“The wine industry is a very cut-throat place, and our brand is unique to most vineyards and wineries. While we cater to all wine drinking, ranging from sweet to dry, our most popular wines are semi-sweet to sweet. Within the Midwest wine market, we are unique because we produce a line of sparkling wines. They have become our most popular wines across the board!

We did not have any financial investors [when building the business], but we did hire one employee in the very beginning. Other than a few contractors to execute some of the building processes, everything was built from the ground up financially and physically. We really did most of the plumbing, electrical, flooring, drywall, fixtures, painting, etc. It was an incredibly hard but rewarding process, and now we are so thankful as it allows us to be in the stage we are in.

Our business has truly taken off with growth in every direction.

We started with three employees including me and my husband. Now, we have grown to a team of over twenty employees spreading across every facet of the business. We are penetrating new markets in the Midwest wine industry, and we recently earned the title of South Dakota’s largest vineyard and winery!”

Running a Family Business

“While there are definitely difficulties, it has been amazing because we have gotten to be stay-at-home parents as our business is located below where we live. Our kids have learned the value of hard work because they have participated in every step of the journey with us. To give balance to work life and home life, we highly prioritize family time and getaways. Now, our daughter and son-in-law have returned to join in the family venture, and we love that this has always been a family business.”

A Passion for Work

Lisa: “I love crushing my goals every day, and I love that I am constantly learning new things while overcoming new challenges. One of the best parts about my work is building relationships with stores and customers on the daily.”

Jeremiah: “Between shipping and wine club, on-site visitors, and events, my job is so fun because there is so much variety and activity. From month to month, there are many different focuses from wine club and seasonal events to weddings during the summer, as well as vineyard requirements, and the different wines being made. Every day is so busy, challenging, and fun. Every day is very different!”

Celebrating Customers

“We have guests who have known us for years and who have built strong relationships professionally and relationally. We keep very close contact and personal relationships with almost every business we work with! This is one of our core values within our business.

Our mission is to bring people together to joyously celebrate relationships and connection! We love being a part of that and value our strong customer base immensely.”

More Information

• How to Sell Wine Online: Learn how to start selling wine online in our step-by-step guide
• How to Sell Wholesale: Five easy tips to help you kick things off

“From our establishment in 2014, we have always been a business built from our own immediate family. We have growth and have been very blessed with expansion capabilities to buy another eighty acres of land for vineyard, grown to sustain over twenty staff, and have recently undergone multiple vineyard, building, and product expansions.

With the Wind is currently producing about 5,000 cases per year and is set on track to increase to 10,000 cases within the next few years. Additionally, with our latest planting, we now grow almost 5,000 grapevines.

Our most recent success story is one of our favorites. This spring, with the addition of our newest vineyard, we have earned the title of South Dakota’s largest vineyard and winery! We are very proud of the work we and our team have put in.

Numerous accounts over the years have also been so fun and satisfying as we have become bestsellers in many of our stores, competing with national and worldwide brands!

It is the most amazing feeling when customers put back a national brand on the shelf after tasting our wines during in-store tastings.

One very proud moment for us was when one of our retailers ordered a sixteen-case purchase for an event back in our first year of business. We were so proud, and we framed the handwritten note order.

In the past six months, we launched our first sparkling wine, and it was ranked as the top seller at one of our retailers. It beat out international brands and was a very proud moment for us!”

“Truthfully, our greatest challenge has been our rural geographic area. We are located in the northeast corner of South Dakota, and it has both its strengths and weaknesses. While it is definitely rural, people are amazed at the peacefulness and the natural beauty that surrounds our area. We ship our wines all across the United States and are happy to be able to have the beauty of our area but still be able to access a customer base through shipping!”

“We chose to create our own website because we needed a way to reach people online. We originally had a website developer, but after that fell through, we needed a platform that would work for a novice to use. Squarespace’s professionalism appealed to us more than other platforms such as Wix. It had so many beautiful templates, and we have never regretted using Squarespace for a second.

We are currently on the Business plan because it is a good middle ground for us. It is cheaper than other plans but has all the features we need!

Not being an expert, there were certain things I was not aware of that we didn’t do right in the beginning. We have fixed those issues more recently and have dove into improving our SEO as well. As for managing and running events, we have found that many of our customers discover our upcoming events through the listing on our website which has been very helpful.

As we have hired marketing staff, Squarespace has seamlessly fit into our business even more. However, I would have loved to learn about SEO from Squarespace earlier in my journey. I find that part of the website builder is a little intimidating still.”

Scalability of Squarespace

“We feel we are still learning and perfecting our website. However, we are always looking for new innovations that will help us scale our business further.

Know that you will probably continue to change and improve your website, and that is okay! 

Work on taking one step at a time, and be patient with the progress. The more you work at it, the better your website will be! It’s a learning process I think we all should learn.”

With the Wind Vineyard & Winery Website Galler

Click the image below to expand

Close

With the Wind makes it easy for website visitors to find what they want with a detailed navigation.

We love that With the Wind encourages readers to sign up to its newsletter while sharing its social links as well.

The use of image galleries and large visuals makes you feel like you're actually visiting With the Wind's vineyard.

Holding regular events, like With the Wind's upcoming "Vine to Table" event, is a great way to engage with customers.

We love that With the Wind has broadened its offering by sharing wine-related recipes on the website.

More Information

• Squarespace Pricing: Find out which Squarespace plan is best for your website

Lisa: “I think I would tell my younger self that everything will come together as it should. I would tell her to remember that all her prior life experiences will come into play perfectly when she owns a business. I would tell her to trust the process, and enjoy the journey knowing that everything will line up for the future!”

Jeremiah: “A financial strategy I will always live by is lean startup. We established With the Wind Winery with no help from investors, so we learned to be scrappy with our finances while still working to keep consumer perceptions as high as possible. Additionally, you have to learn as you go, from your market, products, etc. Stay flexible and listen to those around you. That has been our mantra that we always tell people.”

“We have many upcoming goals and future plans including installing a commercial kitchen for serving food this winter, doubling our production over the next couple years, planting another eighty acres of vineyard, distributing further into the Midwest as well as nationally, and preparing ourselves for the next generation to come in. We have a lot of goals and are excited to see where the upcoming stages take us!”

“I’m Lisa and I’m the founder and co-owner of The Wrinkly Elephant Company Ltd. I now work alongside my husband Stuart, making handmade soap, bath, and body products. We pride ourselves on making products with natural ingredients that are good for your skin and encourage that self-care that everyone needs.

I started in 2017, perfecting my recipes and having them assessed and registered with the EU portal which has now been replaced by the UK portal. I originally started from my self-contained soap room at home – a converted garage that is linked to the home. I set my website up and started selling in 2018. To begin with, it was mostly at craft fairs, but I quickly started to build up a community on social media, mostly Instagram.

COVID hit and craft fairs stopped but, fortunately, my online presence through Instagram meant we continued to sell. We had incredible growth over COVID and Christmas 2020. It continued into 2021 so we moved into a unit. We were there for two years and, at the end of 2022, we won a Worcestershire Small Business Award for product development.

However, with the cost of the rent, car park charges, and energy rising, plus a fall in sales, we decided to move the business back home where we originally started in the part of our garage that is converted into a soap studio. We still mainly sell online, but craft fairs are beginning to pick up again, so we’re doing a few of the larger ones to grow the brand again.”

Setting Your Own Schedule

“The best part about my daily work is that I’m in control of what I want to do that day. What I love most about it all is that I love being creative with my products and packaging and knowing that it’s something I put together myself. It’s such a strange feeling when I get customer reviews of how they love the products or pictures of my products in their bathrooms. It’s a very proud moment and probably one I need to think about more often.

On a daily basis, I try to start my day by doing something for myself. My products are all about self-care so I need to practice it myself – I love to start the day with an exercise session. It sets me up for the day and then, of course, showering with one of our lovely products. Then it’s generally checking emails and social media first while having breakfast.

Stu, my husband, will then package up any orders that have come in overnight or from the afternoon before and get them taken to the Royal Mail delivery office. Then, depending on what stock I have I will probably spend a couple of days a week making soap. Sometimes this may be every week, sometimes I do a week of just soap making so I then concentrate on the other products the rest of the month. It depends on how orders are coming through, and which products are popular. I would say I generally finish mid-afternoon, but will probably spend time on my laptop researching or updating myself on what’s happening within the industry. Fridays are normally the day that I catch up on admin – this can be anything from planning my social media content for the following week, answering more in-depth emails, updating the website, taking new pictures of products, or experimenting with new scents or new products.

Once a month, Stu and I will sit down and think about what events we want to do the following month or even for the next few months. Christmas ones have to be booked early!

We do have a business plan that we try to update on a yearly basis, but we try to set some quarterly targets so that we have a plan of where we want to be. Within this, we will set meetings that will decide on seasonal offers and products and when we’re to launch any new ones.”

Finding Family Time

“I have three boys who are all adults now so when I started this business it was really something about “doing something for me”. I was fed up with working for someone else and wanted to be able to do what I wanted when I wanted. I had always had good feedback that I was a hard worker, so I knew I could do things for myself.

What I enjoy most about working for myself and maintaining that work/life balance is that I can control it. I work when I want and take time off to be with my family when I want. That’s the beauty of it now, I find it much easier to maintain that work/life balance. Don’t get me wrong – I do put the hours in and I have to be careful that I make sure I switch off as I can be on the computer or doing social media at 10 or 11 at night. But, on the flip side, I can take time off in the day to go out for lunch with friends or a shopping trip with family. So, it does even itself out but I can control it.”

“There is so much waste in the packaging industry, and I didn’t want to be part of that. I’ve tried to keep my packaging as plastic-free as possible. My soap bars just have a cigar band around them as they legally need to have certain details on the packaging, and this was enough to get all those details on. However, this sometimes plays against me as I have contacted retailers about stocking my brand and they want the soap to be covered in a box or fully wrapped.

Generally using ingredients that are not tested on animals is straightforward as we have rules in place in the UK. Palm oil-free is becoming an issue now because of the war in Ukraine. We’re being told by suppliers that there’s a shortage and that, if there is any, it’s being used in the food industry. So, this is obviously having an impact on either not being able to source any or the price being ridiculously high. I am still standing by these principles, but it is having an effect on the cost of items at the moment.”

More Information

• Sustainable Products to Sell Online: Thinking about launching an eco-friendly business? Check out the top 10 sustainable products to sell

“This is where I have tried to work hard at building up, not just a brand, but a community. In the early days, I spent many hours on Instagram and showing behind-the-scenes footage of the ingredients and the products, building up relationships with customers and other accounts. I fiercely believe in my products so I would also send out samples for people to try as I was confident that they would love my products as much as I love making them. Of course, they did, and the recommendations started.

Customer service is at the heart of the business, so I always answer DMs and emails within 24 hours where possible. I encourage customers to contact me with questions and I will happily recommend products. I have tried to build up a trust between us. When packing products, although we want to be eco-friendly and use recyclable packaging, I don’t feel that the packaging has to be compromised. From when a customer places their order to actually unboxing it, I want it to be a pleasurable experience, as if it was Christmas Day every time they receive a parcel.

The products are wrapped nicely, and a personalized note is handwritten, even if it just says “Thank you for your order”. I want the customer to feel part of the Wrinkly family and not just an order number.

When they message me on Instagram, I try to remember what they’re saying – like if they’ve had a bad week and then they’ve just placed an order. I would then write something like “I hope your week has got better”. I’ve had such good comments about how they receive their happy post, and they look forward to it so much – the unboxing as well as using the gorgeous products.”

More Information

• ‘Thank You for Your Purchase’ – How to Write the Best Messages: Pick up some top tips on how to communicate with your customers
• How to Create a Personalized Online Shopping Experience: Improve conversion rates and customer loyalty with personalized experiences

A Note on Newsletters

“This is an area that I need to improve. Generally, at the moment, they usually go out saying what our soap of the month is, or what offers we have – occasionally a little update on what we have been up to. I sometimes do offers exclusively for email subscribers to encourage more people to sign up. I need to develop this more as this is an area I want to get better at.

Social media is great but if I lost my account, I would lose my followers. I’m trying to be more proactive in encouraging people to sign up for the newsletter so that I have more control over being able to contact my customers.”

Social Media Success

“I’ve dabbled with all platforms but have found my niche more with Instagram, closely followed by Facebook. My products and videos are very picture and video-friendly, so this suits the sort of style on Instagram. It’s very hard to keep up with the algorithms and posting consistently. I use Instagram to show how the products are being made, the ingredients we use, and behind-the-scenes footage. The customers love to get to know the face behind the brand.

I publicize my offers here too once the email subscribers have been notified first. I also try to collaborate with other businesses and influencers to try and gain more visibility for the brand.”

“I’ve had many photographs from customers with before and after pictures of skin problems, such as eczema or psoriasis. After a couple of weeks of using my natural unscented soap or Natural Oats soap bar, their skin condition improved immensely.

[The business has] enabled me to give up my job working in education and bring the same salary in. We saw incredible growth during COVID and have over 3,000 customers. The business is profitable but like any business at the moment, sales have dropped due to the cost of living crisis – but I still have many regular customers returning. We’re now seeing the signs of it improving once again and ready to take the business to the next level.”

“Well, firstly there are a lot of legal hoops to jump through when you’re bringing a product to market that comes into contact with the skin. When I originally started, we were in the EU so had to comply with EU rules. When Brexit happened, the UK continued their rules but has their own system now that we have to register our products through their new site which – obviously being new – had teething problems, plus we lost some overseas customers.

Also, getting brand visibility is hard but I was fortunate in making some contacts on Instagram so that initially helped a great deal. The problem is now continuing to gain visibility so that we can attract new customers, so marketing is always at the top of our agenda.

We didn’t face many struggles during the pandemic apart from coping with the number of orders – which was a good thing! We did have a couple of moments of there being a shortage of packaging boxes, but we managed to work through it and got our orders out in plenty of time. The war in Ukraine is beginning to affect us now as prices of some ingredients have tripled or even quadrupled. This is hard. We did have a price increase last year to try and offset this, and we have also reduced outgoing costs down to the bare minimum to try and not have to pass any further increases to our customers. This is obviously an area that we’re monitoring closely now.

We’re also struggling to obtain some of the palm-free ingredients. A new product was about to be launched but I’ve had to put it on hold because of this shortage. It’s no good launching a new product until I’m sure I’m still going to be able to get this particular ingredient at a reasonable price.”

More Information

• Small Business Challenges: Learn how to overcome these common hurdles for small businesses

“I wanted to be able to control my own sales. I didn’t want to be controlled by some of those selling platforms where they dictate conditions and when they pay you, as well as taking a huge percentage. I think it’s also a necessity nowadays as most customers expect to be able to find you online and it looks more credible if you have a good website.

I fell upon Shopify and loved their free themes and the ease at which I could set the website up, as well as having an amazing customer helpdesk. There were lots of tutorials and support available to help me alongside different options for themes for the website to be built on, which all seemed fairly straightforward. I had plenty of free choices in how the layout could be set up as well as paid options if I wanted something more advanced.

We chose the Basic Shopify plan as it offered everything we needed it to do. However, on occasion there are more detailed reports that I feel that I need – for example, when approaching Christmas I like to look back at the last Christmas and see what our bestsellers were. I can upgrade my pricing plan to the next level to enable me to do this. I do it for the month that I need it and then revert back to the Basic plan. I love the flexibility of being able to do this.

The variety of apps that integrate seamlessly into the site are great. I have a customer review one, and a subscription service one, and have just recently launched a loyalty program. These were all so easy to install and, if I have queries, these too have had great customer service helpdesks. There’s a huge choice – for someone like me who knows nothing about building websites, these have been great add-on features to a free theme.”

“We want to scale our business and I definitely think there is potential with Shopify.”

Browsing Builders

“Do your research and look at more than one builder. Look at reviews and also what they offer. Does it meet your needs? Can it do what you want it to do? If your business is successful, can the builder grow with you? If you’re a product-based business, do you know how to add a new product? Can you do it yourself or are you always having to ask for help with this?

The main actions need to be simple. For me, adding products easily was key. I didn’t want to have to pay someone to do this every time I wanted to add a new product or new scent. Take advantage of the free themes and play around with them. Ask lots of questions and use their helpdesks – that’s what they’re there for. Speak to other small businesses about their experiences, but try to remember that every business is different. What worked for them may not work as well for you.”

“There’s always something happening – new offers and new products. We are currently just signing off our Christmas range so look out for new gift sets and some new products.

We’re still committed to growing the business further and growing our customer base and want to be a brand known for its gorgeous soap and products that encourage self-care.”

“Go for it. I wish I’d done it sooner but don’t be afraid of hard work and asking for help. You can’t know the answer to everything and there are always people out there that know more than you do. Also, don’t be afraid to learn from your mistakes.

And, research, research, research. It’s a minefield of legal documentation that you have to ensure you follow if you’re bringing a product to market. Be consistent with your brand message and what you want in your product line. Don’t just follow fads, stay true to what you believe in. Join different forum groups that are knowledgeable in the area and make those connections. There are some very supportive communities and groups that help each other out, even if we are all competing in the same market. Finally, always make sure you get your products cosmetically assessed!”

Ovo Electric Bikes is an e-commerce store specializing in electric bikes for riders over 40. I started the company in 2021 but I didn’t start selling bikes until 2022, after spending about a year researching, sourcing products, and building our website.

Purchasing an electric bike can be incredibly intimidating for first-time buyers. Between technical terminology and the dozens of features listed, prospective customers often don’t know how to weed through the lingo to understand what bike is best for their specific needs.

Most bike retailers and brands focus on the potential adventures and thrilling capabilities of the bikes they sell, showing their bikes being ridden by professional athletes and writing descriptions that can only be understood if you know a lot about bikes.

From what I could tell, that wasn’t representative of most of the customers buying an electric bike for the first time. It neglected the anxieties and hurdles first-timers go through when purchasing a bike, so I felt there was an opportunity to make the first-time buying experience approachable and hospitable. As a result, Ovo focuses on translating nuanced, technical terminology and capabilities into accessible language anyone can understand, enabling everyone to come away not just excited, but confident in the purchase they’ve made.

I’m a long-time technology, e-commerce, and activities enthusiast – I love everything from iPads to playing tennis, to DIY home improvement projects – and I particularly love experimenting to see how these things can come together. I’ve been fortunate to have several really interesting jobs during my career, but like most people who change jobs, it’s been anything but a straight line.

I’m an avid learner — I’m constantly getting involved with new projects because doing is how I learn, and there’s no more valuable life skill than constant learning.

My first career out of college was working in television production for National Geographic; it was incredibly interesting and one of the most fun jobs I’ve ever had, but my passion for watching television was greater than creating it, so I wound up switching careers pretty early on to work in e-commerce. I found the space fascinating. It was especially interesting to be in e-commerce during the wide adoption of mobile devices and the shift to people buying primarily on their smartphones rather than desktops & laptops.

I took a few tangents from e-commerce along the way, but I ultimately decided to launch my own business because I realized my deep understanding of e-commerce best practices and “foundation skills” gave me a higher chance of being successful out of the gate.

Hence, Ovo Electric Bikes was born. All credit for the business name goes to my wife here. I was playing around with several different names and she suggested “ovo” because it looked like a bicycle. This left the door open for a lot of creative ways to use the name and logo as we scaled the brand.

Prior to launching Ovo, I didn’t work in the bike industry but was into biking recreationally as a hobby. There are too many wonderful blogs out there that do more justice to the topic of the benefits of electric bikes, but as I said, I really think it distils down to three things: health, cost and fun. 

Electric bikes are a great way for people to get mobile, which is beneficial for a variety of reasons. On the cost side, e-bikes are a great solution for a variety of activities – including commuting – where costs can be substantially higher than the entry cost of a decent electric bike. And finally, it’s fun! I believe it’s always good to invest in your happiness, and there are few people I’ve met who have gotten on an electric bike and not enjoyed the experience.

When I was starting out in 2021, the biggest practical challenges were time and startup funds. I didn’t have a massive budget to start my business, so I was looking to be super efficient in how I spent every dollar.

There are a lot of small costs that add up when starting a business — even one that’s only online —so it was a real chess game to figure out how to be both effective and efficient with startup costs. Shopify was a huge resource for this — their platform is incredibly robust, mature and cost-effective for a variety of things.

It wasn’t just money I was short on, though. Mainly, it was time. Finding, testing, setting up, and merchandising products takes way more time than people realize. There were a lot of late nights uploading images and writing product descriptions.

Luckily, I’ve been fortunate to work for several marquee brands across multiple industries and stages during my career, so I was able to see how those brands handled both building and maintaining their brands across a variety of platforms and channels. This also allowed me to make invaluable connections with people who have been critical mentors and sounding boards in launching Ovo.

But you don’t always automatically have those connections that are going to make your business a success. When I was first finding suppliers, I did a lot of good, old-fashioned cold emailing! Once I figured out the type of bikes I wanted to sell, I wrote down quality and assurance standards that I felt were fair and reasonable for first-time electric bike customers. Then, I did a ton of research finding bikes – and more importantly manufacturers – that met those standards, before reaching out using contact information from their websites. 

Reaching out was definitely intimidating at first, but then you realize all companies exist because they want to sell their products, so they’re always much more welcoming than you think they will be. There were definitely some no thank yous and no replies, but I heard back from almost all of the manufacturers I reached out to!

And communication is a big part of the job. In any kind of commercial business, you’ve got to enjoy talking to people or it’s really hard to enjoy what you do. Specifically though, when a new customer reaches out with questions or concerns they have, helping them translate their confusion into confidence about their purchase is the best part.

Talking to people is the best part of my day-to-day work!

I once had a customer reach out to me who wanted to buy an electric bike for her husband for his birthday, which was under two weeks away. On top of that, she had never bought any kind of bike before and was even less familiar with electric bikes. She was truly starting at zero.

She came in thinking she would have to spend many thousands of dollars to get a bike that would work for her husband, but after several conversations over a couple-day period, we not only found the right bike for her, but it came in well under her budget, too. Plus, we were able to get the bike to her in time for the big birthday! The day after her husband’s birthday, that customer even took the time to send me an email saying how thrilled her husband was with the gift. That was a really awesome, feel-good moment.

