The Commerce Club Podcast

S202: I always said I’d never start an E-Commerce business - I lied!

• Sophie Biggerstaff • Season 2 • Episode 2

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I always said I’d never start an E-Commerce business, but I lied…

Or atleast changed my mind.

In this episode I share my journey of launching my own ecommerce business Tinah, which is a mental wellbeing marketplace on a mission to change the narrative around mental health.

I fill you in on everything you might want to know from the inspiration behind the business, the challenges we’ve faced setting up, and the steps we took to bring the business to life.

If you’re looking to set up your own e-commerce business check out my FREE Start Your Ecommerce Business tool kit - a 30-day action plan for the first month of you launching your ecommerce business.

If you've enjoy this episode please make sure to hit that subscribe button:

And if you’re interested in learning more and supporting TINAH you can find us here:

www.timeisnotahealer.com

https://www.instagram.com/timeisnotahealer

https://www.tiktok.com/@timeisnotahealer

You can also find my online course I followed to set up my e-commerce business right here: https://thecommerceclub.co/p/the-e-commerce-launch-pad

If you've enjoyed this episode please make sure to hit that subscribe button :)

Incase you just stumbled across this episode and we haven’t met before let’s get formally introduced here: www.itssophiebiggerstaff.com

If you’re an e-commerce business owner looking for support I host my online courses designed for you here: www.thecommerceclub.co

For more content like this follow me on socials:

Instagram: https://instagram.com/itssophiebiggerstaff

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@itssophiebiggerstaff

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophie-biggerstaff-retail-consultant/

Subscribe for free business resources: https://itssophiebiggerstaff.myflodesk.com/instagram

I'm launching a new ecommerce business and as promised I wanted to tell you all about it because I always said literally throughout my whole career, particularly when I started consulting for ecommerce businesses, that I would never ever start my own ecommerce business ever. And this time last year I decided to break my own rule and launch my own ecommerce business.

Now, that decision did not come lightly. I had been sitting on a business idea for a really long time and that business idea had been going through various different iterations as it does when you're first kind of figuring something out that you want to venture into. And basically, it got to a point where I was like, I cannot.

not launch this business. Like I owe it to myself, I owe it to other people to launch this business. It just felt like such the right thing to do. And the business is called Tinah, also known as Time Is Not Healer, the official name is Time Is Not Healer. And basically, let me tell you a bit about how Tinah became a thing. If you've listened to other episodes, or if you follow me on social media, or if you follow Tinah on social media,

You will know that mental health has been a topic of conversation in my life for at least the past four years and trying to improve my mental health has been a massive focus for me over the past four years and I have pretty much tried every single healing root technique, method, you name it, I've tried it just to see what helps me with my mental health struggles. I have classically always struggled with anxiety and on occasion depression.

I am surrounded by people that also struggle with these things but aren't necessarily aware that they're the things that are struggling with because they haven't educated themselves into understanding the world of mental health and one big issue in the UK particularly is that mental health issues are not recognized in the same way as a physical health problem and as somebody that has gone through the NHS system to try and

get mental health support, I have found myself tirelessly frustrated at the level of support that is available for people out there. And I wanted to do something about it. So this idea actually came when I was living in Bali back in 2022. And I actually met a psychologist who was living there as well. And we got chatting and I was like, do you know what? I've got this business idea. This is something that I want to pursue.

but at the time it wasn't anything to do with e -commerce. And she was like, great, let's do it. So I pitched it to her. She was like, yeah, let's go for it. We had a few meetings. We mapped out some ideas, but eventually we worked out that she wasn't quite the right fit for the business. And the idea that we had was going to be a massive, massive, massive project. And neither of us really had the capacity to launch it. So.

I parked it. I parked that conversation, that idea for about six months and then at the middle of 2023 it just kept presenting itself to me. I just kept having these conversations with people about it and they were like, that's a great idea. And then I was like, I'm going to have to just do this. Now at the same time I was

Launching my online courses for ecommerce business founders to help them set up their business. So I figured okay Well, if I'm launching these courses to people that are gonna help them launch their own ecommerce business I should just follow the same course and launch my own business as well in the ecommerce and mental health world so I Just decided to go for it. I was living in Albania last summer and I was like, you know what?

why am I not launching this idea? Like I've got this idea, need to practice what I preach, I always tell people they shouldn't sit on their ideas. Whenever a founder comes to me for online mentoring, I'm literally like, come on, we need to go, let's go, let's go, run with your idea. Somebody else is gonna take it otherwise. And I just decided to go for it. And I remember sitting in this apartment that I'd rented in one of the beach towns in Albania, and I was like, midnight, up.

thinking I have to just do it. So the next morning I literally just decided to start mapping out the business plan, decided to figure out what the business was going to look like. And I decided to combine obviously the two passions, the mental health passion, and then obviously my knowledge, experience, expertise in e -commerce and build a mental wellbeing marketplace. Now, even in the past year, that's obviously gone through various different iterations. And when I first started out, I decided that I wanted to drop ship all the products I had.

no budget, like zero pounds. Any money that I was going to put into this business was coming out of my own pocket. I wasn't particularly interested in getting investment at that point. And I figured, right, I need to find mental health products that are going to support people on this journey and take them on this journey to make changes in their life to benefit their mental health because I know it's possible from what I've done.

