By: Chris Von Wilpert
Lindsay McCormick is the hardest working eCommerce business woman I’ve ever met.
She’s working a full-time 9am-6pm job as a TV Producer for HGTV while starting her own eCommerce business from 7pm-3am called Bite Toothpaste Bits.
Usually, I never write about eCommerce businesses just starting out, because they rarely ever make it. But Lindsay has hustled so hard to make her first $1,000 that I had to share her story and the lessons I learned from talking with her so you can see what it really takes to build your own eCommerce business from scratch.
Here are the seven lessons I learned from Lindsay “Toothpaste Bits” McCormick that every eCommerce entrepreneur who wants to start their own physical product eCommerce business can follow:
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Lesson 1: Scratch Your Own Itch
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Lesson 2: Research Your Product Idea
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Lesson 3: Make Your Product
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Lesson 4: Promote Your Product
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Lesson 5: Ship Your Product
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Lesson 6: Grow Your Product
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Lesson 7: Have A Purpose
1. SCRATCH YOUR OWN ITCH
Start by identifying problems you encounter in your day-to-day life that frustrate you. Lindsay was traveling all the time as a TV Producer for HGTV and found that she was going through travel toothpaste tubes at an alarming rate. These were little plastic bottles that Lindsay realized must take up a ton of landfill and can’t easily be recycled.
Lindsay looked for alternate solutions. She tried toothpaste powder and toothpaste tablets (from commercial brands and homemade products she found on Etsy), but both were still packaged in plastic that harms the environment. She also wanted to make it her mission to stop putting the tons of crap found in toothpaste into our bodies every day.
If you look at the back of a toothpaste tube, stuff like propylene glycol, sodium lauryl sulfate, and diethanolamine are all controversial ingredients that lots of people avoid. There is a ton of research and reasons why these chemicals shouldn’t be in our bodies. For example, Hydrated Silica is a commonly found chemical in toothpaste that even dentists agree is not always effective.[*]
Lindsay found that big toothpaste companies are getting away with using the cheapest and easiest (questionably) effective ingredients, even though there are safer and just as effective ingredients available. The thing is, those ingredients cost a little more, and you have to be okay with asking people to try something new (as in using either a powder or a tablet instead of a paste or gel.)
Lindsay says “commercial toothpaste is like fast food.” Fast food is cheap, chock full of weird preservatives and ingredients that may or may not be good for you but, yeah - it’s food. It will fill you up, and the FDA deems it safe, but just because it’s “safe” doesn’t mean you should eat it every single day.
Commercial toothpaste is the same. It has a bunch of questionable ingredients, it’s not sustainably made in any way, and sure, it cleans your teeth, but it’s not actually good for you. When Lindsay had all these realizations, she started researching her own organic non-paste toothpaste product which wouldn’t explode in her travel luggage like this:
Read Moer at >> https://sumo.com/stories/how-to-start-an-ecommerce-business
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