I Did It WRONG: My First 2 Shops Failed (& What Finally Changed)
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I've actually tried to sell things online TWO separate times, several years apart.
Both were complete failures.
Joke's on me, –– ba-dum-bump 🥁–– because now I'm doing it again, and it's finally working!
I'm sharing this because I think it's genuinely funny to look back on, and because I believe there's real value in watching someone else's mess so you don't have to make the same one yourself. Neither of these attempts means I was bad at business in general, or that I shouldn't have tried again... I just didn't know what I didn't know yet.
Sound familiar? Thought so. 🤭 Let's get into it.
Attempt #1:
The Etsy Shop (2016-ish)
Okay so... way back around 2016, I opened a shop on Etsy.
Was it a Squarespace template shop? No.
Was it anything related to web design? Also no. 😂
I was working in-house as a graphic designer at a print and embroidery company, which meant I had access to at-cost materials for production. Jackets, T-shirts, hats, koozies, embroidered stuff — you name it, I could make it. So naturally, my brain saw dollar signs, I guess, and I thought: I could just make this stuff on my break while I'm at work.
Classic side hustle logic. Chaotic, but I suppose I still respect it.
I set up my shop on Etsy, did a deep dive into how their system worked, researched the hell out of it, and... it didn't go so well.
I had one sale.
One. Single. Sale. EVER.
And you might think I'm crazy for putting this on the internet, but apparently that's exactly the kind of thing I'd do & laugh at: the ONE sale I got happened on my actual birthday, from a complete stranger, for a RIP David Bowie koozie.
Like... WHAT?
Honestly, I'm not even a super-fan of Bowie. I'm more of an REM girl. Bowie's cool, but I'm not tattooing a lightning bolt on my face anytime soon.
I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.
I literally sold it for $4.16, total. Shipped it myself. Produced it myself. Designed it myself. All me, baby! LOL
(Etsy also takes a cut of sales, by the way, so I didn't even get the full $4.16. I may have actually lost money on that koozie. 😂)
Eventually Etsy emailed me and said hey, you don't have the rights to use this image, we're taking the listing down. And I was like: "(😬 Shit.) Cool, cool, cool. Not a big deal." And that was the last sale I ever made on Etsy.
Why My Etsy Shop FAILED
Here's the thing: I wasn't completely clueless. I had researched Etsy. I understood the concept. But understanding a concept and having an actual strategy are two very different things.
The shop failed because:
I didn't have a clear niche. I had random stuff — koozies, merch, whatever I could produce, with totally random stuff on those products. There was no cohesive thread, no clear customer in mind.
I didn't have an audience. I thought I could "borrow" Etsy's audience by just showing up on the platform. Etsy is a search-driven marketplace. If you don't know how to play the SEO game there, you're just a store in the middle of a proverbial field that nobody knows exists.
I had no strategy for how anyone would find me. I just... put stuff up and waited. The internet did not notice.
That's it. That's the whole Etsy chapter. 😂
Attempt #2:
My Squarespace Template Shop (2020)
Fast forward to 2020. COVID hits. I got furloughed.
Leading up to that point, I'd been pulling back on client work (in my side-hustle) because I was completely burnt out from working a day job and doing client projects at night. So when I suddenly had a lot of free time, I thought: This year, I'm going to focus on designing. I'm going to get creative. Maybe I can make something I can resell.
That was actually a great idea. Genuinely.
The execution, though? That part I botched.
Instead of learning from anyone who had done this before, FIRST, I just dove in and tried to figure it out myself. I designed three Squarespace website templates, bought a Teachable account & learned an entirely new platform, recorded tutorials for how to use each template, uploaded everything to Teachable, and built out the whole shop structure there.
––Oh, and did I mention that I first built the template shop on Showit, of all places, under my then-new brand 'Launch the Damn Thing®' instead of my current Squarespace site & brand??? 🤦🏻♀️
(BTW: are you tallying these costs yet? Teachable + Squarespace + Showit + video hosting...)
