4 Things You Should Know Before Starting an Online Store

Quick disclaimer: This article is based on my personal experience and is not to be taken as gospel.

1) You're going to have to juggle so many tasks simultaneously —which means you cannot attempt to micromanage each and every step.

Setting up an online store is equivalent to having five jobs at once. It’s like juggling three balls while balancing a spinning plate on your head —oh, and except, there is no pay.

So before diving headlong into the eCommerce world, mentally prepare yourself to have your attention diverted into a gazillion directions. You'll be too busy to care about things which don't really matter that much, and your patience will grow thin with nonessential time-wasters in your life. You're about to become one of those busy af "CEO & Founder"s. Own it. Love it. Flaunt it.

Just to give you an idea of the multitude of drastically different areas your attention will stretch, here are a couple of examples: learning how to emotionally connect with your customers, budgeting and acquiring financial resources, designing products, collecting data, analytical thinking and management skills. They can all seem unrelated at first, and indeed they are. But you also discover plenty of new skills you never knew you had.

I'll leave it to a later stage in my business to explain to you the times when everything starts running smooth and the business pays for itself. For now, as per my rough start, I quickly discovered that being a perfectionist about every little detail of my business was not going to be realistic, nor effective.

When my inner critic gets a bit too loud, or motivation starts to wear off, I remind myself that these are just steps on the road that will lead me to more rewarding destinations. There will come a day when I can hopefully delegate my least favorite tasks to more skilled professionals who actually love what they do and are much better at them than I am. My ultimate goal is to build a sustainable and effective system in which everyone does what they do best and together we make the world a better place.

2) You can't have too much pride in your work — you need to be cool making radical changes at something you might've been putting a lot of effort in.

Another reason you can't afford to be perfectionistic —and this one I learned the hard way.

Before trying my luck at an online store, I started my second business journey as a virtual bookstore on Amazon. I had drafted a very promising roadmap, or so I thought. I thought my plan was perfect just because I worked so hard on it. And although I value the skills I gained along the way, the plan never went anywhere.

My grand idea was to sell logbooks and planners that were already being searched about, so they would just market themselves through SEO and I could just lay back and watch the money flow! Great idea, right? Yeah well... it didn’t work. Luckily though, I found out quickly, and although it was sad to see my efforts go to waste, due to that experience now I know not to take the path of relying on a solitary marketing strategy.

The stage of building an online store I am on right now is strikingly similar to the Spaghetti Tower Marshmallow Challenge. If the name isn’t too self-explanatory, simply imagine trying to build a freestanding structure with tape, a one-yard string, and 20 spaghetti sticks in under 18 minutes with a marshmallow at the very top.

If you’re wondering what the hell I’m talking about, this seeming absurdity is actually a break-through design experiment invented by Peter Skillman and made popular by author Tom Wujec in his TED Talk “Build a Tower, Build a Team.”

In a remarkable social experiment, the Marshmallow Challenge was presented to different groups of people, involving: engineers, kindergarteners, business school graduates, CEOs, MBA students, etc. The point was to see which group would build the tallest standing marshmallow-spaghetti tower in under 18 minutes, and to examine what they did and how they did it.

Out of many seasoned professionals who came up with detailed plans and refined educated guesses, it was the group of kindergarteners who topped all, winning the race by building the tallest standing structure within the time limit.

Surprised now? Well, don't be so fast. The group of people who performed amongst the worst was…

*drumroll…*

Business school graduates.

In a "data-driven" world of optimization and automation, maybe we've forgotten that we’re not robots. We’re not machines with infinite energy and nonstop behavioral consistency. I know, right> What a scam!

But with the skewed rewarding method of schooling and our dire need for structure and predictability, our heads can get so buried in the sand of hieroglyphic biz-talk that we can overlook the humble effectiveness of trial and error.

More on that in next weeks' blog. Join our email list to get an email when it's fresh off the press!

3) sometimes you should ditch your vision board and accept that just like everything else in life, a business doesn’t always go according to plan.

…and that is a beautiful thing.

A business moves and shifts and grows on its own. Almost like a coded entity that once nurtured enough, can carry on on its own without as much input, perhaps beyond our lifetimes!

But before that can happen, first we need to understand why creating a well-structured roadmap doesn’t equate to walking the road.

Let me give you an example. For me, social media, and especially Instagram marketing was one of the hardest action steps and it kept me stagnated for an eternity. I blame it all on branding gurus on the 'net. #notreallybutkinda

With all due respect to their expertise, the circular theoretical discussion of “building an effective strategy” for Instagram never took me anywhere. After consuming enough books, videos, and "free templates," all I'm left with is mere theory and countless unwanted email list subscriptions. In fact, if I hear one more brand strategist on YouTube tell me how I need to find my “why” and “how” imma start throwing punches at the screen.

Ya heard.

Strategy's overrated.

You're wasting time drawing a map if you've never taken a single step on a path. I'm not saying planning is completely useless. But the validity of any strategy starts to decline once it has reached a certain number of steps because as more steps are added, up goes the chance that the unpredictable nature of life will render them unusable.

We can’t predict the future, my fellow humans, I know we try, I do too.

A map is a piece of paper, a road is a road.

As a small business owner, your job should be more about walking the road while delegating the map-drawing. So that one day you can get a four-wheel with navigation installed, and a driver, B.S., who has impressive mapping skills on her resume.

4) You must resist the urge to master all parts of your business and avoid going down too many rabbit holes.

You might think that I’m in no position or age to say this, but trust me, a lifetime wouldn’t be enough to master all aspects of a small business.

I struggled with this one. My parents and elders advise I must first “get industry experience” before trying to start a business all on my own. That would give me credibility, they said. IT WOULD MAKE ME "SEASONED", THEY SAID!

But as it turns out what was way more vital to my business was actually being realistic about the number of topics I could reasonably delve deep into without spreading myself too thin. Additionally, I can't work at totally different positions just to gain experience while trying to set up my own online store. If I am to be my own boss, I can't manage the expectations of another.

If your business is really simple, such as making and selling your own products in a brick-and-mortar, that might be possible. For an online store that just ain't the case.

Bookkeeping, which is sort of a necessity for meeting tax requirements, is detailed enough on its own to require a four-year degree. (Pro-tip: Learn from my mistakes and please, hire an accountant.)

In fact, there are entire college majors on pretty much every pillar of forming a business. No mortal human can be expected to spend 40 years studying marketing, management, finance and accounting, research methods, data analysis, web & graphic design, fashion & apparel design, public relations, and then fiiiinally open that store!

Well, thankfully, that's where you can dip into the magical land of freelancers and employees. There are so many inexperienced yet talented and eager young lads that will gladly do the work for you. That's what universities were made for!

School systems are not made to breed business owners. They are made to systematically fill industrial skilled worker shortages.

Add to that the rapid commoditization of human capital, we get an equation that shows us the more skilled employees a business can afford, the more profitable it can become. Hate the game, not the player.

So ideally, once we know enough about a given setback to set reasonable expectations, we must humble down and leave it to the pros.

We can’t change the system, but if we can own and manage a successful business, we can stand on the more satisfying side of the equation.

I mean… isn’t that why you're reading this?

Comment yes or no so I'll know :)

Stay Fearless,

- Selin Tanriverdi