{"id":40,"date":"2026-06-21T18:48:20","date_gmt":"2026-06-21T18:48:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/shopwithmore.co.uk\/blog\/?p=40"},"modified":"2026-06-21T18:48:20","modified_gmt":"2026-06-21T18:48:20","slug":"six-months-in-what-ive-learned-building-shopwithmore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shopwithmore.co.uk\/blog\/six-months-in-what-ive-learned-building-shopwithmore\/","title":{"rendered":"Six Months In: What I’ve Learned Building ShopWithMore"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Six months ago, ShopWithMore didn’t exist outside of a document and a very stubborn belief that ecommerce needed to be rebuilt from scratch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today it’s live. 20,000+ products. A functioning AI-native platform. An affiliate pipeline importing thousands of products a day. A blog. A newsletter. A small but growing audience watching what happens next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here’s what the last six months actually taught me \u2014 the honest version, not the highlight reel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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1. Starting before you’re ready is the only way to start.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I spent longer than I should have waiting for the right moment. The right feature set. The right number of products. The right design. There is no right moment. There is only the decision to go, followed by the work of making it worthy of that decision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ShopWithMore V1 is not perfect. It will never be perfect. But it is real, it is live, and it is teaching me things no amount of planning would have revealed. Ship it, then improve it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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2. Building alone forces clarity.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am a solo founder. I have no team, no co-founder, no office. Just a desktop in Preston and a very long list of things to build.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I’ve learned is that the absence of a team forces a kind of discipline that group environments can dilute. There are no meetings to hide behind. No one else to hand a problem to. Every decision lands on you, which means you get very good at making decisions \u2014 and very ruthless about which problems actually need solving right now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I use AI agents as my operational team. That’s not a metaphor or a marketing line. It’s how the business runs. And it works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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3. The unglamorous work is the real work.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everyone talks about product vision, AI architecture, and market positioning. Nobody talks about the Tuesday morning when nothing works and you have to fix a sync script before the delivery shift starts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Building ShopWithMore has been mostly unglamorous. Debugging pipelines. Rewriting import logic. Fixing image rendering across different screen sizes. Updating meta tags. Testing affiliate integrations. These things don’t make good LinkedIn posts. But they are the difference between a platform that works and one that doesn’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do the unglamorous work. Do it consistently. That’s the job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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4. The affiliate model is more complex than it looks \u2014 and more powerful.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

ShopWithMore is built on an affiliate and dropship model, which means we don’t hold stock and we earn on sales driven through partner networks. On paper, it’s elegant. In practice, building the data pipelines, tracking infrastructure, and product sync systems to make it work at scale is a significant technical undertaking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We’re live on multiple networks now, with more coming. The model scales in a way that traditional inventory-based retail simply cannot. But it requires patience and precision to get right. We’re still getting it right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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5. Content is infrastructure.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I underestimated this. SEO content, blog posts, LinkedIn articles \u2014 I used to think of these as marketing. I now think of them as infrastructure. The equivalent of laying cable before you need the internet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every piece of content we publish is a long-term asset that compounds over time. The post you write today might bring in traffic for the next three years. Building content alongside the platform \u2014 not after it \u2014 is one of the best decisions I’ve made.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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6. The vision gets clearer as the build gets harder.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There have been moments in the last six months where the gap between where the platform is and where it needs to be felt very wide. Those moments are disheartening if you let them be \u2014 or they’re useful, if you treat them as precision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every frustration with V1 is a blueprint for V2. Every limitation I bump into is a feature I know we need to build. The harder the build, the more specific the vision becomes. I know more clearly than ever what ShopWithMore needs to be \u2014 because I’ve spent six months watching it become something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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We’re at the beginning of a long journey. The next six months will look nothing like the last six. There’s a V2 architecture to build, an affiliate strategy to scale, and a platform to grow into something that genuinely changes how people shop online.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One parcel delivery at a time. One commit at a time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What’s the most important thing you learned in the first six months of building something? I’d genuinely like to know.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Justin Hodnett \u2014 Founder, ShopWithMore<\/em>
shopwithmore.co.uk<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

#BuildInPublic #FounderStory #Ecommerce #AICommerce #StartupLife #ShopWithMore #Lancashire #SoloFounder<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Six months ago, ShopWithMore didn’t exist outside of a document and a very stubborn belief that ecommerce needed to be rebuilt from scratch. Today it’s live. 20,000+ products. A functioning AI-native platform. An affiliate pipeline importing thousands of products a day. A blog. A newsletter. A small but growing audience watching what happens next. Here’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":41,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-shopwithmore-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shopwithmore.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shopwithmore.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shopwithmore.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shopwithmore.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shopwithmore.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/shopwithmore.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43,"href":"https:\/\/shopwithmore.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions\/43"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shopwithmore.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shopwithmore.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shopwithmore.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shopwithmore.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}