Stop waiting to start selling

There's a version of this that plays out constantly: someone has a thing to sell — a limited run of prints, a fixed-scope design package, a batch of ceramics — and they spend three weeks picking the right platform before making a single sale.

The platform matters less than the selling. Here's why that cycle keeps happening, and how to break it.

The setup trap

When you decide to sell something online, the obvious first move feels like building infrastructure. Pick a platform. Set up a storefront. Customize the checkout. Add product photos. Write descriptions. Nail the branding.

None of this is wrong. It's just not the most important thing — especially not on day one.

Lemon Squeezy, a digital commerce platform, recently reflected on their first year in business. The team spent a decade accumulating experience before launching, and their biggest takeaway from year one was consistency: showing up every day, doing the unglamorous work, getting things out the door. The features they're most excited about — checkout customization, expanded APIs, a website builder — came after they'd already been selling.

That sequence matters. Infrastructure follows validation, not the other way around.

What a first sale actually needs

If you're selling 15 ceramics to people who already follow you, you don't need a store with inventory management and a custom domain. You need a price, a way to collect payment, and a way to tell people it's available.

That's the entire transaction.

The full-platform question only becomes interesting if you're running an ongoing catalog, managing subscriptions, or processing enough volume that automation pays for itself. For most first sales — and most seasonal or occasional sales — the setup overhead isn't worth it.

TinyVendor is built for exactly this: set a price, get a link, share it, get paid via Stripe or PayPal. No storefront to configure before you can take money.

The feedback you can't get until you sell

A musician pre-selling an album to 80 fans learns more from those 80 transactions than from any amount of research done beforehand. Shipping questions come up that weren't anticipated. Buyers want to know something the product page didn't address. The file format you picked turns out to need changing.

None of that surfaces in the setup phase. It only comes out once real money has changed hands.

Waiting for the perfect setup delays this feedback loop. And the feedback loop is the whole point of selling early. You're not just trying to make money — you're trying to find out whether your thing resonates, what the actual friction is, and whether this is worth building infrastructure around.

A freelancer offering a fixed-scope package learns this with their first three clients. The pricing, the scope boundaries, what questions keep coming up — none of that is knowable in advance. The first few sales do the research for you.

Build infrastructure for real problems

Once you've run a few rounds and have concrete data — you're consistently selling out, you need to manage pre-order waitlists, people keep asking for the same customization — then it's worth asking what platform you actually need.

Build infrastructure to solve problems you've observed, not problems you're anticipating.

Most people who spend weeks configuring a storefront before their first sale end up reconfiguring it anyway, because what they needed turned out to be different from what they assumed. The platform question looks very different after you've shipped a dozen orders than it does before you've shipped one.

Start with what works

The case for starting simple isn't that simple tools are better. It's that the complexity of your setup should match the complexity of your problem — and most first sales are not complex problems.

Share a link. Get paid. Learn something. Then decide what you need next.

Your first sale will tell you more about what your setup should look like than anything you could figure out in advance.