Let me introduce you to the 4 stages of what I call the Maker’s Roadmap. Below you’ll find a summary of the 4 stages, but I do have a full guide including a checklist for each stage so you KNOW you’re ready to move onto the next one (with some key benchmark to hit) – that you can download just below and that also contains extra resources to help you start and grow a successful handmade shop.
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The first stage of The Maker’s Roadmap is the Dream stage. The Dream Stage is about laying the groundwork for a successful shop:
Most people skip this part – please don’t! I know the temptation is real to skip this because it’s mostly “planning” and not “practical” and because it sounds or feels more productive to dive straight into setting up your shop or taking pictures or creating products, but this stage is INCREDIBLY important.
Any strategic decision you will make later for your business will be based on the insights that you will gain during this stage. So refer to your checklist and make sure that you’ve got all of these foundational items covered. It’s really, really important.
Plus, because no one else does it, or not many other people do it, you will have a leg up your competitors because you will have a strong foundation where they’re going to be working on shaky grounds.
In the Start Stage, we get out of ‘planning’ mode and dive into ‘doing’ mode. By the end of this stage, you will have everything in place to start receiving traffic and sales to your shop.
This is a very practical stage with a fair bit to do:
Take your time, but don’t get stuck being a perfectionist. There will be many opportunities to improve later on. If there are two things though that you do need to spend time on in the Start stage it’s your pricing and your product photography. These are key, critical elements.
It’s not the time to dive into marketing strategies, social media or any other shiny tactic you might stumble upon online. Stay focused.
It’s FINALLY time to do the things you probably wanted to do from the get-go but weren’t ready for.
It’s time to focus on bringing qualified traffic to your site, marketing your products, and most importantly, getting some sales.
This stage is often considered the hardest because it’s easy to feel like you want to or have to do a billion things at once:
It can get really overwhelming, really quickly so my #1 tip here is to only work on 1 or 2 marketing channels at a time and to work in 90 days or 3 months cycles, re-assessing every quarter whether to keep going with the strategies you are using or to decide if you’re ready to add more to your plate.
This is what I call my “stacking strategy”. You want to start with a couple of channels, for example with Pinterest and Instagram. Do it for three months, don’t look at anything else and really focus just on those two things that you picked. Then, after three months, look at it and think, “okay, am I ready to add Facebook into the mix or should I keep going only with those two platforms?”.
That’s how slowly but surely you’re going to stack up your marketing channels to build an efficient marketing strategy. Don’t try to do it all at once or you’re going to spread yourself really thin and that’s not good for yourself because you’re going to burn out and it’s definitely not good for business because you’re not going to be able to dive deep into each platform strategy and to actually get momentum from them.
There are a few key milestones you should reach before thinking about the next stage. They are listed in The Maker’s Roadmap guide and checklist, but the idea is that you stay in the Grow stage and you work in 90 days cycles until you make consistent and predictable sales and until you have one or two traffic sources that bring predictable, consistent traffic to your handmade shop each month.
By now, you have a really solid foundation and are ready to scale up and expand.
A quick side note here: scaling WILL change your business, and it’s OK if that’s not what you want. Going big doesn’t have to be your definition of success, there is a lot of positive things to say about staying small.
If you do want to go big, it’s time to improve on what you’ve built:
This is a really summed up the version of The Maker’s Roadmap, which is really a full-fledged system that you access for free here. I hope this helped you clarify what your priorities should be – the ONE thing I hope you’re taking away from this is that as a business owner, it’s your ROLE to know what is important for your shop/business RIGHT NOW. People will try to sell you all sorts of strategies and courses and it can be very convincing at times, but if you’re not doing thins in the right order and try to skip steps, you will spin your wheel and it won’t work.
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