5 Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Shopify Store as a Female Founder

One Year In: What Running a Shopify Store Taught Me

When I launched the Pearl Spark Pages Shopify store in May 2025, I made a list of ambitious goals. Typical! Looking back on the first year, I learned so much along the way.

TLDR: there was definitely a gap between expectations and reality.

These are five lessons from those first twelve months, written as I moved into year two in 2026. They’re the things I’d share with another female founder starting a product-based business, not a blueprint that guarantees the same results.

Lesson 1: Choose Data Over Feelings

One of my habits is pulling ambitious numbers out of the sky. It’s very typical for me to start a call with my assistant by saying, “Let’s double our email list this month!” without looking closely at the previous months.

I love the ambition behind 10X Is Easier Than 2X. But when I set a near-impossible target, I could make real progress and still feel like I’d failed.

An episode of Susan Bradley’s Ecommerce Roadmap podcast, Here’s Why You’re Probably Doing Better Than You Think, helped shift my perspective. Hearing her discuss how she interprets store numbers made me question the expectations I’d been using. I started looking for context instead of treating a missed target as a personal verdict.

Now I write down the previous month’s results, the current goal, and the gap between them. I pay attention to my audience, traffic, conversion rate, average order value (AOV), and customer acquisition costs. So many acronyms I didn’t know before!

I’m still learning month to month. I can set ambitious goals while separating a realistic working target from a stretch goal, and give myself some grace when the two don’t match.

Lesson 2: Test AI Workflows, Then Check the Output

Shopify’s AI tools had been on my radar, and I’d also been exploring connections between my business tools and Claude. If you’ve read my AI tools post, you know I love a rabbit hole. Claude Cowork became a big part of my experimentation.

In the setup I was using when I wrote this, I’d connected Shopify and Klaviyo with Claude. Having information from those tools closer together helped me investigate questions without so much manual back-and-forth. Some tasks that used to take me ages felt much quicker, leaving more energy for deciding what to try next.

That’s my experience with my own setup, not a statement that every connector has the same access or works the same way. My lesson is to start with a specific question, understand what a connection can access, and review the output against the underlying reports. A confident-sounding explanation still needs checking.

Lesson 3: Find Your Mentors

I wasn’t new to having a website. I’d been an entrepreneur for ten years, mostly in services, where the main call to action was to book a call. I had a few online courses people could buy, but selling physical products was a different learning curve.

You don’t know what you don’t know. Books, courses, podcasts, YouTube, and in-person events became part of how I learned.

Courses I Learned From

After leaving the coaching industry, I wondered whether AI would make paid courses less useful to me. Why invest when I could ask a tool so many questions? My own experience challenged that assumption. By the time I wrote this, I’d invested in four high-ticket courses and found useful learning along the way. Here are three I wanted to highlight.

You don’t need to make the same investments. I’d consider the teacher, format, support, budget, and the specific problem you want help with before buying.

• The One Percent with Ryan Daniel Moran. I joined a three-month sampler of the year-long program. Much of the content I encountered focused on Amazon rather than Shopify, so I didn’t stay for the long haul. Two takeaways I kept were thinking about risk reversal and different types of proof.
• POP Academy with Carlyn Bushman. I met Carlyn through the Entreprenista League. During my time in the program, I recorded a 70% increase in website traffic, a tripling of conversion rate, and nearly triple the cart additions. Those were the changes I reported at the time, not proof that the course alone caused them or results another store should expect. I appreciated having support while learning to grow my store.

Photo Credit: Carlyn Bushman

• Reliable Revenue with Susan Bradley. I’d listened to her podcast for months and taken two free challenges before joining. I focused on improving our email flows, and at the time of writing I was seeing around 30% of revenue attributed to email in the reporting I used. Attribution depends on how it’s measured, so I don’t treat that as a universal target or a guaranteed outcome. I found enough value to continue into her Inner Circle membership.

A year in, having a regular review rhythm and clearer questions mattered as much to me as finding another tactic.

Podcasts I Return To

Before investing money, I invested time. A lot of it went into podcasts. I’ve shared a longer list in my five favourite podcasts for product-based founders, but two deserve another mention here.

• Shopify Masters. I enjoy hearing founders talk about building their businesses and often go deep into the archives to find ideas I can reflect on.
• The Ecommerce Roadmap. Susan’s data-over-feelings approach helps me step back from the emotion I can attach to the numbers. I also enjoy hearing the behind-the-scenes stories from her community.

Want more books, events, communities, newsletters, and podcasts? Explore my Top 100 Female Founder Resource List.

Learning at Events

One of the most useful e-commerce events I’d attended by my first anniversary was Ecomm North in September 2025. I enjoyed it enough to book tickets for my husband and me for the 2026 edition. You can explore the 2026 Toronto Summit page as historical context; check the organiser’s current information separately for future events.

Our female founder group chat was on FIRE that day. We were in different breakout rooms and keynotes, sharing what we were learning and sometimes hopping between sessions.

I enjoyed learning from Scott Cunningham at Merchant Mastery and exploring his Storyselling AI custom GPT. I also received encouraging feedback on my content’s visibility in AI search, something I was experimenting with through answer engine optimisation (AEO) and generative engine optimisation (GEO). I treated that feedback as one perspective, not a universal score or proof of rankings. Seeing friends share their founder stories on stage was another highlight.

Lesson 4: Set Incremental Goals

I still love being aspirational. I also like hitting a target I can celebrate rather than feeling permanently behind.

Now I review a small set of key performance indicators each week, including audience, traffic, conversions, and AOV. I compare monthly results and, where I have comparable data, the same period from the previous year. I want to understand the context rather than assume every change is a trend.

I get a little geeky about the start of the month and the analytics reviews I’ve been experimenting with in Claude. The useful part isn’t the tool by itself. It’s the habit of checking the numbers, asking what changed, and choosing a manageable next step.

Lesson 5: Keep Your Content Useful and Accurate

One challenge in our first year was building around a hero product, the Female Founders Journal. You can explore it in the Female Founders Journal Deluxe Bundle. I was itching to create new products, but also learning how much there was to say about the one we already had.

Blogging became a way to answer questions, share the founder journey, and give readers useful context. That’s how you ended up reading this!

A site doesn’t become ineligible for search results simply because its content is older. Relevance, helpful information, site structure, and links from other sites all matter. For me, the goal is to publish when I have something worthwhile to share and update existing pages when details change, not post just to make the site look busy.

PR was another part of the work. Being included in ten gift guides during the 2025 holiday season felt like a win and gave more people ways to discover us. I’m continuing to build those relationships, without treating a mention or backlink as a promise of rankings or sales.

Looking Back on Year One, and Into Year Two

One reason I created the Female Founders Journal is that I’m often looking at the gap instead of the gain. I wanted a place to notice and celebrate wins, big or small. At the end of our first year, I was celebrating what was then our highest-revenue month. That deserved a pause!

As I moved into year two, I kept thinking about something my operations-focused friend Faith Morris says: year one is orientation; year two is experimentation. That framing gave me permission to see the first year as learning, then make room to play, test, and improve.

If you’re starting a Shopify store, you don’t need to master every metric, join every program, or try every tool at once. Pick the question that matters most right now and give yourself a little room to learn.

Want a moment to reflect on your own progress? Get my 5-Day Confidence Prompts sent to your inbox, my treat! Bring your pen and a little curiosity about what you’ve already figured out. There’s room to celebrate what’s working while you choose your next step.