Six months of evenings: How I chose e-commerce over consulting, coaching and content

In the middle of 2024 I sat down with a sheet of paper and five words on it: consulting, coaching, content, digital products, e-commerce. I had a full-time job at Jaguar Land Rover, a family, a PhD, a postdoc at Imperial behind me, and a year I now think of as the lost year, in which I had been told by my sister to try e-commerce and had ignored her. The sheet of paper was my attempt to stop ignoring things and choose.

This post is about how I chose. Not because my choice is the right one for you, since the whole point of the four paths is that the right one depends on the person, but because the way of choosing turned out to matter more than the answer. Six months of evenings went into it before I placed a first order with a manufacturer in December 2024. Those six months are the part nobody writes about, so I will.

What I already knew about two of the five

Two of the options were not theoretical. Years earlier I had done a piece of consulting for a London company and been paid £8,600 for it. It was the first money I had ever earned outside a salary, and I remember it with more affection than the sum deserves. It also taught me the shape of consulting: you sell hours, the client sets the timetable, and when the engagement ends, the income ends with it. It was real, and it was a job with a different boss.

I had also tried coaching, on the side, and it had burned me out for a few hundred pounds. The economics were the problem, not the people. Coaching sells the same hours as consulting at a lower price, to individuals rather than companies, and it requires a constant supply of new clients found by the coach. I finished that venture tired, slightly poorer than when I started once I counted the time, and with a clear lesson: I did not want an income that stopped the moment I stopped.

The four questions I asked of each option

With two options already tested, I wrote down what I actually wanted and turned it into four questions. I still use them, and they are the spine of the assessment on this site.

Scored honestly, e-commerce won on three of the four questions and lost on one: it needed capital and it carried inventory risk. Digital products came second, and I think they are the right answer for many of the people who take the assessment, especially those with a specialism they can teach. Content came third, because I could see it working for others but could not see myself producing it every day while employed. Consulting and coaching, the two I had actually done, came last for me, and I want to be clear that they are first for plenty of other people. The order is personal. The questions are not.

Six months of evenings

One more thing about the sheet of paper. My sister had suggested e-commerce a year earlier, in 2023, and I had dismissed it for the reasons people usually dismiss things: it was not my field, I had no time, and it sounded like something other people did. When the same option came out top of a comparison I had built myself, with criteria I had chosen, I could no longer dismiss it. That is the practical value of writing the questions down before you look at the answers. It makes it much harder to reject the right answer for the wrong reasons.

Choosing the path took a fortnight. Choosing what to sell took six months, and nearly all of that time was spent finding reasons not to do things. I looked at categories, and most were crowded with identical products competing on price, which is not a game a part-time operator can win. I looked for something in the kitchen, because I understood it as a customer, and for a product where a real point of difference was possible rather than a slightly cheaper copy. The business that emerged is a direct-to-consumer kitchen brand with a focused product line, and the focus was the decision that mattered: one line, done properly, rather than a catalogue.

The evenings had a rhythm. The children went to bed. I opened a spreadsheet of unit costs, shipping, platform fees, returns and advertising, and I moved numbers around until I understood which ones the business would live or die by. I wrote to manufacturers, waited, wrote again, and learned that the slow ones are often the good ones. I ordered samples and found fault with them. My wife tested things without being asked to and gave verdicts I did not always want. Nothing about it looked like a business. It looked like a hobby that was taking a long time to become interesting.

Where the evenings came from

People ask where the time came from, and the honest answer is that it came from the same place the lost year had gone: the hours after nine o'clock that I had previously spent scrolling, worrying about work, or telling myself I would start next month. I did not get up at five. I did not give up weekends with the children. I took roughly ninety minutes on four or five evenings a week, and I protected them by deciding in advance what each evening was for: this one for supplier emails, this one for the spreadsheet, this one for reading reviews of products I might compete with.

Two rules made it sustainable. The first was that the job came first during the day, without exception, because a parallel income that costs you your salary is not parallel. The second was that the research had to produce a written output each week, however small: a shortlist, a cost model, a rejected idea with the reason written down. Research without output is a hobby, and I had already spent a year on one of those. The written outputs are what eventually turned into the decision to order.

The number is the part I would not skip. Before I ordered anything I wrote down the bare minimum my family needed each month and added six months of it as a buffer. That became the line the business had to cross, through its worst weeks and not just its best, before I would resign. It gave the six months of research a purpose beyond curiosity, because every spreadsheet was really asking the same question: can this thing plausibly reach that line? The post on the number covers the calculation.

What I would do differently

Three things. I would start the comparison in 2023 rather than 2024, because the lost year cost me exactly what it sounds like, and my sister was right. I would spend less of the six months looking for the perfect product and more of it placing a small first order sooner, because the first order taught me more in a month than the spreadsheet had in three. And I would write the number down on day one rather than partway through, because a target you have not written is a target you can quietly move.

I would not change the decision to compare all five properly. People who skip that step tend to pick the path that is loudest on social media that year, and then abandon it when it turns out to require something they do not have. The four questions are boring, and boring is the point. They are how a person with a job, a family and no spare evenings chooses something they can actually finish.

The order matters more than the choice

Since March 2026 the business has passed £500,000 in revenue in its first twelve months after launch, with no outside money, no loans and no co-founder. I mention that not as the point but as the evidence that the six months of evenings were not wasted. The point is the order. Build first, in the evenings, with a bounded bet. Leave second, on a number, not on a feeling. Choose third, when the choice is genuinely yours. I got the order right almost by accident, after getting it wrong for a year. The sheet of paper was where it started.

This is my own experience, not financial or business advice. Every figure here is from my own records; your costs, risks and results will differ, and no income is promised or implied.

Build first. Leave second. Choose third. Start with the assessment →