{"id":50,"date":"2026-06-21T19:03:46","date_gmt":"2026-06-21T19:03:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/shopwithmore.co.uk\/blog\/?p=50"},"modified":"2026-06-21T19:03:46","modified_gmt":"2026-06-21T19:03:46","slug":"the-week-that-nearly-broke-me-and-why-im-still-building","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shopwithmore.co.uk\/blog\/the-week-that-nearly-broke-me-and-why-im-still-building\/","title":{"rendered":"The Week That Nearly Broke Me \u2014 And Why I’m Still Building"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"The
The Week That Nearly Broke Me \u2014 And Why I’m Still Building<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

A ShopWithMore founder update<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I’m going to be honest with you. This week nearly broke me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not nearly broke the business. Nearly broke me. There’s a difference, and I think it’s important to say it plainly rather than dress it up in founder language about pivots and learnings and strategic realignment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This week was hard in the way that only happens when you’re building something alone, you’re physically exhausted, and your own mind turns against you. Depression. Anxiety. The kind of fatigue that sits behind your eyes and makes every decision feel heavier than it should. I deliver parcels for a living to fund this dream. This week I did that too. The parcels don’t stop because your mental health is struggling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want to write about it. Because nobody does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What actually happened<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the last seventeen months I have been building ShopWithMore’s V1 \u2014 a dropship platform designed to import and sell products from CPC and other suppliers. I learned everything from scratch. Pipeline integration. API connections. Image hosting. Render. GitHub. Cloudinary. The product sync logic that runs every day and keeps the catalogue current. Thousands of hours of work, most of it between 9pm and midnight after the deliveries were done and the family was settled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It worked. It genuinely worked. We got to 20,000 products live with a pipeline capable of scaling to 120,000 by end of June.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then, in the last 24 hours, I pivoted away from it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not because it failed. Because in a moment of exhausted, painful clarity I saw something I’d been circling for months: the affiliate model \u2014 stage two of the original plan \u2014 was actually ready to execute now, faster, leaner, and more scalable than the dropship route I’d been building.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pure HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. XML feeds from 20+ suppliers. 20,000+ products on a site that loads instantly, scales to millions, and doesn’t carry the infrastructure weight of the dropship model. No inventory complexity. No margin pressure. Affiliate commissions on every sale, with the tech stack reduced to its absolute essentials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was the right call. I know it was the right call. And it still cost me something to make it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What a pivot actually feels like<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

People talk about pivots like they’re strategic moments. Clean decisions made in boardrooms with whiteboards and frameworks. The founder sees the data, updates the roadmap, communicates the change. Everyone nods. The ship changes course.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is not what this felt like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This felt like seventeen months of work sitting on one side of a scale, and a better idea sitting on the other, and knowing \u2014 really knowing \u2014 that you have to let go of the thing you built to pick up the thing that’s right. It felt like grief and relief at the same time. It felt like being completely alone with a decision that would have been easier to make with a co-founder, a team, anyone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I made it alone. At the end of a week that had already taken more than I had to give. <div class=”callout”> <div class=”callout-label”>To any solo founder reading this<\/div> The week that nearly breaks you is not the week that ends the story. It is the week the story gets real. The clarity you find at the bottom of your reserves is different from any other kind. It costs more. It’s also more honest. <\/div><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What depression and anxiety do to decision-making<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’m not going to gloss over this part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When depression and anxiety arrive together \u2014 and they often do, for me \u2014 they don’t announce themselves cleanly. They arrive as noise. Every problem feels permanent. Every setback feels like evidence of something deeper. The voice that says this is too hard, you’re not capable, you should stop<\/em> gets louder. It sounds reasonable. That’s the dangerous part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ve learned, over time, to recognise that voice. Not to silence it \u2014 I can’t always do that \u2014 but to hear it without obeying it. To separate the genuine signal in my thinking from the distortion the mental health is adding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This week, that was harder than usual.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I know is this: the pivot decision I made was right. Not because the week was easy \u2014 it wasn’t. But because the clarity underneath the noise was real. When I stripped away the sunk cost thinking, the tiredness, the anxiety, what remained was a better path forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’m still here. I’m still building. And the platform that launches next is going to be better because of the week it cost me to get here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Where ShopWithMore goes from here<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The new architecture is already in motion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Affiliate-first. XML feeds from 20+ suppliers. Lightning fast, fully scalable, built on the leanest possible stack. The year of learning \u2014 the pipelines, the APIs, the integrations, the failure modes \u2014 that knowledge doesn’t disappear. It informs every decision we make from here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

V2 was always the plan. We just got here faster than expected. And sometimes the hardest weeks are the ones that do that \u2014 accelerate you past the version you were building toward the one you were always meant to build.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Why I’m writing this<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because the founder highlight reel is a lie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LinkedIn celebrates the launch, the milestone, the funding round. It doesn’t talk about the week before the pivot when you’re delivering parcels at 7am on four hours of sleep and wondering whether any of it is worth it. It doesn’t talk about the depression. It doesn’t talk about building something for seventeen months and then choosing to change direction in 24 hours because that’s what the business needs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those weeks are real. They happen to every founder \u2014 especially the ones doing it alone, without a safety net, without a team to absorb the weight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you’re in one of those weeks right now: I see you. It doesn’t mean the dream is wrong. Sometimes it means you’re closer to the version of it that actually works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

\u2014 Justin<\/em>
Founder, ShopWithMore<\/em>
Preston, Lancashire<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A ShopWithMore founder update I’m going to be honest with you. This week nearly broke me. Not nearly broke the business. Nearly broke me. There’s a difference, and I think it’s important to say it plainly rather than dress it up in founder language about pivots and learnings and strategic realignment. This week was hard […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":51,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shopwithmore.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50","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=50"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/shopwithmore.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52,"href":"https:\/\/shopwithmore.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50\/revisions\/52"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shopwithmore.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shopwithmore.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shopwithmore.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shopwithmore.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}