With a little one at home, my days start early so that I have some time to myself before the day gets going and he gets up. I try to start most mornings with some form of workout, then take the dog for a walk. Afterwards, I make sure I have time to hang out time with my son.

Then, I sit down and work straight til five or six; every day is truly different from the one before, which is one of the things that keeps it so interesting. I can be helping new customers, launching new marketing campaigns, reaching out to new vendors, or researching new bikes.

A big part of my time is also making sure orders are placed and fulfilled quickly and correctly – I typically track every order that comes in from the time it’s placed through delivery to make sure I can be ahead of any unexpected bumps that come up along the way. Once my work day is done, I try to always spend at least an hour with my son before he goes to bed; the best part of my day is unquestionably the pre-bed storytime.

When it comes to maintaining a work-life balance, I have a few “non-negotiables” in my day that I try to stick to every day. This helps me keep that balance in check. For example, I always try and have some time to myself every morning before the rest of the family gets up, or I’ll always save a few minutes to ask my wife how her day went. I make sure I never miss my son’s bedtime routine. Those few things are simple but make sure I always know when – and why – it’s time to unplug from work.

There are a few lessons I’ve learned since embarking on this journey, the first being the importance of using high-quality images. A lot of websites out there still rely on a few, low-quality images to showcase and merchandise their products; that just doesn’t work with today’s consumer. Devices are better (and faster) than ever in rendering images, and you have to lean into that. Paying attention to this also pays huge dividends with Google, which really emphasizes quality and performant imagery in SEO rankings.

Learning about and utilizing paid marketing has been one of my biggest challenges. You can very easily spend a lot of dollars quickly with limited to no results because you’ve set up campaigns wrong or don’t know what, where, or how to include certain information. There are a lot of great resources out there for learning this, but it’s still a bit like the Wild West when you’re first starting out. It can be incredibly time-consuming to learn well.

If I could start all over again, there are a few things I’d do differently, but mainly, in the early days, I’d have focused more on marketing and broader content generation, which would have allowed me to attract and interact with more customers sooner. Instead, I fell into the trap of spending dozens of hours writing the perfect product descriptions, only to rewrite them days later.

For anyone looking to start their own e-commerce site, paying attention to profit margins in e-commerce is really important out of the gate to ensure your business is sustainable and scalable, so you can eventually put your primary energy into growing the business.

Pinning down the biggest lesson I’ve learned in my career is a tough one. I’d split it into two categories. The first is about failure. Expect to fail and learn from those failures. I have failed many many times in my career, but learning from those failures and then using those learnings in my next attempt has been absolutely critical.

The second category is the power of listening. Listening is probably one of the most underrated skills for any role or profession; whether it’s to customers, advisors, or employees, effective and attentive listening is important in not just getting work done, but in building the relationships that allow you to do that work in an enjoyable and productive way.

Going through these ups and downs is worth it, though. My first sale was probably the proudest moment for me and my business. The number of hours that went into starting Ovo Electric Bikes before that first sale came in – and from someone I didn’t know! – meant that I got such an energy and excitement boost. It still gets me excited thinking about it today.

More Information

• Looking for help with your marketing strategy? Check out the 8 Best Marketing Channels for Ecommerce Businesses.
• If you want to optimize your website images for SEO check out our article, How to Optimize Images for SEO.

Websites are still the most effective ecommerce channel by far. A good website not only allows you to drive traffic from multiple places but it also has the lowest barrier to entry for prospective customers. And for a large purchase like an electric bike, it’s incredibly important to remove as many barriers and obstacles as possible.

When building a website, I’d advise anyone to be detail orientated, but prioritize things like accessibility and page load times rather than what you think “looks best.” SEO rankings aside for a minute, when starting from nothing, your site should be accessible to everyone from day one, and people care more about your site loading faster than the font you use.

I built my website with Shopify and I chose it for two reasons: its affordability and its app store. It would be impossible for me to scale my business effectively without the cost structure of Shopify and the turnkey enhancements available through their App Store. I’ve been able to add new features and capabilities not just quickly but at reasonable prices for my business within an hour — something that would simply not be possible on virtually any other e-commerce platform out there.

Plus, I believe that Shopify’s payment platform is by far the best in the industry. Without having to do anything on my end, I can accept almost a dozen payment methods. More importantly, it’s both very easy to use and secure for the customer, so they have confidence in the transaction process.

I really feel like I can scale my business successfully with Shopify. Their pricing and product tiers allow you to not only grow your business but also empower you to leverage new and powerful tools at scale like no other platform I’ve worked on.

Of course, Shopify isn’t perfect. Its standard blog tool is limited, particularly in how it handles formatting. They’ve added some new tools for structured data, but blog posts are still relatively inflexible and cumbersome to create. In my opinion, there’s so much short and long-term value in the content that goes into a blog. A lot of customers I talk to read at least one blog post during their shopping journey.

In the future, adding more brands and accessories is top of my mind at the moment. I don’t want to exponentially change what we have but finding brands and products that complement our existing catalogue and fill out the assortment offering is a top priority.

Other than that, I’ll be really focusing on marketing and content generation for our blog to help improve our SEO rankings and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)!

For anyone else just beginning their business journey, I know it can be super intimidating to start this process, so start small and make a checklist. Focus on picking a single category, or kickstart your research phase, giving yourself the opportunity to process and evolve your thinking based on what you learn and discover. And ask questions. In fact, I’m happy to help, so feel free to reach out with any questions you might have!

I’ve always been a bit of a bookworm, even from a young age. My family lived in a lower-income area so, in kindergarten, I was pushed into higher grade levels for my reading curriculum. My parents worked hard, so the summer before I was supposed to start second grade, we were able to move to an area with a better school district. I loved school and eventually, I went to college to become a teacher. I knew that not all children love learning the same way I did as a kid, so I wanted to inspire the younger generations and find ways to make learning fun for them.

But alongside my desire to inspire a love for learning, I’d always wanted to write a children’s book. There was a lot holding me back, though. Mostly, I didn’t think it was possible to do. I thought it was a pipedream or just wishful thinking. But one day, my husband helped me see that there was no reason I couldn’t – I just had to learn how.

So that’s exactly what I did!

I researched like crazy and learned so much. The problem was that the information online often conflicted. It was overwhelming and at times, paralyzing. It all left me so confused and, because of that, my first three books were a flop. Yes, you read that right. They were well-written and beautifully illustrated, but none of that mattered because I couldn’t get them in front of people. I didn’t know how.

To fix this, I started taking business classes and through a lot of trial and error, I finally cracked the code. My fourth book wasn’t just a success –  it became a bestseller the same month it was published and I made five figures in profit.

I knew it wasn’t just a fluke. It was all down to a strategy, a system, that I’ve used to publish every book since.

That’s when people started to ask me how I did it. As a teacher, I wanted to help others achieve the same success, so I partnered with two other teachers-turned-children’s-book-authors and started At Home Author in January 2021. Through our courses and programs, we teach aspiring children’s book authors how to take their ideas and bring them to life!

When I first started trying to write and publish my own children’s books, all the information was so overwhelming, and often it conflicted. I was definitely confused and I felt like I was stumbling around in the dark. I didn’t want that for other people.

I suppose you could say that with At Home Author, I just fell into it. At the same time, though, we felt that it was a service that was so needed. Whenever someone discovers that I’m a children’s book author, nine times out of ten, they’ll ask me how I did it because they have a book idea themselves. Like me, they just thought it wasn’t a possibility. They didn’t know how to make it happen. I want to teach them how – the way I wish someone had taught me. People had questions and I wanted to answer them and help in any way I could. And here we are now!

You can take the teacher out of the classroom, but she’ll still find someone to teach, I suppose!

My husband actually came up with the name ‘At Home Author’. He made a joke during the pandemic that I was an at-home author and later, when we were looking for a business name, it seemed to fit. Most authors do work from home, after all!

Brittany, Chelsea, and I are all former teachers and moms. We’re big bookworms too, of course. We all have different personalities and while sometimes that can be interesting to navigate, it’s also what makes the company work. We fill in the gaps for each other so that our students get what they need from the right expert.

It wasn’t all plain sailing, though. My first two books were published in January and February of 2020, just before the pandemic hit. I was a full-time elementary school teacher at the time so all learning went virtual and there was this air of uncertainty. We never knew what would be changing or what was going to happen next.

Plus, as I said, my first three books weren’t a huge success. I had a plan for my first one – release it and not tell anyone about it! As you can guess, that didn’t go so well. I tried maybe one or two marketing techniques for the second and third, but they weren’t as effective as I wanted them to be. I had no idea what SEO was or how it could help me as an author. It wasn’t until my fourth book when I actually created a business plan, that I started to see results.

So, it wasn’t easy, but there were perks. I liked working from home. For the first time in a career setting, I was able to take my full lunch break and use the restroom when I needed! I didn’t have kids yet so I spent my free time working on my books and after becoming a bestselling author, I also spent time hosting webinars and answering aspiring author’s questions. I gave birth to my daughter in April of 2021, which is when I finally left teaching to enter the publishing world full-time.

While I did love being a teacher (I wouldn’t trade my years in education for anything!) COVID and becoming a mother changed a lot for me. I’d finally been published and was making a steady side income from being a children’s book author but when my daughter was born, I wanted to spend more time with her than I’d be able to if I stayed in teaching. So I left the classroom to write full-time, and I did coaching through At Home Author on the side. It completely changed my life and now, I have a 2-year-old and a 4-month-old, with flexibility that I’ve never had before.

More Information

If, like Vicky, you’ve ever been confused by SEO, check out our resources and top tips on search engine optimization:

• Best Website Builders for SEO
• SEO Basics
• SEO Checklist
• SEO Glossary
• 15 Top Free Tools for Your Website
• 15 Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid

The coaches of At Home Author are all former teachers. We pride ourselves on providing content that is easy to understand, no matter where you’re at in the writing and publishing process.

We used to offer individual coaching but have now switched to group coaching instead. When you join the Profitable Picture Books program, you have access to a self-paced course and recurring monthly coaching calls so that you can ask questions, get feedback, and learn for as long as you’re enrolled.

Coaching calls are meant to give more customized support. They’re an opportunity to get peer and expert comments on a book you’re writing or suggestions for how to improve your marketing plan. Our authors are all in different places in their writing journey so the live calls are to make sure you get the support that you need.

We’re also the only company that teaches our authors about traditional and self-publishing. Other companies focus on one or the other, but I’ve found that no matter which route you end up choosing, understanding the industry as a whole will make you a stronger writer and author.

But there’s more than just our coaching courses that make At Home Author special. We also offer a free Youtube channel. It started as a way for me to create answers to frequently asked questions so I wouldn’t need to repeat myself as often. I could just send people the link to the video when they asked about that subject. It quickly evolved and became a source of traffic for our programs and services, though, which is incredible! It’s almost like a taste of our coaching programs for free!

Honestly, every time I get a message from a student with a picture of them holding their published book, it’s the highlight of my week.

We’ve always offered the answers but the format has grown and changed over time. I used to do a lot more individual coaching, which I loved, but there were only so many hours in my day. That’s why we switched to group coaching instead and I love it even more because my students also get to learn from each other. It’s a supportive community! If anyone is looking to publish a children’s book, I highly recommend you look into the Profitable Picture Books program.

More Information

Interested in using videos for your brand? Check at our article on How to Create a Video Marketing Strategy. And don’t forget to check out which video marketing mistakes to avoid!

If you’re planning on creating your own writer’s website, why not take a look at some writer website examples to get the inspiration flowing?

The best part about being an author and a publishing coach is that no two days look alike. Some days, I’m able to start late or take a long lunch. Some days, I clean my house! But usually, I write for a half hour or so in the morning. I take care of my duties as a coach, and then I brainstorm more writing ideas over lunch. In the afternoon, my kids come home and then I focus my attention completely on my family. My children go to daycare part-time for the socialization so I get less done on the days that they’re home but I love every moment of my time with them.

Basically…every day is a new adventure and I’m the one at the helm!

You have to create boundaries for yourself. It’s hard but you need to commit to whatever you’re doing with 100% of yourself. When you’re with your family, you can’t be giving 40% or 50%. They need you completely present. You need you completely present! So you have to take a look at what you’re doing (or not doing) and set time limits for yourself.

It doesn’t matter how long you’re able to set aside for writing or working on your business, it just matters that you show up consistently with everything you’ve got. And then when you’re off the clock, you’re giving all that effort to your family and your personal life.

The best parts about my job are getting the chance to be creative, whilst also enjoying a flexible working life. I’m in charge of what my own day looks like and it’s a good feeling. Even just knowing that I can take the day off last minute when my kids are sick without issues is a relief in itself!

Every business needs a website. It’s a place where others can learn about what you do, and how to get in touch with you. Plus, it adds a layer of professionalism. It also makes it easier for potential clients to find you. If someone is searching your name or looking for someone who does what you do, the first place they’re going to search is through a search engine like Google. Simply having a website makes getting sales and business that much easier, even for authors!

Before you do anything, though, you need to decide on your branding. This will impact your domain name, what your website design will look like, and much more. You also want to make sure that the platform you’re building your website on is one you like. Moving your website later is doable but it’s a pain so do your research ahead of time to figure out what features are important to you.

We decided to use Wix, and I’m so glad we did. There’s so much I love about it! It’s easy to navigate and makes it simple to optimize your website for search engines. On the rare occasion that an issue comes up, support is always pleasant and the problem is resolved quickly. The drag-and-drop editor makes the design part simple – something I’ve struggled with on other website-building platforms. And I’m a usually very tech-savvy person!

I absolutely feel like I can scale my business with Wix. It’s been an invaluable tool that’s constantly evolving. If you’d asked me a few years ago, I might have said that there were a few features missing from Wix’s offering, but it’s always growing and expanding, developing new tools that are vital for running a business online.

More Information

If you’re considering building a website with Wix, make sure to read our Wix Review for a deep dive into the pros and cons of this website builder.

The future? Oh, I always have some new ideas in mind! I’m releasing a book on SEO for authors in just a few months so that other writers can skip the SEO mistakes I made with my website. The Profitable Picture Books program is also going through some exciting updates, and I have more picture books in the works!

Maybe it’s the teacher in me but I’m a firm believer that you’re never done learning. Even with all the success I’ve had, I’m always looking for ways I can improve, new things I can try, and I share all that new knowledge with my students too.

Learn as much as you can. Even when you think you’ve got it down, there’s still more to learn. There are scams out there that prey on aspiring writers and the best way to avoid them is to research how the industry actually works and surround yourself with a support system to help you keep moving forward.

In both my writing business and At Home Author, if I could do it all over again, I’d start with more research and a stronger plan. While I learned a lot in my journey, I think I would have found success a lot faster and wasted less time and money if I had either hired a coach or taken courses from the start.

If I had to give one last piece of advice, it would be that above all else, you have to believe that your dreams are possible and that you can achieve them. If you don’t, then you won’t find success. You have to be brave enough to take the first step.

“I’ve always had a love for aviation. I’ve been what’s been called an ‘Avgeek’ from a very young age. My father is a general aviation pilot. He always wanted to be a commercial pilot but unfortunately had an eye issue, so couldn’t qualify. I always actually wanted to be a pilot, but for some reason or another, my career path took me a different way.

I was always around airfields as a young boy, seeing different variations from propeller turboprops, then wrapped jets, all the way to commercial airliners. My toys were, of course, all aircraft and I used to have this bicycle that had wings on it. It was like a fake plane. So it’s something that’s obviously been embedded in me from very early on and it’s just been growing ever since. I like the freedom that it brings.

I then also had some background in sales before I took on my educational path, which is soon to come to an end. Back in the day when I was at school, I used to sell perfume from my rucksack. Mainly cash in hand. And from that, I actually worked briefly in the fragrance shop back in the local town. Not something that I practically enjoyed but it paid my way for the time being. But then again it was target sales – and that’s the base skills for what I do now.”

“Back in the day when I was at school, I used to sell perfume from my rucksack. Mainly cash in hand.”

Find out more:

• Learn how to build an online business website with our How to Build a Business Website in 2023 guide.
• Find the best ecommerce website builder for your business with our 8 Best Ecommerce Website Builders For Small Businesses.

“[Lux Jets] really was just an ad-hoc idea that came to us one afternoon and grew from there. But of course, we were both interested in aviation and in having that luxury lifestyle as well. We team the two together and it’s worked out. But we had no experience in it at all. I know that’s quite risky. When you start a new company, most people have past experience in it, but this really was a leap of faith into something new. It was literally just ‘Let’s explore that further’, and over the weekend, Lux Jets was incorporated.

Working as a qualified solicitor, that’s helped us to build the foundations of the company itself very quickly. I had all the legal knowledge to cover the issues and mitigate the risk that most companies would have to pay for. But for the rest, we really put our heads together and got cracking with it and learned every lesson that came our way. It was ‘What’s the first step?’ followed by the next step and learning from our errors as we go along. 

We knew we had to build that relationship with the operators who operate the aircraft. We had built the company on paper, but then how do we build it in reality? We had tools available to us that allow us to connect via a search engine, and that does it quickly. But for us what we really wanted to do, especially with luxury flights, is build a reliable source of operators – and that’s really just outreaching to people.

That’s where it became difficult sometimes. It’s time-consuming finding out who you want to outreach to, and why. First off, we’d send an email, and the email would be ignored. Then, we would give them a telephone call and introduce ourselves, and I think for the operators that we use, we’re bringing them business as much as they would be bringing and supporting us. So it’s a nice two-way street.”

“We had built the company on paper, but then how do we build it in reality? ”

Find out more:

• Find out how to get in contact with affiliates with our How to Find Affiliate Marketing Partners in 2023 guide.
• Learn how to promote a business website in our How to Promote Your Website in 2023: 10 Steps to Glory

“What makes a private jet different from a commercial flight is that you have control over your schedule. Our clientele range from high, net worth individuals up to whole exec-boards. What they all have in common is that they desire flexibility. You can decide to change your flight tomorrow or in a year’s time and you always have flexibility over that schedule. Furthermore, some of our larger corporate clients in the oil and gas sector often need to fly to areas not very accessible like in North Africa, for example. There are not many commercial airports that will accommodate larger aircraft if they’re from mainland Europe. So with the private jet, there are minimal barriers to land at the particular airport that you need.

I will say as well for people that want to fly with their pets – something that we get asked often is can they bring their dog or the cat? And yes, you can with private jets because of less strict requirements on baggage.

Of course, you’re also paying extra for this luxury. There are different sizes of aircraft you can charter. So you’ve got what’s called a very light jet or an air taxi, which usually caters to about four people. You’re looking at around €2,500 per hour of flight time. The more upmarket midsize and heavy jets? You’re looking at €11,000 – €14,000 per hour for the lower bracket. If you want the top-of-the-range Gulfstream, for example, you could be paying €18,000 per hour. Of course, it gets very expensive then if you’re flying longer distances or transatlantic, which could be about 80-90 thousand euros for the flight.

But once you charter a jet, it’s yours. And the more passengers you have the cheaper it is. If you’re spreading it across say six passengers it’s actually fairly reasonable for what you’re getting. But what you’re really paying for is the experience. The pilots are very highly trained and we always ensure that there are two pilots on there. Although it’s not always a requirement, [each flight] is fully catered, and you’ve got a private air hostess or a steward in there. You’re also getting a fixed base of operations – we have the VIP lounge ready for you so you’re not integrated with commercial flight areas in a normal terminal.”

“Our clientele range from high, net worth individuals up to whole exec-boards. What they all have in common is that they desire flexibility.”

Find out more:

• Get the exact right pricing every time with our How to Price a Product: 6 Expert Tips to Kickstart Your Profits guide.
• Want to know how to market expensive products? Read What Is High Ticket Digital Marketing and How Does It Work?

“At first, it was mainly people who wanted to just experience the private jet and we got a load of requests coming through from people who were actually just curious about the cost. Now the more reliable clients are business professionals, high-profile individuals, and actually sporting teams are a large source for us. They need to fly larger groups of people so it’s not just the typical private charter but we can arrange larger aircraft that carry larger teams.

We do occasionally get people that have expendable income that wants to upgrade their package and try out an experience. Often when we’ve spoken with our clients we’ll say, “Why are you looking to transition from booking your first class or a business class ticket to a private jet?” and the simple answer is you can’t get a business class or first class ticket from their local airport and they don’t want to pay for premium economy. They want a more up-market experience.

Our main clientele is really people that have a lot of expendable income and who really want to keep away from the masses of commercial flights. High-profile individuals are usually just business owners, although at the moment we have a few requests from celebrities that want to charter or are interested in chartering. So it can be high profile in terms of their social status. But in most cases, it’s in respect to their financial status.

We don’t get a week that is all the same clientele. They all vary, it can be a CEO or a sporting professional the next week. What makes it quite exciting is trying to cater and tailor the experience to the individual needs rather than just being “Here’s the jet. Turn up at this time, alright?” We design the flight around them.”

“What makes it quite exciting is trying to cater and tailor the experience to the individual needs rather than just being “Here’s the jet. Turn up at this time, alright?” We design the flight around them.”

For more information:

• Get the most from your online business with our Digital Marketing ROI Statistics and Guide for 2023.
• Start increasing your income with the 15 Best High-Margin Products to Sell Online in 2023.

“I think for most operators, they want to keep it as an experience that only a select few can do. It is becoming more accessible but the exclusivity of it demands a high fee.

For example, Empty Leg flights are a brilliant way to chart a jet for a very reasonable price. You can get a private jet chart for about 80% off the standard bespoke price. How they work is, let’s say, someone has charted bespoke from London to Paris, and the next client is down in Nice. That jet has to fly from Paris down to Nice with the plane empty. But what the operators tend to do is offer that particular route for a very heavily discounted price because they have to fly that way anyway. They’d rather recoup some of their money than fly completely empty and waste the fuel cost. So what Empty Legs do is that you can book like you would a commercial flight on a particular route. But it must depart at a particular time. You are foregoing all of the flexibility that you would get by flying bespoke. But of course, you get the added benefit of getting up to 80% off the price.

