393: The Real Reason People Fail At Business (And What To Do About It) With Steve Chou

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You’re listening to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and dig deep into what strategies they use to grow their businesses. Today, I’m doing a solo episode to announce something exciting that is taking place this month on the podcast. Now for the next four weeks, I’m gonna bring on successful students in my course, Making Six or Seven Figures Online, to talk about how they started an online business from scratch with no experience whatsoever. And to kick off student week, I’m gonna start off

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by talking about the character traits of the successful students in my class. You’ll learn what sets the successful students apart from the ones who fail. But before we begin, I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Now I’m super excited to talk about Klaviyo because they are the email marketing platform that I personally use for my e-commerce store and it depends on them for over 30 % of my revenue. Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not another provider. Well Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for e-commerce stores and here’s why it’s so powerful.

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Klaviyo can track every single customer who is shopped in your store and exactly what they bought. So let’s say I want to send out an email to everyone who purchased a red hanky in the last week. Easy. Let’s say I want to set up a special autoresponder sequence to my customers depending on what they bought, piece of cake, and there’s full revenue tracking on every email sent. Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used, and you can try them for free over at klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife.

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I also want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Now, if you run an e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your own customer contact list. And this is why I focus a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing. SMS, or text message marketing, is already a top five revenue source for my e-commerce store. And I couldn’t have done it without Postscript, which is my text message provider. Now, why did I choose Postscript? It’s because they specialize in e-commerce, and e-commerce is their primary focus.

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Not only is it easy to use, but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data and implement automated flows like an abandoned cart at the push of a button. Not only that, it’s price well too and SMS is the perfect way to engage with your customers. So head on over to postscript.io slash Steve and try it for free. That’s P-O-S-T-S-C-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. And then finally, I wanted to mention my other podcast that I run with my partner Tony. And unlike this podcast where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce,

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the Profitable Audience Podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the Profitable Audience Podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

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Welcome to the My Wife, Quitter, Job podcast. Now for this entire month, you are in for a real treat. Every single week, you will hear from a different student in my Create a Profitable Online Store course that is making six or seven figures online. And none of these students had ever started an e-commerce business before. They all started from complete scratch with little to no experience and they now run successful online store brands. But before you listen to those episodes, which are coming up this month,

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I thought it would be an interesting exercise to analyze what sets the successful students apart in my class. What makes one student more successful versus another? Now in the past 10 years, well over 5,000 students have joined my Create a Profile online store course, but I want to be straight up with you. Not everyone who has signed up has been successful with their e-commerce business. Now when it comes to being a successful entrepreneur, the biggest variable in the equation is always you.

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Do you have the necessary motivation and drive to succeed? And do you have the persistence to push through the initial learning curve? And do you have an open mind for learning? Now, after teaching my class for over a decade now, I found that the most important aspect of running an online business is execution and persistence. Can you carry out what needs to be done? And do you bulk at the first sign of adversity? So in this episode,

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I want to talk about some of the patterns that I’ve noticed with the students in my class who’ve done well. And I also want to point out some common pitfalls with students who have failed. Now, a couple of years ago, I conducted a survey of the students in my class, and here’s a snapshot of the data. Of the students who have been in my class for at least a year and launched a product, 56 % are generating at least four figures per month, and 9%, almost 10%, are doing over $50,000 a month in revenue. Now,

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While these statistics are pretty impressive by online core standards, the real question is what is happening to the other 44 %? And why are there so many students not making much money? So in this episode, I’ll give you my take on what the successful students in my class are doing versus what the failing students are not. And hopefully this analysis will set the proper expectations for those who are thinking about starting an online business or quitting their existing job. So the first trait is that successful students

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don’t sit around waiting for traffic to magically appear. Now, in any given group of students, there’s always those who refuse to spend any money or do any additional legwork after their store or product has launched. They come into the class with the grand vision that they’ll start ranking immediately in the search engines within a month, and then traffic and sales will be free flowing like water. Now these students usually start out very diligently by finding a pretty good niche, acquiring vendors, and even putting up a decent looking website or an Amazon listing.

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But then they launch and they refuse to spend any more money or do any additional marketing because they’re waiting for the magical Google Amazon traffic spigot to open up. And what usually happens next is that they’ll waste time rearranging different parts of their site or doing other silly things that are irrelevant when they could be writing content, buying ads or Amazon ads, building backlinks, running giveaways, gathering emails, or doing some good old legwork.

