Hey, Scott Austin here.

I've been working with Shopify stores since 2013.  I talk to over 100 store owners a year.  So I've now talked to thousands of store owners.  I've seen successful brands and I've also watched brands fails.  I've learned a lot from watching so many Shopify stores.  So today we’re diving into an important topic—one that I think every Shopify store owner, new or experienced, needs to hear. This episode is all about the real journey of building a successful Shopify store. It’s not the ‘get-rich-quick’ story you might see floating around the internet, but the story of hard work, consistency, and long-term commitment.

If you spend any time online, especially in forums or on social media, you’ve probably seen ads and posts promising easy ways to make a fortune with Shopify. You know the ones I’m talking about: they promise ‘six-figure months,’ ‘viral products,’ or that ‘one secret that the pros don’t want you to know’—and they make it seem like all you have to do is press a few buttons, and bam, you’re an overnight success.

But let’s be honest—that’s not the reality for 99.99% of people. And if you’ve been working on your store for a while now, you’ve probably already realized that this journey is anything but quick and easy. It’s slow. It’s challenging. It’s filled with ups and downs, small wins, and plenty of setbacks.

In this episode, I want to set a real expectation on what building a Shopify business is like. I want to acknowledge the struggles that so many of you face—the frustrations of spending hours on a single task that seemed so simple in a YouTube tutorial, the constant trial and error of finding what works for your customers, and the feeling that there’s no magic button that will bring you instant success.

I’m here to tell you that you’re not alone. Those feelings? They’re completely normal. And even more importantly, they’re part of the process. Every successful business, no matter how big or small, has been built on the back of hard work, dedication, and consistent effort over the years. There’s no silver bullet. No ‘one-size-fits-all’ strategy. It’s about doing the work day in and day out, finding what works for your business, and building on it over time.

So if you’re feeling tired, frustrated, or like you’re just not moving fast enough, this episode is for you. Let’s dig into the realities of running a Shopify business, why the hard work matters, and how you can stay motivated as you build toward your goals.

Myth-Busting: The 'Overnight Success' Fallacy

Let’s talk about one of the biggest misconceptions out there—the idea of overnight success. If you look around online, there’s this pervasive myth that you can set up a Shopify store and suddenly become a millionaire within a few weeks. The internet is filled with stories about people hitting ‘six-figure months’ or finding that one ‘viral’ product that supposedly changes everything.

But here’s the reality: those stories are the exception, not the rule. They’re often exaggerated or leave out crucial details, and they’re rarely sustainable. In fact, some of them are straight up lies.  For every post you see about someone hitting massive success quickly, there are thousands of store owners out there working hard, day after day, to slowly build their business without any overnight magic.

I just went on YouTube and did some searches and here are some of the actual titles that I found.  Many of these just make me laugh.  Here they are:

1. The ONLY Shopify Tutorial You Need 2024 | How to Build an Online Store in 12 Minutes!
2. How to Build a Shopify Store in 10 Minutes & MAKE MONEY (STEP BY STEP)
3. Shopify Tutorial For Beginners 2024 - Set up Your Store in 10 Minutes
4. The BEST Klaviyo Email Marketing Tutorial in 2025 (Secrets Revealed By Shopify EXPERT)
5. 3 Secret Shopify Settings That Are KILLING Your Store!
6. I Got Rich in 27 days (Shopify Dropshipping)
7. The ONLY Facebook & Instagram Ad Strategy You'll Need In 2024
8. $100K In 30 Days With Shopify Dropshipping

I want to challenge this myth head-on because it’s one of the main reasons so many new store owners feel discouraged or like they’re failing. They compare their own journey—their daily grind—to these extreme examples and wonder why they’re not seeing the same results. But the truth is, successful businesses aren’t built on flashy hacks or luck; they’re built on consistent, deliberate work over time.

Here are red flags for me on advice to avoid on the internet:

1. Anything that shows an expensive car in the image.
2. Headings that stress how easy or quick it is. 
3. Videos that are shot in someone's bedroom.
4. Images that show a high revenue number.
5. Content that specifies this is the ONLY way to do it right.

And here’s something else to keep in mind: even when you do see those ‘instant’ success stories, what you’re not seeing is the years of effort and learning that person probably put in before things finally clicked. Maybe they’ve been learning about e-commerce for years, building other stores, making mistakes, and slowly improving before they ever saw a big win. But those parts don’t make it into the ‘success’ story.