The private jet industry is large. I didn’t know the exact size but I had a look, and $29 billion is the market cap size at the moment. Most of that will be physical acquisitions. Operators buy up large fleets of jets so they can dominate the market. But chartering is becoming a large size of the market cap. I think mainly because it’s becoming more accessible with Empty Legs for anyone to charter if they’ve got some expendable income, right? And so it’s growing – and it’s very competitive.”

“…chartering is becoming a large size of the market cap. I think mainly because it’s becoming more accessible… And so it’s growing – and it’s very competitive.”

“So mainly travel is to and from the airport so you don’t really want to arrive at your fixed base of operations from the jet in an Uber. Most people want to ride in some sort of SUV or limousine. So we deal with those as the main part of the request. On-board catering is always included unless you specifically ask for a more lavish experience. There are always snacks, but you can also have fully catered flights and some do not come with stewardess experience, so you can add that on too. Most people want to go for the full hog.

One of the oddest requests we’ve been asked to fulfill was last month. I got a telephone call from some lifestyle partners and they wanted to chart a very large group of people. I won’t go into too much detail but about 44 passengers. It was from Amsterdam to Melbourne and they rang me up on Friday and asked me if they could get a jet for 44 passengers on Monday. And we tried our best but it’s an impossible task. We get requests that we really would like to fulfill, but I don’t think there’d be any broker out there that could do such a long-distance flight in such a short time. So I think that will be one that will live with me for a while considering how hard we worked for it. But I think we soon realized that they’d left it too late.

Plus, the environmental issues do concern me. I feel that sometimes it’s easy to pick on the people that you are envious of. It’s the top 1% that do charter the most, and it’s easy to pick on them and say they should be more reasonable in how they travel. But the private jet industry has actually reciprocated in that respect.

More operators are transitioning to what’s called sustainable aviation fuel, which is built up of different fats, greases, and oils. That makes it a renewable source or certainly a sustainable source of fuel rather than the gas which most commercial flights use. But yes, it does concern me – although a private jet compared to let’s say a large Airbus A350, for example, does not emit as much emissions as that particular aircraft. But sustainable aviation fuel will be the way forward, I think.”

“…a private jet compared to let’s say a large Airbus A350, for example, does not emit as much emissions as that particular aircraft. But sustainable aviation fuel will be the way forward, I think.”

Find out more:

• Help deal with even the most outlandish requests with our How to Provide Great Online Customer Service guide.
• Make your site better for the environment with 3 Ways to Make Your Site More Eco-Friendly in 2023.
• Do you want to sell but also be sustainable? Get some inspiration with our 10 Sustainable Business Ideas for Online Entrepreneurs.
• Find the perfect sustainable products with our Top 10 Sustainable Products to Sell Online.

“As a private jet charterer, it’s a 24-hour game. Me and my girlfriend, who’s the other company director, split up the time. She’s more of an early bird and I’m more of a night owl. So for me personally I’d wake up usually around six. Clear my head. I’d usually go to the gym and get rid of the stresses from the previous day. Then I would be at the laptop seeing if we had any requests coming overnight that we need to deal with ASAP. If there are, great, we do that. If not, then the day is spent marketing.

Blogging is a big part of our business structure. We just try and expand the business and then the rest of the day would be spent contacting people individually with the sales pitch to draw people into the Lux Jets brand. So, really the day is spent, I would say 70% on growth and marketing and 30% dealing with the requests on the day. 

If we have multiple in the day, then that fraction splits completely. But sitting before my laptop, trying to think of ways to market and beat the competition – that’s my 24 hours. And usually late nights. I clock off at about 11 o’clock at night, usually. So yes, it’s long hours.

I think my favorite success story is how we built a company itself from nothing. We’ve got plenty of success stories of how our client was happy with our services, but for me personally, the success story is how we’ve built up the business from a pipe dream (as some would have put it). And in fact, those same people said they are actually enjoying the content we put out and the services that we provide. So for me, the business itself is the biggest success story that we’ve got.”

“But sitting before my laptop, trying to think of ways to market and beat the competition – that’s my 24 hours.”

“I think if you don’t have a website, you don’t have a business. 50 years ago word of mouth and having a physical presence on the street was how we would get your custom, but everything is now a website. If you don’t have a website – and especially a nice website, that’s easy for people to recognize – I think that your business will flop from the outset.

I think Wix is a great platform to build a website. The developers quite clearly thought about everything that a business would need for a website. Before I started with Lux Jets, I had another website. It was called The Commitment of Traders Club and I built it really for fun as a hobby to see how I would get on with it. I didn’t spend too much time prior to knowing of Wix researching any other website builders because Wix is the one that I think most people think of when they think of the best DIY website builder. I tried Squarespace at the very beginning to build Lux Jets and it was just way too complicated. So I immediately trashed it and moved back over to Wix.

I do think Wix can be a little bit cheeky with their hidden costs. With my email marketing, I was using that perfectly fine until they changed it so you could only send 500 emails or so per month. I forget the figures, exactly, but that made me have to move that elsewhere because we would breach that band and then we’d have to start paying. So if you want to use all the features that Wix offers to the more advanced level, then you have to unfortunately pay for some of those features. That can be a little bit frustrating because if there’s something on there that you really want, but your budget doesn’t allow you to spend it, you often can’t use it

But other than that, nothing else. I can’t praise it enough. [Wix is] perfect for businesses in several respects. My favorite feature on it is the blog. I love how easy it is. But also we’ve got our booking form on there. Once it’s submitted, you can see it on your phone through the app but also straight to your email. I love the way that it’s not just a platform that you build a website on but it’s actually a tool that you use for your business. It complements your business perfectly and I love that.”

“I love the way that it’s not just a platform that you build a website on but it’s actually a tool that you use for your business. It complements your business perfectly and I love that.”

Find out more:

• Learn the 7 Steps to Starting a Business Blog in 2023 with our guide.
• Don’t know how to structure your business website? Take a look at the 10 Best Business Website Templates of 2023.
• Get the best website builder for your small business with our 10 Best Website Builders for Small Business.

“The best thing about my job is actually doing what I want to do with it. The company plans to expand into Europe in greater detail and perhaps I see myself residing there at some point. It’s a highly competitive market. There are many brokers out there, and you always have to try and have that edge. Our edge is that we are personable and transparent when you request with us. You’re speaking with either myself or my partner who is the other director. You’re not just speaking to a sales team like most other brokers. We’re also focusing more and more on our blogging aspect. And as I say, Wix is super helpful for that as it deals with all of our concerns that otherwise would have to host on another website. Our focus in the next three months is on SEO and brand exposure, both digitally as well as physically.

All I need to run my business is on my laptop and I can do that from anywhere. It’s just the flexibility and the fact that there’s no one really to talk down to you or tell you what to do. And that’s the nicest thing about it.

I think if you’ve got a dream about starting a website or business, even if you think it’s challenging or an impossible task, my advice is to just give it a go. If you don’t give that go, then you’ll never know. And if all else fails, it’s a learning experience. My first website on Wix had some success, but nowhere near as much as Lux Jets. But I learned from it and then the next venture that you start, you’ve broken the camel’s back in terms of creating something.”

“All I need to run my business is on my laptop and I can do that from anywhere. It’s just the flexibility and the fact that there’s no one really to talk down to you or tell you what to do. And that’s the nicest thing about it.”

I am originally Indonesian and I left my country when I was seventeen. I went to Germany to study environmental engineering, and I did both my bachelor’s and master’s over there in Germany. And then I started working in an environmental company, in their recycling sector. I was lucky and blessed that I got promoted to manager in a relatively quick time. And I found out also relatively quickly, that it wasn’t the path that I want to proceed with in my life.

I had this dream that I thought was mine. When I started working, I wanted to arrive at that level where I get to wear elegant clothes, and have meetings with the important people. I wanted to have my own name in front of my office and all of those things. But then I was surprised that why? Why is it not providing me the satisfaction that I thought it would be?

So there I was, in a house that was bigger, and it was very nice. I had a car from the company, everything I’d ever wanted. But then every day I came home and was like, what is it actually that I’m doing? And what is it actually that I want to achieve? All of these questions started popping up in my head. And then I did the inner work.

I decided to change the medium of how I would like to give value for others. I did training in psychology. I got a certification with a focus in individual psychology, which allows me to work as a life coach and that is where I started doing the coaching.

Our company’s name is Life Architekture with the mission of helping others build their own meaningful life.

The strongest tool that I was blessed to be able to learn, and I am still using it today, is meditation. At a relatively young age, I learned meditation, so, I learned the skill to observe myself. To be honest, I needed to collect the courage to ask myself the hard inner questions, because my identity was always attached to what I do. I’m from Indonesia. I’m going to Germany. I’ll be an engineer. My ego and everything were already attached to those ideas.

Then asking the hard questions for me was:

• If it’s not engineering, like who are you? 
• What do you actually want to do?
• If the list that you already checked is apparently not your list. What would your list look like?

It’s kind of like me questioning my own identity that I consciously or subconsciously built through the years. My journey with Life Architekture is to help people build their own meaningful life. And it starts with understanding oneself:

• Who am I?
• What are actually my core values?
• What kind of belief systems do I have right now?
• And what are my visions and then how do I think about myself?
• If you’re not a reliable person for yourself, how can you be reliable for others?

Because those are things that we took unconsciously from our environment, whether it’s the family always giving us their values or the environment. Family is usually the first context. But, we are not our parents, we have dreams that are usually not the same as our parents’ dreams.

To ask these questions and then through meditation, I was able to build my own list and then do the adventure of this! What I’m doing right now.

I did my 200 hours yoga course in India in a city called Goa. My intention was I wanted to have another skill to help people to know themselves fully. I built Life Architekture with the Three Months Program through this holistic approach. We are working on the four pillars, the intellectual, emotional pillar, physical pillar, and also the spiritual.

I fell in love with the philosophical part of it. One of the topics that I really liked was about the inner child, becoming closer with your inner child, and then you have some conversation with your inner child, that part I really loved. And then there’s obviously the physical part where you are learning how to teach Yoga. I was having at least three hours a day of the physical-yoga part, and this part hones the discipline.

I believe that these pillars have to be balanced. Also in my experience, if I pursue happiness it gives the taste as though I can’t reach that space. When I reach happiness, and I expect it to be there always, obviously we will be disappointed because happiness comes and goes. So, what I’m offering is more of the calmness and inner peace, and an understanding that happiness, just like other emotions, comes and goes.

When other emotions other than happiness, when you feel sadness, instead accept that those emotions are actually a positive experience because if you have an aversion against those kinds of emotions, it causes suffering — you’re not accepting of the present moment. And it’s actually all that we have.

The word authenticity means for me, you are asking yourself the self-reflection questions. That will help you to become radically honest with yourself. 

Imagine when we are born in this world, we are like a blank paper. And then as a child, we are functioning like a sponge, and taking in information. We are learning from our family, from the environment, maybe from kindergarten from friends, and everything. And then scientists say it is until the age of seven, this process is happening and then you are able to think by yourself. You are not a blank paper anymore because you already have the coding on how you see the world through your environment and your learning process.

Now, the challenge comes. When we become an adult we rarely ask ourselves: is it still the program that I want to work with?

We tend to think, I am the way I am. I am like this and then there’s the danger of coming into the victim role. You may find enough reasons to justify why you are the way that you are, and to justify that, you don’t have to do anything to become better.

Then that’s where the authenticity comes in again – not anymore the program from my childhood. I can now think for myself and am able to see my program.

When I was creating my brand and website, the massive realization was it’s not about what I can do – the spotlight is on what the clients need. When they visit the website they need to feel understood and when they hear about Life Architekture, I want them to experience the joy and enthusiasm that they can create the life that they want.

It was only back in June this year when I started with the website and social media so it’s relatively new. It allows me to share more of me and my work and where people can

understand what I am doing. I’m working with a friend on everything SEO related because our goal is, we want people who come to the website from terms like mindfulness or emotional intelligence, so they can educate themselves or get values from our websites and learn about it.

Find Out More

• How To Build a Brand – discover what it takes to build a brand in 14 steps.
• SEO Basics 101 – need to understand the basics of search engine optimization? This guide is for SEO beginners.

I think it’s about the user friendliness because you can customize the store and then add the blocks like pictures and FAQs. It’s pretty user friendly because of the drag and drop feature. It was convenient for us to build and the reputation that Shopify already has for building websites was also a plus for us. I also found the payment processing is straightforward.

Shopify is usually for ecommerce and for physical products, so for now, we are able to build for this coaching service. But, currently when me and my partner, talk of if Life Architekture grows, we tend to think about WordPress because of the capability of making it more customized. I think when Shopify also offers the tools [for coaching services] that will make it easier for coaching based services. But again, we took this decision by knowing Shopify is usually for commerce and physical products.

My advice for anyone creating a website is to leave perfectionism to the side. You get started because you yourself will evolve to this process. We already think about the next products that we are going to make, maybe just the physical part, for example, yoga. There will be more products in the future.

You just have to get started, you will learn in the process, I’m talking to myself here too by the way. To say that you want it to be perfect is to have fear of judgement, so that’s why just get started. It is a learning process.

You are not a finished product. Neither is your website! It’s never a finished product in my point of view, you are going to grow together with your work.

Here we asked Bayu to complete the sentence from his own experiences. This fun little game led to some lovely insights, we started him off and here is what he said.

•  I am happiest when… “I can leave a positive impact for others.”
• To me, success looks like… “A beautiful and colorful picture built from a collection of puzzle pieces. Those puzzle pieces can be good financial stability, meaningful relationships with others, and a strong relationship with myself.
• If I could go back in time, I would advise myself to… “Go for it. And trust yourself.”
• What having a website has done for me is… “Made my work visible. And built the credibility for me and my work.”
• Being an entrepreneur means… “Learning every day to acquire the skills needed to share my work with more people.”

What I loved about talking to Bayu was his idea of learning to earn your own self-respect. He calmly acknowledged his own tendency for perfectionism, something I myself struggle with at times – but noted the importance of being reliable for yourself so that you can then become reliable for others. I also connected with his thoughts on learning to unlearn other people’s expectations of you, particularly he stated:

“Is it selfish to pursue one’s dreams? But the answer is if you’re doing something just to fulfill other people’s expectations, it’s a ticking time bomb. You are a ticking bomb. At one point, it will explode. And then the resentment that is built. You have to take that accountability for your own life.”

I could see why clients spoke with Bayu, as I felt uplifted to take accountability for my life, and to let go of the expectations of my family and wider society in just that one hour interview. It’s interesting to me to see more businesses lead with this intention to bring authenticity, and often wonder if the boom in meditation in the west is a part of that. Either way, it was an enlightening discussion and if you’re interested in being the architect of your life, we highly recommend looking through Bayu’s website for his Life Architekture coaching.

“I am an elderberry, honey, and aronia-themed food manufacturing company that started out of the need to help my son with his chronic health issues when he was two years old. I’ve gone from two handmade products to now 20, with a retail store focused on the community and highlighting other handmade businesses.

I went to college to be in the FBI, which I did for 15 years until I had my son. So going from that to being an entrepreneur with no business experience has been interesting! But I learn as I go, I’m a quick study, and I have learned over the years that if I don’t know someone, I can find someone who does and is willing to help.

I tackled [building my business] all in-house because I didn’t have the funds to outsource! I didn’t want to put our family at financial risk, so I paid for things as I earned the funds.”

Finding Family Time

“The best part [of my work] is that it’s never the same. An average day is getting my son to school, heading over to the shop to check in, figure out what needs to be made/bottled, and do that. Then I’ll spend time up front chatting with customers or meeting mentees for their appointments. I also serve on the board of a few organizations and volunteer groups, such as Rotary International, so I do my best to get to those weekly. I’ll also throw on paint clothes or “get dirty clothes” to work on my new commercial kitchen or fix something that I don’t want to hire someone to do.

Basically all day, every day, I am meeting, talking, making, or facilitating something new, possible, or established. But when I grab my son from school it’s “off work” time until he goes to bed. I try and make sure we get some family time in there too!”

“I tell people my start was mainly to help people and share our family’s story so that others might benefit from it. The selling at markets was me – as a stay-at-home Mom – wanting to get out of the house two Saturdays a month, to talk to adults about things other than potty training! But it evolved into being very community-focused. I started it because I care about kids and health and, in that, I was out in the community at large, seeing kids, families, business owners – their struggles, their accomplishments. I felt very connected to that. I wanted to be a positive impact on that.

My business is my hobby, which allows me to make decisions based on community growth, instead of dollars in my pocket.

It allows me to take a little more risk, but that has a high community reward. I also make sure I am still front and center to those who have always supported me. While I may have a lot of help nowadays for all Erin’s Elderberries does, I don’t sit at home or go on trips all the time – I go to markets and connect, or I’m in the store to connect with everyone. My customers know if they reach out, I will be there.”

I respond to emails myself. If there’s an issue, I handle it. If someone wants to meet me, I will make sure they do. I post things on social media that I want to connect to my followers with – or want them to understand about me. Many feel they know me without ever having met me, and that is what I always want, no matter how large my company grows.”

Managing Local Events

“I grew up with my Mom throwing some awesome parties, and I watched and learned as a mentor of mine ran our local farmers market… which led me to take a job in a local town as their Event Coordinator, so I could build up their farmers market for them and lay a good foundation for success. So I guess it was only natural when I had my own “space” that I would facilitate things that would bring the community together in fun ways.

But also my son… Lucas. He’s really the inspiration behind it all. He had the idea for a Pokemon trading card day. He wanted to watch a movie outside one night and I thought – we should do this at the shop, for our community. I guess I think of things I feel kids and people in our area would like to do, and I give them a place to do it! You know, as far as strategy goes, I think it’s good because it helps get the name out there. People visit just for that and then come in and learn about us.”

More Information

• How to Provide Great Online Customer Service: Provide positive customer experiences with these tips
• Customer Feedback Best Practices: Learn how to collect customer feedback
• How to Increase Customer Loyalty: Five strategies to help build customer relationships

“Food laws are tricky. You have your individual state laws and then you have USDA regulations and then FDA regulations. Trying to understand where you fit and how you are legally required to do things can be confusing. I spent so much time running in circles trying to understand exactly how I was supposed to do things. I probably wasted six to seven months of time, which is why I now volunteer my time mentoring small food businesses. I try to be the person I needed four years ago since I now have an in-depth understanding that I did not have when I started out.”

More Information

• How to Sell Food Online: A step-by-step guide to help get your food business started online
• Best Food Products To Sell Online: Not sure what to sell? Check out our list of the top food products

“Winning small business of the year by my local chamber of commerce [is one of Erin’s favorite success stories], because it was voted on by other businesses in the country. So to have that respect from hundreds of other local businesses just amazes me.

[Erin’s Elderberries] has helped pay off bills and, most importantly, it’s helped me expand into retail, a larger space, and I’ve created my second business with no business loans. It also formed my scholarship program this year where I got to award the first Erin’s Elderberries scholarship to a local high school senior with a financial need. I elect to put funds back into the business to grow it, so while I can’t say “Oh, I have 15 Mercedes in the driveway”, I can say I’ve expanded my business 30-fold and started a second, completely different, business with zero debt.

I have increased my monthly sales by 450% since starting, and I have also mentored 58 small food businesses on their start-ups since 2020!

However, the biggest highlight was the opening day at the store. I never in a million years even thought of a retail shop. My proudest moment was watching my son help me cut the big giant ribbon at our ribbon-cutting ceremony.”

“I wanted people all across the country to have access to the products I made! I did look at others, but Square Online, for me, was the most user-friendly looking! I am not a tech person and never will be, so the fact that I could create something that looked nice and professional – without having to pay someone money I didn’t have – was what sealed the deal.

I love that it links to my shipping label portal. I also like that you can message customers directly through it or they can message you.”

Overcoming Hurdles

“There were things I wanted to do or offer but I couldn’t figure out how to do it exactly at the time, such as having drop-down menus for variations or options. I didn’t know that’s what it was called at the time so I listed everything separately. But the longer you use it, the more you understand. So I fixed that over time!

The biggest thing I have been wanting is a customer-based subscription service sign-up. Currently, you have to create a subscription and send the sign-up link to the customer. They can’t just go on your website and sign up for an auto-ship every month or three months. I have to use a totally different platform/company for our subscription boxes. We all know the less clicks someone has to make, the more likely they are to checkout. A customer emailing that they want a subscription, then emailing back and forth till they pay is just not good practice. I’ve been waiting four years… hoping they will one day hear us!

The second thing is the ability to have a second “buying page” for wholesale accounts. I’d love for my wholesalers to be able to just go online and buy off my website from their account/sign-in and have it give pricing, but Square Online does not have that capability.”

More Information

• Square Online Store Examples: For more inspiration from Square Online
• Square Online Pricing: Everything you need to know about Square Online’s plans

“Trust your gut always, don’t question it for a second.

Look at other websites that you like using, write down those features that you really like (it takes PayPal, the formatting of pictures, it runs Instagram highlights, etc.), and use that list as you create your own website – so you don’t end up wishing you did something else.”

More Information

• How to Build a Website: Everything you need to know about creating a website
• How to Customize a Square Online Website: Design advice if you need a helping hand with Square Online

“My business is now basically three businesses… we have the retail shop that carries over 88 small handmade goods from local businesses, then we have EE OG – which is the elderberry and aronia manufacturing (handmade) – and now the rentable kitchen. The future of the store is to work to become the place our community wants to come to, rest, and support other businesses. For my elderberry company, my all-time goal is to land a major retailer such as Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Target, or Giant. I want to get my syrup to people faster and have accessibility at later times in the evening.”

At Valley Rays, we make premium sunglasses without the big brand price tag.

We’re an independent sunglasses company based out of sunny Phoenix, Arizona. Living in one of the sunniest cities in the US inspired us to create a brand that was unique to our area and could stand up against the harsh desert sun.

We started our design process back in 2022 when we developed our flagship sunglass model, The Phoenix. The Phoenix was designed to be a modern take on a classic design, but we wanted them to be more versatile, so our customers could wear them anywhere. And when we say anywhere, we mean it. Mountain biking, cruising on the boat, or just out on the town – we wanted our sunglasses to be able to handle it. Of course, this type of versatility requires a little extra work, with a higher-performance design and premium materials.

