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Store Build, Resilience, and Timeboxing
Enhance your health and happiness through entrepreneurial success - one week at a time.
Will Watters
April 07, 2024
What’s up! I just got back from San Diego shooting our upcoming 6th Kickstarter campaign (we will dive into this in a later Startup Playbook).
We run Kickstarter to de-risk expanding in to new categories. Our customers help support our category expansion through pre-orders then wait for the product to be built. This helps fund our first production run and shows us the demand levels for the products from our customers. It’s been a massive strategy for us and we love Kickstarter.
Shoots are crazy. Usually 12-14 hour days trying to get every detail covered. They are crucial for our brand, but exhausting.
I leave Tuesday for Spring Break, but wanted to get this out because there’s some crucial important in here for your brand journey and for taking care of yourself along the way.
Hope you are having a great weekend!
Startup Playbook: Build Your Store
Our first website was horrible. We tried to do to much and had no idea what we were doing. I’m here to help.
Next up for this week, I want to talk to you about setting up your Shopify Store. To this point, we have discussed coming up with ideas, scoring your ideas, naming your brand, sourcing products, getting samples, brand launch timing, and more.
It's time to set up your store.
You can't sell products if you don't have a place for your customers to buy.
You should be working on this while you're still dialing in your samples for launch. This may not be the most exciting step, but it’s crucial for you to succeed.
The best part is Shopify offers some great free templates to get you started. Here’s how you can effectively set up your Shopify store in parallel with the sampling phase:
1. Choose the Right Shopify Template
Selecting the right template is crucial as it sets the tone for your brand's online presence. Shopify offers a variety of free and premium templates that are designed to cater to different styles and needs. Look for a template that aligns with your brand identity and is also user-friendly. Consider the following when choosing a template:
Aesthetic appeal: Ensure it matches your brand’s style.
Functionality: Look for features that support your specific product types (e.g., size options for apparel, color variations for accessories).
Mobile responsiveness: With a majority of online shopping done via mobile devices, having a mobile-friendly design is essential.
Here’s a few free themes that I like for single product brands or early brands to help you get started: Crave, Refresh, & Origin.
2. Develop Your Store’s Structure
While your product is in the sampling phase, you want to work on structuring your online store. This includes:
Navigation and Menus: Create clear and intuitive navigation to help customers find products easily.
Product Categories: Organize your products into logical categories to enhance user experience. If you only have one product for now, that’s totally fine as well.
Essential Pages: Develop the must-have pages such as 'Home', 'About Us', 'Shop', 'FAQ', and 'Contact Us'.
3. Set Up Essential E-commerce Features
To ensure your store operates smoothly, integrate key e-commerce functionalities:
Payment Gateways: Set up various payment options to accommodate all your customers. (Shop Pay, PayPal, Amazon, etc)
Shipping Options: Configure logistics for delivering your products domestically and internationally, if you think you’ll have international customers.
Customer Service Tools: Implement chat support, email contact forms, and FAQs to assist customers.
4. Optimize for SEO
From the beginning, optimize your store’s content for search engines to increase visibility:
Keyword Rich Descriptions: Use relevant keywords in your product descriptions, blog posts, and meta tags.
Speed Optimization: Ensure your site loads quickly to reduce bounce rates.
Quality Content: Regularly update your site with high-quality content that engages and retains customers.
5. Prepare for Launch
As your products are being finalized, prepare your store for launch:
Testing: Conduct thorough testing of your website to ensure all features work seamlessly.
Analytics: Install analytics tools to track visitor behaviors, which can inform adjustments post-launch.
Marketing Strategy: Develop a launch strategy that includes email marketing, social media announcements, and perhaps even a launch-day discount.
6. Continuous Improvement
Even after your store is set up and running, continual improvement based on customer feedback and analytics is key:
Customer Feedback: Regularly collect and analyze customer feedback to understand what works and what doesn’t.
A/B Testing: Test different aspects of your website to see what design elements or features users prefer.
Updates and Upgrades: Keep your store fresh and functional with regular updates to your content, design, and inventory.
By handling the Shopify store setup during the sampling phase, you not only make efficient use of your time but also ensure that you’re ready to sell immediately upon product launch. This approach minimizes downtime and can provide a competitive edge in the fast-paced e-commerce environment.
Founder Playbook: Resilience
As a founder, things won’t always go your way. You have to have mental fortitude.
My mentor Gordon Seabury, CEO of Toad & Co, once shared an insight with me: winning in business doesn't necessarily come from growing faster than everyone else; it often comes from hanging on longer.
Building a resilient brand means committing to the long haul and navigating challenges — they will come.
Why Resilience Matters
Resilience is the backbone of entrepreneurship.
It's about transforming setbacks into growth opportunities. Adopting a growth mindset enables you to learn from each challenge and view difficulties through a lens of potential.
Building Your Resilience Toolbox
Mindset and Reflection: Cultivate a mindset that embraces challenges as opportunities. Regularly reflect on your goals to ensure they align with where you’re spending your time.
Stress Management: Implement stress-reduction techniques. Building a startup is stressful. Physical activity and planned downtime will help fortify your mental health.
Support Networks: Lean on a network of mentors, peers, and a supportive team. I have a handful of other brand founders I am always in touch with. These relationships provide not only emotional support but also diverse perspectives and advice.
Resilience as a critical component of your journey as a founder. It’s about learning continuously and sticking with your vision long enough to see it succeed. Remember, sometimes the key to winning is simply holding on longer than the rest.
Automation Playbook: Timeboxing
Here is something I have really struggled with. My job is busy. I wear a ton of hats. I handle everything from social media strategy to product sourcing, marketing plan to sample testing. I get distracted.
Timeboxing is a powerful productivity technique where you allocate a fixed amount of time to a specific task, work on it until the time is up, then stop. This method helps me maintain focus, enhances efficiency, and prevents distractions.
Why Three Tasks?
Limiting yourself to three key tasks per day forces you to prioritize and concentrate your efforts on high-impact activities. This approach ensures you dedicate your best energy to tasks that significantly advance your goals, without spreading yourself too thin.
Implementing Timeboxing:
Choose Your Tasks: Each morning, select three critical tasks that contribute to your business's success.
Allocate Time: Determine a realistic timeframe for each task based on your capabilities and task complexity.
Schedule: Place these timeboxes in your calendar as fixed appointments.
Set Alerts: Use timers or apps to remind you when your timebox is ending.
Reduce Distractions: Prepare a focused workspace and use tools to block distracting sites and apps. Inform others that you are in a focused work session.
Review and Adjust: At day’s end, evaluate your progress. Adjust future time allocations based on today’s insights.
Benefits of Timeboxing
Efficiency and Focus: Allocating specific times to tasks helps you focus better and work more efficiently.
Prioritization: Helps you manage tasks by importance and urgency.
Progress Tracking: Facilitates monitoring progress on big projects by breaking them into timed segments.
Stress Reduction: Lowers stress by focusing on a manageable number of tasks each day.
Hopefully this helps you out and gets you checking more things off your to-do list. It certainly helps me when I prioritize it.
That’s it for this week! If you want to add anything, or just want to say hey, shoot me a response!
Will
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