Podcast: Download (Duration: 14:10 — 16.5MB)
2023 was an infrastructure year for Bumblebee Linens (my 16-year-old ecommerce store) and a breakout year for My Wife Quit Her Job (my content business), which grew roughly 60% in revenue. Bumblebee revenue was up modestly and profit was way up because we bought our own office and stopped paying $6,500 a month in rent. The content business grew because I nearly killed myself doing 50+ podcast interviews to market The Family First Entrepreneur, which hit the Wall Street Journal bestseller list in May.
This is a solo My Wife Quit Her Job episode where I break down the wins, the losses, the Google core-update hit that clipped our SEO in October, and the exact plays I am running in both businesses in 2024.
Here is the full recap of what worked, what broke, and what I am changing next.
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
- Bought a new office at the end of 2022 to escape a 30% rent hike (from $5,000 to $6,500/month). Lost most of January to the move, but eliminated a $78K/year expense.
- Personalized linens (handkerchiefs, napkins, towels) grew double to triple digits year over year. Non-personalized linens dropped 8-9% to Amazon and marketplace competition.
- Google’s back-to-back October 2023 core updates hit our blog-driven traffic. Retention.com (which captures visitor emails without an opt-in) offset most of the damage by adding ~50,000 emails in a year.
- Launched a new custom-printed linen line on Black Friday 2023 with no fulfillment process ready. Sold 23 items, burned a batch by setting the heat press too hot, and still made a few thousand dollars while learning the workflow.
- My Wife Quit Her Job revenue grew ~60% in 2023. The lift came from the promotion cycle for the book, not the book itself: 50+ podcast appearances in three months spiked YouTube and blog traffic simultaneously.
- YouTube ad revenue peaked at nearly $30,000/month during the book launch surge. Blog ad revenue peaked near $10,000/month. The channel is now over 280,000 subscribers.
What happened at Bumblebee Linens in 2023
Bumblebee Linens had a modest revenue year and a very strong profit year in 2023. Revenue was up thanks to a double- to triple-digit surge in personalized products, offset by an 8-9% drop in non-personalized linens. Profit was way up because we bought our own office building and eliminated the largest fixed cost on the books.
The shape of the year was ugly at the start and strong through the middle. January was gutted by an office move; February through September were record months; October brought a Google update that clipped the blog. November added an unforced-error product launch that still worked out.
The through-line: the parts of the business with a defensible moat (personalization equipment, direct email list, brand) all grew. The parts that lean on marketplace visibility (generic linen SKUs, blog SEO) went the other way.
Why we bought our own office building
We bought our own office building because our previous landlord raised the rent 30% on a 2,300 square foot space, from $5,000 to $6,500 per month. That is $78,000 a year for a small space we had been in for six years, and buying pencils out much better than renting at that price.
The move itself was painful. We shut down the shop for the first two weeks of January to physically relocate six industrial embroidery machines, 500+ SKUs of inventory, and the entire fulfillment workflow. January revenue basically disappeared as a result.
The upside is that Bumblebee no longer pays rent at all, and the space is big enough to last us a very long time. On a business doing 7-figure revenue, eliminating $78K in annual fixed cost is one of the biggest single-decision profit lifts we have ever booked.
Why personalized linens grew and generic linens shrank
Personalized linens grew because personalization is genuinely hard to copy, and generic linens shrank because generic products are a race to the bottom on Amazon. Our personalized handkerchiefs, napkins, and towels grew double to triple digits year over year. Our non-personalized SKUs dropped 8-9%.
The moat is physical. We run six industrial embroidery machines that cost tens of thousands of dollars each, and there is a steep learning curve on running them well. A drop-shipper cannot copy that in a weekend, which is exactly why the category is defensible.
My rule for building a durable ecommerce business is to never do what is easy. The easy plays (drop-shipping, buying from Alibaba and reselling on Amazon unchanged) get flooded with copycats within months. The hard plays (personalization, custom manufacturing, brand-building, content) compound instead.
How the October 2023 Google core updates hit our SEO
Google ran four consecutive core updates in the fall of 2023 to fight AI-generated spam, and one of them caught Bumblebee Linens in the blast radius. Most of the traffic loss was on blog posts that ranked but did not convert, so the sales impact was smaller than the traffic impact suggests. It still hurt.
The bigger structural shift is that Google is now weighting user-generated sites (Reddit, LinkedIn, Quora) and mega-established sites (Amazon, Etsy) much more heavily. Independent brand sites are being crowded down the page as a result. Every operator I know in the space is seeing the same pattern.
The saving grace was our owned email list, which had grown by roughly 50,000 addresses over the previous year thanks to Retention.com (a service that captures visitor emails from your site without a formal opt-in). Owned channels do not care about Google’s mood. They just work.
How Retention.com added 50,000 emails to our list
Retention.com is a service that identifies email addresses of anonymous visitors to your site and adds them to your list without requiring a signup form, and it added roughly 50,000 emails to Bumblebee Linens in a single year. It is legally in the clear (US CAN-SPAM permits opt-out consent for commercial email) and it works dramatically better than any opt-in tool we have used.
The tool matters because it converts wasted top-of-funnel traffic into an owned asset. On a typical ecommerce site, 97-99% of visitors leave without buying or opting in, and most of that intent evaporates. Retention captures a slice of it before it does.
