u/MidnightMarketing

I ran 10+ ecom brands before I was 25. Here are the 5 that taught me the most by failing.

I guess you could say I was a serial ecom entrepreneur when I was younger. Between the ages of 16 and 22, I ran somewhere between 10 and 15 online stores. Some print on demand, some dropshipping, some a little of both. Most of them failed. A few made real money. All of them taught me something.

So I put this post together where I can break down 5 of the brands, explain the ups and downs, and break down the things I've learned from these experiences.

Store 1: Living Jungles (2016)

This was one of the first dropshipping stores I built in high school. It was based around jungle animals with a focus on lions. Think lion bracelets, lion pendants, generic tees. Simple jewelry moved the best. The numbers looked decent. But every time I tried to scale the ad spend, I hit a wall.

I kept thinking it was product fatigue or bad angles. Then one day I stumbled onto a Shopify tutorial on YouTube that was made 3 months before I even started my store. It had a similar theme. Same winning product. Same layout. And half the comments were people saying they just copied the whole store.

No wonder my best-selling product was trending on AliExpress.

That's when it clicked. I wasn't just competing against real brands. I was actually competing against hundreds of people who watched the same video, copy pasted the same store, and were running low quality ads to the same audience. The market was flooded with people who had no idea what they were doing and that somehow made it worse because it trained customers to ignore everything in that niche.

Lesson: Before you build the store, go find out how many other people are already selling the same thing. Saturation from copycats is a different kind of competition and in some situations it can be more detrimental than competing against a bigger real brand.

Store 2: First Glass Drones (2017)

This one was a different kind of painful. I started on the higher ticket side selling more expensive drones. The customer acquisition cost was brutal. We were spending hundreds of dollars to acquire a customer on a product we made maybe $70 on.

So we pivoted to cheaper drones to bring the acquisition cost down. Average order value dropped from around $220 to about $50. Customer acquisition cost dropped too, but only to around $40 to $50. We were still losing.

The bigger problem was targeting. With the jungle store, I knew exactly who I was selling to. With drones, I had no idea. Some buyers were into tech. Some were into aviation. Some were filmmakers. Some were hobbyists. Completely different people with completely different reasons to buy. I never locked in a clean customer profile and the ads never found their footing because of it.

Lesson: You have to know exactly who you are selling to before you spend a dollar on ads. If you can't picture the specific person sitting on the other side of that purchase, you are not ready to advertise yet. Go hang out where your customer hangs out first.

Store 3: Crypt Tees (2019)

This one was a print on demand store selling crypto-themed apparel right at the peak of the 2019 crypto bull run. The timing felt perfect when I started this brand. I was trading crypto and deep in the crypto community. It was the hottest topic in finance at the time and the engagement around crypto was at an all time high.

The problem was advertising. You can't run Facebook ads or Google ads for anything crypto related without getting flagged. So I went directly to one of the biggest crypto YouTube channels at the time and worked out a partnership deal. We had a few successful drops. Things were moving.

Then the market crashed. Bitcoin went from $20k to around $6k in what felt like overnight. The people I was working with on that channel went from fully engaged to completely MIA. I think some of them just got wrecked in the market and disappeared. The channel's engagement dropped around 70% within 6 months. All my traffic was gone with it.

The store could have survived into the next crypto cycle years later. But I didn't wait it out.

Lesson: Two things here. Chasing trends is genuinely risky because the exit is never as obvious as the entry. And partnerships with people you don't fully know are a liability. If that team had stayed committed, we might still have had something. They didn't and I had nothing to fall back on, so I moved on.

Store 4: PrezTees (2020)

To be straight up this one was interesting. I'm not American, I saw an opportunity and I took it. From the outside looking in, the country was ridiculously divided. Tensions were high and so were the people who felt like it was necessary to wear their political beliefs on their clothing in public.