I could have done it so much simpler. I know that now.
I sold one template. ONE.
It was my favorite of the three I made, so at least there was that.
I did give away two or three templates during the launch promo period because I thought a giveaway would drive waitlist signups, and from the waitlist, people would buy. That logic... did not hold up in practice. 🥴
And then —the part that really stings— I continued to pay for Teachable for over a year afterward, even after I shut down the Showit site, and moved everything from it over to my existing Squarespace website. At $39/month. While I technically didn't have a full-time job.
So I created three templates, recorded tutorials for each one, edited said tutorials, made A LOT of bad takes because I was not comfortable on camera, set up a whole launch, gave stuff away for free, and then paid $39/month to host a shop that wasn't selling anything.
Cool, cool, cool. 🫠
Why My Template Shop Failed
1. I spent too much & used the wrong platform (for me).
Teachable is a course platform & it's a great one. People use it as educators to deliver courses, not templates. Putting a template shop on Teachable for me, was like opening a coffee shop inside a car dealership and wondering why people keep asking you about financing & test drives. 😆
In 2020, hosting tutorial videos on Squarespace wasn't really possible the way it is now, with Squarespace's newer built-in features, but even so, Teachable was disconnected from Squarespace in every meaningful way. Squarespace template transfers are a manual process. You have to set up your own automated delivery system through something like Zapier. I had none of that in place.
2. I gave away value at the start and tanked my own perceived worth.
By giving away free templates during the launch, I was essentially telling people: these aren't worth paying for. That's not what I meant, but that's what the action communicated. Oopsie! Lesson learned.
3. No warm audience.
This is the bigger one. I had created a small waitlist that I built while I was creating the shop, but I didn't have an audience that was asking me to create a template shop. Nobody had requested this. I just had time on my hands and thought people would buy because... "why wouldn't they? It's way cheaper than a custom website!"
But "why wouldn't they" is NOT a marketing strategy.
4. No evergreen traffic driving people to the shop.
No organic content strategy to create a flow of traffic to the shop directly. No ads. No SEO plan. Nothing consistently funneling new people toward what I was selling.
So basically: I built the shop, ...I waited for someone to notice, ...and nobody ever did.
What Both Failures Had in Common
Here's the pattern I didn't see until after the second failure, because I genuinely thought I had learned from the first one.
I built something without an audience first BOTH times.
That's it. That's the whole lesson.
The audience are the people who buy. If you don't have people waiting for what you're making — people who asked for it, who know you, who trust you — then it doesn't matter how good the product is. It doesn't exist to them, because they don't know it exists, and if you don't have a marketing strategy even fewer people will find it.
Both times, I basically opened the equivalent of a shop in the middle of a field, in a rural area, with no roads leading to it, and wondered why nobody was walking in & where all my foot-traffic was. 👀
The other things they had in common:
Wrong platform. Etsy required expertise in their system that I didn't have. Teachable was built for courses, not Squarespace templates & was overpriced for what I needed at that time.
No strategy for discovery. Likely terrible SEO, no content or marketing engine, no ads, no audience pipeline.
Assumed demand instead of validating it. I thought of a thing, assumed it would work, assumed people wanted it, and launched into the void.
⏭️ Skip to 8:15 in the video where I toured the old website!
👀 A Peek at the Old Shop (Studio 1862)
Since I'm already putting my embarrassment on the internet, I might as well show you what's left of the old shop.
My previous brand was called Studio 1862 — named after the year our old log cabin house was originally built. I still keep the back end of that Squarespace site alive just so I can see where I came from. A lot of it got lost after I let it expire originally, after moving to 7.1 and starting over as Launch the Damn Thing®, but a few remnants survive.