Here's an example for you.  Kylie Jenner launched a cosmetics brand on Shopify in 2015.  It was an 'overnight sucess' and I put overnight success in air quotes.  And in 2019, Kylie sold 51% of the brand to Coty for $600 million.  But here's the thing.  This brand wasn't built overnight in 2015.  It wasn't even built in the 4 years it took for Coty to buy 51%.  Only the power of something as powerful as the Kardashian-Jenner dynasty could launch such a brand.  And that dynasty has been building for many decades.  From olympic gold medals in the 70s to OJ Simpson affiliation in the 90s to Paris Hilton affiliation in the 2000s to reality TV shows and viral videos over the past two decades.  Kylie was able to harness all of that family brand value and create a new brand seemingly overnight.  But that's the exception.  The rest of us have to do it the old fashioned way. 

So, if you’re working on your store and finding that things aren’t taking off overnight—guess what? You’re in the same boat as just about every successful entrepreneur out there. The truth is, what actually drives long-term success is not a viral product or a magic marketing strategy; it’s patience, persistence, focus and a willingness to keep going, even when things are tough.

In fact, when you really dive into successful businesses, you start to see a common theme: they grow through a series of incremental improvements, through a willingness to adapt, a deeper understanding of their customers and by learning from their experiences. Each small improvement adds up over time and, eventually, can lead to a business that’s not just successful, but also stable and resilient.

So, my goal today is to reset your expectations around what success looks like. If you’re committed to your brand, then know that it’s going to take time. It’s going to be hard. But it’s also absolutely achievable if you approach it with the right mindset and realistic expectations. And that’s what I want to support you in—taking the long view, working on your business day by day, and understanding that true success is built over years and decades, not weeks and months.

Embracing the Realities of Running a Shopify Store

Now that we’ve busted the myth of overnight success, let’s talk about the day-to-day reality of running a Shopify store—the actual work that goes into building a business. Because here’s the thing: building a successful Shopify store is much less about ‘big wins’ and much more about showing up consistently to do the work, even when it’s challenging or unglamorous.

Let me start with a quote which I'll paraphrase a bit here.  This is from a video that I saw in 2011 and was recorded in 2003 that always stuck with me.  The quote goes:

"You have to decide as an entrepreneur to say I don't need to build the killer business overnight. I just need to build a winning business and the goal of winning is so you can play again.  Most companies just need to realize that this is a long road and that you can't build that perfect business.  Once you do that then you keep the current project simple and execute flawlessly on the simple plan and you come back and do it again and again." 

Now, this 2003 quote is from Jensen Huang who is the founder and CEO of the #1 market cap company in the world - Nvidia.  Having this view 20 years ago and sticking to it for so long is one of the reasons his company became #1.

Now let's shift our focus back to building our successful brands.  One of the realities of running a store is that most of the work isn’t flashy. It’s not the stuff that gets talked about in all those success stories. The majority of your time is spent doing tasks that are, well, kind of boring—but essential. It’s building new customer channels, working on customer support, automating tasks, optimizing your website, and working on the little things that, on their own, might not seem like they’re moving the needle.

This is the daily grind.  And it’s completely normal to feel like progress is slow. In fact, that’s how most successful businesses are built: through countless small tasks, improvements, and adjustments that eventually add up to something big. But that ‘big’ outcome doesn’t happen without the hundreds of smaller, less exciting steps that got you there.

And let’s be real: there are going to be times when it feels like nothing you do is working. Maybe you launch a new product that doesn’t sell, or you put hours into a marketing campaign that flops. Those moments are frustrating, and it’s easy to feel like giving up or questioning if it’s worth it.  I don't see those events as failures.  You need to turn them into successful learnings.  Discover what assumptions you had that didn't pan out and factor that into your next initiative.  I've seen too many store owners beat themselves up over failed initiatives.  The have regret that drags them down.  This is one of those mindset things.  Embrace the failed projects!  Learn from them.  You are getting smarter about your customers.

I have a client where we had just done a store redesign.  So our next step was to put together their first marketing campaign.  Memorial Day was coming up so we built our campaign around that.  And it failed miserably.  There were no incremental sales.  But we learned from this.  We discovered that their audience took advantage of national holidays to spend time outdoors with friends and family and not be on their devices buying products.  Our next campaign was not around a national holiday and did much better.  And we continue to learn from every campaign that we do.

So, if you’re finding that the daily work feels tedious or like things aren’t moving fast enough, know that it’s all part of the process. Every adjustment you make to your store, every hour you put in, every small improvement—these are the building blocks of a sustainable business. Over time, these consistent actions compound, and that’s when you start to see real results.

I want you to take a moment to recognize the work you’re putting in and to understand that these small, consistent efforts are what make the difference. The ‘overnight successes’ we see often don’t show the years of preparation and commitment behind the scenes. But for you, the store owner, this daily grind is the reality of building a successful Shopify store, and every task you complete is a step closer to your goals.