This was a print on demand store selling political apparel right after a big election cycle. I built up an organic following on Twitter when the platform's political landscape was completely different and sales came in every single day without running a single ad.

I did this in college and while my friends were working 6 hour shifts after class, I was making sales during lectures. Fun fact, the only A I ever got in college was from presenting this business to my business communication class for our Shark Tank assignment. It was supposed to be an imaginary business, but I just pretended like it wasn't real and showed the class the logos, designs, and business plan.

I knew from the start this type of product had a ceiling. You can make real money riding controversy, but you cannot scale it without risk. The bigger you get, the more you become a target. I was not interested in ending up on any kind of list or creating problems that followed me outside of the business. So I kept it controlled and eventually let it wind down.

Lesson: Short term cash grabs can work. But if you are afraid to scale something because of what might happen when it gets too big, that fear will eat at you. You cannot build a real vision around a brand you are scared to grow. Know what you are getting into before you start.

Store 5: Baking Buddies (2021)

This was honestly one of my best stores and the way it ended still stings a little.

We sold high-end baking tools. Chocolate molds, cake decorating kits, cookie stencils, the kind of stuff serious bakers actually want. I personally hate baking and everything artsy about it but I understood the customer and the product sold well. We had an incredible Q4. Christmas cake decorating kits, cookie decorating sets, holiday themed everything. We were doing around $35k a month.

Then right as we came out of Q4 and into February, my Facebook ads account got banned overnight.

What happened was my supplier had been giving me product images that were actually stolen from North American competitors. I had no idea. One of those competitors filed a copyright report, hit my ad account, and that was it. Gone. The store ran on Facebook traffic almost entirely. Without ads, there was nothing left to work with. I ended up selling the store and moving on.

Lesson: If you cannot physically order the product, shoot your own content, and verify where your images came from, you are sitting on a ticking clock. It is not worth it. Takes one report to lose everything you built. Source your own content from day one and then you can sleep at night without worrying about copyright.

To wrap this up:

I regret nothing. I made this post so you don't make the same mistakes I made.

Every one of them taught me something I could not have learned any other way. How to read a market. How to find a customer. How to spot a ceiling before you hit it. How to protect yourself legally. How to build something that can actually last.

These insights followed me into my next stages of life when I eventually stopped running my own brands and started my agency. When I started getting my first agency clients, I was not just someone who understood what I was selling, which was email marketing at the time. I was someone who had actually run the stores. I knew what a supplier headache looked like. I knew how to optimize a product page. I knew how ads interacted with the backend. Clients would hire me for emails and end up getting someone who could look at their whole operation and solve problems they didn't even know existed.

I don't know where I'd be now if I hadn't failed so much when I was younger.

I ran 10+ ecom brands before I was 25. Here are the 5 that taught me the most by failing.

I guess you could say I was a serial ecom entrepreneur when I was younger. Between the ages of 16 and 22, I ran somewhere between 10 and 15 online stores. Some print on demand, some dropshipping, some a little of both. Most of them failed. A few made real money. All of them taught me something.

So I put this post together where I can break down 5 of the brands, explain the ups and downs, and break down the things I've learned from these experiences.

Store 1: Living Jungles (2016)

This was one of the first dropshipping stores I built in high school. It was based around jungle animals with a focus on lions. Think lion bracelets, lion pendants, generic tees. Simple jewelry moved the best. The numbers looked decent. But every time I tried to scale the ad spend, I hit a wall.

I kept thinking it was product fatigue or bad angles. Then one day I stumbled onto a Shopify tutorial on YouTube that was made 3 months before I even started my store. It had a similar theme. Same winning product. Same layout. And half the comments were people saying they just copied the whole store.

No wonder my best-selling product was trending on AliExpress.

That's when it clicked. I wasn't just competing against real brands. I was actually competing against hundreds of people who watched the same video, copy pasted the same store, and were running low quality ads to the same audience. The market was flooded with people who had no idea what they were doing and that somehow made it worse because it trained customers to ignore everything in that niche.

