이커머스 비즈니스 여정에서 얻은 교훈

### 실패에서 수백만 달러로: 비즈니스 구축에서 얻은 교훈
* 💭 2017년 말, 부모님과 함께 살던 23살의 나이에 대학과 여러 사업에 실패한 후 **은행 계좌에 0달러만 남은 채 백만장자가 되고 싶다는 열망**으로 전환점을 맞았습니다.
* 📈 페이스북에서 가중 담요에 관한 게시물을 발견한 후, **과학적 증거가 뒷받침되는 시장 기회**를 발견하고 과거의 실패에도 불구하고 마지막으로 창업에 도전해보고 싶다는 동기가 생겼습니다.
* 🛍 중국에서 샘플을 소싱하고 제한된 리소스로 Shopify 스토어를 만든 후 사업을 시작하여 **몇 시간 만에 1,000달러 이상의 선주문**을 달성하며 아이디어를 검증했습니다.
* 💰 첫해에는 **1,000만 달러 이상의 매출과 150만 달러의 수익**을 올렸지만, 급성장하는 과정에서 중대한 경영 실수를 저지르면서 **2년 차에는 수익이 250만 달러로 떨어졌습니다.**
* ⚠ 제가 저지른 주요 실수로는 **욕심 때문에 관리 능력을 흐리게** 하고, **제품 전략을 소홀히** 하고, **재고를 효과적으로 관리하지 못해 상당한 손실**과 시장 점유율 하락을 초래한 것이 있습니다.
* 📊 저는 지속 가능한 성장, 명확한 재무 보고, 잘 정의된 제품 전략의 중요성을 배웠고, 더 나은 효율성을 위해 비즈니스를 재구성하면서 **집중의 이점이 즉각적으로 나타난다**는 것을 깨달았습니다.
* 🔍 결국 저는 창업 여정에서 겸손의 필요성과 실패에서 얻은 교훈을 강조하면서 **성공적인 벤처에 집중하기 위해 실적이 저조한 브랜드를 폐쇄**하기로 결정했습니다.
* 📚 이제 저는 **YouTube와 같은 플랫폼과 일일 멘토링**을 통해 이러한 인사이트를 공유하여 다른 사람들이 제 경험을 통해 배우고 비즈니스 활동에서 유사한 함정을 피할 수 있도록 독려하고 있습니다.

기업가의 여정은 지속 가능한 비즈니스 성공을 위해서는 집중력과 전략적 계획이 필수적이라는 것을 가르쳐 줍니다.

In 2018, I started one of the world's fastest-growing online businesses. We made millions of dollars in sales and helped a lot of people. Let me take you back to where it all began. It was late 2017, and I was at a crossroads. At 23 years old, I was living with my parents, and I had just failed university and a string of businesses. I had $0 in my bank account. All I ever wanted at this point was to be a millionaire, and I was very close to giving up, questioning all of my abilities, wondering if I had what it really takes to be successful. I'd sit there at night watching people on YouTube, wondering if I was smart enough to become rich. One day, I was scrolling through Facebook, and I came across a post that changed my life forever. It was a mom who was making weighted blankets for her autistic child, and there was a lot of hype around it. There were so many comments saying, Where can I get this? Where can I get this? But

Unfortunately, she wasn't selling, so after some research, I found that there was actual scientific evidence supporting the benefits of weighted blankets for anxiety and sleeping. I thought I could be on to something here, and the science actually backed me up. Even though I was honestly down and out from so many of my other business failures, I decided to give this business thing just one more shot. If it failed, I'd go back, and I would never launch another business. I would just go back to videography and just travel the world. So, the first thing I did was I went onto Alibaba to look for my supplier, but I couldn't find any listings that even mentioned weighted blankets. And it turns out that this was actually a good sign. I was very, very early to the trend. If nobody was manufacturing them, nobody was actually selling them, and because of the Facebook post, I already knew there was demand. So, using all of the money that I had left, and I was just doing some videography clients here and there, just funneling it in, I managed to get this

beautiful sample of a 7-kilo weighted blanket from China. It was gray. It was stunning. I honestly couldn't afford a full order at this stage because I was just so broke from like all my last failures. I then had to get my mom and my girlfriend and my neighbor's child to actually model the blankets around the house. I couldn't afford an actual model or photo shoot, and I was just taking photos, and then I just set up a basic Shopify store. I launched the store on a Saturday night and set up like the worst Facebook ads you've ever seen, not knowing how it was going to go, and also knowing that if I didn't get any traction initially, I was just going to run out of like money in a few days. Within a few hours, I just heard that Shide kaching instantly. It was just complete relief. It just kept coming in kaching kaching kaching, and we did over $1,000 very, very quickly for a month pre-order, meaning that we didn't have

