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If you gave me six minutes with a version of me from 10 years ago, back when I was just getting started in e commerce, right, Broke, guessing, trying to figure it out, hoping something would stick. Here's exactly what I would tell them. Seven things. None of them would be tactics. All of them would have though saved my, saved me lots of years in the entrepreneurial journey. Hey there.
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I'm Cody McGuffey. I'm a husband dad of three and I'm the founder of Everbee.
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Everbee, Everbee, Everbee.
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Where we serve over a million creators across the globe, helping them grow thriving online businesses. I believe every single human is a creator and I believe every single creator should own a business, a business that gives them the freedom to build the life that they dream of. Built online is where creators, entrepreneurs and leaders get real insights, real stories and the edge to build something that's actually lasts. This is where the next generation builders get built.
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So let's get into it. But before we do, just as a reminder, just I like to remind everyone, because not everyone knows Built Online Podcast. This podcast you're listening to is more than just a podcast. It's. It's a part of Everbee. And Everbee is an e commerce tech company serving over a million digital entrepreneurs, which is crazy to say, across the world, helping them generate over $3 billion in revenue for their online businesses. And Everbee has two main products, right? Ever Be Research, which is a product research tool to help you find the best products to sell across the Internet. Whether it's on Amazon or Etsy or other marketplaces that you're building on. It helps you find the best products to sell. Second one is Everbee Store and that is an AI native e commerce platform where you describe what you want to sell. It generates a storefront, builds in your marketing. It's like an entire payments, like your entire store infrastructure in one box, right? And this, this you can compare to Shopify replaces. Shopify replaces Wix and Squarespace and WordPress it replaces Klaviyo also which you have to have an email marketing platform to, you know, it replaces a lot of pop up apps and all that stuff that you need to, you need to purchase actually and install onto your other other platforms. All that stuff is built in to every store because that's just the way that we, we think it should be and that's the way we built it in. So anyway that's what we do. Could sell for that you can sell physical products, digital products, subscription products as well, print on demand, all that good stuff. Right. So that's what we do. Print on demand is probably the main thing that people use this for. Forever be store there. But that's, that's that. So check it out. Lots of other free content on Everbeat IE as well, and free information. And let's jump back into the episode. So today we're Talking about the seven things I wish someone had told me 10 years ago when I was first getting started in e Commerce. So 10 years ago I was, I was trying everything I felt like I was. I was trying real estate, real estate investing, wholesaling, drop shipping, Amazon, fba, building my own websites, selling on ebay, I was selling on Etsy. And I had some moderate success in all those things. Or not all those things. Some of those things, a lot of those things failed. I was the guy trying to refresh my Stripe account, you know, and, or my Etsy account or Amazon account or whatever it is to, to see if the sale came in right. And some of it worked, a lot of it didn't. And looking back, most of the stuff I was getting wrong and I was wrong because nobody told me the things that I'm about to kind of mention to you right here. So I'm hoping this stuff saves you some time. So here are seven, right? In no particular order, seven things that I would have told myself or would save me a lot of time. All of them would save me probably years on my entrepreneurial journey. So number one, pick a niche. Younger me would have. We're selling everything to everyone, trying to, or online trying to appeal to everything, have everything to. For everyone. Trying to go after big, big categories where I, I was gonna like, I don't know, it just, it wasn't niche down at all. There was no niche. Honestly. I was trying to just flip stuff on the Internet. Cause I thought that's how it was supposed to work. And I feel like I was just watching YouTube videos or maybe it wasn't YouTube at the time as much. It was just wasn't as much today, but it was, it just, I wasn't, I, I wasn't really like niched in. I wasn't serving a specific customer. And the boring niches is where the money is at, right? Pet supplies for a specific type of breed, for doodles or gear for a specific job or products for a specific type of mom or kind of mom or dad or nurse or, you know, that's, that's the stuff that it makes money. I remember a friend of mine, he, when I met him, when he really told me about his Business he was selling like jewelry organizers. Jewelry organizers. Like I would have never done that. Like you, you think you only, you think about jewelry only, right? But you don't think about the jewelry organizers and then a specific type of jewelry organizer he was making and selling. Right? So that's the type of stuff like you need to niche in, understand your customer and