Podcast: Download (Duration: 22:59 — 26.6MB)
Most online businesses fail because of execution and persistence rather than strategy or product selection. After teaching over 5,000 students across a decade, the pattern is consistent: successful students take action with incomplete information, do unglamorous legwork after launch, and change course when something is not working. The ones who fail usually never get past the starting line.
In this solo episode I break down the specific behavioral differences I have observed between the students in my course who reach six and seven figures and the ones who stall out.
Below are the nine traits, along with the survey data on what students actually earn and where the failures concentrate.
Get My Free Mini Course On How To Start A Successful Ecommerce Store
If you are interested in starting an ecommerce business, I put together a comprehensive package of resources that will help you launch your own online store from complete scratch. Be sure to grab it before you leave!
Table of Contents
Key takeaways
- 56% of students who launched are making four figures monthly. Nearly 10% exceed $50,000 a month.
- Launch is the beginning, not the end. Traffic does not appear on its own, and the real work starts after.
- Analysis paralysis kills most attempts. Engineers are particularly susceptible.
- Niche selection is quantitative. Run the numbers before committing, rather than following a preconceived idea.
- Failing entrepreneurs stay the course when it is not working. Successful ones step back and change direction.
- Details are a trap. Hours spent moving a logo 10 pixels are hours not spent on sales.
- Do the bare minimum competently. 90% of what you need already exists.
- Every successful entrepreneur is a people person. Large networks built by helping without expecting return.
What percentage of online store owners actually succeed?
Of students who have been in my course at least a year and actually launched a product, 56% generate at least four figures per month and nearly 10% exceed $50,000 monthly.
Those numbers are strong by online course standards. The more useful question is what is happening to the other 44%, and the answer is almost never about strategy.
The biggest variable in the equation is the person. Motivation, persistence through the initial learning curve, and openness to learning determine outcomes more than niche selection or tactics.
Trait 1: Successful students do the legwork after launch
The most common failure pattern is launching and then waiting for traffic to arrive. Students do the hard work of finding a niche, sourcing vendors, and building a decent site, then stop, expecting Google or Amazon to deliver customers.
What they do instead of marketing is rearrange parts of their site. Within a few weeks they are discouraged, doubting the decision, and concluding the business does not work, having done essentially nothing to acquire customers.
The launch is the beginning. After launch is when the real work starts, and it usually requires either spending money on traffic or doing unglamorous legwork.
Our own store used cold calling, forum marketing, content marketing, PPC, and funneling prospects from eBay before Amazon FBA even existed. Search traffic was nonexistent until roughly month six, and without the other efforts we would have made almost no sales in that period.
The example I return to is Abby Walker of Vivian Lou, who designed her own site, learned Facebook ads, cold called vendors, flew across the country for product pitches, and ended up on the Home Shopping Network and in Oprah Magazine.
Trait 2: Successful students choose winnable niches
Niche selection is a quantitative exercise, and many students arrive with a preconceived product they intend to sell regardless of what the numbers say.
Succeeding in a highly competitive category is possible if you advertise well. It is substantially harder and your path to profitability is much longer.
The successful students research carefully before committing, find ways to test products before spending significant money, and resist the urge to skip to implementation. They also ensure they have a unique value proposition rather than an identical product at a similar price.
I would not launch any product without running a quantitative profitability analysis first. This is not a guessing game.
Trait 3: Successful students take action with imperfect information
Most unsuccessful students never get past the starting line, which means they have not really failed so much as never tried.
Analysis paralysis is the mechanism. Students get so absorbed in research that they never act, and engineering majors are notably susceptible because they expect definitive answers before starting.
The questions I hear: is this product going to be a winner, can you guarantee this works, how long until I hit $100,000. None of those have answers. You cannot know whether something sells until you try to sell it.
The successful students are comfortable investing a small amount as a test and taking a modest leap of faith.
Trait 4: Successful students follow through on feedback
I personally critique student sites and Amazon listings before launch, and frequently redesign entire websites. Some students never act on any of it.
The point of early feedback is avoiding wasted money on ads pointing at a site that does not convert. Watching someone fail when a few specific changes would help is genuinely frustrating.
More broadly, an online business is not static. You should be continuously tweaking and testing after launch. The people who fail are the ones unwilling to make significant changes once they are live.
Trait 5: Successful students change course when things go wrong
What separates successful from failing entrepreneurs is behavior when things do not go as planned.
Failing entrepreneurs wallow in the lack of progress, stay on the same path despite evidence it is not working, and make excuses or play the victim.