How do I then build that into a business? So I started researching on different ideas and decided on a dropship model to find products that already existed from other people, bring them onto my platform and be a little bit like the Etsy or the ASOS marketplace of mental health. Now, every single person that I spoke to, whenever I pitched them the idea, they were like, that is such a great idea. It's such a necessary resource. Like when you're in a mental health blip.

The last thing you want to be doing is going out and trying to figure out what is going to help you in that moment in time. So this marketplace is a place where you can literally come and find a one -stop shop of all the things that are going to support you. You're going to be able to find the products that you need to help you. You're going to be able to find the routines and habits and the behavioural changes that you need to make to support your mental health. So the idea is that it's a one -stop shop.

So then I was like, right, okay, how do I bring this to life? So obviously I own this online course that teaches people how to set up their own e -commerce business. So I literally went to module one and was like, what's the first step that I teach other people? And the first step was kind of, I'd already done a bit of market research, but I did a little bit more. And then the next kind of step was to try and map out my ideal target customer, figure out who and if there were any competitors.

and also try and bring an identity to that brand to try and like bring my idea to life a little bit. So they were the first steps that I recommend to my clients in my online courses and also how I work when I work one on one with people as well. So that's what I did. I took it back to basics, I did the market research, I wrote out a customer profile, created a little avatar for them.

I did a little bit of research into the market to see if there's anybody else doing what we're trying to do and to be honest there wasn't. There are other platforms that do something similar but it's generalised health, it is not specifically focused towards mental health so there is a definite gap in the market and then I was like right I need to bring this brand to life. Now I am, although I've always worked in creative jobs, I am actually not the most creative person.

So coming up with a name was quite difficult for me and coming up with like a brand identity was quite difficult for me. But I figured that was my first starting point to really try and understand like how this brand was going to be coming to life. So I basically just started writing down different words that I associated with mental health. And in that process, I came to the conclusion that when

was struggling with my mental health, something that people would always say to me was you know don't worry time is gonna heal you and that phrase literally used to drive me absolutely crazy because I was like well you know I've been struggling now for like six months like nothing's changing nothing's helping me through this situation so I don't think time is the solution.

So I started writing down time, time, time, healing time, like what am I gonna, mental health, like what am I gonna call this business? And I chopped all of those words into ChatGPT to try and say, can you pose me a couple of different ideas for names of the business based on these keywords? So it chucked me out a couple of solutions, didn't really like any of them. And then I just kept writing down the phrase, time is not a healer, and I was like.

boom, that's the name because I truly believe that like time is not going to heal you when it comes to your mental health. Time is simply a resource that you can use to change things about your lifestyle and your life, your daily habits, your behaviors, your routines to then fix your mental health. So I was like, boom, Tinah, well time's not healer. And then I looked at the words and I was like, they spell all of the first letters.

spell Tinah and I was like great we can actually create a personality for this brand from this name so I decided to call her Tinah or he whatever we want to, there's no gender assigned to this business but yeah I basically just came up with that name from just like brainstorming those different ideas and like thinking about things and advice that I'd been given

And finally it got to a point where I called it time is not a healer. And then I started working on how I was going to bring that all to life. And that was the next stage of the course, my module two in the Commerce Club course and the Commerce Launchpad. I moved on to that and the next step was essentially trying to figure out like, am going to sell?

So that's actually the easiest part for me because I was a buyer for 10 years in the e -commerce and retail world. I worked for some of the world's biggest fashion brands including Ralph Lauren Burberry, Kate Spade, Diesel and I was a buyer for multi -million pound businesses. So the part around the product is like literally duck to water. The most easy thing for me to do could literally do it with my eyes closed.

But when it's for your own business, it's actually kind of intimidating because you obviously want to make sure everything's perfect, right? And I am, I would say I'm not a perfectionist because I will happily just try and see what happens rather than actually, you know, try and make it perfect before I put it out there. I'd rather just chuck something out there because I think sometimes you can get so caught up in like perfectionism that then you never put anything out there.