 The Phoenix was officially launched in March 2023, and has since garnered rave reviews from our fans.

Despite this, we wanted to deliver a high-quality product without the big brand price tag. It’s no secret that almost all of the name brands in the industry are owned by the same company, and they notoriously overcharge for their sunglasses, sometimes even charging a 1000% markup. Learning this made us determined to match their quality, and do it at an affordable price point for our customers.

We started Valley Rays because we knew we could deliver the best value to the market, bringing honesty, quality, and affordability to our customers. Before Valley Rays, customers could choose between overpriced sunglasses or a cheap pair you’d find at a gas station. But we’ve combined best-in-class design, premium materials, and a lower price point to challenge that status quo.

Living in Arizona, there are 315 days of pure sunshine every year. You could say we’re the unofficial experts on living life in the sun, and we wanted to share that sunshine with the rest of the country.

Arizona is smack-dab in the middle of the desert. We’re literally called ‘the Valley of the Sun’. We thought our business was the perfect opportunity to give the world a taste of Arizona and give Arizona what it deserves: a local, premium sunglasses brand.

But it’s not just about the sun. We wanted to create a product that could tough the great outdoors. Both Shane and I are really into sports. We’re big fans of hiking and mountain biking, and if we get the opportunity, we love being out on the lake, too. If we’re stuck inside too long, we go a little stir-crazy!

This was a big factor when designing our sunglasses. We both have our preferred brands, and we used these as a base before making them better. In our opinion, of course!

The biggest changes were regarding the fit and comfort of wearing the sunglasses for a long period of time. We wanted them to be made out of materials that were light and it was important that the lenses were super clear so that our customers could wear them outdoors and barely notice they were even there.

We did a lot of prototyping. We had seven or eight prototypes in the end, but with the accessibility of 3D printing nowadays, this part of the process was really quick and easy. It was the design phase that was the trickiest. We started to nitpick at every little detail. That’s how we ended up with such a great product from the get-go, though! Because we spent so much time perfecting the basic design, we were really able to dial in the fit and make sure it was perfect.

Shane and I both have degrees in civil engineering and we’ve worked in the construction industry for the past 12 years. We’ve learned a lot about running new projects and presenting quality products. The one thing that has been drilled into our brains from day one is that quality can make or break a product. That, combined with our engineering background, has really had a strong influence on our business decisions.

Sustainability is very important to us, too. People are always losing their sunglasses, and sometimes it’s when they’re out on a trail or on the lake. For some peace of mind, we chose to use a bio-resin for our frame material. This offers the same strength and durability as TR-90, but instead of being petroleum-based, it’s actually made out of castor bean oil. This makes our frames 50% biodegradable, without sacrificing quality – something that was a huge win for the Valley Rays team.

We also put a lot of thought into our packaging, too. No one wants their sunglasses delivered in a box in a box in a box. We wanted to create something that could be reused, rather than recycled, so we chose to use a cylinder that people could then repurpose as a sunglasses holder. The cylinder fits in most car cup holders, too, so you can store them safely while driving.

Sustainability is so crucial when creating a business, especially when you see how much waste the industry creates. I think a lot of smaller brands really embrace this mentality. Not only is extra waste bad for the planet, but it’s not cost-effective, either!

Creating a brand isn’t an easy task and there have been many challenges. Shane and I both currently work 9 to 5 in the construction world and although there’s some pretty good flexibility, it can get a little hectic. Plus, we’re both new to the parenting game, so we try to keep ourselves as streamlined as possible. Family is the root of both our priorities. After all, none of this would be possible without the support from home.

But if you’re thinking about starting a sunglasses business, make sure you’re ready for the challenge of a lifetime. We thought it would be relatively cheap to get started, but the costs start to add up quickly.

 Shane and I both had millions of ideas. Trying to boil them all down to one succinct brand was really tough.

You have to really understand what sets your product apart and make sure your marketing is solid. The biggest thing that Shane and I realized is that we couldn’t cut corners when it came to branding and marketing. In the end, we reached out to a design company to help us out and they really smashed it out of the park. From there, putting the website together just fell into place.

We’ve actually outsourced a lot of stuff, mostly due to time but also creative blocks. Time is your best asset as an entrepreneur and it’s better to outsource things you’re not good at or have spent a lot of time trying to figure out.

Even with the extra help, it’s hard work. Whenever we have a free second in the day, we try to smash out as much work as possible. This can be anything from SEO optimization to working on Facebook, Instagram, or Google Ads. When we get out of the office, we create as much content as we can to fill social media and spread the word. It’s all about getting our product in front of as many people as possible. That’s just how it is for a startup!

So why do we do it? The love of entrepreneurship. The challenge. The thrills of success. And the thought that someday we could own something great. There was nothing better than finally receiving our finished product. It had taken us about eight months of hard design work and a constant back and forth with the manufacturer but to actually feel our creation in our hands was a pretty surreal feeling.

Ecommerce is the easiest way to start a business when you’re still working a day job. Once everything’s in place, it only requires small tweaks and it’s not as time-intensive as other businesses. The simplicity of setting up our Shopify store was a bonus, though.

We also really like that Shopify supports the integration of additional apps to help boost your website. Right now, we’re using Bold Upsell, which is great to increase the average order value. We also use Omnisend for our email marketing and LOOX for customer reviews. These apps are super important for our business at the minute, and we’d recommend them to anyone starting out with a website on Shopify.

We absolutely feel that Shopify is the right platform to help us grow. We’re just scratching the surface right now. Soon, we’ll be able to offer more sunglass models and we feel that we offer something unique in the industry. The sky’s the limit!

If you’re thinking about starting your own website, my advice would be to just do it. Just start it. You can even start with a free plan or trial. Starting is always the hardest step, but once you have something, you can tweak and test it to see if the market’s interested. Then, once you know people like what you have to offer, you can focus on growing.

Working with Shane has been so rewarding. We both have our strengths, and it’s nice because each person can focus on what they’re good at. It’s kind of like a divide-and-conquer thing. It’s just important to find someone like-minded that also shares the same motivation and willingness to get the job done.

One of the best parts of this journey so far has been seeing the reviews come in and talking with our customers. We spent so much time finding the right manufacturer, obsessing over the design, and struggling to get our name out there, that when we started seeing the stellar reviews come in, it all finally came into perspective that this is why we do it. We offer a great product that enhances people’s experiences and that has been very rewarding.

We have so many goals and aspirations to list, but right now, we’re focused on getting out next model launched and growing our fan base with our current model, The Phoenix. It’s important to have a good foundation, made up of great customer service and a quality product, so these are our short-term goals, too.

Entrepreneurship is a daily grind and you have to just keep at it. There are no overnight successes.

“I’m a high school graduate with some college. I did something a little non-traditional – I went to a city college and took some classes at a state college, in San Francisco. And I call it ‘majored in film production’, but I’ve always kind of marched to the beat of my own drum and the idea of doing general education never worked for me in the past. I felt like life was short and I just didn’t want to spend time learning about math or things that I didn’t find enjoyable instead. So I would go and take all the film production classes and I would take them all the way from beginning to intermediate to advanced. After I finished those semesters, I would go take the same class from a different teacher all the way from beginning, to intermediate, to advanced again. And when I was done, I went to a different school and started doing the same thing. [I felt that] your experience can be more important than a degree. 

From there, I ended up doing some independent filmmaking in San Francisco. The only movie from that time that might be findable is a movie called Saltwater, starring Michael X. Sommers, who played Bug in Sense8. Also, when I was like, either 18 or 19, I got a job collecting debts for the US Department of Treasury. People think of collection agencies as really, really sleazy most of the time, but this collection agency was actually very reputable. And every Monday they would actually take me off the floor and they would give me high-dollar negotiation training and sales training and personal development training. It was amazing! And that job, as silly as it sounds, has shaped the entire rest of my life. [Since that time] I would always kind of gravitate towards sales jobs and really, really excel.

Today, I use the skill sets more to support my business and the businesses of my clients. I’m getting ready to host a retreat in Sedona, which is called the Authority Retreat. And it’s all about getting my clients the right aesthetic photos and a call to action, video production, and all sorts of things that create the right look for their websites as spiritual entrepreneurs. I’m not in the commercial film industry anymore but that is the training that I have the most outside of high school.”

“[I felt that] your experience can be more important than a degree.”

Find out more:

• Learn how to build an online business website with our How to Build a Business Website in 2023 guide.
• Find the best ecommerce website builder for your business with our 8 Best Ecommerce Website Builders For Small Businesses.

“I was a very well-adjusted kid in high school. Homecoming Queen vibes, cheerleader, good kid, class president – these kinds of things. But I was really insecure and I had a relationship that I had been in for seven years. My high school sweetheart and I broke up and I was at a very pivotal point in my life.

One day I decided I wanted to escape and I tried a drug for the first time and the first time was all it took. For about three years, I found myself struggling as a young woman with addiction and sort of running away from any feelings or problems. But one day I had a near-death experience and I unfortunately found myself in an overdose situation.

And in that moment, I remember leaving my body and I felt like I was floating outside of my body and everything was getting blurry and dark and sort of pinpointing into a focal point of light, like they really say. I heard this voice begin to speak to me and say, “You don’t remember who I am, but I’m your great-grandmother, and you’re hearing me now to save your life.”

I found myself losing my focus and sort of floating in and out a few different times through this whole experience until someone came and found me and got me help. This woman’s voice would speak to me and she kind of said, “Life is gonna be different.”

Shortly after I realized that I would never be able to really know what was real and what wasn’t anymore because I was very psychic from that point on. It sort of happened instantly, which happens a lot after near-death experiences. It was a blessing in disguise because after I got clean and it saved my life, but it also rerouted my entire life. All the psychic stuff [was] happening and trust me, I thought I was crazy! For the first year, the jury was out like I could still be crazy, I could still be experiencing the confusion of when you’re doing drugs.

But what ended up happening is I started doing readings and helping people and realizing, “Wow, this information that comes up and checks out.” So I got sober in 2005 and started officially becoming a businesswoman doing readings for a profession. Even just part-time starting in 2008, after I had really sort of nailed it down, my awareness of how it could help online visitors began to formalize.”

“But one day I had a near-death experience and I unfortunately found myself in an overdose situation.”

“It’s just the ability to divine Truth and the Nature of Things. Believe it or not, everyone has psychic powers, and like muscles, they can be developed. So a lot of people have gut feelings about things, like they can walk into a room and hair can stand up on the back of their neck or goosebumps on their arms.

A lot of people, not to sound too crazy, have telepathic connections, which just means your awareness is entangled with someone else. Mother’s intuition, we’ve heard of that; something happens to the child and no matter where the mother is across the country, she’s aware. A lot of times, people think [psychic abilities] have to be someone talking to you. When really, it’s more like, opening your eyes to the environment you’re already in and everyone can actually develop it.

I sounded like a really silly person for a little while and I don’t recommend this to my students. Today we set up containers where this is more appropriate to discuss, but I got to be honest, [back before] I would just tap someone on the shoulder and say, “Would you mind if I ask you a question about such and such?” and I would figure out what I knew was correct. So I drove my friends crazy for a little while because I was tapping people on the shoulder all the time. And so for me, one of my main focuses when I teach people to cultivate their abilities is to have avenues where it is safe to test.

I mean, I guess I want to clarify just one more thing too, in case it becomes useful to mention at any point, but I’m a very open-minded, very analytical person, but my mind is so open that the jury’s out on almost everything. I see things as more of an experience and a possibility than I do a principle that I think is a hard fast rule. I love skeptics because, how would you know something if you’ve never experienced it and how is your experience better than my experience?”

“I love skeptics because, how would you know something if you’ve never experienced it and how is your experience better than my experience?”

“Spiritual advisors of any kind are an important part of our humanity. We fulfill a role for those who resonate with our values. I believe there is something for everyone in the spiritual space, for those who want to engage with it.

There are as many ways to be psychic as there are people. However, there are some general concepts like the “Clairs”:

• Clairvoyance (psychically “seeing”)
• Clairaudience (psychically “hearing”)
• Clairsentience (psychically “feeling”)
• and Claircognizance (psychically “instant knowing”)

It’s sort of like having a lot of Internet browsers open. And so I have to intentionally shut them down to keep my focus streamlined, most of the time. So if you’re around me and you’re afraid I’m reading your mind, I’m probably not doing it on purpose because I have more important things to focus on.

Because when you’re reading the person in front of you, another technique would be to actually get the information from a higher source. And in that case, those students and those readers (and I’m a little bit like that as well) usually prefer methods that are just over the phone or sometimes [we’ll] just send you an email with the answer and they don’t want their person involved in the process at all. For me, it was always the phone. That was that sweet spot where I wouldn’t get distracted by you personally and I still would be able to dialogue and hear from you what you needed. I mean, I did a lot of in-person events too, but when it came to just building my business online, telephone readings were where it was at.

I really loved predicting babies from clients who are having trouble conceiving. That’s one of my favorite things to do. And I don’t just tell everybody who’s trying to conceive that they will be successful because sometimes that’s not a probability. But when I get to tell the information for struggling parents that really, really, want children… And I can see the children. It’s really powerful, and a lot of times I’ve gotten to meet the babies and hold them. And they look at me like they know me. Baby energies are really interesting.

In harder times there can also be really great beauty too. So for example, death can come up a lot. Whether it’s a parent or a spouse or even someone themselves with a terminal condition, a lot of times because I have made a deal with my guides and with my clients that I will go there, but I’ll take responsibility. I never confuse my gift with my job. My job is to deliver comforting messages and help people. I’m a healer first, right? So there’s the gift and then there’s the job.”

“I did a lot of in-person events too, but when it came to just building my business online, telephone readings were where it was at.”

“I’m an international psychic who mentors other driven psychics to book more clients and build six-figure businesses. I do it through a process of my own called The Money Making Method for Psychic Readers, which consists of a few different elements, mostly sort of accepting your calling, mastering your magic, and getting paid. So it’s a mixture of all things. Psychic readers need to build profitable businesses. I used to be a psychic reader specifically serving consumers who are interested in all things, psychic and spiritual but my business has evolved especially over the past year.

Not having a ‘money mindset’ is a really big issue within the psychic community. Many aspiring psychic readers find it difficult to charge for their time and their insight. Thinking that some judge for charging to use a ‘God-given gift.’ I help break down these restrictive beliefs. One of my famous quotes is that “Psychic readers and spiritual entrepreneurs should be paid for their gifts just like pro athletes are paid for their gifts.” I think this concept provides a healthy juxtaposition to the money shame. It’s important.

Aside from doing the mindset work I just explained. It’s about as easy as running any other business. There’s marketing, lead generation, building authority, providing an honest product or service, using best practices, and nurturing repeat customers. If more psychics looked at it this way, more would be successful at having a profitable business and scaling their goodness and impact.

You can be a psychic online just as easily as you can be a psychic in person because it’s just as accessible virtually as it is having someone in front of you because the people that we serve is sort of a niche audience to be honest. Not everybody is into it. Based on my previous research, there are approximately 330 million people in the US, and half of those people have or would consider receiving a psychic reading. There are approximately 10,000 psychic readers in the US psychic communities. The internet brings all of us together regardless. That’s why it’s so powerful.”

“Psychic readers and spiritual entrepreneurs should be paid for their gifts just like pro athletes are paid for their gifts.”

Find out more:

• Want to expand your business? Read our guide on How to Grow Your Business Online.
• See who’s the best of the best with our 6 Best Ecommerce Platforms for 2023 list, reviewed and curated by us.

“When I was a psychic reader, I’d do four readings a day for three days a week. I’d do two, take a break, and then do two more. I would spend my other days running the business and wearing all those other hats I mentioned before.

I’d make my own schedule and have fun in the sun when I felt like it. I live near Disney World, so I go play or catch a concert in the parks quite a bit. I have the freedom to do what I want when I want.

Today, as a mentor for psychic readers, much is the same. But here’s the difference: instead of reading clients 12 hours a week, I’m creating content for my coaching programs or coaching my students about building their six-figure psychic businesses. It will probably sound like I’m a broken record, but this still applies… it’s a business!”

“I’m creating content for my coaching programs or coaching my students about building their six-figure psychic businesses. It will probably sound like I’m a broken record, but this still applies… it’s a business!”

“How my business worked was that someone would find me and come to my website and they would use a booking system, which is from Wix. I’ve always used the Wix booking system. They would put in their name and their payment information and their phone number and then they’d get a little email due to an automation from Wix. It says, ‘Hey your appointment’s tomorrow.’ And then at that time, I would open up my Wix app on my phone, and simply check in for the day and say, “Who am I calling?” And I would tap their number and I would call them on the phone.

In later years, it has become a one-stop shop for my clients to run a simple lead funnel that I teach in my program. To explain more deeply, my “Become a Money-Making Psychic Mentorship Program” consists of a turn-key solution for building a six-figure psychic business. I literally hand over my business in a box. Let’s just say I’ve been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars through the years I’ve been in business. And it all runs on Wix. 

My clients use the web designer, obviously, but also the booking system, automation, CRM system, coupon systems, shop features, payment integrations, (even their beta “programs” online course hosting), and so much more. Everything they need, Wix can do.

My advice to people starting out is to start with a template… but see through it! Look at the bones. Do you like how the images and information are organized? I’ve had many versions of my website over the years; some were built from pet hospital templates or bakery templates. Don’t let that throw you off. You’ll get better at really seeing a template the more you create. Also, use the features! Learn about how to maximize your business strategies with the tools right there on Wix.

When teaching my clients, I happen to provide them a few “canned” template options that are specifically designed to hold the content we’ve produced together, so it’s a simple drag-and-drop process for them and entails minimal designing… unless they want to. Over time, they usually feel confident enough to spruce them up. I would love them to add a private/internal notes section for the booking system to jot down a few things after a client session. [I want to be] creating and selling more automated, effective content that gets my clients results. Eventually, a more hands-off approach without compromising client experience.”

“Let’s just say I’ve been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars through the years I’ve been in business. And it all runs on Wix.”

Find out more:

• Read our guide on Email Automation to get ahead of the game.
• Find out How Long it Takes to Develop an Online Course with our handy walkthrough.

“The best thing about being a psychic is being in on the magic and seeing behind the curtain. You get to have some of the answers to some of the Universe’s big questions.

If you’re sitting on building your business, six months from now you’ll wish you had started sooner. Feel the fear and do it anyway. Be brave enough to suck at something new. If you feel the call, go for it. Seizing the day is basically the meaning of life.”

“I started Timberdog in 2017 after adopting my rescue puppy, Kashi. She had terrible trauma, including separation anxiety, and I knew it would take a long time to train her. In the meantime, I wanted her close to me everywhere we went, and so I invented the multifunctional pet bed – RuffRest® – that could travel with us, whether we were camping, staying in a hotel, going to the office, road-tripping, or flying to a destination.

The best part of my day is when someone tells me that they love their RuffRest and can’t live without it, and don’t know what they did before it came into their lives! I feel the same way – I never leave home without it.”

A Green Commitment

“The environment is the most important thing to me in my business. What would be the use of an outdoor pet bed if we had no destinations to travel to or camp in, due to forest fires and polluted water and airways? My dog’s love of nature and wanting to be in it as much as possible drove me to craft the perfect outdoor adventure pet bed. I love nature too and need to be able to escape to it. So, preserving the great outdoors has been of the utmost importance to me.

That’s why Timberdog has partnered with One Tree Planted to plant two trees for every RuffRest sold. This will help us with our ambitious plan to be carbon negative by 2027.

It’s extremely pricey to be sustainable, but I didn’t want to be one of those companies who does it later on just for optics. Even though it hurts my bottom line, it was imperative for Timberdog to be a green company from its very inception. Brand and brand equity is everything to a company, and I want everyone to know that Timberdog doesn’t just do things to “look good”. We do things because we want to be good.”

The Daily Grind

“The average day has me going through emails for about 3-4 hours per day, and then working on organic SEO through things like internal linking, blogging, and guest blogging – as well as responding to journalist queries in order to get additional exposure. I also spend quite a bit of time connecting with influencers and signing them up to showcase RuffRest via their user-generated content.”

Building Connections & Influence

“I offer a direct line to me to anyone who seems like they need one – usually it’s folks who are hesitant to buy and tell me they need to be convinced, or people who wish I had a brick-and-mortar presence as they don’t trust buying things off the internet because they can’t touch or test them in person. I also look at every comment as an opportunity to engage in dialogue and demonstrate why RuffRest is, say, at its price point, or why it’s the best pet bed on the market.

After trying to contact Gear Junkie for two years, I finally got through and word of RuffRest has traveled all the way to the editor-in-chief, who will have one of his reviewers do a full spread on RuffRest in the next few months. Also, getting 22 influencers with a combined following of 6.2 million people to sign with Timberdog hasn’t been bad either!”

More Information

• How to Sell Pet Supplies Online: Read our guide if you’re thinking about building an online store to sell pet-related products
• Sustainable Business Ideas: For more ideas to help you get started
• How to Make Your Website More Eco-Friendly: Minimize your website’s impact with these simple steps

“Our pet bed is the first of its kind in the world. Usually travel items for dogs are either a thin roll-up mat, or travel bag, or a simple pet bed made from durable nylon, or simply a sleeping bag for dogs. But it’s never all four of those items in one. RuffRest accomplishes all of that plus 10 more features with its patent-pending design.

[When it comes to creating a new product]… Sketching things out helps me take the visual stuff in my brain and organize it on paper. Drawings are universal and don’t need much language to explain it – when working with prototypers overseas, sketches have proved invaluable. I also keep a master to-do list on Monday.com, keep a Google calendar for meetings, and a paper pad for daily items. It’s a lot, but it keeps me organized.

Amazingly, I went from a drawing on the back of a loan to a fully-fleshed, commercially viable product within 4 years. It took another year to perfect it, get it manufactured, and get it on the market. I’m working on building the brand and community in the meantime. It’s very exciting work.

