Learning growth when the money was mine.
I wanted to learn paid media, so I picked a business model that would force me to learn it fast.
customers acquired.
monthly paid media spend at profitable scale.
paid social channels operated directly.
paid media experience before starting.
Find where the fish are. Learn how to cast a rod.
Dropshipping gave me a low-inventory way to learn ecommerce and paid acquisition. I still had to find a product, understand the audience, source creative and make the economics work.
My research was pretty scrappy: Google Trends, TikTok, competitor stores and a lot of doom scrolling until patterns started repeating.
After a few failed attempts, I hit blue-light glasses during COVID. There was a lot of conversation around the category, but the strongest signal was simpler: younger customers wanted them as a fashion accessory.
Find the right creator before everyone else does.
I didn’t have a creative team, so I built one manually.
I would scroll TikTok, find micro-creators who looked and spoke like the customer I wanted to reach, then email them directly with free product and, sometimes, paid-content offers.
The goal was not follower count. It was fit. Could this person make the product feel native to the audience?
Traffic only matters if everything after the click works.
The ads pushed traffic into Shopify, but getting the click was only the first half of the job.
I learned CRO by having to make the store convert: build a cohesive offer, create urgency without making the site feel fake, reduce friction and make the next action obvious.
Every part had to line up — the creator, the ad angle, the product page, the offer and the checkout.
Once the product worked, I stopped selling the same thing everyone else could source.
At first, fulfillment was classic dropshipping: a customer ordered through Shopify, I bought the product from the supplier, and the supplier shipped it to the customer.
Eventually I was spending about $10K a month on ads profitably. That was enough proof for me to take the next step.
I developed my own version of the glasses, created packaging, brought inventory into the US and moved fulfillment to a 3PL through Shopify Fulfillment Network.
Generic product, low inventory commitment, fast learning.
Custom product, packaging, inventory and US fulfillment.
It was my introduction to owning the whole business problem.
Maccesory taught me paid media, but that is not the part I value most now.
It taught me how market research, persona selection, creator sourcing, creative, CRO, product development, fulfillment and unit economics all connect.
And because it was entirely founder-funded, there was no separation between “marketing performance” and the business outcome. If the funnel did not work, I paid for it.