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And within a few weeks, they quickly become discouraged by their lack of sales and they start doubting themselves. Was this the right decision? Did I just waste all my time on a shop that generates no income? Meanwhile, it’s only been a couple of weeks and they haven’t really done anything proactive to build traffic to their site. Now here’s just a public service announcement to all new business owners. The launch of your product is just the beginning. After you launch is actually when the real work begins. And oftentimes you’ll either have to spend money to acquire traffic

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or do some legwork to get customers in the door. And the legwork is the key. Early on with our online store, we did a combination of cold calling, form marketing, content marketing, PPC marketing, and funneling prospects from eBay to attract our earlier customers. And we started before Amazon FBA even existed. In fact, search engine traffic for our store was non-existent until about the six-month mark. And without our other efforts, we probably wouldn’t have generated many sales at all during the first six months.

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Now, whenever I think of students who have done the legwork, I think of Abby Walker of VivienLiu.com. And this was an interview which I’ll link up in the show notes. And this is a student I interviewed a long time ago. You should check out her episode. But because of her persistence and tenacity, she designed her own website. She learned Facebook ads. She cold called vendors, flew across the country to give product pitches, and eventually ended up on the Home Shopping Network and Oprah Magazine. Now, the legwork is never glamorous, and it’s not always fun.

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But early on, you need to do what you need to do to get customers in the door. The next trait is that successful students choose winnable niches. a large part of my class is devoted to helping students find the right niche, and there’s always a delicate balance when deciding what to sell online. On one end of the spectrum, you need to sell something that has sufficient demand, but on the other hand, the product category must not be too competitive or saturated. And I can’t tell you how many students sign up for my class with a preconceived notion of what they want to sell. But here’s the thing.

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Even after running the numbers and realizing that selling t-shirts or jewelry is probably not the best idea, they go forward anyways. Now, I don’t want to say that’s impossible to succeed in a highly competitive niche. And if you know how to advertise well, you can make any niche work. However, it will be much more difficult and your timeframe to profitability will be significantly longer. The niche that you choose is important and picking the right product to sell will make things much easier for you in the long run. In fact,

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I wouldn’t even consider launching a product of any kind without running a quantitative analysis of my potential profitability. It’s not a guessing game. There is a science behind choosing the right product. And the best students in my class spend a good amount of time carefully researching their niche before they fully commit. And they find alternate ways to test their products before spending a large sum of money. Now, even though they’re anxious to jump straight into the implementation phase, they take their time to make sure that this first crucial step is done correctly.

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Not only that, but the best students in my class make sure they can provide a unique value proposition which makes their shop stand out among the competition. Successful students also take action. Now, the majority of my unsuccessful students never get past the starting line. In fact, I hesitate to say that these students failed because you can’t really fail unless you’ve given something an honest try. Now, the most common symptom among brand new students is analysis paralysis. They get so hung up in the research process that they never take.

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action and believe it or not, engineering majors are actually the most susceptible to this because they expect to have all the hard answers before they begin. Hey Steve, is this product gonna be a winner? Steve, can you guarantee that this is gonna work? And Steve, how much time is it gonna take for me to break 100K? Well, in business and life, there are never definite answers. You can do all the research that you want, but you’ll never know whether something’s gonna sell until you throw it up and try to sell it. And the best students in my class are comfortable

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with taking action with imperfect information. They’re comfortable investing a small amount of money as a test just to see what works, and they’re willing to take a small leap of faith. My successful students always follow through. Now, this point is critical, and oftentimes the most difficult aspect of teaching my class. Now, as part of my class, I actually take the time to thoroughly critique a student’s site or Amazon listing before they go live, and oftentimes I’ll even redesign their entire website for them.

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And the hope is that by providing early and actionable feedback, a student can avoid wasting time and money on PPC ads or other forms of marketing for a non-converting site. As far as I know, there’s no other class or online program out there that does this. And not only does it take a tremendous amount of my own personal time, but I also take a lot of pride in providing honest and actionable feedback. Anyway, there are times after a website critique where I notice that a student never ends up acting upon any of my feedback.

