Starting a small business is all the feels. It’s exciting and magical, but it is also scary and overwhelming. Here are three things I wish I’d known when I started my own product-based small business.

1- You Can Do-It-Yourself

In the early days of my product-based small business, I didn’t realise it was possible to save my money and do things myself. I paid a photographer a huge sum of money for some (pretty awful) product photographs. I also paid a graphic designer to create our first website, which, by the way, looked amazing but had zero practicality, no shop function and it cost almost £10k.

There are, of course, some things that you absolutely have to pay the professionals to do- accounting, for instance. But it is possible to learn how to take decent product photographs and build a basic website (that has a shop) without paying someone else.

2- Start Marketing From Day 1

Seriously. This one is a biggie. As a small business owner, you NEED to market your business. If anyone brags to you that they “don’t need to bother with any marketing”, that’s a big red flag. Perhaps they are doing well right now, but in the future, things may change. The marketplace they sell through may go under, or may stop pushing their products to the first page.

Set up your social media and get a website straight away. Like, NOW. Start an email newsletter and gather customers’ email addresses (note- you need their permission for this). If you don’t know how to do these things, get researching, read up, watch tutorials, ask friends and family for help. We’ll cover this in more detail later.

Oh, and film your work, your processes, your workshop, your day-to-day stuff. Start building up a collection of short videos of you in your work environment from the beginning. Future you will be so glad you did. This sort of video footage is great for social media, and in a few years you’ll want to look back at how far you’ve come.

3- Quality Over Quantity

Possibly the most important lesson in running a small business is to focus on quality over quantity. Your goal should not be to create the most amount of products or designs. There is no point in creating 367 greeting card designs if they are all awful. No one will buy them and you’ll have wasted a lot of time and energy.

Instead of trying to create lots of designs, set a goal to start with 10, and make them the best possible 10 that you can. Do your research, look at what your competitors are putting out there, see what’s trending and gather ideas and information. Ask yourself, is this something I would buy?

I say this from a place of love and experience. Some of the first designs we made were bad. Really bad. They were drawn quickly, with very little attention to detail. The product photography was, well, blurry and ugly. It was only once we really started to focus on quality that our orders started to take off. We obsessed over getting designs central on our laser cut cards, we agonised over paper colours and we started taking better photographs.