So, when you’re feeling worn down by the grind, remind yourself: this is the work that matters. This is what separates successful stores from the ones that don’t make it. And when you stick with it, and you keep improving over time, that’s when you’ll start to see the payoff.

I want to wrap this up with a quote from Lady Gaga who said this in her Oscar acceptance speech:

"All I have to say is that this is hard work. I've worked hard for a long time and it's not about winning, but what it's about is not giving up."

Key Components of Long-Term Success

Now that we’ve covered the daily grind and the reality of this journey, let’s talk about something critical to your long-term success: focusing on the things that truly matter. Because here’s the thing—when you’re building your business, it’s easy to get sidetracked by ‘vanity metrics’ or tasks that look good on the surface but don’t actually move the needle on your bottom line. I’m talking about things like follower counts on social media, the aesthetics of your website, or even spending hours perfecting product descriptions that no one’s going to see if you haven’t driven traffic to your store.

And I'm going to give you another quote here.  This one is from Steve Jobs.

"People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully."

The truth is, to build a successful Shopify store, you need to stay laser-focused on what truly drives revenue and profit. This is about prioritizing the tasks that directly contribute to your store’s growth and profitability, rather than getting caught up in things that might look good but don’t actually bring results.

So, let’s break down some key components of long-term success—and specifically, how to stay focused on actions that have a meaningful impact on your business.

1. Commitment to Revenue-Generating Tasks

When you’re deciding how to spend your time, ask yourself: is this going to help me gain a customer, make a sale or retain a customer? Revenue-generating tasks are the core of a sustainable business, and those can look like a few different things: creating a new customer acquisition channel, improving your product pages, running strategic promotions, optimizing checkout to reduce abandoned carts, and reaching out to past customers to encourage repeat purchases. These are the kinds of actions that contribute directly to your bottom line.

One challenge that I see many store owners struggle with is doing the boring and hard tasks over and over again.  For example, creating new blog articles for your SEO strategy.  Those tasks are never urgent, so they fall into the tomorrow bucket.  One tool that I use to combat this is to schedule that task on my calendar and ensuring it gets done.  So schedule a time weekly early in the morning before things get hectic to publish a new blog article or whatever your task is.  And ensure that it gets done.  For me, that's what I do with this podcast.  Each episode takes hours and hours of work and I do all of it myself.  So I knew a weekly episode wasn't realistic and I instead picked a bi-weekly rhythm.  Now I've done 146 episodes over the past four plus years.  I've never missed an episode.  But doing that consistently is very, very hard.  So when I first got started, I created a schedule and a rule for my podcast.  The schedule is that every other Sunday, I create the episode.  And the rule is that I'm not allowed to go to bed until the episode is done.  It is so easy to find a reason that it doesn't get done.  But successful store owners find ways to consistently do the boring tasks over and over and over again.

2. Customer-Centric Focus

I've talked with many business owners and not just Shopify store owners.  You see, I've been around for and been involved in many industries.  And one of things that always amazes me is how well successful businesses know their customers.  They understand their exact customers needs, attitudes and behaviors. 

One of the most effective ways to build a long-term business is by focusing on your customers’ needs. Building a business around your customers means gathering and acting on their feedback, refining your products to meet their needs better, and creating an experience that encourages them to come back.  I've done a whole podcast episode on this that I'll link to in the show notes.  Think about it—when you invest in relationships with your customers, you’re creating a cycle of trust and loyalty, which ultimately translates into repeat purchases and higher lifetime value. 

So I recommend that you find ways where you can listen to your customers.  I literally mean listen to them.  Not deduce, not survey, not summarize.  You need to hear the words coming out of their mouths.  Because that's how you become smarter about your business and gain the confidence to ignore all of the poor advice on the internet.

I believe that every business is unique.  They have a unique combination of products, customers, business models and brands.  And this is why one-size-fits-all advise isn't the most impactful.

Know your customer and build your business around them.

3. Avoiding the Vanity Metric Trap

Vanity metrics are tempting, but they’re a distraction. A lot of store owners get fixated on things that might look good on the surface—like social media followers or website traffic numbers. But if those metrics aren’t translating into sales, they’re not helping you grow. Focus on metrics that align with your goals: revenue, conversion rate, average order value, customer retention, and ultimately, profitability. Vanity metrics can give you a short-term boost, but long-term success is built on meaningful numbers that directly support your business.