I did most of it [the work] myself as I could not afford outside help. But I did have to invest in a few expensive things, such as the tech pack, and some help to customize the website theme I purchased. I also needed help shooting the videos and professional photos of the product. I cut costs by doing most of the setup work myself and just having the pros come in to do the last bits which I could not figure out.

I had to go through many tech packs, many manufacturers, many disbelievers, and thousands of other missteps before finally landing on a manufacturer who could bring my vision to life. But even here there were communication, tech, and knowledge barriers. It was a steep learning curve for the both of us since I knew nothing of textiles and manufacturing, and they were encountering a complex product like mine for the first time.”

More Information

• Best Selling Pet Products: Find out which pet products are trending for 2023

“[The pet industry] is a saturated, highly-competitive market. You better have something that stands out. And you must stick by it for several years before seeing success.

Be patient and keep grinding. There’s room in the market for everyone – don’t worry about copycats. If you stand by your product, your product is here to stay. There will always be copycats, but you’re the original, and if you’ve built your brand properly, the people will know that.”

“Kickstarter inspired me [to build a website]. I noticed that innovators on there had these endless, scroll-type landing pages which explained products exhaustively. This is critical when you’re new to a market with a product and early adopters need to read all about it. It has to be informative, anticipate all possible questions, and be visually stunning. The devil is in the details.

I chose Shopify because they were the most popular choice at the time, had incredible themes, and had real-time phone support. Now that they’ve nixed their phone support, I am considering other options.

Nothing really sets it apart from other major players, to be honest. Google Analytics 4 has been very helpful as a tool but you don’t need Shopify to get on it.

I’m on the hunt for a platform which won’t cut corners on their customers. Shopify has steadily been going down, in my opinion, for the past couple of years.”

More Information

• Best Website Builders: Check out Shopify’s competition in our list of the top-rated website builders on the market

I am happiest when… my customers are happy.

To me, success looks like… my customers’ satisfaction.

If I could go back in time, I would advise myself to… relax and not worry so much.

Having a business website has… been hugely gratifying and helpful. People are impressed with the site, so I’m very proud of it.

Being an entrepreneur means… strapping in for a marathon, not a sprint.

“I’ve been in business-to-business tech marketing for about eight years. I’ve worked for some of the world’s biggest tech companies like Hewlett Packard, DXC Technologies, and AVID. I’ve also worked as a contractor for Facebook.

My role has always been in various marketing roles, [but] it never really covered blogging or anything like that. So when it does come to blogging, I was completely new to it and SEO and all the other things. I was just learning from scratch.  

But I feel my background in marketing was also kind of what pushed me to do it because I understood the tech world and understood that these things are possible. If you say to your parents, ‘I’m starting a blog and it could make a lot of money.’ They’d be like, ‘No way. You’re falling for a scam. These things don’t happen.’ But they do.

I think being in tech and marketing helped me learn that because I do think in the future, there’ll be more and more people doing this.”

“For myself and other business owners who set up their own blogs, I sort of break it down into three steps when I’m explaining it to people. 

So the first step is to create a blog. The second step is to optimize your blog and then third, monetize your blog. Starting a blog is basically creating your own website, which will depend on the budget that you have. You can always hire somebody to do that, but I don’t normally recommend this if I’m speaking to friends just because it is so easy these days to create your own website from scratch. You don’t need an expert to do it. 

And then, once you’ve created your blog, you want to optimize it. So this is mainly to do with search engine optimization SEO, which means actually getting traffic to your blog, and then thirdly is monetizing your blog. Because once you’re getting a constant stream of traffic to your blog, you can then make a lot of money from it.

There are skills that you need but also skills that you sort of develop as you’re teaching yourself. There were things I didn’t know much about even though I’ve been a marketer. I didn’t do much content marketing and writing. And I definitely didn’t do any website design. All of these things were self-taught.

I’m a very, very, impatient person. So I feel like if I can do it, a lot of people can do it. You need to be somebody who likes to learn and it’s probably not for you if you’re not willing to try out new things and learn new things and create these things from scratch. Because it does take a lot of learning.”

“It is so easy these days to create your own website from scratch”

Find out more:

• Website builders are the easiest way to build a website. See which ones are the best with our Best Website Builders of 2023 list.

“It’s really easy to monetize a blog and set it up but you need traffic to your blog to actually make the income. So you can put affiliate links, you can put display ads, you can launch an online course but you’re not actually gonna make money from it because nobody’s there. You haven’t built trust and loyalty with an audience. You haven’t got the authority that you need in the blogging space. So you won’t be actually making any income from those yet.

Keep on ignoring SEO if you’re just writing something for your friends and family to see. But if you’re writing it for millions of people to see and [want] to monetize from it? SEO plays a crucial role in attracting organic traffic to your blog. So you need to do your keyword research and make sure you’re writing your meta tags and backlinks. It’s the second most important thing.

From there, the biggest monetization strategies are paid ads. So that’s Google AdSense and the like, who basically pay you to put little banners on your website. [There’s also] affiliate links which is where somebody can provide a link to a product and then if someone else goes on that clicks, the link and purchases something the other person who posted the link gets a commission.”

“Blogging has now kind of moved from being a hobby to being a business, which I think is really great because it’s getting more people an opportunity to make more money”

“When you first think of blogging, especially when you think about it decades ago, it was just writing content. It was about your hobbies, or your interests, or what you saw on TV. But now, we have social media and you’re able to now express your opinions on a new film that’s come out on Facebook or Twitter. Or for business-related ones, on LinkedIn. 

Blogging has now kind of moved from being a hobby to being a business, which I think is really great because it’s getting more people an opportunity to make more money. And there are certain bloggers who started out just having a hobby, but they now have employees and they run massive businesses. 

There’s Adam Enfroy, who runs a blog focused on blogging and personal finance, but also software reviews. He’s a great inspiration. I think last year alone, he made just over 4.5 million dollars, which is just insane. And I think numbers like that are either gonna put you off and say, ‘There’s no way I can do that.’ Or it’ll make you realize ‘Wow, he was just a normal guy – he wasn’t an expert in blogging and he’s got this far and I can too.’

Even though I’m not in the food blogging industry, there’s Casey from Get On My Plate, who runs a really cool food blog and she realized pretty soon that she was able to make a lot of money from her blog as she was able to quit her full-time job. And now she offers coaching sessions on blogging and there’s Leah, from By Leah Claire who runs a lifestyle travel blog. I love to look at travel blogs and kind of wish I was there but she also does something quite interesting, which is she’s working on blogs for the idea of flipping them. Sort of like flipping houses, she’s gonna flip blogs for profit, so that’s really cool. So I’m following her as well.”

“I spent ages playing around with colors and logos and wasting so much time. Because the most important thing is the content.”

“It can be a bit overwhelming to somebody who’s completely new to this and has no idea where to start. My best advice is to have a plan and stick to it. 

You need to post consistently, and you need to post things that are relevant. The best thing to do is your keyword research so you can identify their search intents, which is the motivation behind users’ online search queries. That will ensure a really good starting point and make sure your content is ranked.

Next, you need to work out your content strategy. Look at what the latest trends are, the news, and developments in your niche. Follow influential people as I mentioned and see what they’re talking about. And look at news sites, social media channels, and industry forums just to make sure you’re staying current and on top of things. Stick to small, realistic goals and you’ll find you won’t be overwhelmed.

I’m the sort of person who’s really into branding and design, having been in marketing. I can’t tell you how many times have changed my website’s design! It doesn’t actually matter as long as you have a website with the basic pages that you need and the formatting is readable and user-friendly. I spent ages playing around with colors and logos and wasting so much time. Because the most important thing is the content. 

So I would say, make a plan, stick to it, and don’t go back and change things just because you want to. What’s that saying? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”

“Stick to small, realistic goals and you’ll find you won’t be overwhelmed.”

“High-quality, interesting content is what makes a good blog. People will go on your blog because they’re searching for something and they’re clicking on a link. They think [your blog] is going to answer their question and that’s what a good blog will provide.

A bad blog does not contain any value, or anything new to the reader, and will also be not user-friendly. You could have great content, but if your text is really small and the font is too wacky or the colors are off – that’s just gonna make somebody automatically click off of it.

The issue is you’re gonna have a million things to do [setting up a blog]. From designing the website to branding, content strategy, writing the content, keyword research, SEO, getting backlinks, and reaching out for guest posts. Just so many things to do that, sometimes, it can cause burnout.

If you need help with coming up with content ideas, like if one day you’ve just got brain fog, you can always ask ChatGPT to help you with starting something off and giving you a framework. For instance, if you’re giving it prompts such as ‘help me write an email template’ and then working from that, it can be really good. But if you also ask it to write the blog post, you’re just gonna get really generic, sometimes plagiarized content and Google can tell and Google will penalize you for that. So there’s no point really. Plus, you can always tell now what content has been written by ChatGPT because it’s quite obvious. That’s gonna make you lose readers. I think it’s great, but it shouldn’t be abused.”

“I think [ChatGPT] is great, but it shouldn’t be abused.”

Further Information:

• Want to see more about blogging? Here’s our list of the 6 Best Blogging Platforms for 2023
• Or, check out our How To Start a WordPress Blog if you want to get to grips with that platform immediately 

“I have been using WordPress on and off for about five years. It’s great for blogging because you’ve got complete customization over it. You can have different themes and plugins that will help you create your vision. And you don’t actually need anything super fancy. You just need the basics for collecting email subscribers and doing maybe landing pages and pop-ups to get more engagement and being able to sell courses or eBooks, and you’re able to do all these things with WordPress.

If you want to do something else, there’s probably a plugin that can help you do it. I have all the essential ones. RankMath keeps a checklist of all my keywords when I’m writing a post and I use UpDraft Plus so I can sleep at night and not worry about things going wrong and losing all my data.

One thing that I think may happen to newcomers is to not get overwhelmed by the WordPress dashboard. Being told about plugins and themes can be quite scary, but I found it all quite easy. Play around and watch some YouTube videos because it really is user-friendly when you use it a bit more.

What elevates WordPress from other platforms like Shopify or Wix is the customization options you need when running a blog as a business with WordPress. I’d always recommend it to people. I think it’s the most popular content management system in the world so when it comes to blogging, it’s just really good at bringing your vision to life. 

Things can go wrong – I’ve received error messages late at night but with the WordPress community, everything was solved in seconds. But just keep in mind that things can go wrong, like with everything.”

“You just need the basics for collecting email subscribers and doing maybe landing pages and pop-ups to get more engagement and being able to sell courses or eBooks, and you’re able to do all these things with WordPress.”

“So originally, I didn’t have my blog under my own name. I didn’t want to use my own name. I didn’t want my name out there, I was sort of worrying that I’d fail. And It’d be more embarrassing if that was under my name. 

If I had a generic blog name I could sort of hide behind it. But there are a lot of things I learned from that. Firstly, my blog name was focused on blogging itself, which meant limiting myself to topics centered around blogging and hurting my growth. If I wanted to expand into topics like YouTube, podcasting, or software reviews, it’d have been awkward.

But there was something I learned recently called the brand of you, which is the concept of building a personal brand and leveraging your unique identity to establish yourself as an influential figure online. It teaches that people should view themselves as their own niche.

People often wonder what niche they should do when starting out. Well, you are your own niche! You’re developing a strong personal brand so you can differentiate yourself from others and therefore craft a sustainable business from his ‘brand of you’.

I was initially worried about using my own name because it’s Welsh and hard to pronounce. With the two f’s, people might think it’s a typo but I spoke to members of the blogging community and they were like ‘Don’t!’ They knew tons of blogs with really complicated names or foreign names and Google doesn’t actually care. If you still write really good content Google is going to put you as that number one result.”

“They knew tons of blogs with really complicated names or foreign names and Google doesn’t actually care. If you still write really good content Google is going to put you as that number one result.”

I’m the owner and founder of Simply Preloved Children’s Boutique. I source, quality check, and sell affordable, preloved baby and toddler clothing online to busy parents. My store is ideal for parents concerned about the impact of fashion on the environment and the cost of clothing small bodies.

I’m a mum of three – I gave birth to my youngest child early on in the pandemic. He had to be delivered early, was underweight, and initially had some feeding issues. I was on maternity leave from my full-time job and it quickly became clear that each child needed me to be around for different reasons. Coupled with difficulty finding affordable childcare places for the youngest two, I needed to reconsider my career.

I spent two years at home with them, adjusting to a new way of life, but I felt I could start something independently from home. Buying preloved items has always been important to me – born initially out of need when I was surviving as a single parent and now very much a passion.

“I knew I had an eye for sourcing inexpensive quality clothing, a wealth of knowledge about buying and caring for clothes, and the drive to help struggling families.”

I had the opportunity to participate in free online coaching to help identify my values and build a me-shaped business. I decided to take the plunge, built my website, and studied technical and content SEO.

A Passion Project

I’ve been concerned about the environment since I was a teenager. For me, sustainability is a very broad topic – it seeps into all aspects of our lives, not just recycling an empty plastic bottle and saving the planet. Being sustainable to me is as much being intentional and purposeful with items we consume in our everyday lives as committing to recycle, save energy/water, and think about our carbon footprint.

As a society, we should be mindful of not depleting resources for future generations and maintaining a balance. But it is also about what we as consumers buy and from where, the quantity of what we buy, reusing and repairing items, and repurposing. We must all work together to limit environmental damage; for me, something that everyone can do quickly and very easily is to reuse products that have already been produced and are in our homes. It’s better for the environment and it’s far cheaper for you!

Finding Brand Values

Alongside the environmental issues, I have a genuine heart for families struggling financially. It’s been a lived experience for me for many years, particularly since starting a family. I’ve been sharing many ideas for helping families on my website in my blog.

In the current economic climate, families are hit from all angles; especially those middle-income families with one income who aren’t eligible for financial support – this is an area where my experience and expertise can help and make a difference.

My main focus is on providing excellent customer service. From sourcing clothes, through the quality checking process, to storing them and then packaging each bundle carefully. I’m taking time to ensure that all items are cared for. I don’t sell anything I wouldn’t dress my children in.

The Preloved Process

I buy items locally from other mums or on online marketplaces. When I send out an order, I include a flyer offering to buy items back once finished. When purchasing online, I scrutinise photographs and check the description for flaws.

Once I receive items, I check them in direct sunlight, particularly around the neck for baby clothes under six months (for milk stains) and the cuffs of long-sleeved tops for babies and children over six months (for food stains). I also check seams for holes, the back and front for any excessive wear stains or holes – excess bobbling is also a no-go.

Anything that doesn’t pass my checks is bundled up and sold online elsewhere as playwear (suitable for nursery/preschool) or sent to charity; nothing ends up in landfill.

I’m toying with digging out my sewing machine and customising garments that may need repairing with patches. Still, I must wait for my youngest to be in school next year and off my hands!

More Information

• Sustainable Products to Sell Online: Care for the planet with these sustainable product ideas.
• Sustainable Packaging Tips: Adopt sustainable practices across your business.

As an older mum, I have been genuinely interested in discovering how older generations have overcome my parenting struggles. I have talked with my mother about what she and my maternal grandmother did differently and implemented changes to how I parent. I had huge anxiety about the volume of baby essentials I felt I “needed” as a first-time mum, until my own mum pointed out that my grandmother had three babies under three during the Second World War – and didn’t “need” any of it!

That helped to shift my perspective and when I went on to have baby number two and three, I always asked myself, “Did Grandma Fred need it?” The answer 95% of the time, of course, was no! Of course, it’s a personal choice and many things that are invaluable for new parents have been invented – I purposefully didn’t buy too many gadgets that I would dispose of again in a few short months. My new mindset helped reduce the overwhelm as a new mum by having a clutter-free house.

Juggling the Workload

My main challenge has been one of time. I’m the default parent at home – I’ve had to juggle looking after the children and running the home with setting up a business which has been difficult at times. My youngest two aren’t of school age yet, so I’ve had to channel time working on my website and social media during the few hours they’re at preschool each week.

Between updating and maintaining a website, sourcing stock, creating social media content, blogging and fulfilling orders, many things need my attention each week. It is vital to prioritise tasks and complete the most time-specific tasks first – it can be easy to waste time on the fun stuff that doesn’t win me any clients. I’m realistic and allow myself margin during the day; two of my three children are of preschool age. No day goes 100% to plan, and that’s OK.

Since becoming a mum, I have had to change my view of what success looks like and lower my expectations of myself. I try to not spend too long thinking about the text and design for social media posts; it is better to post regularly, concentrating on connecting with people and building a following rather than wondering if something could look better.

Do some market research first and identify your ideal client, not just who you think they are. I’ve also joined a local networking group for women in business, which has been a great source of ideas and encouragement. It is also important to connect with people who understand what you do – running a small business can be tough, and it gets lonely.

Don’t be concerned about making mistakes or what others think about you. I would also suggest not thinking too much about something before doing it, as you can talk yourself out of it! Not everything needs to be perfect when starting – sometimes completed is good enough.

I hope to do some local pop-up stalls at various events this year. I am also in the process of building a lucky dip web page – where customers can pay £10 and receive a customised box of four or five items personalised for them based on colour/style preference.

I often have people comment that my youngest two are wearing cute items and they’re often wearing preloved items that I’ve put together from different brands. Several parents have told me that this is something they “can’t” do, whereas I love it – so I’m excited to offer this soon!

I am also working on a “build yourself a bundle” page where customers can access a discount for buying multiple items.

I built my website because I want to be online and not have a physical store. Wix was recommended to me by a friend and also had good reviews – I briefly looked at other platforms but didn’t feel that they offered the same functionality and support that Wix does.

The best thing about Wix has to be its overall ease of use. I’m no IT expert at all, but whenever I struggled to do something, there has been an online help article that has helped and the chat feature is good too.

With features, the best thing for me has to be calculating postage costs automatically. As I upload stock, I weigh each item – Wix then calculates the correct postage payable for the customer during checkout.

There have been minor things I’ve had to tweak, particularly between the desktop and mobile site but Wix makes that quite easy. From looking at the website, there are plenty of things available to me that I have not implemented yet but could do as and when I grow.

More Information

• Wix Review: See if Wix is the right fit for your needs.
• How to Make Your Website Eco-Friendly: If you want to minimize your digital footprint, check out our guide on building a green website.

Our brand is called PERSEVE. We’re a women founded and AAPI (Asian, Asian American, or Pacific Islander) owned haircare brand that is founded by me and my mom, Hyeri, who has been a hairstylist in New York City for over 25 years. We’re a clean and cruelty-free haircare brand creating luxurious yet affordable formulas that are quality alternatives to prestige brands. Our mission is to make premium haircare formulas accessible to everyone. 

“As immigrants, our culture is super important to us so we focused on adding our background to the brand.”

My mom and I founded the brand together and are Korean-American immigrants. As immigrants, our culture is super important to us so we focused on adding our background to the brand. When we started we knew for sure we were going to have everything formulated and made in South Korea. Our products are all under $20, but equally equivalent in ingredients, standards, and performance of a prestige product that retails for $30.

Working Alongside Family

This is kind of corny, but the best part is working with my mom. We have polar opposite personalities, but we mesh well together. Also, the fact that my mom and I are working to build something together motivates us daily. We have polar opposite personalities and work styles, but that helps us a lot as a team. In areas I lack in, she thrives in. And areas she lacks in, I thrive in. We balance each other. And we also prioritize communication because it’s super important in every aspect, not just when running a company together.

My mom has been a hairstylist in New York City for over 25 years so she’s always had a passion for haircare. I think our love for hair care stems from the idea that it frames our face and helps us feel more beautiful, but also can help us in so many ways to change our style and identity at the snip of a scissor or flick of a curling iron.

As small business owners, we tend to wear a lot of hats – I usually manage our marketing, social media, and business development. And my mom takes more of a product development and operations role in the business. She does all the dirty work while I do all the pretty work.

I was experiencing intense hair loss after getting COVID and tried so many different products from high-end, drugstore, to personalized products. Not much worked except a $30 shampoo from Sephora, but it wasn’t realistic to spend $30 on a single bottle of shampoo.

“It almost felt like brands were gatekeeping prestige formulas by sticking overly expensive price tags on them. My mom and I had a lightbulb moment and made it our mission to make prestige formulas accessible to everyone.”

Our goal is to make affordable luxury hair care, like treat yourself vibes, but products on a budget. We want to make the ingredients of a prestige brand accessible to the everyday consumer with our clean and cruelty-free price inclusive products.

The very first thing we did was create a brand identity. My mom and I brainstormed so many names for the brand and landed on PERSEVE after about a month. Then started working with a graphic designer to create logos and content for the brand.

The hair loss was such a life-changing experience for me because it essentially gave me a whole new career path. When I got COVID, I was living in NYC and I had just lost my corporate job due to the pandemic, dealing with the aftermath of losing my hair was extremely stressful.

Probably a few weeks after I recovered from COVID, my hair would come out in clumps and I would see it mostly while washing my hair, or when I brushed it. I was so desperate for a fix so I tried everything. The only product that worked was a $30 shampoo, but being out of a job in the middle of a pandemic I couldn’t justify paying that much for a single product.

My mom and co-founder, Hyeri, has been a professional hairstylist in New York City for over 25 years and actually created one of the first non-toxic keratin smoothing treatments before launching PERSEVE, so she has experience with manufacturing and that definitely helped us a lot with our brand.

Prior to PERSEVE, I was an event planner for hospitality groups mostly doing corporate events. It’s a world of difference from what I’m doing now.

As a small business owner, your hours aren’t the typical nine to five. Everyday is different, but I typically start my day out at around nine at our office. The first thing I do when I get to the office is check my emails. Then my mom and I will usually go and help our warehouse team in the back with packing orders and preparing wholesale shipments for pickup or delivery that day.

After that, I’ll go to the office and do some work. Mostly consisting of prospecting, sending cold emails, and working on our social media platforms or marketing initiatives. Usually throughout the week when I have a free moment, I’ll work with our photographer who has a studio nearby to plan and create content. Every week is filled with different projects, but that’s typically what my day to day is like.

I think a core moment for us was when we finally received our finished products. Our products are made in South Korea so it was a long and extremely stressful process to get our products delivered due to the pandemic and importing restrictions. It was delay after delay so when we finally got it, it was unreal. It felt like our hard work finally paid off.

