Lessons for my eCommerce bets, and where I hope to go next
Physical products are hard, and AI is coming for the software jobs!
I have a few tiny eCommerce ventures, and I found eCommerce to be brutal.
I’ve tried a few in the past, but at the moment I’ve been working on my wool sock making business for about a year (https://www.manibas.com if you want to take a peek), as a very very casual side business.
I also have another casual store that sells vegetable seeds. I put even less effort in that one: I update my stock once a year, sometime add a few varieties and package up the seeds when the orders come in. I would harvest seeds for myself anyway, so I don’t count any harvesting time here.
The marketing and sales requires the same kind of work, regardless of the price and effort it takes to create the product :
Writing blog post.
Writing product listings/sales pages.
Posting to various social media platforms.
Reaching out to other business for wholesale sales or other kinds of collaboration.
It’s not just eCommerce too: you need to do much of the same to market a SaaS, a digital product or even open a restaurant.
My current stores are both pretty low volume: I can see the way to grow, but the grind at the beginning is brutal and I really didn’t understand how much effort it would be.
That’s the main lesson right there: if you’re starting something for a brand new (to you) audience or niche, it takes forever to move the needle as a side project, unless you’ve really hit a nerve somwhere.
Most of us think about this linearly, but it’s more of an exponential thing, and the beginning is a lot longer that we like to plan for when we think about an exciting new project.
I’ve enjoy both those stores and will keep growing them slowly. I’m not expecting them to grow big and it scratches the itch of selling physical products. Also, both socks and seeds are never going to be replaced by some other tech!
On the other hand, since it’s always the same effort, but not the same return in product sold, the smart thing would be to focus the bulk of my efforts on just one audience that has more potential than 4$ seeds packets.
I strongly believe “small bets” approach and moving forward in small increments. but those bets should ideally be around the same general audience so all those marketing efforts are somewhat reusable.
So, in the future, I hope to be spending most of my efforts in one market that’s fun for me. I’ll always talk shop about my indie business in this newsletter for sure, but I’m still in the search of what’s my “thing”.
There is my micro SaaS that I want to ship for sure, but talking about pure software is a bit boring to me. I like a good discussion about architecture or tech in general, but the in-depth minutia of a language or framework was never my thing.
I’m considering teaching about hardware instead of only software, such as building project with Arduino, Raspberry Pi and other automation tech such as Home Assistant. I’ve always been a web developer, but I studied in electrical engineering and always liked tinkering with that stuff even if I never made a career out of it. It’s also more evergreen than the latest JS framework.
With the latest AI advances, it’s also never been more relevant to start thinking about the world beyond pure code.
I’m thinking about putting together a small Arduino workshop or course. Please reply if that is something that would be interesting to you, and what you would be hoping to learn!