Here's a real example for you.  I had client who was focused on growing SEO traffic, which is a great metric to pursue.  But that's the only metric - traffic - that they focused on.   So they created 100s of blogs articles and achieved the goal.  95% of their traffic was from SEO.  We're talking over 40,000 sessions per month.  But here's the problem.  The content was too far removed from their business.  So none, and mean 0 of the traffic converted.  They also didn't optimize the articles for conversion through email sign-ups or moving them into the shopping experience.  If they had also been tracking other metrics like email sign-ups or revenue, they would have been able to see the flaws in their plan and adjust.  

An effective way to this is to have a scorecard format that you look at regularly that has a consistent set of metrics.  I've done an episode on building a scorecard for your business that I'll include in the show notes.  

I have worked with clients that get too hung up one metric.  Measuring your business will involve multiple metrics.  Two metrics that I see get over-emphasized are site-performance and conversion rate.  Just saying.

4. Consistency Over Intensity

It’s important to remember that consistency wins over big, intense efforts. A lot of times, store owners will go all-in on a new tactic, hoping it’ll bring a big result. But the truth is, the biggest wins come from small, consistent improvements over time. Whether that’s tweaking your email marketing, refining your product descriptions, or testing your pricing, these incremental changes add up. Don’t worry about having a ‘perfect’ store right away; just focus on making it a little better every week.

Here's an applicable quote from Thomas Edison, history's most prolific inventor.

"The three great essentials to achieve anything worth while are, first, hard work; second, stick-to-itiveness; third, common sense."

5. Commitment to Learning and Adapting

Finally, staying committed to learning and adapting is key. E-commerce is always evolving, and what works today might not work tomorrow. Every store that's been around for a few years knows the impact of an update to the Google search algorithm.  Be open to learning new things, testing strategies, and adapting as you gather more data on what resonates with your audience. Staying flexible is one of the best ways to ensure that your business remains competitive over the long term.

So, as you work on building your store, remember: focus on the tasks that truly matter. Spend your time on actions that drive revenue and profit, build strong relationships with your customers, and keep moving steadily forward. When you do that, the vanity metrics will start to lose their appeal, and you’ll find yourself building a business that’s stable, sustainable, and set up for long-term success.

JadePuma’s Support Program: Your Partner in this Journey

One of the challenges for Shopify store owners is that they are alone or part of a small team.  And it can be helpful to have someone to use as a sounding board and strategy partner.  That’s exactly why I created the JadePuma support program—to be here with you as you build your business, every step of the way.

The goal of the JadePuma support program is simple: to provide you with ongoing guidance and support tailored to your specific business. I work alongside you month over month, year over year.  We'll regularly meet face to face in an online meeting.  We'll evaluate the recent business metrics and map out a plan for the next couple of months. 

One of the core aspects of my program is helping you stay focused on the tasks that genuinely impact your revenue and profitability. I'm frequently talking my clients out of getting side tracked and help them focus on things that will move the needle. 

Every business has its highs and lows, and I'm here give you perspective through both. When you hit a rough patch, it’s easy to feel discouraged or wonder if you’re doing something wrong. I'm here to remind you that those tough moments are just part of the journey and to help you work through them with a steady hand and a clear plan. And when things are going well, I’ll help you capitalize on that momentum to keep building on your success.

I shared an example of what this support can look like in my past episode with Reptichip which I'll link to in the show notes.  

So, if you’re feeling like you’re ready for some extra guidance or you’re just tired of trying to do it all on your own, consider the JadePuma support program. I've got a couple of openings for 2025.  Let me know if you want long-term support in growing your brand. 

Conclusion: The Power of Perseverance

As we wrap up today’s episode, I want to leave you with a final thought on the importance of perseverance. Building a successful Shopify business isn’t easy, and it certainly isn’t quick. There will be days when it feels like you’re just spinning your wheels, putting in the hours but not seeing the results yet. There will be moments when you wonder if it’s all worth it or if you’re on the right path.

I’m here to tell you that, yes, it’s worth it—and yes, you probably are on the right path. The truth is, success in Shopify, like in any business, doesn’t come from a single strategy, a lucky break, or a one-time win. It comes from steady, consistent effort. It’s built on the back of the work you put in day after day, even when the results aren’t immediate.

When you look at successful brands, you’re not seeing the thousands of hours of hard work, the failures they learned from, or the slow build of incremental improvements over years. You’re seeing the outcome of persistent dedication, a willingness to keep learning, and a mindset that’s focused on the long term.

So, if you’re feeling frustrated, if you’re feeling like things aren’t moving fast enough, remember: this is a marathon, not a sprint. Stay committed, do the work, and the results will follow. 

Thanks for listening.