Ecommerce Pulse

Who has time to read more blogs, right? With all of the blogs, podcasts, and books being thrown your way, you might not even feel like trying to fit more consumption into your life.

I feel the same way, but one thing I've learned over the past year or so is the importance of flooding my mind with the thoughts of people who I want to be like. There's a quote you've probably heard before by Charlie "Tremendous" Jones: “You will be the same person in five years as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read.”

By carefully choosing blogs to read by great thinkers and inspirational writers, you have the chance to "meet" and be influenced by people in a way that will powerfully shape your growth as an entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurs are a different kind of people. They are never completely satisfied with the normal, acceptable lifestyle commonly called "successful" by the rest of society. This traditional "success" often includes a good job, a nice house with a 30-year mortgage, a couple of nice cars (on which it's considered OK to owe a lot of money), a few weeks of vacation every year from the job you don't really enjoy, etc.

I'm very excited to share with you that I've recently settled on a niche for my new online store. For the past two months or so, I've been doing a good bit of brainstorming, research, and analyzing of ideas for potential products to sell, and I think (slash hope) that I've done a decent job of selecting a niche.

In the past year, I've had the amazing opportunity to start my own business, work from home, and enjoy the freedom of being my own boss. Right now I'm sitting in a hotel lobby, sipping coffee and working on my laptop, since my wife and I are currently traveling and working on the road. It's an incredibly free feeling to be able to pick up and travel whenever we want to, not having jobs to tie us down. I've always had that entrepreneurial bug--always having a new business idea and wanting to start something new--but it wasn't until this past year that my business grew enough to support us full-time.

Before starting an online store, it's important to find out if there is enough demand for your product. I would highly recommend NOT ordering $10,000 worth of doggy snowsuits from a Chinese manufacturer without first knowing if people are going to want to buy them! Spending money on R&D or inventory without first determining demand is a great way to flush all your startup capital down the toilet.

No matter how great you think your idea is, make sure you know some solid facts about the demand for your product before investing a lot of time and money in your idea.

I'm going to explain several different ways to test market demand, but it's probably best to use some combination of these.