[Journey] Ecommerce, Poker, Websites... and more?

Quick introduction
Norwegian guy in his twenties. Currently taking a 6-12 month break from the 9-5 grind where I worked as a Senior Software developer.
So far I've spent my time just relaxing, but it's time to get the grind going. I will attempt to update the thread 1-4 times a month, depending on progress and my schedule.

As of now I am currently working on the following:

Ecommerce
Currently me and a good friend are running an online store. Niche is family fun/geeky.
We officially launched in January 2023 and these are the current stats ($1 is equal to 10.81kr) :


Best month so far was August 2023. 23.8k NOK ($2202.21) in total sales across 62 orders.
Our margins as of now are pretty bad sadly, 10-30% usually. It's a competitive niche, we only sell in my country and we don't have access to the real good prices from suppliers yet. Hopefully we'll get those eventually, just gotta keep on keeping on. The currrent strategy is to focus on a broad inventory, meaning that we would rather take in 10 different items rather than 10 of the same item. If something sells, we order more of that item next time. This strategy has proven successful so far, but things might change.

Currently we have:
232 unique items for sale.
239 total orders.
210 customers that have made an order.
426 customers that reached checkout (with or without purchase)
49 customers subscribed to our newsletter.
58 followers on Instagram
5 followers on TikTok.

Please feel free to ask more questions and I'll answer if it seems reasonable.
Unsure about what else should be mentioned.

As for our goals, we hope to overtake the well established older stores in our niche(s).
Upping all the numbers mentioned in "Currently we have:" is a good step towards this.


Poker
I've been playing poker on and off the last 10 years. It's mostly been a hobby, but I've previously taken it serious and lived off the poker income for a whole year during studies. I believe with work and dedication I'll be able to get my previous skills and go beyond. I'll mainly be playing online PLO (Pot Limit Omaha), but I'll also play cards live every now and then. Seeing as poker is illegal in my country there will probably not be much live play. It should be noted that while I find poker incredibly entertaining and mentally challenging, I doubt this will be the biggest focus. If I can keep doing the hobby and make some solid side income that is great. I'll be okay with making $1/hr as well, seeing as it is something I could do for hours as entertainment.

I got access to several good study-tools to level up my gameplay, it just depends on how serious I end up taking it. Studying is never fun, even when it's something I enjoy. If there is interest I will post interesting hands every now and then, otherwise I'll just post graphs of my results.

I'm starting online with a small bankroll of $220.

Websites
Currently own 6 additional websites.
I'll keep it short and simple. I want there to be organic traffic, and I want to make money displaying ads.

Finance website: 383 articles, 273 impressions, 2 clicks last 3 months. Adsense approved.
Evergreen website: 62 articles, 162 impressions, 0 clicks last 3 months. No monetization.
Tech website: 49 articles, 268 Impressions, 6 clicks last 3 months. No monetization.
Beauty Website: 96 articles, 743 Impressions, 0 clicks last 3 months. Adsense approved.
Education website: 135 articles, 3720 impressions, 28 clicks last 3 months. Adsense approved.
Adult website: 206 videos, 15 impressions, 4 clicks last 3 months. Getting some traffic from videos on other tubes, 1-3 visitors a day. Ads through exoclick.

Thanks for joining me on my journey and keeping me accountable. I hope it turns into an interesting one! As previously mentioned, feel free to ask any questions. I wont reply until the next update.
GLHF.

That's a good result my friend. As any business would, you would always expect ups and downs to it. Would you mind telling us which niche is it for the first few screenshots?

Can I have a question: how do you promote your ecom site?

All the best for the journey.

love the poker part - its hobby for me as well except i lost $100 last month with loose bank roll management which i would say is very important (just like with anything in life). Man i feel so lazy compared to you!! Good luck and ill be watching this thread

Poker is such a fun game (especially when you're good), I played it for a while (Holdem) and it was a blast! Hey, based on these stats, I'm curious if it's better for you to focus on e-commerce/poker and drop the sites, simply to improve what's working and amplify the gains. Or do you want to diversify ?

September is over, and it was a good one!
Updates below, replies all the way at the bottom.

Ecommerce
Family Fun/Geeky:
+0 TikToks posted. (5 ready, hoping to start something for halloween/christmas)
+0 Instagram reels posted. (5 ready, hoping to start something for halloween/christmas)
+0 Instagram pictures posted.
+2 Unique items aquired for resale. (35 new items ordered, not yet received)

September turned out to be a new record for the store, happy days!
Total revenue ended up being 28,049NOK($2,595) which beats the previous record by almost 5,000NOK! I believe this is due to a mix of several things: Niche performs better this time of year, we had a refill on some of our most popular products and christmas is getting closer. Fingers crossed we manage to go beyond next month as well!

Really happy with the work we put into this store this month. We ended up creating a webscraper that compares all products we can buy from our distributor with our competition. If a product has a bigger than 30% margin we research more and end up buying it if it feels right. This was a big reason why we managed to scope out 35 new items to order without big issues! Other than that we did several small improvements to the products we already have in store. Hyperlinks to relevant products when a customer is looking at specific items, added automatic upsell on a few items and rewrote the description on some of the things we have for sale. For october I believe we will keep doing the same as we did in September, but I hope we manage to focus more on social media, seeing as that is free advertising down the line.

