Angie Stocklin: The right timing can be the secret sauce to success

When Randy and I started One Click in 2005, we didn’t set out to build the three-brand, eyewear-focused, B2C ecommerce company that Foster Grant purchased in 2018. We didn’t start the company out of a need to solve an urgent problem, and we didn’t talk to any customers before we started. I’m not sure we followed a single piece of advice that I give to founders today.

So why did it all work? Unfortunately, time doesn’t allow us to go back and do a pure A/B test on how we started our business, but I have a theory on why it worked: timing and execution.

At the end of each semester, I almost always have at least one student in my Entrepreneurship and Innovation classes at Purdue ask if I thought our original business model and success could be replicated today. The short answer? No way.

◗ In the late 1990s, companies like eBay, Amazon and PayPal launched, and the early 2000s saw shopping online become more common for the general public. We were right in that sweet spot of letting others test the waters and set the standard, but early enough that we didn’t find our markets saturated by competition. We were also early enough that a lot of bigger brands and department stores had not yet spent money and effort on their online presence. And maybe even more important? Amazon wasn’t the Amazon we all know today.

◗ Building a website, especially an ecommerce website, was more difficult in 2005 because the world of Shopify didn’t exist. Randy designed and coded our first website on his own, and our second site, SunglassWarehouse.com, was built on Yahoo! Store by the previous owner. Yahoo! Store made uploading products easier, but you still needed a hard-to-find engineer to tackle the proprietary RTML coding language.

All this effort created a roadblock for the everyday person and was a small protective mote for our early company. Today, there are numerous ways to plug and play when it comes to starting an ecommerce business, reducing some of those barriers to entry.

◗ Marketing and advertising is never easy, but I promise you it was easier in 2005 than it is today. A lot of those big brands I mentioned before were slowly starting to build functioning ecommerce sites, and a few of the brands were starting to tackle digital marketing, but there were simply fewer companies spending money on ads. This made it easier for us to compete with our small budget, and spending a lot of concentrated time and effort to dive into online marketing helped us ramp up more quickly than a company attempting to transition away from traditional methods.

There were also fewer platforms to learn, and no one was talking about building a community, engaging your audience, and building a brand. It was all about executing on the X’s and O’s of your marketing strategy. The playing field was much more level in 2005 than it would be if a tiny, bootstrapped company launched against the budgets and internal knowledge and resources of an established company today.

“So,” you might be asking, “this was all just luck?” I would say the timing of the type of business we wanted to launch was pretty lucky, yes. But it wasn’t all luck. It was also proper execution.

Our business model was acquiring underperforming websites and rehabbing them with the goal of turning a profit in two years. At that point, we would either sell the property and take the money to invest in something we felt had a bigger opportunity, or we’d keep the business and use the cash flow to our advantage.

As you can imagine, this is not a “set it and forget it” type of cash-flow business. It required consistent and constant attention and strategy, and because of our backgrounds, we had to teach ourselves almost everything about business, ecommerce, logistics and digital marketing. Simply entering the market at the right time wasn’t enough to create success.

However, I can also say with certainty that sheer effort and will would not have created the outcome we had. We have a few websites and brands in our history that were showered with love, attention and money and just didn’t make it. Maybe they failed because of the wrong time or the wrong product or even the wrong audience, but it is clear to me that sheer willpower and work ethic weren’t enough to create success.

So, if you are thinking of starting a business today, I urge you to solve an urgent problem and talk to your customers before you start. But don’t overlook the power of great timing combined with dedicated and strategic business execution. It might just be your secret sauce.•

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Stocklin is an angel investor and exited founder who currently teaches entrepreneurship at Purdue University.