I'm Starting a Shopify Store from Scratch

[00:02] from scratch and I want to bring you guys along behind the scenes and show the last few months how much the whole thing has cost and talk to you a little thing has cost and talk to you a little bit about how I managed to decide what

[00:15] business to start so I should probably start with what the new business is well it's a Shopify store but it's not a drop shipping Shopify store Drop Shipping is something that I considered getting into many many times but I just could never

[00:28] feel good about the idea of selling things that so many other people were already selling it didn't feel authentic it didn't feel unique it didn't feel like I was bringing real value to the table and there's also just so many

[00:41] issues with quality control so while there can be money to be made there I am confident I ended up deciding not to go that route but if you're not doing something like Drop Shipping or you're selling something that other people have

[00:54] already created and is already available for you to get to sell then that normally means you'll have to create something from scratch yourself and product development can be a really long and complicated and time intensive

[01:09] process and that's pretty risky when you don't know for sure if it is going to work out and if it's going to be successful but then a few months ago I did this interview on my podcast where I interviewed someone who had a digital

[01:22] product shop and this idea really intrigued me because digital products are something that I already know really well but she was selling them in a way that I had never really thought about selling them she uses Shopify and that

[01:34] whole shop model where you have lower cost products and you get your customers to add multiple of them to their cart and have upsells and all that sort of thing and come back and buy more and you're selling them done for you things

[01:48] like tools and assets and resources that they can take and use in their business or in their life instead of educational products now I dearly love educational products and the reason that I got into this whole business that I'm in today is

[02:00] because I really wanted to teach people how to do things for themselves how to to successfully Market those businesses and so on and I think that it is so important that people do learn how to do those things for themselves but there's

[02:15] educational industry you can teach people to the best of your ability all day long but at the end of the day they're not necessarily going to go out something that's been frustrating to me for a long time that sometimes I can't

[02:30] through on what I teach them so when I came across this idea to create digital products that like I said are done for you resources so I'm talking about things like templates that people can use to build their websites and swipe

[02:43] copy that they can use for their marketing email campaigns things that because they're saving them from having to do the work themselves and at the same time can help them make more money because they are tried and tested out in

[02:59] the real World specifically all the things that we are going to be selling have been tried and tested in my businesses and in the businesses of hundreds of my clients so we know for sure they work and it just gives me so

[03:14] much joy as a business owner to sell products that I really believe in and that I know are going to get the customer's results so that's just a little bit of why I decided to start this new business and how I came to that

[03:27] decision I guess I'll touch real quick on you know in the past I had had so could never commit to any of them and it's because they were completely separate from my current business and so it was going to require a ton of time to

[03:41] get them off the ground and to build them completely from scratch but this was a business that could be a sister business to my existing company and so it was going to take us way less time to create the products way less time to

[03:53] build the infrastructure and it's going to sell products that will appeal to my existing audience and so I won't have to go out there and find customers in a new know who I am at all okay so now let's

[04:07] talk about how much this whole project ended up costing and I was actually so pleasantly surprised at how little it did end up costing I was expecting there there are two main reasons why there weren't one is because of that sister

[04:21] business aspect that I was talking about where the new business was able to get a lot of benefit and share a lot of resources and assets with my existing business is including and this leads me to the second thing I have an existing

[04:34] team and I pay my team on salary and every month we take on new projects and that's included in the number of hours that I have each team member contracted for so I didn't have to hire new people or even pay my current team members

[04:48] the sacrifice was what we call spending their time working on this project rather than on working on another project that could have benefited Us in some other way so I

[05:01] didn't have any direct or extra costs relating to the graphic design work or setting up the website or creating the products or any of that however I do of pocket for those things I don't think it would have been very much not more

[05:15] than a few thousand because really it ended up being pretty simple and easy to set up so let's get into now kind of the tech side of things so I chose to build this on Shopify my main website is built on Squarespace and I really like it and

[05:29] Squarespace and actually has a lot of the same functionality as Shopify but when I just compared the two and the features and functionality of both and the end of the day I just decided that Shopify had the most like robust