A meaningful number of the 50,000 addresses have converted into new or repeat customers, which is why the tool paid back its subscription cost many times over. It is one of the few “growth hacks” I run in 2024 that I unreservedly recommend to other operators.
The Black Friday custom-printed linens launch (what went wrong)
We launched a brand new custom-printed linens line on Black Friday 2023 with essentially no fulfillment process in place, sold 23 items, burned a batch by running the heat press too hot, and still made a few thousand dollars while writing the SOPs on the fly. It was a mess and it was worth it.
The backstory: we bought a DTF (direct-to-film) fabric printer from Sublistar mid-2023 to answer customer requests for printed graphics on our linens (something our embroidery machines cannot do). Running a DTF printer is nothing like running an inkjet at home. Print head cleaning, powder application, oven baking, and heat pressing are all separate, hands-on steps.
I was so nervous about volume that I did not even mention the new line in the Black Friday email. We created new categories on the site, launched with nine design choices, and let customers discover it organically. In hindsight, launching an operationally complex new product on the busiest shopping day of the year with no test batches on all 500 SKUs was a genuinely dumb move that turned into a very cheap lesson.
How the Family First Entrepreneur launch grew My Wife Quit Her Job by 60%
The Family First Entrepreneur launch grew My Wife Quit Her Job by ~60% in 2023, but the growth did not come from book royalties. Every cent of my six-figure advance was spent on marketing and a book-launch coach, so the book itself made me zero dollars. The revenue lift came from the promotion cycle around the launch.
Between mid-February and May, I did 50+ podcast interviews (some days four in a row). Those episodes all released within roughly the same week, which drove a simultaneous traffic spike on my blog, YouTube channel, and course page.
Random course inquiries surged. Ad revenue exploded.
At the peak of the surge, my YouTube ads were paying almost $30,000 per month and my blog display ads were paying almost $10,000 per month. Both settled back down after the launch hype faded, but the channel emerged from the cycle at 280,000+ subscribers with a much bigger baseline than before. The book was the excuse; the promotion tour was the growth engine.
What I am doing differently in 2024
In 2024, Bumblebee Linens is testing an AI voice bot for basic customer service calls, and My Wife Quit Her Job is going all-in on video volume across YouTube long-form, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and TikTok. The theme on both businesses is “be everywhere the customer already is,” which the last year of Google turbulence has made non-negotiable.
On the ecommerce side, I am also building a handwritten-message embroidery product (brides keep asking) and figuring out how to automate the workflow so as few humans as possible touch each order. Custom-printed linens will become a real profit center once the new SOPs are stable.
On the content side, I hired a scriptwriter for YouTube long-form and someone to slice each long-form video into Shorts. I am running a real test on whether a human editor beats AI for that job, because if AI is close enough, I can scale the format to daily posting without hiring further.
Frequently asked questions
How did Bumblebee Linens perform in 2023?
Bumblebee Linens grew modestly on revenue and grew significantly on profit in 2023. Personalized products (handkerchiefs, napkins, towels) grew double to triple digits year over year, generic linens dropped 8-9%, and eliminating rent by buying our own office removed $78K of annual fixed cost.
Why did My Wife Quit Her Job grow 60% in 2023?
My Wife Quit Her Job grew about 60% in 2023 because of the promotion cycle for my book The Family First Entrepreneur, not the book royalties themselves. I did 50+ podcast interviews in three months, which released simultaneously and drove a huge traffic spike across the blog, YouTube channel, and course page.
How much money did the book actually make?
The book itself made me zero net dollars. My entire six-figure advance from Harper Collins Leadership was spent on marketing, PR, and a professional book-launch coach. The financial payoff came indirectly, through the traffic and course-sale surge that the promotion tour produced.
Which Google update hit ecommerce sites in late 2023?
Google ran four consecutive core updates in the fall of 2023 targeting AI-generated content and low-quality pages, and the October and November rounds hit many independent ecommerce sites hard. The updates also boosted user-generated content sites (Reddit, LinkedIn, Quora) and giant marketplaces (Amazon, Etsy) at the expense of smaller brand sites.
What is Retention.com and does it work?
Retention.com is a service that identifies anonymous visitors to your ecommerce site and adds their email addresses to your list without an opt-in form, and yes, it works well. It added about 50,000 addresses to Bumblebee Linens in a year, and a real slice of those addresses converted into new and repeat customers. It is legally compliant under CAN-SPAM.
Should I sell on Amazon or on my own website?
You should sell on both, with your own website as your home base and marketplaces as additional channels. Amazon-only sellers are exposed to policy changes, price competition, and account suspensions with no fallback, while owned-site-only sellers miss a huge chunk of buyer intent. Omnichannel is now the baseline, not the advanced play.
Is drop-shipping still a viable business model?
Drop-shipping is technically viable but structurally weak, because the low barrier to entry guarantees hundreds or thousands of stores selling the same product at ever-lower margins. The durable ecommerce plays involve either private-label products, custom manufacturing, personalization, or genuine brand-building through content. Easy is not the same as good.
What are the biggest ecommerce priorities for 2024?
The biggest ecommerce priorities for 2024 are diversifying traffic sources beyond Google, building an owned email and SMS list you can market to for free, and adding operational moats (personalization, customization, content) that copycats cannot replicate overnight. Video content across YouTube, Shorts, Reels, and TikTok is now a baseline requirement for reach.