Current store stats:
234 unique items for sale. (+2 since last update)
264 total orders. (+25 since last update)
111,419NOK ($10,309) total revenue. (+11,589NOK/$1072 since last update)
232 customers that have made an order. (+23 since last update)
454 customers that reached checkout (with or without purchase) (+29 since last update)
49 customers subscribed to our newsletter. (+0 since last update)
58 followers on Instagram. (+0 since last update)
6 followers on TikTok. (+1 since last update)

----

Interior/DIY Home:
+0 TikToks posted.
+1 Instagram reels posted.
+3 Instagram pictures posted.
+12 Unique items aquired for resale.

Since the last update we started a new online store focusing on "Interior/DIY Home". To our surprise we actually started seeing results pretty fast! The profit margins are much higher here. Buy inventory, sell it for 10X the price. No droppshipping here either, everything is stored in our own homes. Future plans is to expand the inventory, but that might not happen for a little while.

We've ordered custom branding material for packaging and such, making sure the customer feels like they are paying for a premium experience.

Current store stats:
12 unique items for sale.
4 total orders.
3227 NOK ($298) total revenue
4 customers that have made an order.
8 customers that reached checkout (with or without purchase)
3 customers subscribed to our newsletter.
9 followers on Instagram
0 followers on TikTok.

Poker
Bankroll: $389 (+$169 since last update)

Progress since laste update:
15,478 Hands played.
0 hrs 45 minutes of study.

Only thing I am happy with is the fact my bankroll somehow grew due to bonuses, rakeback and leaderboards.
This was such a shitty month of poker and I straight up played really bad. I didn't do much studying either.

I am posting this graph to keep my self accountable, but I honestly just feel ashamed about my own performance.
The gameplay netted me +$5.74 before rakeback and bonuses, but I played really bad and got really lucky. I have to do better if I wanna keep this bankroll growing.



As for October, I am playing my first live tournament this year! Norwegian Championship of Poker is happening next week, and I have bought into one event, the PLO Main event. The cost was ~470 USD. Really looking forward to this as the Norwegian Championship is the only legal poker you can play in Norway each year, gonna be fun! I'll give an update on how this went as well, but this is more of a fun thing than a grind thing. If I end up cashing that's of course good, but main goal is to have fun!

Websites
Nothing much happened here since last update, so I'm gonna keep it short and sweet:
Finance website: +0 articles posted.
Evergreen website: +2 articles posted.
Tech website: +1 articles posted.
Beauty Website: +0 articles posted.
Education website: +1 articles posted.
Adult website: +16 videos posted.

Thanks for joining me on my journey and keeping me accountable. I hope it turns into an interesting one! As previously mentioned, feel free to ask any questions. I wont reply until the next update.
GLHF.

Replies

teaMBuilderTLC said:

That's a good result my friend. As any business would, you would always expect ups and downs to it. Would you mind telling us which niche is it for the first few screenshots?

Click to expand...

Thank you so much! Indeed, there have been ups and downs, but so far it seems to be trending upwards! It might not have been obvious in the first post, but the website niche is "Familyfun/Geeky". Not going to reveal more than that, sorry. The other store we started is "Interior/DIY Home".

nqlong1986 said:

Can I have a question: how do you promote your ecom site?

Click to expand...

We have tried several different ways, but the one that gives us actual results is Google Ads. We've tried Meta ads with pretty shitty results. We're also trying to build socials for future promotion. We also get some organic traffic: 62 clicks from Google search during 1st-28th September.

kalpana007 said:

All the best for the journey.

Click to expand...

Thank you!

katsuhiko1990 said:

love the poker part - its hobby for me as well except i lost $100 last month with loose bank roll management which i would say is very important (just like with anything in life). Man i feel so lazy compared to you!! Good luck and ill be watching this thread

Click to expand...

Thanks for the nice words, but as you might see in this months update, I didn't stay disciplined at all. Maybe next month!

Archtale said:

Poker is such a fun game (especially when you're good), I played it for a while (Holdem) and it was a blast! Hey, based on these stats, I'm curious if it's better for you to focus on e-commerce/poker and drop the sites, simply to improve what's working and amplify the gains. Or do you want to diversify ?

Click to expand...

Indeed, it's way too fun. It would 100% be better for me to focus on those two, but I really need more than one thing to focus on so that I can stay sane. It should be noted though, that e-com always get's first priority. It's my baby. But I am still working on those others for different reasons: Case studies, Diversification, Fun. We'll see how this thread evolves with time, but for now I want to keep posting the updates including those "bad" projects as well.

We have tried several different ways, but the one that gives us actual results is Google Ads. We've tried Meta ads with pretty shitty results. We're also trying to build socials for future promotion. We also get some organic traffic: 62 clicks from Google search during 1st-28th September.

Click to expand...

Thank you very much for your answer. I agreed that Google bring the best customer but now it is difficult to get into GG merchant. Also SEO for ecom site is really hard. Anyway, I will try GG again. Thank you.