“We’re immensely proud that we’ve sold about 15K products so far and a lot of them are returning customers.”

One tip is patience is key, you’re not gonna see instant results. For example, in marketing especially if you’re bootstrapping and not throwing thousands into Facebook ads, you are not going to see an instant return. We’re immensely proud that we’ve sold about 15K products so far and a lot of them are returning customers.

Creating an online presence especially for a CPG (consumer packaged goods) is so important. You need to have a consumer facing website to capture consumers. And a website is the most cost effective selling channel especially if your brand is new and haven’t entered major retailers yet.

We launched our business on our website. We bootstrapped and built the brand ourselves. The only thing we really outsourced for our business was a photographer and a graphic designer, but beyond that we kind of do everything ourselves.

Experiences of Building with Wix

The templates are absolutely the best thing about Wix. The Wix templates are easy to use and actually aesthetically pleasing. There’s so many design templates you can choose from too. And you literally drop and click to design and you’re done.

Wix made everything user-friendly and also automated a lot of the actions, so it’s very hands off compared to other platforms. Also, the analytics and email marketing features have been the most helpful tools for our business.

The only problem I do have with Wix is that sometimes the website editing tools glitch and freeze, but beyond that I have nothing bad to say about it. It’s one of the best website builders.

Invest in a better chair – just kidding! But in all honesty, I would maybe tell myself to “have patience.” And I say that because in the first few months of launch, I was so anxious and constantly beating myself down for not getting instant results. Then once our brand started getting some traction I realized that all I needed was some patience.

 “Also plan and organize everything. Creating content and copy for the website prior to starting is always a good idea so that everything is more organized and you’ll definitely finish the website a lot quicker.”

I would also say don’t give up. It’s so hard being a business owner, but the empowerment from building something from the bottom up with your own two hands is priceless. I feel so proud to say I created a brand on my own.

Do your due diligence and research everything. Research the industry, your competition, trends, and ingredients. It’s so important to know your information because the hair care industry is one the most saturated sectors in beauty and you want your products to differentiate within that mountain of competition.

For the future we have some retail partnerships in the works so hopefully we’ll have some exciting news soon. But our ultimate goal is to have our products available at major retailers like Sephora and Ulta.

“I had gone to school for film and cinematography, and then I switched to photography after graduating about four years ago. From there I started doing weddings, just as a way to pick up jobs, and then I realized I liked it. Before I knew it, I was getting referrals and stuff. So that then kind of snowballed into me having my own business.

I went full-time between two and three years ago, just on my own – so now it’s just me and then I’ll hire contractors sometimes to help out with some work. I shoot 20-30 weddings and elopements per year. Mostly in the Midwest of the US, and then a few abroad as well.”

Finding Brand Values

“I think one thing that sets me apart – and it’s a big philosophy of mine and my photography – is consent-informed posing. So I approach photography through a trauma-informed lens, which then kind of takes away – or I think supports people – to feel more comfortable with me.

“It allows us to create photographs without me making any assumptions about who they are, or what they want. Keeping the collaboration open.”

I started making monthly donations pretty early on in my business. Without mentioning it or telling anyone – it was a personal thing at that time. But I realized as I kept working with people that the clients I really enjoyed working with, and that were getting the most out of working with me, had a similar passion for supporting the community and we would lean towards supporting the same causes.

Putting it on my website is another way to communicate who I am as a person and also a way for clients to know what to expect from me and where my passions outside of work lie. I can’t leave myself at home when I go to work, I’m always showing up with these pieces of myself too. So I wanted to use it as another way to narrow down my clientele – to be people that knew what I stood for and that felt like knowing that I was a good fit for them. It’s also a good conversation starter too, and it also just feels good working knowing that I’m supporting these two places monthly [The Gentle Barn and The Innocence Project].”

The Magic of Fantasy

“I think as far as my niche goes, I think something else that sets me apart – and is very central to my business – is wanting to focus on, or take inspiration from, fantasy books and movies. Like folklore and stuff like that, and trying to incorporate that into my work. I work with a lot of people who are really passionate about fantasy movies and films, and different stories. So I find it fun to try to incorporate the things that they like into the photography.

I take a lot of inspiration from Celtic folklore, especially images, right now. That’s kind of like it’s less specific but I’m really inspired by the scenery and colors of Ireland. And the history of it – the Celtic folklore stories. And, as for films or shows, I would say visually that I take a lot of inspiration from the show Outlander – I think it’s shot in a way that I really like to emulate with the colors and the composition. And the same with the more magical elements of The Lord of the Rings.”

Bringing Personality to Your Business

“I wanted to avoid the more generic personality things that people will put on their websites. The first time I made a website and started writing about myself, I wanted to be very approachable to everyone and be kind of generic in a way. I wanted to have details that wouldn’t make anyone not like me, if that makes sense.

So when I redid my website over the past two years, I worked with a copywriter and she was really helpful, but I leaned into mentioning things that not every person can relate to – but are true to me. And I’ve found that I’ve met with and worked with clients that then align more with what I like because I’ll mention kind of obscure things, but they’re pretty important in my life.”

The Joys of Work

“My favorite thing about work is meeting the people that I end up working with and getting to know them and getting to know their families. Just being able to support them through a process that – I mean quite a few people may do more than once – but for a lot of people, it’s just one time and they’ve never done it before. It comes with a lot of emotions and baggage and stuff like that, so I like to be a support person in that way.

I also like to be able to empower people when it comes to trying to encourage them to make their wedding or elopement or portrait session – make it whatever they want it to be. So that’s really rewarding.

And day-to-day, I really enjoy editing, especially when I feel like I’m doing something where I have a little bit of artistic freedom. I’m able to really give people what they want, or what they hope that they could get.”

“My services and process definitely evolved, especially with things like permitting and the legal checks that come with destination weddings and more adventurous elopements in national parks and things. Because a lot of people – I mean, most people – haven’t eloped to a national park before. So how would you know that you need a permit in order to take photos on a mountain or need to get permission?

My first one, I had to do serious research and I realized that I wanted that to be a part of what I do for my clients and not something they have to do. I want to provide that education and, if I’m the expert in our relationship, I want to provide all of that. So that definitely came from learning and working.”

“It’s helpful now that people can know what to expect through my website, and it’s a reminder of what to expect of myself.”

Growing a Business

“Over the years, my business has grown and as it’s grown, I’ve had to learn more about efficiency and making sure that I’m hitting deadlines since I have more clients. And I’ve been wanting to maintain the personalization, the one-to-one process. Even having, you know, 50 clients a year, or however many, I didn’t want to lose that personal feeling.

So that’s been a learning curve and there’s been a lot of things I’ve had to learn as I’ve grown. A lot of it has to do with marketing and my website and trying to find ways to be more efficient in that department, but also learning when to delegate – or when I’ve hit a roadblock and need a contractor or professional who can help me take the next step.

I’ve also had to adapt my contracts a bit too. Going through the pandemic, I learned a lot about how to deal with cancellations and rescheduling – that kind of stuff that didn’t come up a lot before COVID. That’s when I had to learn about adding it to my contract and setting expectations early too.”

Planning Ahead – Preparing for Busy Seasons

“For me, fall is my busiest season, and summer is wedding season in the industry.

It’s something else I’ve learned over the years – I’ve had to be strategic about scheduling because I’ve learned that one of the best things I can do for myself is give myself breaks so it’s not back-to-back every weekend. And there are quite a few back-to-back weekends, but I’m still trying to be intentional about how far I’m traveling and giving myself time to decompress and get editing done in between. So that helps me seasonally.

Something else that helps me deal with the rush is trying to get as much backend stuff done as possible during the off-season. So that’d be December, January, February, March – I try to set up marketing as much as I can. I try to get ahead of any website updates and changes and do that when I’m not my busiest because then that takes something off my plate for future me.”

“I have the goal of doing more destination weddings. I have one booked for next year (2024) which will be fun, but I’d like to lean into making more social media posts and blog posts with education about destination weddings and putting out more content that’s helpful to people. Trying to be more of a resource in the future for people, even people who don’t end up booking with me.

I just think that there are a lot of misconceptions and legal gray areas with destination weddings and some things that some photographers and vendors may skip out on learning about that I think are really important, so I’d like to lean into that education piece more in the future of my business.

And same for my more personal passions, like environmentalism. I’d like to do more in the sphere of eco-conscious weddings and elopements. So I think overall doing more education and maybe one day trying to host some kind of workshop or something of the sort would be on my goals list. Overall, I think just booking more adventurous National Park elopements around the US, I would enjoy too… so those are my upcoming goals.”

“When I was first starting out, I was accepting any client that inquired without getting to know them and without doing my full due diligence of making sure they were a good fit. I haven’t had any crazy difficult people but I’ve had clients that I’ve learned maybe I could’ve been more diligent about making sure that we were what was best for each other. And especially in shorter sessions, like portrait sessions, there’s less of a relationship-building element as weddings.

So I find that the more I know a person and the more we’ve spent time talking and feeling comfortable, the better. With shorter sessions, I think it’s easier to end up just pushing through, despite whether you think it was a good fit or not. Usually, I handle it by doing the best work I can for them and make a note to myself that down the road, if they wanted to work together again, I would probably point them in the direction of someone who I think would be a better fit for them. And just keep mental notes about stuff like that so that I can serve people the best way.

As much as you can, don’t work for free either. Especially in creative fields – you know, art, writing, theater, music, photography, all of that – I think it can be easy to say you just want to do it. So you’ll do it for free – and there’s definitely space for collaborations and exchanges and donating your time. I still do that, but I think that a lot of people just starting out in the photography field will do any work for anyone for any price. And I think that just does a disservice to the people working and is a quick way to burn out in the field.

So I would say to remember to honor what you need, so then you can do the best work for the people you work with.

I still need to work on learning when to delegate and outsource and when to push through – time is money, as people say, so you may be able to do something yourself, but is it worth the 40 hours of time spent learning and rewriting and reworking things? So I kind of wish at the start that I had reached out for more support, especially in a lot of the administrative stuff.”

“I wanted a place where people could go to basically get everything they needed about working with me. So I wanted a place to put all of the photos and a place to have an FAQ – like a home base where people could access everything they needed to book me.

I was on Squarespace for my first year, and I think Squarespace has a great user interface and it’s really user-friendly but I did feel limited in customization after a point. So it was helpful in getting my website up really quickly and it looking pretty clean and straightforward in a short period of time. It felt super easy to use, but after that first year, I realized I wanted to do a bit more with altering my code and doing more with Google Analytics and tracking things. And overall, it just felt like it wasn’t easy anymore for me to make design changes, so I ended up going to WordPress because I’d worked with it a little bit in the past and had heard really good things from other photographers working with WordPress and how they were getting good SEO results from it.

I would say my SEO performance has been probably one of the better things I’ve noticed since switching, and I also really like how customizable everything is in WordPress. And the amount of plugins that they have available is helpful as well.”

Revamping The Business

“I was noticing that I was getting less inquiries of the sort that I wanted to work with and that I wanted to shoot. So I was getting more cold leads – people just messaging every photographer that comes up on Google. People who hadn’t picked a date yet, or weren’t really sure… less inquiries that were real leads of people that wanted to see if we’d be a good fit. When those leads got less frequent, I decided to revamp my website so that it reflected more of me and what I wanted to shoot. That’s what kind of drove the changes.

This year, I did a full overhaul of my homepage and my pricing page – for that, I hired a copywriter that specializes in elopements because I found that I wanted to lean more toward elopements. She was really helpful in getting that big chunk of copy done, and then I updated the other pages on my website myself, having that as an inspiration or framework.”

Website Building Tips

“My advice to someone who has never touched a website would be to start with the most user-friendly and straightforward experience you can find. Because with web building, I think it gets overwhelming really quickly, and there’s so much you can do with it. For me, a big part of being able to get a website up quickly was finding that Squarespace was really simple for me to use and then just running with that because it allowed me to get my first draft up, so to speak. Even as I was working on customizing it and working on my business overall, I still had that framework up.

Whatever seems the most doable for you, and you can always change down the road.

My other advice would be to watch YouTube videos and to read blogs and to try and learn as much as you can about it and how it works, because it can be very complicated.”

More Information

• Squarespace Review: See if Squarespace is a good fit for you with our detailed review.
• WordPress Review: Read all about the pros and cons of WordPress.
• Squarespace vs WordPress: We put these two website builders head-to-head.
• Best Photography Website Builders: Check out our list of the best website builders for photography.
• How to Build a Website: Use our beginner-friendly guide to help you get started.
• How to Create a Photography Website: Build your dream photography website by following these steps.

The key takeaway we found from speaking with Hannah is how important it is to connect with your clients or customers, and why bringing your personal values and passions to your work can help to build those strong relationships.

Every business faces hurdles, but you should always be ready to adapt – Hannah did just that by revamping her website and by letting her processes evolve with experience.

I am happiest when… I’m reading a book outside with a cup of coffee.

To me, success looks like… serving myself and my community in the best way that I can.

If I could go back in time, I would advise myself to… travel more.

Having a business website has… been a very rewarding time suck.

Being an entrepreneur means… connecting with and sharing my skills with people.

“My name is Eliana Bergman,  I sell self-cleaning lint brushes through an ecommerce platform and my company is called De Novo®.

I initially started my business in February 2021, right in the middle of the pandemic. I started it from home and built the website and the brand mostly in the waiting room of the Child Development Center where my son would go for various therapies

I mostly do B2B, meaning most of my sales come directly from other retailers, but I do generate organic sales on the website as well. Over time, we have brought in around $140,000.

Initially, it was very little sales, but lately, it’s around 2,000 [products sold] on a monthly basis. This year has been very good but it still fluctuates depending on the month.”

“De Novo®’s mission is to provide consumers with the option to generate less waste in the world by selling reusable, self-cleaning and fashionable lint brushes. Instead of the discardable sticky sheets and constantly producing more trash, it’s just one product that will last you many years and you don’t have to constantly be producing trash or purchase refills.

In my household I mostly use it for pet hair. Our medium-sized schnauzer, Maya, sheds a lot twice a year, so these brushes certainly get put to the test. But you don’t have to have a pet to find these brushes useful. My mom, who has no pets, uses them after the dryer to remove the lint off her clothing. We also have a fair share of clients in northern states and Canada, who find our products helpful in the colder months when they wear sweaters and scarves which leave lint on finer textiles. 

I personally use my De Novo® Back-To-Basics two-to-three times a day on my sofa and then the little De Novo® On-The-Go I keep in my purse so I have it when I’m out and about.”

“Since delivering my second child, I had been experiencing a whole lot of hair loss. Aside from our dog Maya, we also had a cat who sheds a whole lot. So we had all this hair from everyone everywhere. As a stay-at-home mom, I spent all day at home and needed to find a solution to this problem. It was also appealing to have a job that I could do remotely so that I wouldn’t need to be pulled away from my family. You might think that having three kids and pets is enough, but I’m just one of those people that can’t really sit still and do nothing, so I decided to go for it and give entrepreneurship a try.

I also felt like there was plenty of opportunity with these products. The reusable lint brushes you find in stores today are all black or white with red bristles, which is just ugly. And the traditional lint rollers with sticky sheets produce so much trash. 

I wanted something nicer but also effective. I wanted a product I could have on my coffee table or hanging with my winter coats and feel comfortable leaving it there because it is stylish. De Novo® lint brushes are always on my coffee table. I can easily pick it up and clean the couch and I just put it back and it looks nice. The traditional sticky sheet lint roller is not something you keep out, because it just doesn’t look nice. 

This brand came to fruition as a combination of everything. It was my own hair loss. My pets were shedding like crazy. The amount of trash produced by sticky sheets, how ugly your typical lint roller is, and ultimately, my own desire to make a difference.”

“This brand came into fruition as a combination of everything. It was my own hair loss. My pets were shedding like crazy. The amount of trashed produced by sticky sheets, how ugly your typical lint roller is, and ultimately, my own desire to make a difference.”

“The product designs are created by a Chinese manufacturer and De Novo® is the brand. I contacted a broker in China who helped me get in touch with the manufacturer. 

I had to ensure that I was not hiring just anyone to produce these products. It was also really important for me to do a social compliance audit and make sure they actually take care of their own team because that’s important to me. We also did a manufacturer audit and a raw material test before we started production. I recommend that you test your products. If you want to be a brand, you need to buy them, test them, see if you like them, test the market out, and then evaluate to make sure you feel there is enough potential for growth with the brand you create.

You don’t want to be just producing just another piece of trash. You’re producing something that has quality and you need to know what is in your products and where it’s coming from and that this factory is treating their employees correctly.

Once you’ve tested everything and you’ve done all of your compliance, then I do think it’s important to trademark. There are so many products out there right now and so many people trying to make a quick buck. You don’t want your hard work to be capitalized on by someone else

It took about a year from start to finish to trademark De Novo® and it wasn’t so bad. I opted to hire a lawyer to help me do it, which was helpful as there was a bit of back and forth following the initial application. Now I have this trademark for 10 years and it’s my brand and it feels really nice to know that I have that protection. 

If it does expand and it does grow, I’ll do the same thing for the European market, but I’m not really there yet, so we’ll see.”

“I have worked since I was about 15 in various retail shops. Following my Masters, I started my career at the National Hispanic Leadership Institute (NHLI), a small nonprofit in Washington DC that promotes Latina leadership. From there, I went on to work in communications and marketing in a range of different sectors – from transportation to the wine industry. 

My background has helped tremendously in building the company. Because even though I don’t have a business background, my understanding of and experience in marketing and communications has helped me position De Novo® and its products. Being able to market the brand has been crucial. The way it will grow is through sales and marketing. 

Currently, I do Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest, as well as email marketing, which is huge. I take my customers on a journey, telling a story and letting them know that they’re buying these products from this business – but behind the business is a real person. And that person is me.

I think that human connection is really important. You miss it so much these days. You just buy a product and you don’t even think about the fact that people are behind this product. And that human connection is really important because it creates customer loyalty. You’re going to come back and say oh you know what, you gotta buy the brushes from Eliana, you gotta go there because she’s a real person. She sells these great brushes, and you’ll feel like you know me and that’s really important to me. 

I started the business during the pandemic and everything felt so quiet everywhere. I got opportunities very easily. So we were on Univision, which is a national TV network in the USA for the Hispanic market. All it took was two weeks and the products were listed. I don’t think that would have happened in a normal time period, but I think it was quite difficult to get people to move. Everyone and everything was paralyzed during the pandemic.”

“I wanted something nicer that was also effective. I wanted a product I could have on my coffee table or hanging with my winter coats and feel comfortable leaving it there because it is stylish. De Novo® lint brushes are always on my coffee table.”

“Yeah, it’s hard. I have three kids, and my youngest just turned six months old. I feel like I’m a juggler but I enjoy it so much. It’s something that I love. I really love the flexibility that being a business owner gives me. I’m able to work from home and I’m able to be with my kids. I’ll take care of my baby and breastfeed while I send emails.

On a usual day, I’ll wake up at four to five, and during that time period is when I’m emailing or speaking with the manufacturers in China. I want to catch them before their day closes. 

Then my kids will be awake and I send them off to school right around 9:00. 

I do more work until they come home from school, and then I’m with my kids. Then in the evening, I do more work. So it’s a full cycle and around 9:00 pm I’ll go to sleep.

I did everything myself for a while. I recently hired a young woman from Canada to help me out with social media. She also does my photography and my posts on Facebook and Instagram.”

“It’s great to have a goal in mind. My goal from the beginning was to work with FabFitFun. When that partnership became a reality it was surreal. I sell on their marketplace and it goes very well on a monthly basis, so it’s nice. Their partnership has been very important to me.

With FabFitFun, you get a mystery box of products quarterly, and it is such a cool idea to introduce consumers to products.  I am such a big fan of what FabFitFun does and how it allows consumers to test out products without having to pay full price. Last fall, I was given the opportunity to showcase one of our brushes to potentially be added to one of their future boxes, and I was over the moon by the opportunity. I worked for about six months trying to ensure we were ready to submit the products to FabFitFun. I did this while pregnant and I actually worked while in labor. I’m crazy. 

However,  after everything was said and done, they did not select De Novo® to be in one of their upcoming boxes. This was a giant fall for me but it was also a big learning experience at the same time. Though the door is closed for me this time, going through the requirements has been a great experience and it has made us better for any future opportunity that might come along.”

“If you’re gonna do ecommerce, you need to have a Shopify website.”

“If you take out your sticky sheet roller, you’re gonna use at least three or four sheets. And if you’re like me, you don’t actually go and buy the replacement for the sticky sheet. You just go out and you buy a new roller. Also, everything is in a box or it’s wrapped in plastic. It’s like plastic upon plastic upon plastic. And this is a requirement for many retailers. It’s all trash.

To me, product display is important, but we need to get to a new way of displaying products to reduce excess waste. Even though De Novo® is a very small business, this is still a core value of the company. All our products come in a linen bag, and that bag is recyclable and reusable, and while the product itself is not built on sustainable resources (yet), it does provide a more sustainable solution.

In a perfect world, I would love for these products to be produced sustainably from recycled plastics because I don’t want to waste any additional material. I’m trying to figure out what would be the best way to use recycled plastic to create a brush because that would be more of a niche item. It would be something that would make my product one hundred percent sustainable, and that would be great. 

I want to be able to get to the point where we are selling brushes made from recycled plastics that you can recycle again, which can in turn be made into another brush. So it would be a perfect cycle. That’s where I would like to take it. That is my goal and dream for the future.”

Extra Tips

• If you want more tips on how to make your online business more sustainable, why not try our 3 Ways to Make Your Site More Eco-Friendly article?
• Or, for sustainable packaging-specific advice, check out our 10 Sustainable Packaging Tips for Your Online Store

“If you’re gonna do ecommerce, you need to have a Shopify website. It’s easy because everybody integrates with it. I have my warehouse with my products and orders to fulfill them to customers and each step is done by Shopify. So it’s like a process where I don’t even have to do anything.