the product, but we were going to ship it in a month, and people were still willing to purchase now and wait. This was just a huge validation. I remember thinking, Okay, I'm going to be an overnight success. In our first year, we made over $10 million in sales and $1.5 million in profit. The second year, that number grew to $2.5 million in profit. It was a crazy feeling trying to launch businesses for 6 years straight, constantly falling short, then suddenly this happening. What really just felt like overnight, we scaled quickly, hiring an amazing team, overtaking our competitors, achieving the number one spot on Google for weighted blanket, and we really kind of became synonymous with the product. People would say, Oh, I'm going to get a calming blanket rather than a weighted blanket. We were also helping people; we had amazing reviews. I started to dream even bigger, thinking about how big I could take the business. I got an offer to sell the business for over $10 million, but then around October 2020, upward trajectory

just completely took a sharp downturn, and everything changed. Next 12 months, our profits plummeted. We went from like 1 month we made 500,000 to losing over like a million dollars in the year because of that. You know, we learned so much from these failures. It was only when I took a really hard look at my business that I was able to pinpoint these three major mistakes that I made. If you're an aspiring entrepreneur or just trying to scale your business, this is just really important that you listen to what I'm about to say because I don't want you making the same mistakes again. So, the first mistake that I made was allowing hype and greed to turn me into a poor manager. When you start making a lot of money, something really funny happens. Suddenly, you get really afraid of losing it. You think you're going to be happy, but you're actually just scared. A common thing that entrepreneurs do in this situation is they try to repeat their initial success in another secondary business. They use the rationale that if

business. A gets taken away from them. At least they'll have business B making money now. This logic is so flawed. What it does is make suboptimal decisions with your time and resources. Now, I took this even further. I launched over 10 brands after climbing blankets, which meant that I would spend at maximum 1 hour focusing on cing blankets a week, and I was making millions of dollars. I was ignoring the need for tight financial control and clear C centers for each brand. I allowed each business and their financials just to all merge into one big mess under one account. It was hard to even know if we were making money because I wasn't sure who was working on what. I also hired aggressively and expanded our team to about 100 people. I was just so focused on the bottom line as a whole across all the brands, so I was ignoring calming blankets communication. Then just became so complex. Tracking output was challenging. Motivating a large team was way harder than I thought as well. Now keep in mind this was my first

successful business, and these were the first people that I have ever hired. The main mistake that I think I made here was nobody in the company was properly incentivized, whether calming blankets lived or died or thrived. I failed to realize also that the beauty of e-commerce is that they can stay lean. You can hire VAs; you don't need to hire full-time employees, and they can work on a fractal basis. The final thing to summarize is a David Sax's quote, which is, The benefits of synergies are hypothetical, but the benefits of focus are immediate. We lacked focus and paid the price. We ended up restructuring our entire organization, and each business became its own entity with dedicated teams and clear profit centers. This is how it should have been set up from the beginning, but it was just too late. Now, the second mistake was not having a basic product strategy. We expanded into new brands, new products without a clear strategy, launching variations of the weighted blanket, such as a hand-woven weighted blanket, silver iron.

weighted blanket bamboo weighted blankets would keep our customers just constantly coming back. This approach just didn't work. It diluted our brand and confused our customers. We just also moved far too quickly, not giving each product drop a proper process. You see, each product that you drop on e-commerce should have a clear unique selling proposition that creates the ability to acquire new customers at a profitable acquisition cost on Facebook. In my current successful brands, we do this very well. We spend so much time thinking and planning about new products. Then Crazy came up my brand. The Udi entered the market as a cheaper alternative. Yeah, I know what you're thinking. It's pretty stupid that I started competing with my own brand. They focused on a lower-cost product, making it possible to sell a cheaper product using their massive size and brand strength. The problem was the Udi was also using the same marketing channels as King W. It was even worse than Kart. OD ended up becoming probably the number one seller of weighted blankets in Australia. But this comes

back down to product. Our initial product strategy didn't provide the long-term leverage we needed, and our only defense was our brand and our high-quality product. The results: customers just kind of flopped to this lower end of the market. Our brand just wasn't strong enough to retain customers, and we lost a significant market share. We didn't have a clear product flywheelers like Udi, where we create different variations of the udies and drop them month-on-month. I realized that we probably should have had unique painted products or licensed designs so that people like Kmart would have to stock us, or better yet, if we had really beautiful and unique products, our revenue would have climbed, and we could have even just created our own beautiful stores. Now, this brings me to our third mistake that we failed to do, and this was planning on multiple fronts, but mainly inventory in e-commerce. Stuffing up your inventory levels can send you bankrupt. We launched too many products without proper inventory forecasting in place, which meant that all of our money