really dive in there. And that's, that's something that would have saved me lots and lots of time because I feel like years I was just kind of having, selling general stuff on the Internet and that stuff doesn't work anymore. And maybe it did in the past, but it did not work really for me. And it's, it's probably not working today. Um, even if it kind of looks like it is, but it's, it's really not Real money is when the niches. Number two, the math has to work. The math has to work. You have to build a business where the unit economics work from the beginning. And so what I mean by that is you should be thinking about your, your million dollars and do the million dollar math before you really even start selling the product. Um, for me, the mistake that I was making is like, oh, I want to sell supplements online. And then I'd be starting to sell supplements and then I would, I would figure out a supplier, I would do it and then I wouldn't even do on how the supplements is actually going to make me money. You know, I didn't understand like that you need to start with what's the price point I'm going to be selling at this phone work. What's my cost of goods sold? What's it going to cost me landed? So if I'm going to order it, then what's it going to cost me to get to my, to my garage? In my case it's a warehouse. Then what's it going to cost me for shipping it right to my garage and all that stuff? That's very important. So what's the landed cost? I would call that. And then I have to make sure that I have margin for, for obviously marketing. I need to somehow get the marketing or if I'm selling on Amazon or Etsy or something like this, then I need to make sure that I have, you know, calculating all the fees in there as well. So I need to understand my margins. And for me there's a lot of ways to make this number, this, this money work or this, this money numbers work. But it's, it's important to do the math right. So for me now learning back I would tell myself right away is like, dude, you should be, you should be going after 60% gross margins, minimum, okay? So if you can't figure out how to, your, your 60% gross margins, like out of the gate, you're going to just bump into a whole bunch of problems. And I was going, after, looking back on it, I was going after like 20% gross margin products, 30% gross margin products, because I thought that was good, but it's not. Um, it doesn't leave you enough for, enough spread in there for other things. I'm gonna try to keep going through a little faster here. Cause I don't want to keep this, I don't want to. I want to keep this episode fairly short and concise. Number three, own the customer or you don't have a business, right? For, for years I built on platforms I didn't own the customer, right? Amazon, ebay, Etsy Marketplaces, they paid out, for sure. But that any day that they, any day that they changed the algorithm, my income changed, right? And I didn't have a relationship with the customer. I didn't have their email address. There was no way to reach them. I didn't have any leverage. If I wanted to sell that business, I can maybe sell it, but it's going to be at a fraction of the value I think it's worth because the buyer is not going to. They want a customer base. They want like a, you know, an email list. And so if I lost everything tomorrow, you know, I would have, if I lost that the algorithm changed, I would lost everything, right? So I would tell myself that I need to be building my own asset that I own. If so, if I lost everything, like all the other sales channels, I would still have one asset. I'd have my email list and I'd have my customers. I could always generate more of those or I could always generate more sales from those guys. Number four, I would stop building and I would probably start selling more. I spent so much time building things that nobody asked for. The perfect logo, the perfect website, the perfect product description, tweaking the homepage, the hero image over and over and over again. I would try to get the hero image perfect, perfect. Picking the fonts. None of it mattered. None of it mattered. Nobody was on the site. There was no traffic anyway. I was decorating a store with no customers in it. It's silly looking back on it. And younger me just, just made that mistake over and over again. And so now I, I would advise my younger self to, to just ship the ugly version, just get it, just get it out there in front of real people and make the tweaks later. You know, make the tweaks, put it, keep it on the list, but just don't prioritize that. Prioritize the traffic, prioritize the. The product that people actually wants in there and you feel like they need. The polish comes after, not before. Number five, ads aren't as scary as you think. Ads aren't the scary part. Ignorance is pretty scary, though. So I avoided meta ads for years because I thought that I would waste money. I thought I would just, you know, just waste money. And in fact, I did. I did waste money. But the reality after I started, but it's just because I didn't know what I was. I didn't know what I was doing. And then finally, after running them and, you know, again, like, I wasted some money. But I Learned faster in 3 weeks of running ads than I had in 3 years of reading about them, right? Of studying them. You just need to try. You need to get in the game. You need to just see what actually works. Ads are the feedback loop, and you're paying for information that meta is getting you. In this case, meta for me, whether. Whether something inverts, whether it doesn't. Why does