Lesson: Before you build the store, go find out how many other people are already selling the same thing. Saturation from copycats is a different kind of competition and in some situations it can be more detrimental than competing against a bigger real brand.

Store 2: First Glass Drones (2017)

This one was a different kind of painful. I started on the higher ticket side selling more expensive drones. The customer acquisition cost was brutal. We were spending hundreds of dollars to acquire a customer on a product we made maybe $70 on.

So we pivoted to cheaper drones to bring the acquisition cost down. Average order value dropped from around $220 to about $50. Customer acquisition cost dropped too, but only to around $40 to $50. We were still losing.

The bigger problem was targeting. With the jungle store, I knew exactly who I was selling to. With drones, I had no idea. Some buyers were into tech. Some were into aviation. Some were filmmakers. Some were hobbyists. Completely different people with completely different reasons to buy. I never locked in a clean customer profile and the ads never found their footing because of it.

Lesson: You have to know exactly who you are selling to before you spend a dollar on ads. If you can't picture the specific person sitting on the other side of that purchase, you are not ready to advertise yet. Go hang out where your customer hangs out first.

Store 3: Crypt Tees (2019)

This one was a print on demand store selling crypto-themed apparel right at the peak of the 2019 crypto bull run. The timing felt perfect when I started this brand. I was trading crypto and deep in the crypto community. It was the hottest topic in finance at the time and the engagement around crypto was at an all time high.

The problem was advertising. You can't run Facebook ads or Google ads for anything crypto related without getting flagged. So I went directly to one of the biggest crypto YouTube channels at the time and worked out a partnership deal. We had a few successful drops. Things were moving.

Then the market crashed. Bitcoin went from $20k to around $6k in what felt like overnight. The people I was working with on that channel went from fully engaged to completely MIA. I think some of them just got wrecked in the market and disappeared. The channel's engagement dropped around 70% within 6 months. All my traffic was gone with it.

The store could have survived into the next crypto cycle years later. But I didn't wait it out.

Lesson: Two things here. Chasing trends is genuinely risky because the exit is never as obvious as the entry. And partnerships with people you don't fully know are a liability. If that team had stayed committed, we might still have had something. They didn't and I had nothing to fall back on, so I moved on.

Store 4: PrezTees (2020)

To be straight up this one was interesting. I'm not American, I saw an opportunity and I took it. From the outside looking in, the country was ridiculously divided. Tensions were high and so were the people who felt like it was necessary to wear their political beliefs on their clothing in public.

This was a print on demand store selling political apparel right after a big election cycle. I built up an organic following on Twitter when the platform's political landscape was completely different and sales came in every single day without running a single ad.

I did this in college and while my friends were working 6 hour shifts after class, I was making sales during lectures. Fun fact, the only A I ever got in college was from presenting this business to my business communication class for our Shark Tank assignment. It was supposed to be an imaginary business, but I just pretended like it wasn't real and showed the class the logos, designs, and business plan.

I knew from the start this type of product had a ceiling. You can make real money riding controversy, but you cannot scale it without risk. The bigger you get, the more you become a target. I was not interested in ending up on any kind of list or creating problems that followed me outside of the business. So I kept it controlled and eventually let it wind down.

Lesson: Short term cash grabs can work. But if you are afraid to scale something because of what might happen when it gets too big, that fear will eat at you. You cannot build a real vision around a brand you are scared to grow. Know what you are getting into before you start.

Store 5: Baking Buddies (2021)

This was honestly one of my best stores and the way it ended still stings a little.

We sold high-end baking tools. Chocolate molds, cake decorating kits, cookie stencils, the kind of stuff serious bakers actually want. I personally hate baking and everything artsy about it but I understood the customer and the product sold well. We had an incredible Q4. Christmas cake decorating kits, cookie decorating sets, holiday themed everything. We were doing around $35k a month.

