Build Log — Ecommerce — Shopify
Ospeka started as a £1,000 stake and no real plan beyond “try it properly.” It closed its first year on Shopify at £100,000 in revenue.
I didn’t set out to write a Shopify case study — I set out to see if I could actually build and sell something myself, end to end, rather than run paid media for other people’s stores all day and never test the theory on my own. Ospeka was that test. Same skills I use for clients — Google Ads, PPC, conversion thinking — pointed at a store I owned outright.
The store itself is unglamorous by design. No agency, no dev team, no big ad budget to start — just Shopify’s default toolkit, a small amount of stock, and the same paid-media discipline I already had from the day job. The store was built to sell from day one, not designed first and monetised later: product pages, checkout and the ad funnel were all built together, because that’s the only way I know a store actually converts.
Doing the marketing and the build yourself forces a kind of honesty a hired-out project doesn’t get. There’s nowhere to hide if a page doesn’t convert — you built it.
That’s the real lesson from the first year: most of what made Ospeka work wasn’t a clever growth hack, it was the boring discipline of watching what the ads actually told me about the store, and fixing the store instead of just spending more on ads. Running both sides — the marketing and the Shopify build — at the same time is what closed that loop fast.
It’s also why the Shopify work I take on for other people — CPadel, Upper Crust, and the builds and fixes I do more broadly — starts from the same place: a store isn’t finished when it launches, it’s finished when the numbers say it’s converting. I’m still adding to Ospeka’s story as it grows past its first year, and I’ll keep documenting the specific mistakes and fixes here as they happen rather than tidy them up in hindsight.