So I didn't necessarily make anything perfect before I started pitching to people or sharing things on social media. I just went for it and was hoping for the best. And I had so many ideas bubbling up of what this business could be. And then a friend reached out to me. And my friend is actually somebody that has been very... What's the word?

a very big factor in my mental wellbeing journey and the way that I've like gone about it because when I lived in Bali I met a called Kelsey and Kelsey has a background in psychology and she actually has a high performance coaching business where she supports founders of big businesses, structure their businesses to be more efficient for them to be more efficient as a founder and

I went to her when I was really struggling when I was living in Bali and my business was kind of a bit chaotic and you know I didn't really know 100 % how I wanted to proceed with it. My mental health was really struggling and I was actually physically ill as well. So I went to her and I was like I need to scrap it and start it again and she like basically just made me see

where my limiting beliefs are holding me back, like where things in my life weren't really supportive of the person that I wanted to be. And actually my mental health journey, I would say really started with Kelsey, like giving me some advice to start bringing in some more healthy habits into my life. And Kelsey approached me when she saw like, when I started posting a little bit about Tinah online, she approached me and was like, you know what, I actually really want to get involved in this business. Like it sounds great. Now Kelsey, if you listen to our podcast over on Tinah.

or you've watched any of our content on Tinah, if you haven't, go and check it out. We're at Time Is Not Here though on most of the different social media platforms and also on YouTube. Kelsey has had her own experiences with mental health and unfortunately her mum had passed away last summer so she was literally approaching me like two, three months after this it all happened and I just knew that she was going to be a perfect fit for what Tinah needed.

I am very much an ideas person, I love taking action but I'm not necessarily the most most streamlined or do things in a logical way. I'm very much about strategy and like coming up with like different creative ways to do things but she is very like operationally efficient and just like really like brings me back down to a little bit because I can I'm a Pisces I get carried away.

So basically I brought her on board as fractional COO of Tinah. I always said that if I started a second business I didn't really want to do it alone and she is just like the perfect fit for Tinah. Like she couldn't have had a outcome with somebody to run this business with. Obviously there's been

so many different challenges along the way of launching this business and it's gone through different variations of different business models and you'll obviously see when we launch officially what the final outcome has been. But basically we've gone on a journey over the past 10, 12 months of trying to bring this idea to life and initially when I started I had this really ambitious goal of launching within a three to six month period which is so unrealistic but classic me, I wanted to push myself.

But that didn't happen, obviously. And we still haven't actually launched it. And maybe by the time this episode comes out, it will be live, because we are very close. But we really wanted to set it up solidly, with solid foundations. That is another thing that I speak about in my online course, in the e -commerce launch pad, is setting your business up with solid foundations. And I truly believe that that is the key to success for long -term, sustainable business models.

I have had so many clients come to me over the past few years in year two or three where they haven't set their business foundations up from the beginning and then they have to go back and start some of the things again. Obviously they found some things that work but then there's a lot of things that just don't work for them anymore. yeah, I'm a big believer in setting your business up with solid foundations. Ultimately if you were going to build a house you would not.

build the house without laying some foundations in the ground for us, right? So you need to do the same approach with your business. So that's the model that we've adopted. We've adopted figuring out like our foundational core business. Again, lots of different challenges have arisen along the way. But I have pretty much stuck to my online course like the whole way through. Like we've gone through all the different processes, gone through the ideation, like the setup phase.

the building awareness phase and not trying to figure out our style of content. And now I'd say we're in that between the building awareness and launching phase. And I talk through all of these phases in my course, the Econos launch pad in a lot of detail and kind of give you a step by step action plan of like exactly how to get through each point. And I would say like once you're past like that first kind of set up phase, you'll then just kind of like fine tuning and figuring out like what

what is actually gonna work? Like how am I gonna get my business out there in front of people? Because ultimately, if you've got no audience, you've got no potential buyers. So obviously if you want a business to work, you kind of need people to know that it exists. So our biggest challenge, to be honest, has been

raising awareness. Now, neither of us are natural marketers, like both of us are service based business providers. We are really good at building strategies. We're really good at like organizing things and we're really good at like the logistical side of the business. But when it comes to being creative and marketing and coming up with new ideas all the time and like pushing out content, that's where we really struggled. And I know that this is something that so many of my clients struggle with as well. So many clients come to me when you know they

they don't know how to actually figure out a way to market. They don't know how to actually market their brand or position their brand in the right way. They don't know how to identify their unique selling points and that communicate that to customers. So marketing is so hard for so many people. And again, I teach this, I teach how to do it in my online courses, but when you're actually doing it in real life, something that I've realized is, you know, this is actually very difficult.

if you don't have a budget. If you've got budgets, different story. If you don't have a budget, that's where the challenge is coming. We did not have a budget. We bootstrapped this whole business. So, know, whilst we have made some success on certain platforms, we've had to test it a little bit. And we're at a point now where we're really honing in on our strategy. And we actually have a podcast as part of Tinah because we've got three goals. One is to empower people to take their mental wellbeing into their own hands.