Then right as we came out of Q4 and into February, my Facebook ads account got banned overnight.

What happened was my supplier had been giving me product images that were actually stolen from North American competitors. I had no idea. One of those competitors filed a copyright report, hit my ad account, and that was it. Gone. The store ran on Facebook traffic almost entirely. Without ads, there was nothing left to work with. I ended up selling the store and moving on.

Lesson: If you cannot physically order the product, shoot your own content, and verify where your images came from, you are sitting on a ticking clock. It is not worth it. Takes one report to lose everything you built. Source your own content from day one and then you can sleep at night without worrying about copyright.

To wrap this up:

I regret nothing. I made this post so you don't make the same mistakes I made.

Every one of them taught me something I could not have learned any other way. How to read a market. How to find a customer. How to spot a ceiling before you hit it. How to protect yourself legally. How to build something that can actually last.

These insights followed me into my next stages of life when I eventually stopped running my own brands and started my agency. When I started getting my first agency clients, I was not just someone who understood what I was selling, which was email marketing at the time. I was someone who had actually run the stores. I knew what a supplier headache looked like. I knew how to optimize a product page. I knew how ads interacted with the backend. Clients would hire me for emails and end up getting someone who could look at their whole operation and solve problems they didn't even know existed.

I don't know where I'd be now if I hadn't failed so much when I was younger.

I ran 10+ ecom brands before I was 25. Here are the 5 that taught me the most by failing.

I guess you could say I was a serial ecom entrepreneur when I was younger. Between the ages of 16 and 22, I ran somewhere between 10 and 15 online stores. Some print on demand, some dropshipping, some a little of both. Most of them failed. A few made real money. All of them taught me something.

So I put this post together where I can break down 5 of the brands, explain the ups and downs, and break down the things I've learned from these experiences.

Store 1: Living Jungles (2016)

This was one of the first dropshipping stores I built in high school. It was based around jungle animals with a focus on lions. Think lion bracelets, lion pendants, generic tees. Simple jewelry moved the best. The numbers looked decent. But every time I tried to scale the ad spend, I hit a wall.

I kept thinking it was product fatigue or bad angles. Then one day I stumbled onto a Shopify tutorial on YouTube that was made 3 months before I even started my store. It had a similar theme. Same winning product. Same layout. And half the comments were people saying they just copied the whole store.

No wonder my best-selling product was trending on AliExpress.

That's when it clicked. I wasn't just competing against real brands. I was actually competing against hundreds of people who watched the same video, copy pasted the same store, and were running low quality ads to the same audience. The market was flooded with people who had no idea what they were doing and that somehow made it worse because it trained customers to ignore everything in that niche.

Lesson: Before you build the store, go find out how many other people are already selling the same thing. Saturation from copycats is a different kind of competition and in some situations it can be more detrimental than competing against a bigger real brand.

Store 2: First Glass Drones (2017)

This one was a different kind of painful. I started on the higher ticket side selling more expensive drones. The customer acquisition cost was brutal. We were spending hundreds of dollars to acquire a customer on a product we made maybe $70 on.

So we pivoted to cheaper drones to bring the acquisition cost down. Average order value dropped from around $220 to about $50. Customer acquisition cost dropped too, but only to around $40 to $50. We were still losing.

The bigger problem was targeting. With the jungle store, I knew exactly who I was selling to. With drones, I had no idea. Some buyers were into tech. Some were into aviation. Some were filmmakers. Some were hobbyists. Completely different people with completely different reasons to buy. I never locked in a clean customer profile and the ads never found their footing because of it.

Lesson: You have to know exactly who you are selling to before you spend a dollar on ads. If you can't picture the specific person sitting on the other side of that purchase, you are not ready to advertise yet. Go hang out where your customer hangs out first.

Store 3: Crypt Tees (2019)

This one was a print on demand store selling crypto-themed apparel right at the peak of the 2019 crypto bull run. The timing felt perfect when I started this brand. I was trading crypto and deep in the crypto community. It was the hottest topic in finance at the time and the engagement around crypto was at an all time high.

