xShepherdx
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For a bit of backstory, check out my intro post here.
Since starting my business 3 years ago, I've spent been struggling to make it profitable. For the curious, this business is a digital eCommerce business operating in a creative niche.
But as of today, I am FINALLY happy to report that things are looking up. My ads are finally profitable, sales are growing, and I have an actual plan for growing the company moving forward.
To be clear, I’m not out of the “desert of desertion” yet. My site has yet to break $4k in revenue. And my feedback loop is only just starting to spit out actionable results. Things could change at any moment, which is kind of fun.
My ultimate goal is to earn enough from my ecom business (this or a future one) to live on and start buying real estate. The plan is to live cheap, house hack a duplex/triplex/fourplex, and grow my RE portfolio while scaling my income from the business at the same time. @Envision did this exact thing in my same city, so I'm optimistic that I can figure it out too.
My goals for May are:
1) Scaling up my Meta ads now that they’re finally profitable. More ad spend, more creative, more experiments. I’ve found a guy who can crank out high-quality video ads for my niche. They've been working great so I’m leaning into that for now. My goal is to profitably break $4K in revenue in May.
2) Figuring out why my email deliverability went into the toilet overnight. I was getting ~40% open rates for a while but now only 2.5% of Gmail users open my emails. And Gmail addresses make up over 80% of my subscriber list. Email has been beyond frustrating for me and this latest struggle only adds to my frustration. Any email pros here?
3) Begin publishing content on TikTok. One of my contractors had some ideas so we’ve scheduled a few months of content to see what happens. This is largely an experiment, but I’m stoked to finally have the ability to put out content regularly. If this works at all, I'll be finding someone to do content on a regular basis for TicTok, Insta, YouTube, etc.
4) Release 3 new products. These products fit into a trending niche within my niche. These 3 products will be small and marketed primarily as a bundle. The products we've developed are really sick and I think our community will love them. As a bonus, I've got a few affiliates who will be happy to do content around these products which should help.
5) Build (or find) a dashboard that allows me to easily see AOV, CAC, MER, conversion rates, and more. On a normal site this would be simple, but with paid and free products ran through the same store tracking even basic metrics becomes a huge PITA. Even checking the simplest data takes me like 20 minutes due to page load times and having to input the data manually.
This thread will be where I document my journey and share the lessons I’ve learned. So please, say hi, ask questions, and follow along with my progress.
Since starting my business 3 years ago, I've spent been struggling to make it profitable. For the curious, this business is a digital eCommerce business operating in a creative niche.
But as of today, I am FINALLY happy to report that things are looking up. My ads are finally profitable, sales are growing, and I have an actual plan for growing the company moving forward.
To be clear, I’m not out of the “desert of desertion” yet. My site has yet to break $4k in revenue. And my feedback loop is only just starting to spit out actionable results. Things could change at any moment, which is kind of fun.
My ultimate goal is to earn enough from my ecom business (this or a future one) to live on and start buying real estate. The plan is to live cheap, house hack a duplex/triplex/fourplex, and grow my RE portfolio while scaling my income from the business at the same time. @Envision did this exact thing in my same city, so I'm optimistic that I can figure it out too.
My goals for May are:
1) Scaling up my Meta ads now that they’re finally profitable. More ad spend, more creative, more experiments. I’ve found a guy who can crank out high-quality video ads for my niche. They've been working great so I’m leaning into that for now. My goal is to profitably break $4K in revenue in May.
2) Figuring out why my email deliverability went into the toilet overnight. I was getting ~40% open rates for a while but now only 2.5% of Gmail users open my emails. And Gmail addresses make up over 80% of my subscriber list. Email has been beyond frustrating for me and this latest struggle only adds to my frustration. Any email pros here?
3) Begin publishing content on TikTok. One of my contractors had some ideas so we’ve scheduled a few months of content to see what happens. This is largely an experiment, but I’m stoked to finally have the ability to put out content regularly. If this works at all, I'll be finding someone to do content on a regular basis for TicTok, Insta, YouTube, etc.
4) Release 3 new products. These products fit into a trending niche within my niche. These 3 products will be small and marketed primarily as a bundle. The products we've developed are really sick and I think our community will love them. As a bonus, I've got a few affiliates who will be happy to do content around these products which should help.
5) Build (or find) a dashboard that allows me to easily see AOV, CAC, MER, conversion rates, and more. On a normal site this would be simple, but with paid and free products ran through the same store tracking even basic metrics becomes a huge PITA. Even checking the simplest data takes me like 20 minutes due to page load times and having to input the data manually.
This thread will be where I document my journey and share the lessons I’ve learned. So please, say hi, ask questions, and follow along with my progress.
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