The app AfterShip on Shopify has been such a huge help because it allows customers to easily track their own packages. I used to get so many emails from people who didn’t know how to track their packages, but those emails basically do not come anymore. With AftersShip, all you do is go to the website and you can track your order and you know exactly when it will be delivered. 

The AfterShip return app is also great because customers can start their own return process and then I just click approve and Shopify sends them a shipping label and that’s all it is.

That’s why Shopify has been an important partner for me. My biggest goal is to continue with business development. Since I mostly sell directly to retailers, my day-to-day is less busy and I don’t have too many direct-to-consumer interactions. My website is a platform for people and companies to be able to see the products and get to know the company a little bit more. If you want to dive in deep to get to know me better, you should sign up for our newsletter. 

If I were to start the process from the beginning again, I think I would initially just start with a Shopify free template. I would also download the apps that I already know work. Because I had to go through and download so many different kinds of apps with Shopify, I had to weed out the ones that made my website very slow. I even hired a consultant to go in and delete some of this additional code because they couldn’t find all of it. So there were some lessons learned.

I did buy one of their templates because I wanted the website to look a little bit different than their free options. The building was a learning experience – a bit of a plug-and-play. I don’t have a background in web design but I found it relatively easy. Plus, they have very good customer support. 

From a user perspective, I would have preferred a platform that I can easily turn on and off [the] features when I want it, instead of relying on third-party apps. I think that Shopify should try to consider doing things more in-house.”

“The most important lesson I’ve learned in my career and through De Novo is to not be held back by fear. That’s the biggest lesson. Fear cripples and makes you feel small in this environment. Being an entrepreneur, having a small business – it’s so easy to be afraid of sending that email and to lose a little bit of money. 

But you just have to not give up. And it’s a lot easier now. There are so many opportunities within ecommerce that you don’t even need to have products. You can easily just create a website and a whole ecommerce business and someone else will ship it out [your products] for you. Even Amazon is allowing you to publish your own books. For an additional cash flow or even just a hobby, it’s worth it to just see what happens.

Feelings of fear and giving up will stop eventually, they aren’t permanent. So just move forward and don’t be afraid.”

I’m Mordy Oberstein, the Head of SEO Branding at Wix. I used to be the liaison to the SEO community, which I stole from Google Search Liaison. I also used to work for an SEO platform called Rank Ranger as the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) for five or six years. I come from the SEO world and Wix didn’t have the best reputation for SEO at the time and they brought me in to help bridge that gap. Which was relatively easy because the product itself was far more advanced than the SEO community realized at the time.

What I do is establish links with the SEO community, answer questions, and concerns, and showcase what we do. Fast forward to now, I spend my time between Wix, and consulting for Semrush on the side. I was the Head of Communication at Semrush, which is an SEO tool. I came back to be able to position Wix as a brand around SEO for multiple SEO communities.

So fully integrating with the SEO community like, for example, launching an SEO learning hub, which involves articles, a podcast, webinars, and a newsletter. I find ways to really add that voice to the SEO world.

What SEO fundamentally is in my mind – and I’m sure if you asked 10 different SEOs you’ll get 20 different opinions – but to me, it’s about showing Google or other search engines that your website is relevant and trustworthy around whatever it is that you do. And then once you have that definition of what you provide and a working understanding of what SEO is, I think it’s how you can find your own pathway.

If you’re technical SEO, for example, it’s going to be making sure the sites are indexable. Making it crawlable on the technical side of things, efficiently showing Google that your website is trustworthy.

For learning about it there’s reading about it and then there’s doing it. It could be as simple as spinning up a website and trying to have a newsletter or blog and just getting your hands even just mildly dirty. Getting involved in what it means to actually set up site structure, optimize your title tag, etc. You can read about it until you’re blue in the face or go to as many webinars as you want. But just basic hands-on, first-person experience is more important than anything else.

How’s my day-to-day? A lot of emails, a lot of tweets – I’m internally speaking to other teams about SEO, educating them. Then there are the creative products that we’re doing like YouTube ads that we’re putting out around SEO for the average site owner, and for business owners.

Wix is interesting because you’re talking to so many people that you’re trying to help.

You know, a mom, a pop, a large business, helping to do SEO. We’re trying to help our partner agencies with SEO. You’re speaking to the SEO community about SEO at the CMS level, just super interesting!

There are still times when I’m very much intricately involved in the SEO world day-to-day tweeting and connecting to people. There’s the SEO education aspect of it as we run the SEO podcast. So there are all the ins and outs of running a podcast.

There’s literally the SEO work that we do on the Wix SEO hub as well as the SEO advice we have on the Wix blog. Those two assets are very similar and at the enterprise level there is always overlap between similar assets. We work hard to ensure each offers something unique so we don’t step on each other’s toes on the SERP.

Then there’s, you know, the wider strategy. How do we position ourselves? What audiences are we speaking to next? What’s our future, five years down the line? What are we trying to achieve with a new product?

It’s kind of everything SEO – all over the place.

I think it’s very easy for SEOs to get lost in search volume and keyword difficulty, those kinds of metrics – without thinking about the business goals behind the keywords. But I think for the average site owner, getting too focused on the tools is a bad thing. I think the average site owner understands their business goals inherently. So I’m not worried about that with them.

I’m more worried that they don’t realize what the landscape looks like on the SERP. And giving them data and information to show them, wait, if I sell shoes and I’m trying to rank for shoes, it’s impossible. I’m not Nike, I’m not Adidas. I’m not going to rank for that. But giving them the best understanding to rank better. I used to work for a property management company in New York City, they owned 50 apartment buildings there, you know, 500 million dollars worth of capital. They were very immature in the digital space. They were very business savvy, we’re talking about major professionals. But digital is just not their space. And you need to give them some kind of context to better understand it.

Look, obviously, the basic information inside of the Semrush integration is not going to get you your super detailed insights. It’s not really what it’s meant for. What I think that it does do though, is it opens up your mind to think, wait a second I didn’t realize this was so complicated. Now, maybe I should do some more research. And I think for site owners, they need to have that incentive, and that inner drive to say, I’m gonna learn this. I’m gonna follow this. I didn’t learn SEO from a course, I literally learned SEO because I was working as a content writer for an educational software company.

If people really wanted to get into SEO, this is the only way to really do it and I think having things inside of the Wix platform, like the Semrush integration or showing access points to the SEO learning hub does two things;

It gives them the basic information they need to get started and it also gives them the opportunity to spark that SEO journey.

Yes, but I’ll say it depends. The short answer is if your technical foundation is sound then yes and I’ll quote John Mueller who tweeted that when you build websites to test them, you don’t really dedicate the actual amount of energy and focus that you were to do a real website. So these tests are kind of funny.

And then from there, there was a whole conversation that John was talking about CMSs, whether it’s Wix or Squarespace. Said that they do fundamentally handle the technical foundation well enough. Now I think that if you look at what Wix is doing versus other CMSs, like we’re the only CMS that pulls in Google Search Console URL Inspection API. So you can see the indexation and status of all of your pages literally, in one click. But fundamentally, the web has gotten to a place where a lot of the technical barriers around ranking have been removed because there’s been a call on the CMSs.

There’s literally a website called whatsugar.com and she ranks for everything sugar related. I think she was some kind of chemical engineer or something like that. Just put up a whole website about artificial sugars answering questions about sweeteners. She somehow has some kind of background in it and the content is phenomenal. It is really good, strong content about is this sugar or better than that sugar. Whatever it is and she’s competing for really competitive keywords.

I’m not saying that she wouldn’t be benefited from having an SEO come in and optimize things. Taking what she’s doing now and increasing it. But she’s gotten to the point where she’s killing it completely on her own. So it’s most definitely possible.

Look AI, I get it okay, content is hard. People don’t like writing, I love writing content, but many people don’t like writing it and you need it for the web. The commodity of the web is content. Whether it’s a product page, a blog post, or a landing page — it’s content. And if your business can’t handle this, it can’t have a digital presence.

We’re opening Pandora’s box. You can look forward to the web being temporarily ruined — and then it fixing itself.

Whether it’s SEO or even PPC. You need it. There has to be something to put on social media. It’s very fleeting. The idea is to send people somewhere, which is why all the algorithms don’t want to send the enemy anywhere — they want to keep them on Twitter or LinkedIn or whatever it is. I get that content’s hard and AI seemingly, solves that problem. It’s like you’re putting a drug in front of somebody and saying don’t use it. And not to make light of drug use, but it’s like asking a drug addict five years down the line, how did it go? Not well.

I had Bing write me a birthday poem for Barry Schwartz in the style of a romance novel because I know Barry would hate it. And it was amazing! But if I was a poet and I looked at the poem I’d be like, this is crap!

This technology is amazing but that’s different from if the content is good. Just because wow, it’s an amazing technology, and I can’t believe it wrote it. That doesn’t mean the content is actually good. It doesn’t mean that it’s accurate.

For example, I’m a big baseball nut, one of the cases I looked at was there’s a player on the New York Yankees. When they first brought him over they thought he was gonna be a great defensive player. And if you ask Bing chat if this player is good at defense it’ll come back with he’s amazing, but by the end of the season, turns out that he was not. That content was accurate at the beginning of the season until he had some kind of brain fart and just completely melted down.

You just don’t realize how much inaccuracy is in AI content. The average site owner who is very much incentivized to use AI is not going to realize that this is not great content. They’re not experts on what is quality content. So, Bing spits out a couple of paragraphs like, all right, that’s a blog post — that’s not a blog post.

The search engines are going to have to figure that out. Otherwise the web will, and it’s already flooded with crap content. It’s only going to get worse and Google’s going to have to figure it out and it’s really not that hard to do.

In my honest opinion, there are a million tools out there that are able to identify whether or not the content input is written by an AI writer. Google can do that. It’s gonna figure out what’s crap content and what’s actually expert-written content.

I do have concerns about smaller size websites ranking in an AI world. Because if Google’s looking at things semantically at the whole website, large websites have entire content teams and they can create that semantic awareness for the search engine. It’s going to have a larger impact on what Google decides to rank for snippet-level content. That is fine for an AI writer to write. But there’s no way to get around having a human being either write or extensively edit content.

I think over the last few years informational content vs sales content has been a large part of loss in ranking. Accenting that commercial intent with a little bit more information. I’ve seen that a lot of times that Google prefers that you’ve given the user more. I think it’s better for the users, to give them more context to understand what the heck they’re actually buying. You see that with the product review updates. So back in the day, you could stuff in a bunch of affiliate links on a very, very thin review of something and you’d be done with it.

Masking a commercial intent to get you to the affiliate link and the information was just a way to get you there. And I’ve seen that a lot of times where you have a commercial intent lurking, underneath the informational content, Google is able to figure that out and doesn’t like it.

I call it the brand sniff test, think about it like a brand marketer. If you look at a web page and in three seconds flat, you’re like, I do not trust this thing. Whether it’s the tone or the way they’re structuring it. Look at your website as if you are a user with an unbiased opinion or actually get real users to look at it and do the sniff test.

Also knowing that if I’m looking for five easy ways to fix my washing machine, I don’t want the astrophysics of washing machines. I don’t want like, the physics of a wash, and don’t care. Understanding from a user’s point of view what they want and what quality means to that target audience is what Google is trying to do. Like they ask Google, do you have EEAT as part of your algorithm? The answer is no, there’s no EEAT score. But what they did say was, we tried to mimic what quality content would look like algorithmically.

For the future of Wix, teaser spoiler alert! Some exciting things are happening on the SEO front, but I’m not allowed to talk about it yet. We’re continuing to put out content that really helps SEO, it’s one of the great things about our SEO learning hub.

If you’re an SEO listening or reading this, you can edit that customizable markup and add additional markups to those pages. But what it also does is Google changed its guidelines around Google Shopping. If you have valid product structured data markup you’re automatically eligible to be shown in shopping results, you don’t have to go through Google Merchant Center.

Also, if you’re on the ecommerce SEO side of Wix and you have a store, you’re already eligible for rich results automatically and you’re already eligible for Google shopping automatically. There are going to be new tools added and integrated into multiple places inside the platform. That will help whether you’re an SEO, a pro, or a business owner. To help you catch things you might have missed around SEO — which is all I can say for now.

I think the most meaningful part of what I do is always when you hear stories like, my friends 13-year-old nephew likes photography and he’s spun out a Wix website and he was able to do it all himself — when you’re actually helping people.

Discover More Articles

• Bar None Games Interview – learn how this game company grew to over a million in revenue.
• Spanish and Go Interview – discover how this couple became YouTube sensations.
• Wix Review – See if Wix is right for your website building needs in our comprehensive review of Wix.

“My unique selling point is one of the reasons I left the larger national company, I felt like my matchmaking clients needed a more tailored experience. In terms of matchmaking dating is not one size, fits all. And I felt like I wanted to give my clients unique experiences where I was able to coach them in their matchmaking experience and in their dating.

I take the time to get to know them better and understand their life history, relationship history, preferences, priorities, and deal breakers before I actually set them up on a date.”

Brigitte spends a lot of time with her clients, and asks a range of questions to really delve into who they are. This, she noted, was a huge part of her process. I was honored that she shared with me some of the important questions she asks clients like:

• Where did they grow up?
• Who they were as children?
• What their family life was like?
• Relationship history
• What are they looking for moving forward?
• Do they have specifics they’re looking for in terms of match?
• What is important to them?
• How do they see their life a year from now?

These are just some of the techniques Brigitte uses to shape her understanding of her customers. As I was later to find out, she also uses almost therapeutic techniques to coach people into happy, healthy relationships.

“I come from a lot of longevity in terms of relationships, my grandparents on one side were married for 76 years. My grandparents, on the other side, were married for less years, they got married during the war and developed a beautiful love. Also my parents are now celebrating their 59th anniversary.

So I’ve been surrounded by a lot of long-term relationships and I think to me it’s something that is incredibly special, and I’d like to help other people have the same experience.

The best part of the work I do, is when I get a text or an email from somebody and they say, oh my gosh, I totally forgot to tell you that, so-and-so and I are still together or I’ve been meaning to tell you that the guy that you set me up with three years ago, we are now engaged. Those are definitely the best moments of my day.”

“My coaching programs are tailored to whatever somebody actually needs to get them back on the dating scene or to become comfortable while dating.

When I take on a matchmaking client, there is a reasonable amount of coaching that comes along with that process. There’s two different ways you can work with me; I take you on as a private client or I take you on as a date coaching client, or we do a combination of both.

If somebody came to me and said, I would like to hire you as a matchmaker, but I have some commitment issues. I need to work through those first for a few months. The question is always, why? Why do you feel that way? What are you afraid of? Let’s break through that first before I start setting you up on dates.

A lot of clients come to me and they don’t want the coaching. Nobody thinks they need coaching. Everybody thinks I know how to date, I’ve done this before, I know what I want. And nine times out of ten, I drag them into the coaching room because they actually do need that.”

Yeah I can imagine many people not being aware of the need for coaching. What were you doing before that led you into your business?

“I’ve been coaching for over 25 years in the wellness space. I started out as a food coach, where I helped people figure out how to reach their weight loss goals without giving up all of the foods that they loved.

I had a blog for many years called, I Hate Celery Sticks, which was based on the premise that we can eat whatever we want and still reach our weight loss goals. Without giving up the foods we love or going on crazy diets or over-exercise routines, or following any fads. I started actually coaching a few years ago within the dating and relationship community.

I’m a small boutique matchmaker. I generally don’t take on more than 10 clients at a given period. My matchmaking packages range from 15 to 25k per client, but depends on the separate hourly costs.

I think the biggest realization was how important coaching was to the matchmaking process. When I first left the national company, I assumed I would focus only on matchmaking but when I started to build the website, and I started to add more to it, I realized how mandatory the coaching piece is to have a successful matchmaking business.”

Further Information

• How to Start a Wellness Business: inspired by Brigitte to start a wellness website? Here is our informative guide.

“One of the couples whose photograph is on my success page, had a long list of priorities. One of them was that she wanted to be matched with somebody who makes her laugh. And then all of the other priorities were were about physical qualities.

But I knew this guy and he cracked me up. And every time I spoke to him, he would make me laugh. I just had a really strong feeling that there would be a connection there. Some of the work I do, there is a methodology to it, but there’s also some intuition as well. And I presented him to her, she out right refused to even meet the guy, absolutely not! 

I kept on nudging her a little bit, and after two or three good dates with other individuals. She learned to trust me. And I talked her into going out with this guy and what happened?

She has a ring on her finger, and they are engaged. They’re getting married in the Cayman Islands in May, they’re gonna have a big family party over the summer which I will go to, that’s probably one of my favorite success stories. Because there was so much resistance. She really thought he did not look like the person that she imagined herself to be with.”

Do you think that blocks a lot of clients? The aspect of just focusing on appearance, rather than the contents of someone’s character?

“Absolutely, positively, yes. So you asked me about my favorite success story. I’m going to tell you about my favorite unsuccessful story, because there’s such meaning in this to me. I share this one with a lot of my clients too.

I took on a client who was very adamant of the person that she wanted. She wanted somebody who’s well educated, was professional and that came from a good family. And I set her up with somebody that I had date coached.

A gentleman who was professional attorney in private practice and done very well for himself. He came from a very prominent family, and I introduced the two of them over dinner. I also curate the entire date.  So I have both my calendars in front of me, I know when one and the other is available. I set up the date and make the reservation. I let them both know where they’re meeting.

I set up the date in a lovely Italian restaurant down in Soho, and they went on a date, so excited! I mean, I couldn’t sleep that night because I couldn’t wait to get the email from both of them!

The next morning I didn’t get an email, I got a phone call… A screaming phone call from my client who basically said, what were you thinking? How could you set me up with somebody that orders spaghetti and meatballs?

I thought it was a prank. I thought I was on like, matchmaker candid camera! I said, but what do you mean? And she said, how dare you set me up with somebody who ordered spaghetti and meatballs? I don’t want a commoner. First of all, this was a lovely, Italian restaurant. I guarantee the spaghetti meatballs were $30 a bowl, it was a beautiful establishment. She also didn’t like that he showed up in a t-shirt, probably a $100 t-shirt knowing him. And that was the end of what could have been a really good relationship.

The challenge with these expectations is that we don’t leave any room for surprises to happen. Maybe the person of one’s dreams does not have an Ivy League degree. Maybe they don’t have hair, maybe they have a couple of extra pounds. When you have those expectations, you immediately eliminate 80% of the population.”

“What a happy relationship looks like could be different for everybody, but I will tell you that the majority of relationships that I set up are people that clearly want to see each other again. Sometimes I’ll get a text simultaneously in the bathroom, like the men’s room and the women’s room. Both like oh my God, this is amazing. Thank you so much.

I have learned what qualities I want them to look for. For example, two people don’t need to make the same amount of money to be in a good relationship. But they have to have the same idea of how to spend their money. If they agree then they have a really good chance of having a good relationship. If not, that’s where the tension comes in.

Also how people relate to their family, right? I have couples where they first get together. And one person says, Thanksgiving let’s go to the Bahamas, and the other says, what Thanksgiving? No, I do that every year with my entire family. So when you have people that can agree on certain key issues such as vacation time, free time, money spending, work ethic, politics and religion –these are markers of a really good chance of a stronger connection.”

What do you think is the reason people can struggle to find the right relationship?

“I think a lot of people don’t find partners because they think their partner is gonna fall out of the sky, or they’re gonna meet them over the tomatoes at the Farmers Market. The white horse is gonna walk in with the shiny Prince and those things only happen on television and in the movies.

They don’t often happen in real life.

I encourage my clients to be open to the world around them. What I found is that you need to be intentional about what you really need.

Everybody’s so unique. It’s almost impossible to generalize which is what I really love about the work that I do. But some general rules are, before you go on the date I think it’s important to know what is important on that list. I suggest to my clients that they leave the list at home, and they go out on a date and they just be open. I generally do not suggest asking a ton of questions on the first date. I think the best experience is just to be yourself and talk about your day and talk about yourself, but not necessarily turn the date into 20 questions.

Also don’t come from work, go home. Take a shower, change your clothes, put your date mode on, and go out and have a good time. Try to think that you are looking to meet somebody new and interesting, not necessarily looking for the man or the woman of your dreams.”

I often hear we bring baggage into new relationships, what are your thoughts on that?

“You know, baggage can be replaced by life experience. We don’t get into our 30s, 40s, and above without having experiences. Those experiences are what make us interesting and unique. They should be celebrated and not looked at in a negative way. If there are certain realities that are triggers for certain people, the more that we know ourselves and the better that we can share our vulnerabilities with our partners – the more success we can potentially have in a relationship.

So baggage to me is not intimidating, it’s just part of who we are. Unless you grew up in a bubble by yourself, and you didn’t have parents, siblings, a community, home, or a school, it just doesn’t exist. Nobody’s a clean slate.”

“I think the ease of the platform made it very simple for me to navigate. It’s very user friendly or at least it was Brigitte friendly, which means that it has to be extra user friendly! I felt like GoDaddy answered the question before I had it. And when it didn’t the phone support helped me, they would spend ages on the phone walking me through each step I had to take.

I know there are some features that I’ve not yet explored, some of the marketing features that I see and Google Analytics. I haven’t paid attention to that at all, but that’s on my list of resolutions for this year.

Any advice for new start ups I would say, to borrow a very famous term, just do it!

One barrier to a lot of businesses starting is that we spend too much time thinking about little things like, should the font be this, or should I make this red? I would say don’t spend too much time on the small steps, don’t sweat the small stuff. It can always be changed later.

The bigger decision is that you have an idea. You’re letting people know about your idea, you’re making yourself available to people. You’re not going to make a break your business, as far as I’m concerned, whether your logo is, you know, black or blue.”

Further Information

• GoDaddy Review – take a look at our comprehensive review if you’re thinking of using it to build your website.
• GoDaddy Ecommerce Review – want to build an online store? Then this read is a must.
• How To Build a Site With GoDaddy – ready to learn how to build a website with GoDaddy? Take a look here to find out how.

That’s wonderful advice, do you have any tips for those wanting to start a matchmaking business?

