Roll back to the Spring of 2003, when Coaches Dave & Kevin launched their very first two online stores! They were equipped with nothing more than a cheap "how-to-build-a-store" guide and positive (although naive) mindsets! Long story short, their first two stores flopped and they ended up back at the drawing board to regroup.
Coach Kevin bailed on Coach Dave at that point, and turned his focus to getting an accounting degree! Coach Dave (the less risk averse brother) turned his focus to learning how to drive "high intent" visitors to web stores.
After yet another failed attempt (and all the education that came from those first 3 flops!) Dave finally struck gold with a store he called Everything Birds (launched on bird-supplies.net in 2004 & later migrated to bird-cage.com in 2005). In Dave's first full year of operations that little "at-home business" turned a net profit just North of $100k! Which got the attention of Dave & Kevin's younger brother, Mike, among other family members & friends.
Unsure that Mike was committed to the e-commerce career path long-term, rather than letting him in on Everything Birds right out of the gate, Coach Dave partnered with him on a startup project called Jerry's Paintball (JerrysPaintball.com). Within 3 months of launch this new project was clearing $6,000 a month in bottom-line net profit, and Mike (not Coach Mike yet!) was convinced that eCommerce was the career for him!
With a list of new store ideas in hand and a store launch model that was really starting to take serious shape, Dave & Mike got Jerry's Paintball listed for sell on Flippa and sold it for $60,000 (all cash) within just a matter of days! Then that lead to them also deciding to move Everything Birds, and they did so just months later, which banked them another $173,000!
After the sale of Everything Birds, The New York Times & Fox Business News both got a hold of the story and helped spread the word that the Hermansen brothers were the real deal when it comes to eCommerce! (In fact, that might be how you found Store Coach in the first place!)
Crazy enough, the above successes were truly just the beginning... Dave & Mike continued to roll out successful niche store after successful niche store (and still are to this day!). A few years into this crazy win streak, in late 2007, Dave & Mike launched one of the most successful digital products the internet had ever seen to that point, a training program called Niche Blueprint. (It was supposed to be available to buyers for a full week, but the doors had to be closed after 36 hours because there were simply too many sign ups to offer support to!)
Annually updated releases of Niche Blueprint were rolled out in 2008 & 2009, and after years of Dave & Mike pushing Kevin to join them, he finally gave in and quit his partner-bound career path at a CPA firm for the final release of Niche Blueprint in 2009.
The "Niche Blueprint days" consisted of far more than just training people on the niche store model the Hermansen Brothers had created. Behind the scenes they were building a nice portfolio of successful niche stores. This is when Coach Scott (one of the most successful Niche Blueprint students, see his story here) joined the team and started helping them further build out their e-commerce portfolio! (This is the time period in which our team built out and sold off PitchingMachinesNow.com for $149,000!)
In 2010, rather than continuing to do annual updates to Niche Blueprint and leaving most would-be-buyers out in the cold, we opted to launch an "always open" eCommerce hub called Store Coach where people can buy/sell/build eCom businesses! (Which is obviously where you are reading this now!)
Our team has been creating e-commerce training courses since 2007, and it has evolved continuously over the years as our internal systems have been optimized & perfected. In recent years our model has evolved to focus on selling our own private label products with our own made up branding as well as dropshipping well known branded products.
This is for two primary reasons... 1) traditional dropship ecommerce has become so competitive over the years that margins for online retailers in that space has dropped to almost nothing in most markets, and 2) selling your own private label products eliminates direct competition and allows you to basically name your own margins! (This is why private label e-commerce businesses are selling for millions these days, whereas all of the older traditional dropship stores typically maxed out in value somewhere in the 6-figure range!)
Along the way we sold so many of our web businesses, and we were so darn good at getting top dollar for them, that folks in the Store Coach community started asking us to sell businesses for them. That's why in 2015 we started brokering the sell of websites, and that parlayed into us launching the best eCommerce business marketplace on the web!