The other one is we want to destigmatize the conversation around mental health and we also want to educate people on different things that they can do with their mental health as well. those three pillars are actually incorporated into our podcast. So our podcast is actually seeing quite a lot of success and we've decided to really hone in on podcasts and make that into a bigger thing than we initially thought it was going to be so that we can then use that as a benchmark to

bring people in to the business and then ultimately we'll launch the marketplace and start marketing that as well. So yeah, there's been a lot of different things going on with the setup of this business. We are kind of in the stages at the moment where we're in between, like I say, that building awareness phase and launching. We're really close to launch because all of the back of house systems and stuff have been set up. The website is almost ready to go. I've onboarded so many products for the brand.

but we still don't have that audience, we don't feel comfortable hitting that live button and being like, we're live, because we know that we're not gonna make sales. So this is again, something that I do with my clients and the people in the courses all the time, is really encourage you to build that audience before you launch, because ultimately, if nobody knows about you, they can't buy from you. So we are so close to that point, and I'll do another video talking through the exact steps of how we went from this idea stage to getting to this nearly launch stage and like,

talking through some of the challenges more specifically maybe per episode of what we faced but in this episode I just wanted to give you an overview of where I always come from, the kind of things that I did at the beginning and then where we're at today and then something that might help you because I think sometimes people don't even know how to start, the amount of people that I get come to me and say you know I've got this idea but what do I do with it, where do I go with it? I think that's

First 30 days is make or break for you as a founder because if you are not taking consistent action, if you get bored of your idea really quickly, if you haven't got passion for it after the first 30 days or you found it too hard, you're probably not gonna succeed with your business in the long run. So what I've actually done is write down the 30 day plan that I had when I first was starting Tinah and bundled that up into a guide for people that are launching their own e -commerce business.

and put together the first 30 actions essentially that you need to take and it's a bit of a mix of strategic actions to get your business started. So like I said, naming my brand, I did all of the initial logos, colour palettes, fonts and stuff by myself. I very quickly at the beginning set up my Shopify domain and started making it into reality, like doing all the logistical parts. At the same point, I also had to do a lot of mindset work because ultimately again, I'm a service business provider.

I've worked in the e -commerce bar for a really long time, but I've never founded an e -commerce business. So I had to lot of mindset work around to kind of like some of limiting beliefs that I had about myself and about the idea to be able to work through that. So this guide that I've put together the first 30 days is a real mix of kind of mindset work and also actions that you can actually take to build your e -commerce business. Now, the idea is obviously not to start in 30 days. As I said, I set myself a three to six months deadline and haven't even hit that. So.

The idea is not to start in the 30 days, but it is to get you going and if you make it to the end of the 30 days then I feel like you can make it the whole way through. So if you are interested in that there is a link in the show notes to direct you to somewhere where you can download that. our next steps with Tinah is basically just keep going with marketing. We kind of know what works now for us and we're just gonna hone in on that because one thing that we've realised is when you try and spread your attention really thin

multiple different marketing channels or techniques you lose you don't actually target anybody so something that we're really trying to do is hone in on the channels that are working for us and just rinse repeat that strategy to build the audience and then watch this space because Tinah will be going live very very soon and you'll be able to see all the different bits and hard work that we've put into it and I will do another episode once we're live talking you through step by step the process of how we got it to where

it actually is today. So if you are interested in mental health, if you are interested in learning more about mental health, if you are interested in improving your mental health, please make sure you go and follow us at time. It's no healer. We are on TikTok. We are on Instagram. We are on Pinterest. We're on YouTube. We're on Spotify. So all of the platforms, we're even on Facebook actually. So.

Please go show some support if you are interested in that or equally if you are interested in setting up your own e -commerce business and following the same process that we followed to set up Tinah, please head over to the link that is in the show notes and you can start your 30 days off with really like getting very strategic about what your business model is going to be and start making progress to actually turn your idea into reality.

Thank you for listening to today's episode of the Commerce Club podcast. I am so excited to be back and sharing more insights into the e -commerce world with you, particularly with this new business that I'm launching. I'm just excited. I hope you can sense my excited energy on the podcast. I really love podcasting and I've missed it so much in the past year that I haven't been running this podcast. So yeah, I will be back very soon with more episodes, with more e -commerce.

business tips and more updates on my new business. Time is not here though.