How many times did you check your stats yesterday?

Honestly. Not the number you would say to somebody else.

I know makers who look 10 times an hour, and who can tell you exactly which day the number started sliding, and who feel worse every single time they look and go back anyway.

And the thing underneath that, the one almost nobody says, is the swinging. Completely believing on the Monday that this is going to work. Completely certain by the Thursday that it never will.

That is exhausting in a way that a bad month is not, because you cannot get your footing in it. You are making decisions about your business from whichever end of the swing you happen to be on that morning.

I have been at the wrong end of that

When I was 19 I sold Swarovski crystal jewellery, and it got a lot of favourites. People saved it. Plenty of them.

The sales never matched, and I had no email list at all back then, so I had absolutely no way of ever speaking to a single one of those people again.

They liked it enough to save it and not enough to buy it that day, and then they were gone. I still think about that, because the favourites are the proof the jewellery was fine. The product was never what was broken.

So here is what is actually sitting under a quiet shop

You cannot tell which problem you have got. Whether people are seeing it and not buying, or whether nobody is seeing it at all. Those are two completely different problems needing two completely different fixes, and the shop hands you the same set of tools for both.

Everyone who does arrive is a stranger and stays one. They look, they go, and you never learn who they were, so the shop you have in year 2 is starting every sale from exactly the same cold place as the shop you had in month 2.

You put things live and then hope. I have seen this in the answers people give me and it is close to universal. New thing goes up, gets listed, maybe gets a post afterwards to say it is there, and then everybody waits. Almost nobody warms anyone up first, because nobody has ever suggested it as a thing you are allowed to do.

And when a sale does come, it barely counts. Two of them and the fees have had most of it, which makes the whole thing feel like a lot of effort in exchange for a number you would rather not work out per hour.

None of that is about how good you are at the thing you actually make.

So you go looking for the reason, and there is one obvious answer sat right there, and almost every maker lands on the same one.