The "shoppe" itself listed:
A mini website audit offer
A mini brand audit offer
A Photoshop T-shirt mockup template I'd made for my day job (this one actually sold okay organically, which is hilarious in retrospect)
A freebie
And a roundup of Society6 coffee mugs with designs like "Get Shit Done," "Fuck This Shit," and "Oh, For Fuck's Sake"
Why? 🤷♀️ Why were there swear word mugs on my professional design brand? I have no idea. I thought they were funny (still do), but they did not match the Studio 1862 vibe at all. But looking back, this is actually when I started realizing there was a massive disconnect between how I was representing my brand and who I actually was as a person, and ultimately the face of the company I was accidentally building.
Those mugs would fit perfectly on Launch the Damn Thing® though! On Studio 1862? Not so much. The rebrand wasn't just a name change — it was me finally figuring out how to show up as myself.
screenshot of my review from Kate's website
What I Did Differently to Actually Sell My Products
Between 2020 and now, I didn't just try again, I completely changed my approach.
After the rebrand to Launch the Damn Thing®, something clicked. The new vibe was more me. Marketing felt easier. I had more fun doing it. I stopped dreading the content work because I wasn't performing a version of myself that didn't fit anymore.
Eventually I started building an audience here on YouTube, growing my email list, and showing up consistently in ways that actually connected. I got intentional about platforms, positioning, and —most importantly— who I was building things for.
The biggest shift: I stopped trying to figure it all out alone.
I'd never run a successful digital product shop before. I didn't know what I didn't know. And after the second failure, I finally accepted that if I was ever going to do this again, I needed to learn from someone who had already done it successfully.
That was the best decision I made in this whole process!
Now the shop pretty much runs on autopilot. Same person, same business under a different name (& vibe), but a completely different experience for both me and my students!
The Course That Helped Me 3x My Sales
I took Kate Scott's Scale With Templates course, and it taught me everything I was missing.
I quite literally 3x'd my digital product sales after binging Scale with Templates, going from earning $5,745 in 2023, to making $17,965 in 2024.
The course was created specifically for Squarespace designers who want to set up a template shop that actually works. It covers the tech (including ThriveCart and selling through Squarespace), plus positioning, pricing, delivery systems, and all the strategy stuff I was flying blind on both times before.
It's the roadmap I wish I'd had in 2016, ...and again in 2020.
Kate's videos are clear, to the point, with no-fluff, and are very well produced. I powered through it in less than a week, maybe even a weekend. It answered every question I didn't know I had, and probably some I'd been too embarrassed to ask before.
Even though my shop doesn't primarily sell Squarespace templates right now (it actually only sells one Squarespace template for designers, as of posting), everything I learned in that course still applied well enough, in concept, to the digital products I am selling. The strategy transferred well.
👉 Learn from Kate! Enrollment opens periodically, so check the link for current availability.
Lessons Learned from 2 Failed Online Shops
Want to see more of my mess-ups? Drop a comment below! I'm planning to make "I Did It Wrong" a recurring thing here on the blog and on YouTube — real failures, real lessons, mistakes you can actually learn from without making them yourself.
And if you're a Squarespace designer thinking about selling templates, check the link above to enroll in Kate's course. Learn from my shit-show, so you don't have to live it.
Neither of those failures meant I was bad at business & should give up.
The Bowie koozie was a $4.16 lesson & a slap on the wrist for doing something truly stupid. The Teachable shop was a $39/month-for-a-year lesson. Both lessons were worth learning — because those experiences eventually pushed me toward the education I actually needed, which led to the strategy I'm now using successfully.
You can see the roadmap: two failures → found the right resource → learned the strategy → implemented it → it worked.
That's not a failure arc! It's just how it actually goes sometimes, IRL.
Done is better than perfect. Get the idea out there. If it flops, find someone who's figured it out, learn from them, and try again with better information. The journey is not as linear as we want it to be, but it's also not as complicated as we make it. 🤭
We don't have to be perfect on the first try. Or even the second one.