The problem was advertising. You can't run Facebook ads or Google ads for anything crypto related without getting flagged. So I went directly to one of the biggest crypto YouTube channels at the time and worked out a partnership deal. We had a few successful drops. Things were moving.

Then the market crashed. Bitcoin went from $20k to around $6k in what felt like overnight. The people I was working with on that channel went from fully engaged to completely MIA. I think some of them just got wrecked in the market and disappeared. The channel's engagement dropped around 70% within 6 months. All my traffic was gone with it.

The store could have survived into the next crypto cycle years later. But I didn't wait it out.

Lesson: Two things here. Chasing trends is genuinely risky because the exit is never as obvious as the entry. And partnerships with people you don't fully know are a liability. If that team had stayed committed, we might still have had something. They didn't and I had nothing to fall back on, so I moved on.

Store 4: PrezTees (2020)

To be straight up this one was interesting. I'm not American, I saw an opportunity and I took it. From the outside looking in, the country was ridiculously divided. Tensions were high and so were the people who felt like it was necessary to wear their political beliefs on their clothing in public.

This was a print on demand store selling political apparel right after a big election cycle. I built up an organic following on Twitter when the platform's political landscape was completely different and sales came in every single day without running a single ad.

I did this in college and while my friends were working 6 hour shifts after class, I was making sales during lectures. Fun fact, the only A I ever got in college was from presenting this business to my business communication class for our Shark Tank assignment. It was supposed to be an imaginary business, but I just pretended like it wasn't real and showed the class the logos, designs, and business plan.

I knew from the start this type of product had a ceiling. You can make real money riding controversy, but you cannot scale it without risk. The bigger you get, the more you become a target. I was not interested in ending up on any kind of list or creating problems that followed me outside of the business. So I kept it controlled and eventually let it wind down.

Lesson: Short term cash grabs can work. But if you are afraid to scale something because of what might happen when it gets too big, that fear will eat at you. You cannot build a real vision around a brand you are scared to grow. Know what you are getting into before you start.

Store 5: Baking Buddies (2021)

This was honestly one of my best stores and the way it ended still stings a little.

We sold high-end baking tools. Chocolate molds, cake decorating kits, cookie stencils, the kind of stuff serious bakers actually want. I personally hate baking and everything artsy about it but I understood the customer and the product sold well. We had an incredible Q4. Christmas cake decorating kits, cookie decorating sets, holiday themed everything. We were doing around $35k a month.

Then right as we came out of Q4 and into February, my Facebook ads account got banned overnight.

What happened was my supplier had been giving me product images that were actually stolen from North American competitors. I had no idea. One of those competitors filed a copyright report, hit my ad account, and that was it. Gone. The store ran on Facebook traffic almost entirely. Without ads, there was nothing left to work with. I ended up selling the store and moving on.

Lesson: If you cannot physically order the product, shoot your own content, and verify where your images came from, you are sitting on a ticking clock. It is not worth it. Takes one report to lose everything you built. Source your own content from day one and then you can sleep at night without worrying about copyright.

To wrap this up:

I regret nothing. I made this post so you don't make the same mistakes I made.

Every one of them taught me something I could not have learned any other way. How to read a market. How to find a customer. How to spot a ceiling before you hit it. How to protect yourself legally. How to build something that can actually last.

These insights followed me into my next stages of life when I eventually stopped running my own brands and started my agency. When I started getting my first agency clients, I was not just someone who understood what I was selling, which was email marketing at the time. I was someone who had actually run the stores. I knew what a supplier headache looked like. I knew how to optimize a product page. I knew how ads interacted with the backend. Clients would hire me for emails and end up getting someone who could look at their whole operation and solve problems they didn't even know existed.

I don't know where I'd be now if I hadn't failed so much when I was younger.