Starting Over from Not-Exactly-Zero

by | Mar 4, 2025 | Blog, Marketing and Strategy | 0 comments

In my planning, I have the advantage of having an already-established shop presence. If I were truly starting from zero, I would have to figure in startup costs that I don’t have. Sharptooth Snail’s ongoing expenses are automated, and built into my budget. The shop is, for the most part, built. The branding exists. I know my market, and how to spot trends.

I’m in a position now where I have to work out some problems. Namely, I’m not making enough sales, and I have no budget available to advertise. If I were a client coming to me with these issues, I’d first want to look deeper into the issues, determine what kind of assets we have, and make a short term plan to get some momentum. It’s time for a SWOT analysis.

SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. It helps stakeholders understand where they are now, how far away they are from where they want to be, and what they might already have available to get there. Here’s what mine looks like for Sharptooth Snail at the moment:

SWOT Analysis

Strengths
Site's already built. This feels like starting over but a lot of the overhead is long done
My products are proven. I have sold well in the past and have done accurate trendspotting.
I'm a good designer and illustrator, damnit! I'm also a solid strategist and understand this market from my almost two decades in it.
Already have an existing fan base. Mailing list is growing and the open rate looks good. Facebook and Instagram following is over 1K each
Weaknesses
Lack of Confidence— a lot of time wasted dithering instead of implementing strategy or creating content
.5% Conversion Rate when not sending targeted traffic
Low Organic traffic— like only 4-10 users per day
Basically no budget right now
Not really positioned well to attract fine art collectors or higher-end print sales
Opportunities
Weird animals are gaining popularity. This is a niche that's growing.
Existing prescence on POD marketplaces like RedBubble and Zazzle to leverage while building some revenue
Using this strategy/execution as a model to teach students how to do it.
Plenty of room to optimize the shop and reposition my art practice to attract new buyers
Threats
AI generated images in an unsavvy market are hard to compete with. I just can't out-produce a robot in terms of quantity
Low operating budget means being outbid in ad auctions if I go that route
Fall of democracy? Definitely social instability in the coming years. No idea how that's going to affect a non-essential business like mine.
I went back and forth trying to decide whether traffic and conversion should be considered a Weakness or a Threat in this analysis, and it's actually a little of each, since I can do things to improve both, but they still rely on customer behavior.

 My long term goals for the shop are to have it not only paying for itself, but paying me in a way that I only need to take on client work part time, if at all. I’m looking at wanting to bring in $10-15K per month in sales, which at about 30% proft is $3-5K per month.

My primary challenges are going to be getting enough traffic and then converting that traffic at a higher rate than I’m currently doing. I need an operating budget.

I started writing this article on a day where I was really in the dumps about how little I’ve sold in the last 30 days, when I got an email from Zazzle that a design I’d made some 15 years ago sold (on several sets of party napkins), and I’d made a little over $5. I was buoyed by that sale, and I remembered that I have that asset available to me to turn to at any time. Leveraging my existing (and, frankly, ancient) precense on RedBubble, Zazzle, and TeePublic are going to be necessary to start generating some revenue that I can sink into attracting traffic to the shop.

This is something that I had, at one point, talked about in the strategy part of Make It Real, and backed away the second time I taught it live, because I felt like it overcomplicated getting set up. But I still think it’s a solid strategy if you’re starting with absolutely nothing, and I am planning on putting it back into the new version of the course. I had students who balked at having to turn around and spend more money on a domain and a year of hosting on Shopify. This seems to me like a reasonable alternative to get started.

I need to raise up an operating budget somehow, and right now about $300 should be enough to get me started. That will go mostly toward advertising and ordering samples, which are not only to assess quality, but to make social media content with, and potentially to use as giveaways.

I was reliably doing somewhere between $300 to $1000 in sales from all channels about ten years ago. I should be able to do that again. My first goal is to get $100. I can do that this month.