Data, Trolls, and 15-Second Stories

Whew! It’s been a hot minute since I have posted an update. Thanks to those who reached out to check in; it has been a busy two months since my last real update.

Good news and bad news - if you came here for pie charts and tables showing where I spent my time, that is over. When I had many different activities (running my business, business acquisition, consulting, etc.), it was easier to track. Surprisingly, running just one business is too hard to track because the things within the business are much smaller blocks of time. I am bouncing around on so many tasks compared to a few months ago. Yes, multitasking and wearing multiple hats is true for entrepreneurs. I’ve had to set up some "focus time" on my phone to block certain notifications, like sales notifications from our website, so I can focus.

Speaking of multitasking, one thing that I had been pondering is how AI can improve our ability to multitask. There have been many studies, articles, podcasts, etc., that I know I have consumed about our inability to truly multitask as humans. They say it can take 20 minutes or so to shift from one task to another, so bouncing between tasks is pretty much useless to be most effective. So how does one do it effectively? Interestingly with AI, because they keep the context, when bouncing between tasks, the AI agent picks up without "context switching" - they aren't working on the other tasks. It's like I am air traffic control helping land a bunch of planes but the planes are AI agents doing various tasks for me.

A while ago I did talk about energy management over time management. I do find myself coming back to that now, but I am trying to be more data-driven. My energy could be developing our mobile app because it is something I enjoy doing, but that doesn’t pay the bills. Marketing does. Now I look at the data and decide what to work on. How did our ads do yesterday? Is it time to change them or are we seeing an issue with conversions on the website? I let the data and my energy dictate what to work on that day.

Another thing I had the energy for was re-doing the website. I decided in December that I wanted to convert our website from Squarespace to Shopify after months of sitting on this idea. It had been on my mind for a while, but in talking with other e-commerce companies and hearing how great Shopify is, I decided I wanted to do it by Jan 1 so I could have a clean pipeline in 2026 on one platform. It was done by the 5th, so I only had a few orders to convert over which worked out great.

Let me tell you, if you are going to do e-commerce as your primary income source for a business, Shopify is where it is at. Since launching, I have integrated our packing slip/thank you letter together and it’s printable within our site admin screens. I have enabled accurate shipping calculation which saves me money (I did flat shipping on Squarespace because they charged extra for the dynamic shipping calculations). I’ve set up the cost of all my products so I can get real-time profit calculations. I’ve updated the analytics dashboard to have the metrics I need, filtering out junk traffic to get more reliable metrics.

Now, I am spending more time in optimization (image size, shape, etc.). Updating the flow and storytelling of our site. Optimizing the checkout process to increase conversions, and measuring various steps in the buying journey is something I think about daily now. I never imagined I would be focusing on such minute details, but it all matters.

I did wrap up our marketing consulting contract in December as well and have been watching YouTube videos and listening to podcasts on the topic. Of course, I am also leveraging AI to help guide me through the process.

Speaking of, December, while we were doing Meta advertisements with our consultant, this was our best sales month. It was a blend of advertising and website optimization that lead to the success. Here were some fun learnings:

1. I realized that our original card game and our waterproof version (waterproof cards) were listed as different products. So I changed the products to be the same, but the waterproof was a "variant" and it forced the user to pick between the two. As soon as I did that, the waterproof started selling (and it was more expensive than the regular so an "upsell"). I let them keep selling until I decided to start slowly upping the price to test what the market was willing to pay. This took some time to decide to do it because I felt it wasn't "fair" for the next customer to pay more than the previous, but the reality is, I am running business and I needed to understand the customer willingness to pay for this product. We only had a limited number of these waterproof versions and I am not sure if we will replenish, so I wanted the data to know if it was worth purchasing again. Even though the customer was paying more for this, our margins were not as good because 1) it’s a more expensive product and 2) we bought in low volume.
2. On our website, we also didn’t have "recommended products," so I updated to have suggested products that paired well. For example, for our OG game (our primary product), I recommended a limited edition storage case that we had made for us and also our patches. As soon as I did that, they started selling.

It was after these changes I started noticing our average order size was increasing. It wasn’t people buying multiple of one product for gifts (although we did have that); it was one of each of a few things as a bundle. Now with our new website, I am trying to figure out how to re-create that with the same increase in order value because selling one $15 card game to each customer is not very sustainable when paying $50 or more on Meta advertising a day (what we have been doing over the last week or so, up from $20 a day in December).

In December, I was also walking to the post office a lot for these shipments. I started recording 15-second thank you videos to past customers from 2025. I recorded over 50 videos but ended up sending 41 (I would add closed captioning, put them on YouTube as a private video, and then email with a specific platform that could "embed" videos). The results:

41 videos sent. 20 of the emails opened. 6 people clicked it. 1 unsubscribed (they didn’t even open the video to see it was a personal message to them!). Not a single response back. I had to stop doing that for now just because of how time-consuming it is to do the sending part.

Speaking of videos and closed captions, I am spending a lot more time on video and editing. Trying to tell stories in 15-second Meta ads is not easy. As I do this more, I get better at it and it’s not as daunting as it used to be. Previously, if I had to choose between working on our mobile app (future product development) or editing videos (marketing), I would choose the app development. I was better at it and enjoyed it more. Now that I am getting better at video editing and understanding how to read the Meta dashboard metrics, I can use that with my custom AI agents to understand what is working and not working in our videos to make changes.

As I get into the marketing routine and website optimization to figure out how to make this profitable, I am also looking at some new products to launch. Specifically, we are working on a new variant of our OG game and have our graphics designer working on the images. This will help increase our average order value (AOV) because it will be a distinctly different, not competing product, which will make our marketing profitable. We also secured a new deal with a past client on a custom product which will be announced soon. This ended up being a win-win as they get a custom product and it turns into a marketing lead for us and our games. Additionally, I got another large national wholesaler which will also be announced soon.

The last thing I will leave with is, when you are building and scaling a business (especially if you are selling a product) the more people you reach, the more people will dislike your product. Yes, when you build it, the trolls will come. On the other hand, you end up meeting and hearing from customers that are complete strangers who love your product and are super encouraging.

if you build it, the trolls will come

One thing that I have reflected on too is that you have to realize that you are building something for someone, but not everyone. If you think your product is amazing and everyone should buy it, you are going to be disappointed when people don’t like it. If you accept and understand that some people will not vibe with your product, then 1) you can learn from the critiques but also 2) have fun. I am keeping a running list of the troll comments in a document so we can learn what people don’t like about it, because maybe we can make changes, but also because I am having legitimate fun responding to people in a witty but educational way.

remember: you are building a business for someone, but not everyone