somebody click? What's the click through? Rate all that stuff? I didn't know any of that stuff, but. And you'll never know that stuff. Even if you educate yourself ahead of time. You still won't understand them until you just start doing them. Right. So what I would advise myself is just start, start in ads and just run ads to your sites, to your store. Five, five bucks a day, and just kind of look at it and pay attention to it every single day. And then. And throw it in ChatGPT or whatever you use Claude and ask it like, what does this mean? What does this mean? What does this mean? As if it's your own personal mentor. Because that's pretty much what it is, right? Things number six, most people quit one inch away from the breakthrough. And this is the one that hurts the most. Probably because I've watched it happen so many times. And I would tell myself this, like, make sure this does not happen 10 years younger. Cody. I've watched it over too many times. Somebody runs a brand for four months, they don't see the traction that they wanted or expected they would be getting. And I just. They just shut it down. And then six months later, they look back at the data and realize the next 90 days would have been the inflection points. And they would have had the breakthrough and the ads were just starting to optimize and they just had like this click in their brain. That happens. The email list was just about to compound even more and they missed out on the opportunity. E commerce is a compounding game. The first six months feel like nothing is really working because there's so many learning, so many things you have to stand up and so many things that just need to happen. You're creating something new for the world. Why, why should it just take, you know, two months to get started? Things take time. So I would have, I would have told my younger self, I am telling my younger self that, hey, just hang in there, focus, keep going. Even when it's not clear, it's a little muddy, muddy, it's a little foggy. Hang in there, you, the light will show. Just keep tapping one step at a time. Do the next right thing. And if it's not clear, still just do the next logical right thing. Okay, number seven, I think this is an important one that I did not understand. The win isn't the monthly profit. It's the asset that you're building. Okay? Business is not about necessarily just about your monthly revenue, your monthly profit. It's the asset that you're building. You're building an asset for yourself, for your family, for your future. For the longest time I thought it was success, just meant to be, you know, monthly check basically, right? It's like if I'm not profiting month, thousand dollars a month on, on average, then $10,000 a month or 20,000 or a hundred thousand dollars a month and you know, I'm not doing it right. No, that's not necessarily true. That's part of it. But it's. The bigger win is actually the thing that not many people are talking about. It's the enterprise value, it's the value of the company, the business that you're building. You're building a brand, a list, a customer base, something that has real outside value of just what you're getting paid each month, right? A solid E commerce brand doing a million dollars a year with 20 to 30% net margins after, you know, after ads and all this stuff might sell anywhere from 700,000 to a million dollars, right? Roughly about, I don't know, I'm just at the time of this recording, maybe one time, one times your revenue. So if you're doing a million dollars about, it's about probably you could try to sell that business for $1 million. That's life changing, right? That's life changing. That could imagine a million dollars. Like, whoa, when you're starting an E Commerce brand, you don't have a million dollars. You'd be starting something different usually, always, sometimes. And you can only get there if you build something that you actually own, right? And you don't get to sell an Etsy shop for, for a million bucks. You don't, you don't get to do it because you don't own the list, you don't own the customer base. And you're certainly not going to do it. You know, it's not going to do it very easily. So the check is nice, the monthly profit, monthly revenue is nice. But the asset is something that can contribute to your generational wealth and that's, that's life changing not just for you, but your kids and your grandkids and their, their kids, things like this. So to recap, pick a boring niche, make the math work, own the customer, stop building, Start SC selling, run ads. Just learn, just get started. Something that's going to compound over and over again for so many years for all the future businesses that you own. Don't quit, right? Don't quit after month two or four. And remember, you're building an asset. You're not just building an income, you're building something that's. It's an asset. So that's it. Hope this is helpful. 6 minutes, 10 years. It's everything that I feel like would have saved me years and everything I probably wish I would have known or somebody would have told me directly. So if this is helpful, let me know in the comments. Just. And if you have any specific things that you wish I covered, let me know. That's the only feedback loop that I've got, so. Or you can send me an email. I guess you can do that too. It's totally fine. And yeah, so go ahead and check out Everbee I.O. for the research Everbee I.O. store for Everbee Store. Check out more episodes like this if you feel like this is helpful and I'll see you next week with another episode. See y' all soon.