It's been 6 months and I still haven't launched
Months 4-6: Finding the balance between part-time business and full-time work
Welcome! Small Business Chronicles is a blog where I candidly share my journey to build a creative small business while managing a full-time job as a product manager. If you’re a Medium member, you can also receive these post updates directly on Medium instead.
The business I’m building is called Joyfully Books — a place to find the most personalisable storybooks to give as a joyful gift to a special child in your life.
I thought I learned this lesson the first time I quit my job to build a startup —
“Launch fast.”
“If you’re not embarrassed by your first product, you’ve launched too late.”
“Fail fast, fail often.”
Even though I knew I’d go slower building in my 5-9, I didn’t think I’d be this slow.
But before I start making excuses, lets jump into updates.
I finally launched my website 🎉
I don’t have anything to sell yet, but the purpose of the website is to share what I’m building and connect with anyone interested in what I will eventually sell.
For the SaaS-curious, I used Webflow. I hesitated between that or Shopify. Shopify seemed the “right” choice for anything e-commerce (Webflow’s e-commerce offering is pretty poor — according to my research on Reddit).
My learning was just to not overthink it. There is no perfect SaaS. So just use what you’re comfortable with — that’ll be the fastest way to get running. For me, that’s Webflow.
I’d love for you to check it out and let me know what you think!: https://joyfullybooks.com
4 storybook pages illustrated, 6 to go…
When I started illustrating my first personalisable storybook, my process was just to complete each page, one by one.
That wasn’t a great idea. Instead, I wish I had outlined the whole book upfront so I could see how it was all going to come together. It would’ve helped me know which illustrations needed to be full-feature pages versus spot illustrations.
Anyway, I’ve got around to that now (finally).
I’m using Canva Print, for no other reason than I wanted to try out their new print platform (and free shipping of course).
Was illustrating the book myself, instead of hiring a professional illustrator the right choice? I’m still not sure. As much as I love the opportunity to improve my illustration skills, this was a much, much slower way to build. I’m hoping by illustrating the book myself, customers will be more likely to support the business. We’ll see.
If I could go back in time and start again…
I would’ve started with selling something small. (Yeah, yeah, this is just the lean start up / MVP approach — nothing new here.)
But I mean really small. Like personalised children’s sticker labels, bookmarks, magnets… anything smaller than a whole dang book. It might be a different product, but my assumption is that it’d be attracting a similar audience.
I could be learning how to do marketing, fulfilling orders, and getting feedback — instead of spending all my time… well, not doing those things.
But it’s not too late to pivot (probably).
I think I had the right idea when I started with children’s portrait commissions on Etsy. Oh yeah, that Etsy shop got banned by the way — I wrote about it on Medium.
Finding my golden hour 🌇
When I was working on my startup full-time, I found it difficult to structure my days and fill my time productively.
Now I have the opposite problem. With limited time during my week, I have to be really strategic about my time.
Even then, I find it more helpful to think of it as an energy management, rather than a time management problem.
There are certain times of day when I naturally have more or less energy for certain tasks. I generally categorise them into 3 blocks:
Easy tasks for the evening: Anything administrative or pure execution (such as website updates and video editing), I can usually batch in a 1-2 hour evening block on a weekday.
Medium-difficulty tasks for a morning: Writing is an activity I’m now comfortable doing — it just takes time to get stuck into. This has been easier to accomplish during a morning (e.g. 7-9 am before a workday). It’ll usually take me 2-3 of these blocks to complete a new article (e.g. for my Medium).
Hard tasks and deep work for a weekend block: Anything creative (such as illustration) or requiring deep flow (e.g. designing the first version of my website), I’ll save for a weekend when I can block out a larger chunk of time (2-3 hour blocks).
An update on “building in public”
Ok so the whole “haven’t launched yet after 6 month” debacle aside, I still find myself proud of simply not having given up yet.
I haven’t made a large amount of progress when measured against any kind of business metric — but I have been taking small, consistent steps week-on-week and spending a fair chunk of time outside my day job working on the side.
But I’d say 80% of that time has been on content, and only 20% on the product.
This was (at least, initially) a deliberate choice, since one of the major factors for my previous startup’s failure was lack of a strong distribution channel.
Not only that, building in public (on Substack, Medium, and Tik Tok) is my main accountability tool.
Here’s an update on my main 2 platforms (Tik Tok and Medium).
Tik Tok traction has been slow
After 5 months of posting 2 videos per week and experimenting with different formats, I’ve:
Gained 300 followers
Had 1 successful viral-ish video (15K views)
Had 2-3 other moderately successful videos (~1-3K views)
Everything else usually falls within 200-500 views. In general I’m observing that lifestyle content performs a lot better than my art content. To do well in the art niche, you need to have a pretty spectular style or talent for it.
But I’m not ready to give up on it just yet. Visual content is surely the way to go to promote a creative small business like mine.
In contrast, Medium traction has been strong
I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the traction of my Medium articles recently.
For background, I’ve been writing on Medium since 2020. I was never too serious about it — I started by just cross-posting content that I was writing for my former startup as part of our content marketing and SEO strategy.
This changed when I decided to try writing about my failed startup experience.
The caveat was that it made me less excited about posting blog updates here on Substack, when I knew I could be spending that time on articles for Medium.
The compromise I reached was reposting the blog content here on my new Medium blog — but posts will be available free-to-read here on Substack also!
What’s next?
For the last few months, I’ve been focused on creating content.
However, I’m running dry on content ideas, given I haven’t progressed on the product and business side of things.
So for the next few months, I’ll be focused on getting my first product shipped.
Until next time,
Joy