was sitting into inventory in the mess of rapidly scaling. We began selling out of our top sellers of cing blankets, and we didn't even notice. So, we were forced to advertise our non-top sellers, and these had very, very bad customer acquisition costs. And it also really ruined our brand image as well. We then had to clear a lot of this inventory at a loss so that we could restock our good inventory. Even during peak co-times when demand was high, we were still unprofitable because we couldn't get our top-selling products in stock. Compare this with the supply chain crisis that happened iOS 14.5 with rising acquisition costs, and suppliers were taking forever as well. We just couldn't get our inventory under control. So, why am I sharing this story? Because I want you to succeed by learning from my mistakes. Trust me, successful people fail even more than unsuccessful people. Anything that I kind of want you to take away, it's these six important lessons that I learned from this failure. First, don't scale faster. Rapid expansion can

lead to inefficiencies and increased risk. Instead, growth should be sustainable and well-managed. Second, define a clear financial reporting and strategic plan. If you're unsure about your financial health, don't hesitate to bring in a fractional C-level employee like a CFO to get things cleared up. Next, focus on product and market diversification. Even though our initial product strategy worked, it wasn't defensible in the long run. We should have developed these unique products and built a product flywheel. But there's always a kicker here: you don't want to do that too early or too late. Next is to get your team structure up. Ensure clear roles and responsibilities while incentivizing those who have power in the business with financial rewards. Next is to recognize and act on issues quickly. Don't wait too long to pivot when something isn't working. The Pareto principle, or the 80/20 rule, is critical. Focus on the 20% of activities that drive 80% of your results. And lastly, this failure taught me the importance of focus and humility. Not every venture

succeeds, but every failure is a lesson. So, where is cing blankets now? Now, unfortunately, alongside with a lot of my other e-commerce brands that were ranging from small profits to very unprofitable, I decided to turn them all off. I now focus on the udie, my investments, YouTube, and daily Mentor. If you like today's video, hit subscribe, and if there's anything you're struggling with on your business journey, just either join daily Mentor or join the free eCommerce course. I'm here to help.

How I Went From $0 to $10M in 12 Months [the most profitable online business for 2025]

Davie Fogarty

성공으로 가는 여정: 온라인 비즈니스 시작하기

2018년, 저자는 실패와 부모님과의 생활로 어려움을 겪은 후 빠르게 성장하는 온라인 비즈니스를 시작했습니다.

인생을 바꾼 담요에 대한 페이스북 게시물이 아이디어를 촉발시켰고, 저자는 이 트렌드에 일찍 뛰어든 것이 유리하게 작용했습니다.

제한된 리소스로 Shopify 스토어를 개설하고 빠르게 1,000달러 이상의 선주문을 달성하며 성공의 시작을 알렸습니다.

성공적인 비즈니스의 여정과 그 도전 과제

첫해에 천만 달러 이상의 매출과 150만 달러의 수익을 올리며 빠르게 성장했습니다.

창업자의 성공은 공격적인 확장과 여러 브랜드 출시로 이어졌고, 이로 인해 경영난과 재정적 혼란을 초래했습니다.

하지만 2020년 10월에 이르러 수익이 급감하면서 급격한 확장 과정에서 저지른 실수로부터 소중한 교훈을 얻게 되었습니다.

성공적인 비즈니스를 구축하기 위한 실수

첫 번째 실수는 직원들에게 적절한 인센티브를 제공하지 않고 린 이커머스 모델의 이점을 실현하지 못한 것이었습니다.

집중력과 명확한 제품 전략의 부재로 인해 브랜드 확장이 혼란스러워지고 고객 충성도가 희석되었습니다.

자체 브랜드와 저가 제품 경쟁으로 상황이 더욱 복잡해졌고, 그 결과 경쟁업체가 호주에서 가장 많이 판매되는 담요가 되었습니다.

초기 제품 전략은 장기적인 영향력이 부족하여 시장 점유율과 고객 유지율이 떨어졌습니다.

독특한 제품 변형과 라이선스 디자인으로 매출과 브랜드 인지도를 높일 수 있었습니다.

잘못된 재고 계획 및 예측으로 인해 재정적 어려움을 겪고 브랜드 이미지가 손상되어 효과적인 재고 관리의 중요성이 부각되었습니다.

비효율과 위험을 피하려면 지속 가능하고 잘 관리된 성장이 중요합니다.

명확한 재무 보고 및 전략 계획을 수립하고 필요한 경우 부분적인 CFO를 영입하면 재무 건전성을 명확히 하는 데 도움이 될 수 있습니다.

제품 및 시장 다각화와 함께 강력한 팀 구조와 신속한 문제 인식은 성공적인 결과를 이끌어내는 데 핵심적인 요소입니다.