The Challenge

Why

It wouldn't be fun if we wouldn't challenge ourselves with certain goals. One of the main reasons we are taking this challenge is that we have basically 0 experience in building an e-commerce store. We have built businesses before, I personally:

• Had an IT consulting business
• Developed countless websites
• Developed a semi-successful flight aggregator app
• Built HR SaaS on my own(you can see it here https://wellb.ee)

But We have never tried building a Shopify or Woo-commerce store. Not even talking about trying to make a business of it.

Rules

Besides the challenge of never have built something similar, we are gating our selves with some rules:

• We will use no code, or low code tools only
• Max money we will invest from our own pockets $1000
• Reach $1000 monthly revenue after 6'th month
• We can pivot when we see it's not working
• We will share a bi-weekly summary of how we doing

The Plan

To keep this challenge interesting we will be posting bi-weekly updates. To help us with the structure of this challenge, we came up with a plan or steps in how we are going to execute.

Everyone will be able to learn from our mistakes as we go through this challenge. Here's how we are structuring this plan:

1. Search on niche by analyzing trends and business groups or communities
2. Find what we will sell by either drop shipping or partnering with manufacturers in local communities.
3. Establish a supply chain and delivery.
4. Build Shopify store.
5. Implement payment provider to our Shopify store.
6. Set up conversion funnels for ads.
7. Research and implement business analysis tools.
8. Launch ads campaign.
9. Earn money of pivot.

Without further ado let's expand on our plan

What to Sell

First weeks we will spend looking for trends to find a niche of products we will sell. Not only have to find a niche but also decide where do we sell, globally or locally. Here's a list of tools and communities we will use to spot trends:

• Google Trends - This is an obvious choice for us to search which products are being searched on google the most during these times.
• Trends VC - An awesome paid report (also has free articles) on trending business topics. Also has an aggregated list of paid business communities that people can join in finding that perfect idea.
• Trends. co - Another paid newsletter service with their own trend research which should help us in finding good products. If you pay for a yearly plan of this newsletter, you are then invited to private Facebook groups where you can also get and discuss ideas. By a guy who created an awesome business podcast - "My First Million".
• Indie hackers - A nice community of people who build profitable businesses as a side hustle. Also has a great podcast on Spotify which we highly recommend.
• Googling blog posts and tools - This might sound basic, but googling will be a big source of our knowledge. There are hundreds of articles which already made all the research for us.

Supply

The next challenge is to find the particular product to sell and a supply where to get it from. It will depend drastically on where do we choose to sell. If we choose Lithuania or the Baltics, we will most likely try to contact manufacturers directly and try to get partnerships. Or even try to buy and resell products ourselves as we would want to have the fastest delivery times. If we choose a global market then we will probably drop-ship. In the future articles we will answer the following:

1. Where do we get the supply?
2. Where do we ship?
3. How do we ship?
4. Do we do drop shipping or ship it ourselves?

Where to Sell

There are multiple platforms nowadays that people can use to build their e-commerce business without writing a single line of code. In the series of future articles, we will cover which platform we decided to choose. Some key points to consider:

• Rent a shop or host it ourselves.
• Which platform is cheaper.
• How many different SKU's every platform supports
• Availability of different plugins.
• Shopify vs Magento vs Woocommerce vs Prestashop.

Collecting profits

How are we going to collect money from users? Which payment provider is best? Which payment options would be the cheapest? These are the questions that we will answer in this part. We will discuss different SaaS payment providers such as:

• Paypal
• Stripe
• 2Checkout

We will take into the account different locations that we will serve and currency localization.

Getting Users

Ads are the obvious choice when trying to bring users to your store. But which ads will give the most impressions? Which ad platforms bring more conversions?

Getting users will not be easy as we will try to spend as little money as possible on ads and try to discuss more alternative ways of advertising. A good start is to use product directories and media such as reddit.com, product hunt or even use this list of 150 different directories where you can present your e-commerce site.

As said above, ads are an option, but we will try our best in finding alternatives to google or Facebook.

Next Steps

So we got our plan and now what? The next step would be searching for trends and hopefully finding a niche and a possible product to sell. We will release a bi-weekly report on how we are doing with clear details on how we are doing it so people could follow along.

Ok so after I post this, we are starting our challenge of building an e-commerce business in 6 months. The details:

• Profitable in 6 months. At least $1000 monthly revenue past 6 months.
• Will deliver at least 2 reports per month with all the details.
• Limiting our budget to $1000 from our own pockets. Reinvesting from shop revenue is ok
• Will use no code at all.

The rules are set. Will continue with searching for trends and products.