“I would say speak to other matchmakers and network with other matchmakers. The matchmaking community is beautifully collaborative, a community of people like myself. Who have small businesses. We need each other to share ideas, information, and networks. I’m part of two national matchmaking communities, one of them is the Matchmaking Institute and  Matchmaking Alliance. I’m certified through both of those.”

In many ways, Brigitte’s biggest lesson on love is similar to her thoughts on business. She told us, “the biggest lesson is to be open. Emotionally open. Physically open. Psychologically open. Open to falling in love with somebody that you did not expect.”

It’s my personal thought that we need to be open in business too, open to the possibilities, to our ideas, and to feedback and iterations along the way.

It is a virtual team building company. So what that means is that we work with companies all over the globe to help them bring their employees together in a virtual format. Typically over Google Meet or Zoom these employees are distributed or remote. And all of our events are interactive collaborative, and really focused on helping people to actually form real connections with their co-workers.

Team managers say that it’s really great in terms of productivity and employees do really appreciate it because you save a lot of commute time. But I think the number one challenge, is employee burnout is high when you’re remote.

It’s hard for employers to figure out how do we actually keep our team feeling engaged? And make sure that people feel connected to the company, or to their co-workers. That’s where we come in. We are the experts at making sure that people are actually having a good time and creating spaces where it doesn’t really matter if you’re an introvert or an extrovert. So that every single person really feels comfortable and can create true memories together. 

I love what you say about connection. What kind of games do you offer that inspire connection?

It’s team-based trivia, people break into smaller groups and work together to actually compete to be the final trivia winner. It’s all themed around specific categories that we curate based on what we know about the group or the organizer can choose the categories.

The second game is TV Game Show, it’s inspired by a few fan favorite TV game shows and can feel nostalgic to people and create a team-based collaborative atmosphere. Our next event is a game called Mini Games Party, which involves three different events that are all kind of unique in different puzzle games.

We also have an Interactive Icebreaker event. That’s the best for groups that are really trying to just get to know their co-workers. Oftentimes, we’ll use it for new employee onboarding. We also have a bingo event which we call, Not Your Grandma’s Bingo. It’s our own spin on Bingo with multimedia experiences in a bunch of different bingo formats, so it’s keeps people on their toes.

We started the company in 2020. As you probably can imagine it was during a period of time where human connection was really difficult to find, and I think everyone felt pretty lonely. I’ve always loved games whether it’s virtual or whether it’s in person. I just think it’s really fun. It brings people together like with my family and with my friends and it’s super joyful.

The company started pretty organically. My co-founder and I had both been in business school, and our first year business school reunion was May of 2020. Obviously, that was supposed to be in person and then soon turned virtual, and with that, my co-founder Spencer essentially came up with this trivia game format.

It kind of progressed naturally from something that was just for friends into something that we also realize had a place at the workplace too.

Your website says that 98% of players report feeling more engaged with their team after. What’s it like getting that kind of feedback?

It’s amazing and super fulfilling. It’s one of my favorite parts about the job, being able to see the actual impact that it has on people and on teams. And I think it really highlights the importance in the positive value that we’re able to bring to who we work with.

Spencer has a background in startup operations at mid-sized to growth stage companies. He was actually an employee for Uber before, I believe there were around 10,000 employees, he really was there through a stage of extremely high growth at Uber with a focus on operations.

He also previously was head of operations at a few different Series A startups. On the side though, he’s always done comedy. Stand-up comedy is his passion and really, what makes him so excited. Products, content creation, game design, and community building are really the areas where he shines. He loves getting people together and he has put a lot of thought into how to do that.

For me, I worked at an early stage, venture capital firm, where I was focused specifically on launching early stage startup. That zero to one stage; testing ideas, building early concepts, minimal viable products, things like that. Before that, I was investing in tech companies at a private equity firm. And so I’ve seen a lot of different tech companies at different stages, both super early as well as a much later stage.

Do you think that both those experiences combined is partly what has led to the success of Bar None Games?

I think definitely, with any young company you’re always testing and iterating different ideas. I draw a lot from my past experience of doing that zero to one testing, building, and being extremely scrappy with a really small budget. For Spencer, he’s worked at larger startups and seen a lot of different best practices.

Given that he was at Uber during a high stage of growth, he also had to be really scrappy and creative. And for sure his humor and his love for bringing people together – I think is one of the reasons why all of our products are so high quality.

The business owned by myself and my co-founder. So I’m a woman of color and then my co-founder is part of the LGBTQ+ community and we feel really passionate about diversity and inclusion. We actually work with a lot of employee resource groups or people who are actively involved in their own companies.

DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) efforts to host team building events that are focused on honoring and celebrating different DEI communities. March for example, is Women’s History Month, we’re working with a ton of different companies to host events that are both educational, but also fun and engaging on Women’s History Month.

We have another game that’s called Celebration Games, where it’s celebrating the impact that females have had in global history. There’s also games on, Pride Month, API Heritage Month, Mental Health Awareness Month.

We also work with 70 different professional entertainers that are comedians, actors, actresses, Broadway stars. Truly people who are born to be on stage and they’re also really diverse as well, to reflect on the values that we have. Along with our clients that we work with, and you know, the different types of topics that we really honor and celebrate.

First of all, there’s so much to be done in the very early days, that it’s impossible for both people to be doing it all. It’s just the most efficient for people to have clear areas of focus. But second, I think it also enables you over the course of growing the business to really specialize in what you’re doing and you become even more of an expert in that area. So at our company Spencer focuses specifically on product and sales so he runs all of our sales team, outbound sales process, and talking to customers.

For me, I run operations and growth with the actual day-to-day execution of all of our events and ensuring that every single event goes off without a hitch. Now we have three other employees who work with us. One person who’s on the sales side and two people who are on the operation side and that’s been immensely helpful to have more hands on deck. We’ve also really focused on learning and development for our employees as well.

Having a really high quality product and making sure that people are actually having fun. You need to consider what do they actually want? Because I think sometimes, I feel like it’s easy to create a product that you want, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s what the client wants.

The only way you can figure that out, is by talking to your customer and getting feedback. And honestly when you get that feedback, reacting to it quickly, and integrating changes. I think as a business owner you have to be able to have a really thick skin, it’s never a personal – it’s always in the best interest for the business.

Brand definitely matters! The website that you see right now is actually the third iteration of our website. The very first website that we had was put together by ourselves really quickly, it had all the information on the page, but it wasn’t necessarily organized in a way where we were optimizing for user experience.

We hadn’t really sat down and thought about what the photos or illustrations would convey. The key things I wanted for the second version of our website was to put a little bit more thought into flow and things like that. But the version that you see right now, we actually worked with a website designer and a branding expert. We sat down with her and talked about:

• What is our key value proposition?
• What feelings do you want someone to leave with when they look at our website?
• How can we improve navigation?

And she honestly redid our entire site from our logo, branding, illustrations, as well as the site navigation. She designed it to ensure that it was easy to navigate and that we had content on the page that is helpful, but not overwhelming.

We just did the rebrand to our current website last fall. So it’s been maybe about six months or so. It’s not been that that long, but it’s had a really direct impact to when we talk to customers who have never heard of us before. Our website looks way more credible right now, and it does make these sales conversations much easier.

When you have a website that looks legit that you can point to, it makes it really easy to understand what our company does and people just understand quickly, they get it.

Were there any challenges with building your website with Squarespace?

One thing that I wish we thought about more was SEO friendliness. From an SEO perspective, we have run into a few hurdles with Squarespace because of the way the page loads and the overall website load time. 

There’s essentially a massive code base that gets loaded every single time and there’s no way for us to edit that or turn it down. So from a page load speed perspective, it’s not the most ideal platform – which does impact SEO.

Candidly we weren’t even aware of it as something that was important to SEO. I would definitely advise someone to think about that. But what I do love is that it’s really easy to customize, it’s super user-friendly when it comes to editing stuff on your own.

Advice I would give to someone starting out is to do a free trial and play around with it and see if it feels intuitive to them. And choosing a website builder that feels like they’re continuing to invest in the technology. I’ve definitely seen with Squarespace over the last three years have incorporated different types of design elements and given us more functionality.

Further Information

• Squarespace Review: take a look at our comprehensive research and testing on Squarespace.
• Squarespace SEO Review: want to know more about the SEO capabilities of Squarespace?
• Squarespace Alternatives: discover other builders that are like Squarespace.

We love expanding on different themes and we are also continuing to focus on our hybrid and in person events categories. When people think of us, they still think of us only for virtual events, but we do hybrid and in person events too. And also we will be building our branding and our marketing presence.

If you could go back and start again, would you have done anything differently?

We’ve worked with over 1500 companies, and 90,000 people play our games – something we’re already incredibly proud of. The fact that people are giving us their time and trusting us with their team’s time that we’re able to actually create true connections, I think that’s the biggest piece of data in terms of how successful are we to doing what we set out to do.

There’s always things that you do that you kind of wish that you did earlier, because it made such a big difference. But I think also the reality is that you are just so limited in terms of your own time, your own resource that you’re always going to be forced to prioritize. Like, for example, do I wish that we had our branding and our website up earlier? Yes, I do. But I also know that the reason why it took two years to give our website a facelift, is because there were just so many other things going on.

I mean, there’s nothing major that I would do differently if I had to start again. I think there are times when you feel challenged as a business owner and so it’s not like everything goes flawlessly, and it’s not like everything is super easy. But I do think it’s all part of the journey and I’m really happy with where we are right now.

It’s also really rewarding, there’s nothing quite like feeling like what you have built with your own hands is really adding something to people’s lives. I would say be ready for ups and downs, but celebrate your wins. Focus on how you measure success. If you measure success as personal growth and your own learning and development, there’s no other journey where you will go through as much personal growth. You’ll end up being really proud of yourself.

Shontel started her awesome career as a luxury journalist in Los Angeles, and that was the bulk of her career for over 12 years. Her aim after college was to work for CNN after studying in Atlanta, but the recession led her down a different path – luxury writing and marketing.

She went from “being just a journalist to actually helping businesses with their sites, and then doing my own. [What I do is] a mix of content and a mix of digital marketing focus.”

Around 2017, Shontel worked for the Oprah Winfrey Network, and the curiosity of the Website Builder Expert team was piqued. 

She told us, “So it’s a network, there’s all these shows. And then for online, we had to figure out which assets from those shows are going to be the best for marketing. So, like, what would fit for social, for YouTube, for the website. Discovering which clips we think are going to resonate the most, and tell the story without giving it away.”

“I was a senior producer at that point. Not only would I help to figure out the story lines that work best for an online audience, but I also helped with the website strategy and I created original digital content for the OWN Your Vote campaign — both in 2017 and again in 2020. That was an initiative that Oprah was really passionate about to encourage voters among women and it was just really fun. One of the most fun things was to try to figure out how to work with the Obama Foundation on a live stream.”

“I am just really all about how to connect with an audience, no matter what that is. Whether that’s through content [or] through marketing, [it’s] helping businesses [and] individuals find out what their audience communication style will look like and where they should focus.”

“It’s really recognizing what you actually want to accomplish. Kind of reverse engineering and then building the strategy out that can help lead you to success. I think I’m really good at – when it comes to digital – spotting a lot of the blind spots.”

“These days I’ve been really interested in thinking about underserved communities, like people of color. People that aren’t born into these elite circles, but that are creating luxury products. How can they take up space, you know, how can they actually have a voice here? So that’s something that I’ve actually really been big on leaning into.”

Further Information

• Identify a Target Market – discover your audience and target market to help enhance your content and sales.
• How To Do Market Research – learn all about what you can do in market research to see what appeals to your customers most.

“Being creative with your content is probably the biggest step, especially if you’re starting. Also really narrow down your platforms. Knowing where the content should live and where you believe it will have the biggest impact as a journey. I think this is something I took from journalism,” she said.

Shontel showcases her knowledge of Googles E.E.A.T guidelines by saying, “I do think expertise is quite important. I do think the more you can write about just one particular thing and just really become the person that’s known for that, that ends up being your best bet.”

“I worked at a high-end restaurant and I learned about food, from this high-end restaurant. I did not grow up going to a lot of fine dining restaurants, but working in this place I learned so much about the quality of ingredients and then started to learn about wine.”

“Working in a restaurant is actually what made me quite a strong luxury writer. Yeah, I would not have guessed that in a million years.”

“When I moved to Los Angeles after college and I got an internship at a luxury magazine, I was able to hone in on food because I was the only one that had experience in a restaurant. I was able to have conversations with chefs in a really interesting way that the other interns weren’t able to, because I had the experience myself.”

Shontel began working at Angeleno Magazine, a regional, high-end magazine about modern luxury. It was there that she learnt the ropes on all things architecture, high-end art, beauty, fashion and philanthropy.

She explains, “Los Angeles is one of the most famous cities in the world for luxury. What better place to learn? The magazine was great because I was just thrown in, from day one, interviewing celebrities and talking about their product lines.”

When we asked Shontel about whether working for a luxury magazine allowed her to get a lot of luxury items for free she said, “There’s all this stuff coming to your house. And that was actually how I started writing more about wine. To this day, I get things sent to me. If you’ve seen beauty influencer unboxings on YouTube and TikTok – it’s like that!”

Further Information

• High Ticket Digital Marketing – discover how to market high ticket items online.

“Know which [social media] platforms are right for you because I don’t believe everyone needs to be everywhere.”

“I’m very big on having multiple streams of income because, [this career is] quite volatile. We’ve seen all of the layoffs from all of the big tech companies,” she said.

When discussing her business, VINOTES, she talks about how she did research on the best notebook printers, found the US trademarks, got her business licence, YouTubed business answers, and used the website builder Strikingly to create her website. 

“The biggest lesson is to really lead with being a business as early as you can. That means getting your business bank account, forming an LLC and, when it’s tax time, you’ll be happy that you did.”

Her notes on working with Strikingly for her business were, “It’s really easy for you to build and see it as you’re building — which I think is quite nice. I’ve worked with Drupal, WordPress, custom CMS and, honestly, something as simple as the back and forth between backend and hitting update can be the most encouraging. I think for people that aren’t used to building sites, but that really want to just get something out into the world — that’s really helpful.”

“I think it’s going to increasingly become blurry as brands are all encouraged to become media companies. I think you’re going to just continue to see brands take up space in untraditional areas, especially when it comes to marketing and  content.”

“That means a beverage brand will have a TV series or a podcast. That’s just going to continue to be what we see. For example, the Gwyneth Paltrow brand, Goop, has a website, products, a restaurant and has shows.”

Shontel discusses the importance of social media and how it will continue to grow, but advises that having your own website is important to prioritize. This is because you are less at the whim of the platform. She goes on to talk about maintaining social media alongside monetizing your website with products as “that’s yours, that’s your home.”

Shontel told us she was incredibly nervous about the initial investment to produce her VINOTES notebook. She didn’t want to compromise on the quality of her product and was willing to spend everything she needed to for the sake of quality. 

“Yes, it’s expensive starting a business, but it’s not worth it to take shortcuts. This is more money than I’ve ever spent on anything – besides my car. I was like, oh my gosh, I’ve never spent this much on my own creativity and vision. But that is the leap you need to take.”

“I was so nervous. I definitely remember one sleepless night where I was like, this is the biggest financial mistake I could make, what am I doing? I was like, I’m gonna lose all of my money. Oh no, no one’s gonna buy it.”

“But it becomes easier to part with that money when you truly believe in it and recognize the investment. I was fortunate enough to get my whole investment, of thousands and thousands of dollars, back in like a month.”

We’ll leave you with the feeling Shontel gave us. She opened our eyes to the leap of faith needed in any project or product you want to create in your life. Like her, we hope to “encourage people to do one thing. I believe everybody should have a product, because my product sells without me doing a lot of work.”

Further Information

• Sell Wine Online – learn how to sell wine online from start to finish in this guide.
• How to Market a Product – Read on to find out about marketing your own product.

Jim and May’s story began with Jim needing to learn Spanish, through a language-learning website. He started learning Spanish with May which eventually led to her inviting him to Mexico to meet her.

“And so, I went down to Mexico, for the first time I was leaving the country by myself. And we had this fantastic experience. I mean, not only did we fall in love, but she showed me around the country and taught me about her culture and taught me Spanish, it was really just this fantastic experience,” Jim told us.

“[May’s] a language teacher, and I’m a music producer. My background is in audio and video production, and so we thought, well, wouldn’t it be fantastic if we could start a business where we could provide this experience for other people? Where we could be a bridge for people to experience Spanish-speaking countries, and have a much more authentic experience while traveling abroad.”

This led the duo to begin crafting a podcast, which wouldn’t meet the light of day at first – because, as Jim explained to us that after doing their research, the ecommerce world was raving about YouTube instead.

Jim explained: “So early on we thought we would start as a podcast. So this is back in like 2011. It was really early on but we never published the podcast episodes that we released. Not sure exactly why, maybe I was a little embarrassed of my Spanish at the time because it was early on. 

But we ended up going to a travel conference for creators and bloggers. We went there and there were a couple of sessions focused on bloggers, then there were sessions that were really pushing the idea of getting creators to get on YouTube, because Google owns YouTube.” 

The decision to move towards YouTube would prove to be the right call, as they managed to grow it from zero to 160,000 subscribers! Aiming for the awesome 200,000 subscriber milestone for 2023, Jim and May have also hit an incredible 10 million views on their YouTube channel in a little under seven years – so we delved into the details of how they achieved these milestones.

“With the Spanish and Go YouTube channel, I remember just getting to 100 subscribers that was like, wow, we got a hundred people following us. And then it was a 1,000, and then 10,000, and then a 100,000. All of those little milestones were huge for us.” 

Jim noted that with YouTube, you not only get the video which you can post on your YouTube channel and website, “but you also have the audio [for the podcast] and you could convert a video into a blog post. So you could kind of have a little bit of everything, just in one form of content. So we decided to start a YouTube channel. And when we really started the business in full force in 2016, we launched our YouTube channel and started producing mainly video content.”

Jim and May started with ideas for evergreen content, the kind of YouTube content that will always provide value. But Jim also stated that consistency is key with YouTube.

It’s a wonderful thought to travel the world and start a business with your significant other, but we were curious about the working dynamics and how that might affect both your business and your relationship. We were delighted to see that May and Jim have been able to capture a lovely balance.

“You know, I was still living in Minnesota and when we met, we had to figure out how we could even be together to start this business. So we got married and then went through the immigration process to get May up to the States. Then together we worked for a while with the goal of saving up enough,” Jim tells us, so that they could test to see where there business would go in two years.

Jim explained that it was at a really early stage in the relationship that they came up with their business idea, just a few months of having met in person. He said that before they even discussed marriage they had the idea, due to May showing him around Mexico, as for him it was a “truly a life-changing experience.”

Working with your significant other he notes, “can be a little tricky. It has its challenges occasionally, but for the most part we work really well together. You know May is primarily responsible for the language instruction and cultural content so she does a lot of the research for us.”

May grew up in Mexico so she has the inside scoop into the culture and locations to visit, while Jim’s role is the more technical aspects of the business. Jim is responsible for “getting things up on the website, the audio and video production,” as well as marketing and email funnels. The duo also work with two others who handle editing, podcast management, and manage the immersion retreats. 

Their accomplishments are all the more impressive when it’s such a tight-knit team, in our opinion.

More Information

• Why Is Email Marketing Important – if you’re curious how email marketing can help your brand, check out our article about it
• Get started with Squarespace Email Campaigns

The Spanish and Go website is the central hub for everything they offer to their 160K plus audience. We wanted Jim’s honest opinion of what it was like building the business with Squarespace, and whether it was worth our readers building with it.

When we asked Jim why he created a website he said, “The biggest impact of having the website was we learned early on from travel conferences that you have to find a way to convert your audience into a newsletter. Early on that was one of the primary reasons why we had the website. And so that’s helped us grow our email list tremendously over the years. [Our audience] watch a video and see that we mentioned that we have a PDF and then they can sign up and get that as a download.” 

Jim noted that the best part of working with Squarespace is its flexibility and how quickly you can create content. Making it easier to sell their immersion retreats, having had to use Teachable to host the podcast membership and their language course before. 

“It’s nice that we can easily create a new product and update our inventory and add discount codes. Those are huge advantages and it’s just easy to maintain. I don’t think we’ve had much if any downtime at all with Squarespace. And it’s just been easy to implement our brand colors and have a consistent look across our website.”

On the success that Squarespace has provided Jim and May, Jim stated, “I think it’s the integration of forms, we’ve used that to get people on our newsletter and that’s been fantastic.” He told us that it was an easy way to let people know that they could get free extra learning materials and tell them about the services they provide.

“Overall, I would say. We absolutely could scale considerably more with Squarespace. However, there is a major disadvantage of Squarespace that I see, and it’s just that it’s terribly slow. And it seems like no matter what we do in terms of optimizing images and trying to make everything as lightweight as possible on our end, we can’t keep load loading speeds down.”

Jim and May ran into some trouble with site speed, with help and support directing them to their image sizes multiple times. Despite their efforts to resolve the issue, they still have slow load times – which you should be aware of if you’re planning to create a website with Squarespace. Video and image optimization is there to greatly reduce load speeds. But sometimes, like in this case, it’s just due to the providers’ capabilities. 

When asked if Jim regrets using Squarespace due to this issue, and whether he should’ve opted for a WordPress blog, where you have more control over the backend, his response was unclear. On the one hand, he notes that it could’ve been better to have full control – but that when they began it was just the two of them, and it was an easy way to start the business.

Despite the pandemic dampening the duo’s efforts to create an amazing experience on their retreats over the last few years, the future for Spanish and Go looks bright, continuing on their mission to visit every Spanish-speaking country (21 in total). “And we want to provide useful content for audience, about the culture differences, language differences, and in slang.”

They’ll be continuing to innovate content on the Spanish and Go podcast, to provide exciting Spanish immersion program, their epic climb to YouTube’s 200k subscribers, and provide blog readers with some top notch learning resources. If you’re interested in learning Spanish authentically then Jim and May are there with friendly guidance.

More Information

• Best Website Builders – want to know which website builder could get your website up and running? We’ve put together a list of the very best
• Best Ecommerce Website Builders – want to create a store, then this guide will give you the most up to date information on ecommerce builders