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Now I’ll be the first to say that I’m not always 100 % correct, but I’m usually pretty close. And in general, it really frustrates me to see someone failing, even though I know that a couple of tweaks here and there could make a huge difference. Now running any online business is not a stagnant affair. And even after you’ve launched, you should be constantly tweaking your site and making small changes to improve conversions. And testing is the key. The people who fail are the ones who are not willing to make any major changes after launch. So don’t fall into this trap.

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What defines a successful entrepreneur versus a failing entrepreneur is how you behave when things don’t go as planned. So failing entrepreneurs tend to wallow in self-pity at their lack of progress. Failing entrepreneurs tend to stay on the same path even though things are not working. And failing entrepreneurs feel helpless, make excuses, and play the victim card. Meanwhile, successful students take a step back, analyze what went wrong, and plot a different course of action.

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Successful students also don’t get bogged down with the little details. Almost all my students who run successful companies have this uncanny knack for staying focused and not getting sidetracked by my new details. Now there’s a reason why this is very important trait. Not only could it quite possibly be the most important one, but it used to be and still is actually one of my greatest weaknesses. Now looking back, when I started my wedding linen store, I kept getting stuck on stupid, meaningless details. So for example, when I was working on the first iteration of my website,

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I remember spending hours tweaking the look at the sidebar and header for my online store. I would move our logo 10 pixels to the right, make the sidebar just a little bit wider and move things all around. And after all that tweaking, everything still looked pretty much the same. And I wasted many hours that it could have been using to grow the business, especially in the early stages. Now, if you’ve taken my free six day mini course, you’ve probably seen me talk about various shopping carts like WooCommerce, Shopify and BigCommerce. And here’s what I come to realize.

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Even though I’m still a huge proponent of owning your source code and having the flexibility of an open source platform like WooCommerce, most of you, and I would say 90 plus percent of you are probably better off using a fully hosted solution like Shopify or BigCommerce or Shift4Shop because the little details of site design can bog you down. Is your time better spent tweaking your site or formulating your sales plan? And good entrepreneurs know their priorities and will rarely waste time in any activity

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that doesn’t directly affect their end goal. And speaking from experience, it’s all too easy to becoming gross in something that appears to be significant on the surface, but actually doesn’t matter at all. So you got to prioritize.

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If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself.

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Now, first and foremost, protecting our IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copyrighting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

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And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L.com. Now back to the show. Successful students also know when someone else can do the job better and faster. Now, one of the easiest traps to fall into is to try and do everything yourself, especially if you aren’t the right person for the job. Now, a lot of new students will often try to save money on a bootstrap budget, even if doing so is not in line with their goals. They don’t take into account the time aspect of their work.

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and think strictly in terms of dollars. But the best entrepreneurs I know optimize their time for maximum throughput. They know what they’re good at and when to outsource. All right, confession time. Those of you who know me well know that I always try to do everything myself, even though I’m not the right person for the job. And I’ve been known to code up entire plugins on my own in order to avoid getting nickel and dimed with a monthly fee for a simple feature. So for example, I coded up my own review system instead of paying for a popular review service.

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that would have cost me hundreds of dollars per month. But hear me out here. When I take on the task of doing something myself, I do so for the sake of learning, and I rarely have a strict timetable. In addition, because I teach a class on e-commerce, I feel like I must have detailed knowledge of everything that I teach. That’s why I always get my hands dirty. And in fact, what differentiates me from a lot of other teachers out there is that I actually do everything myself and know all the little details. But if you’re a brand new entrepreneur just starting out,

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you need to consider the trade-offs of going cheap. When I first started out, I designed my own website, even though I knew nothing about web development or programming. And as a result of my lack of experience, I ended up spending a lot of time writing code that was probably already written by someone else before. I devoted many hours learning and struggling through something that I couldn’t easily hire someone else to do in a quarter of the time. Now, I don’t regret my decision to learn about web programming because I’m now self-sufficient when it comes to web design. But realistically,

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My wife and I could have launched our store several months earlier had we hired someone just to do the job. So you got to figure out your timetable, your budget, and adjust accordingly. Now, successful students also know how to do the bare minimum just to get by. Now, if you’ve followed me for a while now, you probably know that I’m a lazy entrepreneur and you don’t need to be great at everything. And in fact, you don’t need to be an expert at anything unless it’s one of the core competencies of your business. Now, successful students are adept at learning

