How many hours a week does it take to start a Shopify store?

About three to four evenings a week of 30–60 minutes, for roughly four weeks to your first product test, then about two weeks per test after that.

Do I need an LLC before I start?

Not to make your first sales. Most dads start as a sole proprietor and form an LLC once the store is consistently making money. Talk to an accountant in your state; it’s usually a few hundred dollars and an afternoon.

Should I build the store or find the product first?

Store first, but only the skeleton (domain, Shopify account, hidden). Then product. Don’t spend a single evening on design until you know what you’re selling.

How to Start a Shopify Store While Working 9‑to‑5 (A Week-by-Week Plan)

The reason most people never launch isn’t laziness. It’s that nobody told them what to do on a Tuesday night. Here’s the week-by-week order that gets a working dad from nothing to a live product test in about four weeks, and what happens after.

The rule that makes this work

Never end an evening without finishing one concrete thing. Not ‘worked on the store’. Bought the domain. Found three proof links. Uploaded the photos. Each of the ten steps below ends with a deliverable so you can’t stall in the middle.

Week 1: Rules, store, product list

Evening one: decide your test fund (about $300 per product test, and plan for several) and write down your rules for when a test passes or fails. Evening two: pick a store name that fits a broad lane you know (garage, outdoors, pets, truck), buy the .com, sign up for Shopify, connect the domain, and turn on password protection. Evenings three to five: build a list of ten products that already sell. Each needs a competitor ad running for weeks, two to ten other stores selling it, and real demand. Rank your best three.

Start your Shopify trial

Open Shopify through this link and sign up with your business Gmail. The trial gets you the first month for a few dollars, and the rest of the course assumes you set it up this way.

Start my Shopify trial →

This is a referral link. It costs you nothing extra and helps keep the course price where it is.

Week 2: Numbers, supplier, boring setup

Run the numbers on product one: price it at three times what it costs to deliver, and work out the most you can pay in ads for one sale. Find it at a and order one through your own store, like a customer. While it ships, set up payments, sales tax, one free-shipping rate with your real delivery time, policy pages, and abandoned-checkout emails.

Week 3: Product page and six ads

The product lands. One evening to shoot six to eight photos in daylight and build the page in your own words. One evening to shoot six short vertical videos: three angles, two different openings each. Then post one a day for a week as a free test to see which openings hold attention.

Week 4: The five-day test

Turn off the password, send a launch code to fifty people you know, and turn on one Meta Sales campaign at about $30 a day with your best three to six videos. Don’t touch it for 72 hours. Check ten minutes a day against the rules you wrote in week one.

Week 5 and after: Scale it or test the next one

If it passed, raise the budget slowly and keep making new ads. If it didn’t, log what broke and put the next product from your list live within a week. Every test after the first takes about two weeks, because the store and your skills carry over. Then settle into a rhythm: Monday numbers, Wednesday one new ad, Saturday posting and stock.

Want the whole thing broken into evenings?

The EcomDada course splits every step into evening sessions, most under an hour, with a checklist, plus a test-rules calculator, a test log, the launch message, the factory quote script and a store-name generator. It’s $10, a dollar a step.