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 five weeks to first sale. Week 4 (launch) is the busiest.

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 first order in about five weeks.

The rule that makes this work

Never end an evening without finishing one concrete thing. Not 'worked on the store'. Bought the domain. Sent five supplier messages. Uploaded the photos. Each of the ten steps below ends with a deliverable so you can't stall in the middle.

Week 1: Name, store, product

Evening one: pick a general-store name (two words, easy to spell) and buy the .com. Evening two: make a business Gmail, sign up for Shopify, connect the domain, pick the free Dawn theme, turn on password protection so nobody sees it yet. Evenings three to five: choose your first product. Small, light, under $12 landed, sells for $25–45, solves one obvious problem, already selling on Amazon. Score three candidates and commit to one.

Week 2: Supplier, numbers, boring setup

Message five verified suppliers on Alibaba early in the week and order two samples with express shipping. While they're in transit, run your unit economics (sell for at least 3x landed cost, free shipping baked in) and do the setup nobody enjoys: Shopify Payments, one free-shipping rate for the US, policy pages from Shopify's templates, the abandoned-checkout email.

Week 3: Product page and content

Samples land. One evening to shoot five phone photos in daylight and build the product page with a five-block description: problem, promise, proof, details, guarantee. Two evenings to shoot and caption three 15-second videos: problem/solution, unboxing, and why you started. Post them on a TikTok and Instagram with the store name.

Week 4: Launch

Turn off the password. Make a 20% LAUNCH code and send a message to fifty people you know, not five. Post the video in three communities where your buyer hangs out. Turn on one Meta campaign at $10 a day with your three videos as three ads, and don't touch it for seven days. Your first order should land this week.

Week 5 and after: One sale to ten

Read fourteen days of numbers. Ten-plus orders: reorder inventory and raise the budget. Three to nine: tighten the product page. Zero to two: the product is wrong, not you; go back to your second candidate. Then settle into a rhythm: Monday numbers, Wednesday shipping and one new video, Saturday posting and inventory.

Want the whole thing broken into evenings?

The EcomDada course takes these five weeks and splits every step into 30–60 minute sessions with a checklist, plus the supplier script, the launch message, a margin calculator and a store-name generator. It's $5.