Successful students step back, analyze what went wrong, and plot a different course.
Trait 6: Successful students ignore the small details
Almost every student running a successful company shares an ability to stay focused and avoid getting absorbed in minor details. This may be the single most important trait, and it used to be my own greatest weakness.
When I started my wedding linen store, I spent hours tweaking the sidebar and header, moving the logo ten pixels, widening things slightly. After all of it, the site looked essentially identical, and I had lost hours I could have spent growing the business.
This is also why I have shifted my platform recommendations. I still believe in owning your source code and the flexibility of open source, and more than 90% of people are better served by Shopify, BigCommerce, or Shift4Shop, precisely because design details are a time sink.
The question to ask: is your time better spent tweaking the site or building the sales plan?
Trait 7: Successful students know when to outsource
A common trap is doing everything yourself to save money, without accounting for the time cost.
I am guilty of this. I have coded entire plugins to avoid monthly fees, including building my own review system rather than paying hundreds monthly for an existing service.
My reasons are specific: I do it to learn, I rarely have a strict deadline, and teaching a course on ecommerce means I need detailed knowledge of everything I teach. Those reasons do not apply to most new entrepreneurs.
When I started, I built my own website knowing nothing about web development, and spent many hours writing code that already existed. I do not regret becoming self-sufficient, and my wife and I could have launched months earlier by hiring someone.
Figure out your actual timetable and budget, then decide accordingly.
Trait 8: Successful students do the bare minimum competently
You do not need to be excellent at everything, and you do not need to be an expert at anything unless it is a core competency of your business.
Roughly 90% of the features you need already exist. Before hiring a developer for something custom, look for a plugin that already does it. Before starting any coding project, search for what is already out there.
Nine times out of ten I can assemble and adapt existing code rather than writing something new. Good entrepreneurs do not build from scratch unless they have to.
Trait 9: Successful students are excellent with people
I have never met a successful entrepreneur who was not also a strong people person. My most successful friends have large networks built by helping others without expecting anything in return.
This is why I started the podcast. As an engineer inclined to hide behind a screen, podcasting forces me to reach out and talk to someone new and successful every week. It is also why I started the Seller Summit.
Being a successful entrepreneur ultimately means listening to problems and finding solutions. The more people you can help, the more successful you become.
The trait underneath all of them: an open mind
The best students are continuously learning. Warren Buffett reportedly reads 600 to 1,000 pages daily and spends roughly 80% of his day reading. Bill Gates reads around 50 books a year.
The point is less about volume and more about staying open. Success today does not persist automatically, and businesses have to keep evolving to stay relevant.
My favorite example is Netflix. Having destroyed Blockbuster and while dominating mail-order DVD rental, Reed Hastings pivoted toward streaming when DVDs were still 99% of the business. Obvious in hindsight, difficult at the time.
Andy Grove of Intel put it best: only the paranoid survive. If you are unwilling to change, someone will overtake you, and the only way to change is exposure to different ways of thinking.
Frequently asked questions
Why do most online businesses fail?
Execution and persistence rather than strategy. The most common pattern is launching and then waiting for traffic to appear instead of doing the marketing legwork. The second most common is never launching at all due to analysis paralysis.
What percentage of ecommerce students actually make money?
Among students in my course for at least a year who launched a product, 56% generate at least four figures monthly and nearly 10% exceed $50,000 a month. The 44% who do not are usually the ones who stalled before or immediately after launch.
How long before an online store gets search traffic?
Search traffic for my own store was essentially nonexistent until around month six. Everything before that came from cold calling, forum marketing, content marketing, PPC, and funneling prospects from eBay. Without those efforts there would have been almost no sales.
Should you sell a product you are personally interested in?
Only if the numbers support it. Many students arrive committed to a category like t-shirts or jewelry and proceed even after research shows it is saturated. Succeeding there is possible with strong advertising skills, and the path to profitability is far longer.
What is analysis paralysis in business?
Getting so absorbed in research that you never take action, usually driven by wanting certainty before starting. Engineers are particularly susceptible because they expect definitive answers. You cannot know whether a product sells until you try to sell it.
Should you build your own website or hire someone?
Depends on your timetable and goals. Building it yourself makes you self-sufficient and costs months. Most new entrepreneurs are better served by a hosted platform like Shopify or BigCommerce, because design details consume time that should go toward sales.
How important is networking for ecommerce success?
Consistently important. Every successful entrepreneur I have met is also a strong people person with a large network built by helping others without expecting return. Being an entrepreneur fundamentally means listening to problems and finding solutions.