[05:45] powerful system that was going to make this shop as functional as possible and give the customers the best experience and make it the easiest for us to run as well so I picked Shopify and the plan that I decided to go with cost about $29

[05:59] and then another expense that we had and this one was a little bit unexpected actually was the theme so I chose to buy a premium theme now Shopify has a bunch of free themes but not a ton I think that there are about a dozen free themes

[06:13] on Shopify and so one of the reasons that I chose to buy a premium theme is just because I wanted my store to look unique and Polished and intentional and whole bunch of other stores that are out there and then the other reason was

[06:26] because I wanted to make sure that it did have all of the function it that we needed to be able to effectively sell these digital products and just do everything we wanted it to do and that premium theme it cost I think

[06:38] expected to pay for that but I think it weren't very many other expenses now the only other expenses that there were actually were to pay for some apps so

[06:52] install on your Shopify store to make it do things that it couldn't do otherwise so for example we installed a reviews app that will enable our customers to leave reviews on the products and then we also installed a digital product

[07:06] delivery app that will make it so an email automatically gets sent out to customers when they buy one of the products and will deliver that digital product to them thankfully with digital products we don't have any sort of like

[07:20] products we don't have any sort of like shipping and handling sort of activities to pay for but we do have to pay for this app and I think it's about $10 a month to deliver the digital products to people's inboxes now the other big thing

[07:34] that went into this project was the design work so we had to create new branding essentially from scratch we had to choose colors we had to decide what we wanted the vibe to feel like we had to design the logo and decide how the

[07:50] pages would be laid out of course and then there also was the design of the products I'll get more into that later but this part could have been very a wonderful designer her name is Emily

[08:03] Banks and she is somebody who's on retainer on my team and so I work with her every month on my video thumbnails and on branding changes and creating PDFs already and I love working with Emily and she did all of the design work

[08:18] looks nice you can give her all the credit because she did a fantastic job with that part of things so with the design work done and the site set up the next big part of the project was to create the products themselves and these

[08:33] there were some of them that I was able to use assets that I've already created in the past for coaching programs that I run so for example I run this program called 100K Mastermind where we help people build sales funnels to sell their

[08:48] products online and so inside of that program we have all sorts of resources and assets that we've created for those students so for example there there is a

[09:00] email sequence that they can use in their sales funnels that is to sell their product so it's essentially like a launch sequence or a sales sequence and we've already mapped that whole thing out and collected swipe copy that's been

[09:14] proven to convert very well and things like that so we were able to just take all of that and package it up into this beautiful product that we can sell in the store all a cart instead of keeping it behind the pay wall of that coaching

[09:30] products that we were able to do that with however we also created some products from scratch exclusively for the shop and a great example of that is the sales page template that I created now we already have sales page templates

[09:43] and guides inside some of the coaching programs but for the most part they are kind of simple sales pages that are just like how can you throw something up quickly that will still convert well but won't take too much of your time because

[09:57] building a business building a Sal funnel those are pretty big projects and any one of the details so I just kind of FasTrack them and I give them the best time but something that I'd never done before was to create a complete guide

[10:12] for creating what we call a long form sales page so I'm not talking about like cuz sometimes they are miles long but I'm just talking about a sales page that like checks all the boxes and converts as high as possible with nothing held

[10:26] as high as possible with nothing held back so I created this whole s page layout and then I filmed videos to go along with it and explain how to write each of the different sections and then we created a workbook that communicates

[10:38] all of like the lessons that I taught in the videos plus workbook exercises to help the customers actually write their sales pages so they don't have to just what I taught them if that makes sense

[10:52] just asking them questions and letting them answer the questions and those page anyway that's an example of one of the products that I created completely from scratch now once the content for these products was created whether it's

[11:07] something that we already had then the next step was to hand it over to Emily to work her magic and just make it pretty as we say so she designed all these beautiful PDFs and different assets so that we could deliver content