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and doing just the right amount of research and work to get by and not an ounce more. Now going back to the web design analogy, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel in order to create a high converting website. 90 % of the features you need have already been written by someone else. You just need to do your due diligence and find the required bits and pieces to put it all together. So for example, before you even hire a developer to implement something custom, spend some time looking for a plugin that already does what you’re looking for. Personally, before I start any coding project,

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I just do a bunch of Google searches to see what’s already out there. And I would say nine times out of 10, I can simply piece together and adapt existing code for my own needs. Great entrepreneurs don’t create anything from scratch unless they have to. Now this is another trait that I’ve noticed with successful students. They are excellent with people. Now going out of your way to help others is actually my favorite trait of my successful students. Now, I’m not sure if it’s just a coincidence.

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but my most successful friends have gigantic networks of people who are always willing to help. And they’ve established these mutually beneficial relationships by helping each other out without expecting anything in return. In fact, I’ve never met a successful entrepreneur who also wasn’t an excellent people person. And it seems as though making friends and helping others just comes with the territory. And this is the main reason why I started my podcast. Now, as an engineer who likes to hide behind a computer screen,

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Podcasting forces me to reach out and meet other entrepreneurs. And as a result, I get to talk to someone new and successful for a solid hour every single week. Now fostering lasting relationships is what I love about networking with new people, which is why I try to attend as many events as my wife will allow me to attend. And incidentally, it’s also why I started my own conference called The Seller Summit. By the way, tickets are on sale now and are going up in price every two weeks. We are almost sold out, so grab your ticket now.

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But above all else, being a successful entrepreneur is about listening to other people’s problems and finding solutions. And great entrepreneurs just simply have a knack for fixing things. And the more people they can help, the more successful they become. Recently, I actually had a successful student, Maria, come on office hours to talk about how to avoid getting mind-effed with your business. And she’s helped out on a number of occasions as well with the class. I’m very appreciative of her time. And it’s no wonder that she’s running a successful e-commerce business as well.

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It’s just in her personality. Now the final trait I want to talk about is that successful students have an open mind. My best students are constantly learning. Now you’ve probably heard the story that the wealthiest entrepreneurs in the world read an insane number of books. So for example, Warren Buffett has been known to read between 600 and a thousand pages per day and devotes about 80 % of each day to reading. Bill Gates reads about 50 books per year. Now I don’t read nearly as much as Warren Buffett or Bill Gates.

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But one thing that I’ve learned from the great entrepreneurs of the world is to keep an open mind. After all, just because you’re successful today does not mean that it will last forever. And you have to be constantly evolving your business in order to stay relevant. My favorite example of this is with Netflix. Even though they obliterated Blockbuster and were killing it with their mail order DVD rental business, Reed Hastings made the tough decision to focus the business towards streaming video. Now in hindsight, this seemed like an obvious decision, but back in the day,

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DVD rentals were still 99 % of their business. One of my favorite quotes of all time is from Andy Grove of Intel, who once said, only the paranoid survive. Now, if you’re stuck in your ways and unwilling to change, then someone will eventually overtake you. And the only way to change is to expose yourself to new and different ways of thinking. Now, based on all the character traits that I just talked about in this episode, do you have the character traits of a successful

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e-commerce store owner. If so, then I really want you in my class. I love running my class, but sometimes I get frustrated when a student does not follow through. And what can I say? I’m just very passionate about making sure my students succeed because when they are successful, I’m successful. I talk about them. I brag about them, which always leads to more business. I want everyone to make money online. And I hate seeing someone give up when they are so close to the tipping point because sometimes it’s just a matter of time until things start clicking.

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Sometimes it’s just a matter of time until search engine traffic or word of mouth kicks in. Now the main thing is that you need to set the proper expectations for yourself and your business. And making money online is not something that just happens overnight. It’s a marathon and not a sprint. So you need to give yourself the necessary runway to give things a fair shot. In any case, I encourage you to tune in for the next four weeks and enjoy student month on the My Wife, Quitter Job podcast. Hope you enjoy that episode.

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Now one last thing that I wanted to mention is that no one was born with all these character traits and many of them are just naturally acquired over time. And once you see even a little bit of success, you’ll be inspired to continue on. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 393. And once again, I want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base.

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SMS is the next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at postgrip.io slash Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Clavio, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned card sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifeclutterjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.

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Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLA V I Y O. Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and they’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.