and started to sell them.

I ran my own Facebook ads and immediately saw some success. Within the first month or so, I was doing $2k+ in sales per day.

Each month, more and more.

April and May of 2020 were my largest months, over $600k between the 2 months, I probably netted like $150k off of those 2 months, pre tax. Then it was all downhill from there.

So what happened?

I’ve done this in the past, grown some online business to decent numbers, never this high, and let it go to shit.

This time, I said “no fucking around, I’m going to pay for the best of everything.”

Boy was that wrong.

Developers. Not the most expensive, but they were several thousand a month. What did I get? An expensive agency that was outsourcing to people from Upwork and Fiverr it seemed like. They were also going through not only devs but employees like crazy.

Email marketing. Not super expensive but too passive, I wanted someone for that price to make decisions and tell me things to try and improve, not me having to do it all and you just make the email for me. For example, (we should try doing this segment, or we are seeing this data so we recommend trying XYZ, etc)

Paid advertiser. I thought the first guy was not performing, he wasn’t too expensive and he got me to the big numbers, but they just kept slipping. Despite numerous attempts, we did see any improvements. Hired a more expensive guy thinking it would be better, same. Deciding to switch off freelancers and go with a big expensive agency. They just sucked and blew the money, they didn’t care, they just wanted to up the spending to get a bigger %.

Email marketing #2. Went with a more expensive agency option thinking I would get better results. The initial setup was good, I should have stopped there. IMO, when I step in to write an email, send it out, and it earns 2x what your campaigns are doing, you’re not worth the money.

Developer #2. I would not say this is a waste because of quality, just not needed. I had upgraded to Shopify Plus and one of the benefits is being able to go headless. Since the first dev butchered my shop so much, I decided to rebuild and decided headless was the way to go. I also did a complete rebranding. Again, these weren’t the most expensive but it was still a LOT of money. They were a boutique agency and I was extremely happy with everything, it just wasn’t needed.

All of this, mostly the marketing agency, bled me dry. Spent hundreds of thousands, I’m now in huge debt, trying to dig out.

So what did I learn?

1. Grow slower. Too much going on, got spread too thin. Should have built slower and focused on each new aspect until it was properly established.
2. I should have focused more on content. Our products are new, people didn’t understand the digital planner concept. More video and tutorials would have been helpful.
3. Not jumped up to huge ad spend just grown slower, focus on adding new channels as each one becomes more stable.
4. Diversify acquisition methods. Most of our focus was on Facebook ads, we did dabble in Google and Pinterest. What I should have done is put more time into Google and Pinterest and possibly try other methods. I also should have invested more into SEO.
5. Bankrolled more money for a rainy day. I did this a bit and just ran out, but being so new, I should have done more. Money wasted on a lot of the efforts above could have been saved.
6. Not upgraded to Shopify Plus. I wish I just took a basic theme and had it customized when needed. I got caught up thinking I needed a special solution and had to have something fancy built. Sometimes, less is more. I also didn't use the features enough to justify it and especially as sales declined didn't save enough on the payment processing.

So that is the obvious stuff that I learned.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask, I can do more details in another post if it's requested enough.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.