[11:22] that looks really professional so for the initial launch of the shop I decided I wanted to have about 10 products available and ready to purchase and so we've been working on those for these past couple months by the way if you're

[11:34] wondering how long this whole project took we started planning it in December and then we worked on it a lot in January and the first half of February and the shop is going to be launching on February 24th which is right around the

[11:49] created we just had to upload them to the site and write descriptions for them and put the prices on them and all of that and then the shop is actually ready we are just finishing up those last couple products and then we have to get

[12:04] them uploaded and polish up a few little things but we are so so close to being ready to pull off the curtain and let you guys come in and check out all these about launch week and what that is going to look like and how we're going to

[12:19] promote it so in short like I said the shop is launching on February 24th and we're going to run a launch week from Monday the 24th through Saturday March first so it's going to be like a six day launch week and the main thing that's

[12:33] happening on launch week aside from the doors opening which will happen at noon on Monday the 24th is noon Pacific which is 3 p.m. Eastern but for that whole week everything in the shop is going to be 30% off and then also every day we

[12:49] are going to be doing a different free gift with purchase I'm not going to spell them all out right now because I want them to be surprises but I do want to give you just an example and a taste it so I want to go through the first 3

[13:01] days um on Monday every purchase is going to get our business plan template and the training I made to go with that so this is one of the products that we sell in the shop but if you buy anything in the shop on Monday the 24th and you

[13:16] will get it for free and then on Tuesday same deal in that if you buy anything on the shop you will get this for free and what's going to be for free is called what's going to be for free is called the mockup and so this is a design pack

[13:29] it's a whole bunch of images of different devices in different settings background but some of them are like a laptop on a desk or a tablet on a desk or things like that and you can drag and drop screenshots from your digital

[13:43] products into these images just in canva and then you'll have these beautiful mockups of your products that you can use on your sales page or in your emails sell in the shop but you can get it for free if you make a purchase on Tuesday

[13:57] and then on Wednesday if you make a purchase in the shop you will get one month of startup Society for free and this is probably a good time to just briefly talk about the differences between the startup shop and startup

[14:09] Society so startup Society is the membership program that I run for online business owners and it is educational so inside startup Society we have over two dozen business courses and then we also do have a lot of resources tools

[14:23] templates Etc that go along with those courses that members get access to inside the startup shop we are only going to be selling the tools we're only going to be selling swipe copy for your emails templates for your website

[14:37] writing guides for your website business plan templates all that sort of thing so there won't be any like educational type content aside from just how to use those resources and in case you're wondering no there actually isn't any crossover

[14:51] between the two so none of the resources that are available for free in startup Society to the members are going to be being sold in the shop everything in the shop is either exclusive to the shop or from one of our premium coaching

[15:04] programs okay so just to wrap this up if you are interested in being the first to know when the shop launches getting the link to access it and to check out the products and getting access to the launch Week deals then what you need to

[15:19] do is go to Gillian perkins.com sshop now that is not going to be the link for the shop when it launches but if you go to Gillian perkins.com sshop you can put your name on the launch list and then I will send you an email when we go live

[15:32] on Monday the 24th with the link to access the shop and the coupon codes to get those deals so again that link is Gillian perkins.com shop I'll definitely put it down below as well and that's where you can enter your name and email

[15:45] address to get on the launch list and be the first to know when the shop opens super random but I'm not planning to make another video about this thing I'm figured while I'm making announcements I'll make another announcement real

[16:01] quick um not only am I creating a new business but I'm also creating a new life so I'm pregnant and this is my sixth baby and I don't know if you can tell or how much it looks like I'm showing on camera but um I'm about

[16:15] due in June so we're going to launch this shop and then run a couple coaching programs and then I'm going to be off for kind of that middle later part of the summer on maternity leave well this has been a bit of a longer video but

[16:29] thank you so much for sticking around to the very end I hope you'll check out the shop when you launch and of course I always want your feedback if there's a that shop something you would love to buy from me or to learn from me then

[16:43] let me know and we can see if we can get it added but thanks so much and I hope it added but thanks so much and I hope you have an amazing week