My Week in the Trenches: March 31, 2019 Edition
Man, I remember that week, around March 31st, 2019, like it was yesterday. I had this little side hustle, right? Trying to get a custom sticker shop off the ground. Nothing fancy, just me, my computer, and a cheap cutting machine I’d saved up for. I’d been tinkering with designs, trying to figure out shipping, all that jazz. This particular week, though? I had it all mapped out in my head. I called it my “horoscope week,” kinda joking, kinda not. I was like, “Okay, for Pisces this week, it’s all about pushing that launch button and watching the orders roll in.”
I started that Sunday, pumped up. My goal was simple: get the first batch of designs finalized, load ’em all up on the site, hit ‘publish,’ and then spend the rest of the week promoting like crazy. I pictured myself checking my phone every hour, seeing those sale notifications popping up. I even had a little spreadsheet going, with expected traffic numbers, a few sales projected. Felt real good about it. Felt like I was finally gonna turn this hobby into something.
I sat down at my desk, fired up the design software. First hurdle: a couple of my “final” designs? They looked pretty crappy when I zoomed in. Pixels everywhere. Had to go back, redraw some lines, tweak colors. What I thought would take an hour, chewed up half the day. My “easy” start evaporated fast. Spent the afternoon just wrestling with those files. I was already feeling the first crack in my perfect “horoscope.”
Next day, Monday. Time to get them online. My platform of choice? It decided to be a real pain in the ass. Image uploads kept failing. Descriptions wouldn’t save right. Every time I hit “save,” I’d get some cryptic error message. I swear I spent a good four hours just refreshing pages, restarting my browser, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Eventually, I realized one of my image files was too big. Rookie mistake, but man, it felt like the universe was just messing with me. That put me way behind schedule. By the time I actually got half the designs up, the day was gone. My grand marketing push was now a distant dream.
Tuesday rolled around, and I was still plugging away, trying to finish uploading. Finally, late afternoon, I hit that “publish” button for the whole store. Felt a weird mix of relief and terror. Now what? My plan was to flood social media with links. I opened up my drafts, ready to unleash them. And then it hit me: my fancy scheduling tool decided to freeze. Wouldn’t post anything. I tried manually, but that meant I could only hit one platform at a time. It was slow, tedious, and felt utterly ineffective. I was expecting a flood, and I got a drip. No sales that day. Not even a single view on some of the products.
By Wednesday, my initial enthusiasm was wearing thin. I checked my stats. Five visitors. Five! And I was one of them. My “expectations” for the week felt like a bad joke. Instead of getting upset, I just started troubleshooting. Why no traffic? Was my SEO bad? Were my hashtags useless? I spent the day researching, watching YouTube videos, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. Realized I hadn’t even set up Google Analytics properly. Idiot. Another half-day just fixing that basic stuff.
Thursday and Friday were a grind. I started just posting directly, whenever I could. Even tried bothering some friends to share my stuff. Got a couple of clicks, still no sales. My projected spreadsheet numbers? They were officially in the dumpster. I was frustrated, yeah, but also, something clicked. This wasn’t about some magical “horoscope” week where things just happened. This was about grinding, figuring shit out, and dealing with what actually came up. I kept tweaking descriptions, trying new keywords, even redesigned a couple of the weaker-looking stickers.
By Saturday, the end of my “Pisces week,” I had one sale. One! It was from a friend, which was nice, but it wasn’t the tidal wave I’d expected. But you know what? That one sale felt like a huge win. Because it wasn’t handed to me. I’d fought for it. I learned that week that setting expectations is fine, but expecting them to just materialize without a mountain of work and a ton of unexpected problems is just naive. I went into that week thinking I could predict the outcome based on my hopes. I came out of it realizing that the real “prediction” is that things will go wrong, and your job is to figure out how to fix them, piece by piece. That experience, that hard reset of my expectations, really stuck with me. It taught me to plan for the worst, hope for the best, and always, always keep pushing.
