I hit seven figures in my handmade business in 2018. Here are five things I know now that I wish I had known earlier.

I want to say something upfront: reaching a million dollars in annual revenue was a milestone, but it was not a destination. It was a point on a longer journey that had significant struggles before it, genuine lessons during it, and new challenges after it. I share these lessons not to impress you with a number but because every one of them applies whether you are working toward your first $10,000 year or your first $500,000 year. The principles scale.

The Context: I started my handmade business in 2013 with two babies at home, a full-time CPA job, and about $100 a month to work with for the first seven months. I built it in the basement after my kids went to sleep. I added Amazon Handmade in 2015, quit my CPA job in 2017 once the business had proven it could replace my salary, and hit seven figures in 2018. We grew to a 6,000 square foot warehouse, then bought buildings totaling over 15,000 square feet. I have had 15-plus employees. I have made every mistake there is to make. These lessons are earned.

Lesson 1: Entrepreneurship Is Not Easy. Anyone Who Tells You Otherwise Is Selling Something.

The version of entrepreneurship that gets shared on social media is the highlight reel: the big sales days, the warehouse, the team, the freedom. What does not get shared as often is the years of working alone at midnight, the cash flow crunches, the hiring decisions that went wrong, the platform changes that hit without warning, the days when nothing was working and you had no one to call.

Running your own business is genuinely hard. It tests your patience, your confidence, your relationships, and your resilience. It gets easier in certain ways as you build experience and systems — but "easier" is relative. Parts of it get harder as you scale. Different hard, but still hard.

I am not saying this to discourage you. I am saying it because sellers who go in with realistic expectations handle the inevitable difficult stretches better than sellers who expected freedom and ease and encounter reality instead. The hard parts are not signs that you are doing it wrong. They are part of doing it at all.

Lesson 2: You Have to Keep Setting the Next Goal

When I hit six figures, I did not stop. I asked what it would take to grow further and I went after that. When I hit seven figures, same thing. The businesses that stagnate are usually the ones where the owner hit a milestone, felt relief, and stopped driving forward.

Growth does not happen on its own. It requires intentional decisions: what new platform to add, what process to improve, what person to hire, what product to develop. When you stop asking those questions, the business plateaus — and a plateau is rarely stable for long. You are either growing or slowly declining, because the market is always moving.

This does not mean you need to pursue scale for its own sake. The goal can be more revenue, or it can be more time, or it can be more stability. But it needs to be something. Know what you are working toward so your decisions have a direction.

Lesson 3: Hire Before You Are Ready

Almost every handmade seller I know hired their first employee later than they should have. I did too. We wait until we are already overwhelmed, already dropping things, already burning out — and then we try to hire someone and train them while we are at maximum capacity. That is the worst possible time to onboard a new person.

The right time to hire is when you can see that you will need help — not when you are already drowning. Hire before the season, not after it starts. Build the capacity before you need it, not while you are buried under demand you cannot fulfill.

The cost of hiring someone a month early is small. The cost of being understaffed during your peak season — in missed orders, damaged metrics, and your own burnout — is significant. Most sellers who have made the first hire say the same thing: I only wish I had done it sooner.

Lesson 4: Success Does Not Happen Overnight — And That Is Actually a Good Thing

Social media makes it look like everyone is having viral moments and explosive growth all the time. Most of them are not. And the ones who do have overnight explosions often lack the systems and capacity to sustain them. A sudden 10x in orders is a crisis if you do not have the infrastructure to fulfill them.

Steady, compounding growth is more sustainable and more durable than a spike. When you grow consistently year over year — even at 20 or 30 percent annually — you have time to build the operations, the team, and the systems that can support each new level. You are not constantly playing catch-up.

Stop comparing your first year to someone else's fifth year. Focus on your own trajectory. Year-over-year growth is the metric that matters, and it compounds.

Lesson 5: You Have to Stay Willing to Pivot

The handmade selling landscape in 2025 looks nothing like it did in 2013. New platforms emerged. Established platforms changed their algorithms and fee structures. Buyer behavior shifted. Products that sold consistently for years suddenly had more competition. The sellers who lasted through all of those changes were the ones who stayed curious, stayed adaptable, and did not cling to "how it used to work" after the market had moved on.

Growth mindset is not a buzzword. It is a practical survival requirement for running a business. When something stops working, the question is not "why is this platform failing me" — it is "what is changing and how do I respond to it?" The answer might be a new platform, a new product line, a new marketing approach, or a new operational model. The willingness to find and act on that answer is what keeps businesses growing through change rather than being ended by it.

Ready to Build a Business Worth All the Hard Parts?

The Growth Thread is built for handmade sellers who are serious about treating their business like a business — learning what actually works, building systems that hold up, and growing in a way that is sustainable rather than just busy. The Amazon Handmade content is deep. The business strategy content is real. It comes from someone who has done this at scale, not from theory.

Enrollment is not always open, but you can get on the waitlist and be first to know when doors open:

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Not ready for that yet? A good next read is the guide to scaling your handmade business with multiple revenue streams — the practical side of building a business that does not depend on any single platform.