Two businesses, built in public — mistakes included.
No inflated numbers, no invented results. These are the real decisions, in the order they happened, from the two businesses I built myself.
Dermarose Laser & Skin Clinic
Opened in the middle of the pandemic's economic aftershock, with no marketing background. Every early decision — pricing, equipment, systems — was made under real-time pressure, not from a playbook.
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2020
Pricing to survive the moment cost more later
Discounted pricing brought in early clients during a difficult economic window — but once a market gets used to a price, raising it pushes clients elsewhere. The lesson: don't rush positioning with offers, even when the timing feels urgent.
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76,000
EGPEquipment bought on trend, not on usage
Devices that made sense as trends at the time went underused once the trend passed, and couldn't be resold at value. The real question was never "is this popular" — it was "will this get used enough to earn back its cost."
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2×
A "flexible" booking system meant double the reconciliation work
Multiple payment options per session (deposit, full payment, instalments) sounded like good service — it also meant the accounts took twice as long to reconcile every month. Systems need to be tested in real use before being trusted with your books.
VitalRoots
A haircare and skincare brand built from the ground up — including two failed websites before the third one worked.
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21,000
EGPWebsite #1: zero sales
A first agency-built website produced no sales at all. Every underperforming ad got blamed on the creative — when the real issue was that the door the ads were driving traffic to didn't open.
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55,000
EGPWebsite #2: same problems, doubled
Advice to "own the whole build" led to a custom WordPress site — more expensive, more complex, and still broken: the tracking pixel and event data never fired correctly. The advice wasn't wrong; the real cost of getting it working wasn't accounted for.
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#3
The "simple" stopgap outperformed both
A basic Easy Orders page, meant to be temporary, performed better than either paid build. Simplicity wasn't the fallback option — it was the better one. VitalRoots later moved onto Shopify, this time with the customer journey mapped first.
Budget isn't the variable that matters most
A celebrity campaign, average results
A large-budget campaign with a well-known celebrity produced ordinary results — reach without relevance.
A micro-influencer, entirely different results
A fraction of the budget, with a creator who understood the audience directly, outperformed it. Budget size was never the deciding factor — audience understanding was.
Want a system built the way these were — the second time, correctly?
Every service on offer comes from a lesson learned firsthand, not a framework read secondhand.
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