this last week we did nearly $133,000 in sales selling nothing but t-shirts on our own website we did this using something called print on demand meaning that we only ever spend money after we make a sale so it's super low cost and the barrier to entry has never been lower and the demand has never been higher making this one of the best times to start one of these businesses that's why I'm making this series so you can see everything that goes into growing one of these businesses completely from scratch to multiple six figures per month
in sales we've grown the store to the point now where we're very close to the six fig threshold and while that's exciting our goal is seven figures in 12 months and honestly after the sales we saw this past week I'm starting to get worried as to whether we'll be able to get there or not that's why in this video I'm going to break down the Lessons Learned what went wrong and how we're trying to get things back on track for the next couple of weeks especially as we start heading into Q4 Black Friday Cyber Monday
really big sales month coming up and we want to make sure we have all our ducks in a row so we don't get washed out by the competition all right so we got to start off the way we always do with a refresh so everybody's on the same page that this is not made up and here we can see the sales for this past week we started off strong being down 29% got to love that then we increased our sales slightly to about break even with last week uh about $1,600 we did $1,700 on the
30th and $1,500 which was down 133% the day after that 2100 which was down 30% then we shot up to 58% above the previous week but that wasn't really due to us having a really good day that was mostly due to us having a terrible day last week and then on Sunday we finished off pretty even with the week before we're going to dive into the numbers more Clos closely but a key lesson to take away something you can see here is that the sales are very inconsistent right now cuz we're at such low scale
meaning we have so few sales each day like even a handful of five or 10 sales can really like move the dial in a meaningful way that's why one of the lessons from this week is to do the best we can at just forgetting the sales and continuing to work on the projects we have on our road map things like building out our email flows building out our social media strategy rounding out the business in all the different areas and just forgetting about the sales as crazy as that sounds while we just continue to check
the boxes and build the business to be the best that it can because if you're able to do that then you're always going to be building the business and you're not going to be just chasing the sales and putting out fires Jeff Bezos is one of his letters to the shareholders he talks about how he watched as their stock price plummeted meanwhile all of their internal business metrics were Rising like their returning customer rate their average order value for their customers the number of new products that were being launched he stayed focused on the most
important drivers in the business and for us obviously we're not Amazon but for us it's just new projects and new improvements that we're making in the business how is that continuing to move the ball forward all right now diving deeper into the numbers this week we had a conversion rate of 1.98% which is not bad it's slightly lower than we' like it to be but again obviously the most important thing is our overall Ras then our average order value was 46.87 and another metric that I want to point out is our online store speed this
is a crucial factor that often gets overlooked the reason it's so key is that 80% of our traffic is coming from mobile devices they're coming from social media which are instantly responsive and if somebody comes to your website and they have to wait a second or two seconds for it to load they're just going to leave a sneaky way that this gets impacted is as we're adding more and more apps to our store like apps from the App Store that seem like what a good idea and it'll add some features or functionality to the site
but the unspoken hidden cost of that is it takes your site longer to load so we always want to keep our sight speed as fast as possible 46 is honestly one of the fastest sights I've ever had I've had sites down in like the fives and 10 which is just brutal and your conversion rate will slip and you'll be just left wondering what the hell is going on so be sure to keep an eye on your site speed and here you can see what I was talking about with mobile it's in the last week we
had 12.1 th000 sessions and 10,000 of those were from mobile devices so crucial to be optimizing the buying experience around mobile and literally forgetting about desktop entirely just about if if Mobile's not optimized then nothing else matters another thing I want to point out is our sessions by social source is that right now the vast majority of our traffic is coming from Facebook and Instagram in the next couple of weeks we want to start diversifying into other channels like Tik Tok and Pinterest um and YouTube which is key for us because we don't want to
be building a business that's solely dependent on Facebook ads it's okay in the beginning is should just focus on one channel get good at that and then once you have Revenue consistent sales coming in it's a really good idea to diversify I know from going through the process of selling a business that buyers are much less interested in a business that is owned by just one channel if all your sales come from one channel and that channel goes away so does the business so we're planning on branching out and diversifying uh for more than just
these channels and then down here you can see that while social has been by far the largest traffic Source we also have a decent amount coming from direct and what direct means is our email list our SMS list people from our social media pages and people just searching for us organically which is pretty exciting the way you really get this number up either direct sales is by delivering on an amazing customer experience making sure that after they buy from you one time they're going to want to buy from you again and again now let's go
over our profit report from this past week and see exactly how much we took home so we did $3,489 sales so this number that's being shown by Shopify is actually after discounts and returns then we spent about $5,200 on printify for them to fill our orders we had another $584 on Shopify discounts and refunds and we had $494 in transaction fees just to be able to swipe people's credit cards and our second largest expense was our advertising which 95% of this is from Facebook but we spent $5,151 on ads then our overhead expenses which these
are all of our monthly fees just broken down on a weekly basis was $294 so right now we're paying right around 1,200 bucks a month for Shopify clavio couple of our other softwares and then our team who helps out with some of the customer service tickets and product uploads and stuff like that which I can talk more about that in future videos how to hire and effectively manage and build an awesome team that makes your life a lot easier if you're interested in learning more about that let me know in the comments section down below
so after deducting out all those expenses that brings our net income to a grand total of $1,693 in profit for the week which is not too exciting by any means but it gets a little bit sweeter when we're able to add in the $212 that we made back on the capital 1 2% cash back so I talked about this in previous videos but we put all of our expenses on that and we make an extra 2% back off of all the expenses which sounds like a tiny amount but it really does add up quickly over
time especially because it's a post tax amount meaning all the other profit we have to pay taxes on and report it to the IRS but credit card rewards are under their own classification and does not have to be reported as normal income you still have to report it but it's not taxed and then we have our 5% rebate on our protocols with pry which is just because we've done so much business with them they give us a little discount and that adds up to $181 62 which sound like small numbers but when you add it
to our overall profit for the week it brings us to $2,875 in profit if you make that at a monthly rate that's about $8,000 or if you annualize that that's about 96 Grand in profit for running your own business and selling T-shirts from the comfort of your home is not too shabby and to wrap things up our plan to get things back on track is honestly to keep doing pretty much what we're doing like I mentioned earlier we just want to get back to building on the business and our top priorities right now are our
email flows our social media presence diversifying our traffic sources like doing Google pmax ads Tik Tok ads and really refining our customer service Sops and best practices so that every customer who buys from us has the best experience possible and we're really able to optimize our lifetime value so people want to come back and buy from us again and again and one thing that we're trying out that's been working pretty well is using chat GPT prompts for our customer service team to be able to answer every question one extremely well and two very quickly so
let me know in the comment section down below if you want to hear about any of those topics I'm happy to make videos on it yeah there's a lot that goes into running these but it can be truly manageable and I'm here for you guys to let me know what would be interesting to you guide me with where the gaps are and your knowledge and what I'm sharing truly an open book everything besides sharing the URL of the store because that would just lead to more copycats and I would know what to do with but
everything besides that let me know how I can be helpful I appreciate you guys for watching and I'll see you next week bye
