Hey there ,
Here we have for you a special Podcast where we look back at our 1st month of being “live”.
We truly feel that UnderstandingE is more than just the guides and tools, it’s also about the journey that we are taking with you and feel there is huge value in us being as transparent as possible and sharing our journey.
Press Play below and listen in to our journey so far:
In this podcast you will hear from us what it has been like on our side of UnderstandingE, including:
- The story of Day 1 – New Years Day
- Important points of note that have occurred in the month of January
- The story behind our Real Business Future 50 nomination
- How Gary Vaynerchuk has inspired much of the UnderstandingE ethos with his book “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook“
- What we both think we could have done better this month
- Finally we look at what we have planned for February
The incredible 1st Day
For us the numbers we hit on the 1st day, totally blew us away.
The day before launch we changed our web hosts and are we glad we did or what! We received 1,736 unique visitors on Day 1.
What is more incredible is we launched on New Years Day, a bank holiday pretty much around the world, when most people would be nursing hangovers and…. we didn’t publish the guides until 4:00 pm.
This response was more than we ever dreamed it would be.
We launched on Day 1 with 35 guides covering getting started with Magento and the basics of M2E Pro.
In January we have added a tasty 29 more! Which we think is a massive achievement given it had taken us 4 months to get 35 ready.
Key moments in January
We have had an incredibly busy January with some fantastic wins, but our fair share of headaches too.
Firstly we have had some amazing feedback and have been told by several users that there is nothing else out there like what we have created here.
We have also attracted the attention of several multi-million pound businesses who in some cases are paying over £80,000 for their second generation software.
Although we aren’t there yet, being able to cater for these types of businesses is certainly on our agenda.
We have been working on the plan for a special Webinar organised by Feedvisor next week. Matt will be presenting a piece on “The one simple rule to help you sell more online”
As always Matt is 100% committed to giving away as much value as possible in the time that he has.
This Webinar is free to join. It takes place on Thursday the 6th February at 2:00 pm GMT. You can reserve your place by clicking the button below.
We also had a fantastic podcast with Scott from Powerhouse Fitness. There was some amazing content in that podcast but one that stuck out for us is that they have 40-50 members of staff using the Magento admin area every day! You can hear more from Scott in the podcast here.
We had our fair share of headaches too, in getting bank accounts sorted for the business which took much longer than anticipated.
We also had one headache which turned into a success where we decided to totally re-structure the courses and in the space of three days had re-built the layout to what you see today.
A site which gives you full trackability of where you are up to in each course.
Real Business and Gary Vaynerchuk
We also reveal the story behind our Real Business “Future 50″ nomination and how Matt thought Dave was taking the P*** when he told him we had made the shortlist.
Also hear why Matt has his reservations about going to London, an insight you probably weren’t expecting
We also get on to the topic of our idol Gary Vaynerchuk and how his book “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook” has inspired a lot of the reasoning behind why we do what we do with UnderstandingE.
It is backwards to how most businesses have worked in the past and continue to work, but it is a system that we believe in and we know with our passion, it can’t fail.
Reflection
For the first time we ask each other, what could we have done better, and give totally honest un-rehearsed answers.
This is us being human, and showing you that we don’t pretend to be perfect but instead are at times our own worst critics. By keep asking this question it can only make us better at what we do and acheive.
Coming up in February
This is where we get to share with you what we have planned for February. You will hear how Matt after hearing Dave say one of our targets was do-able, made him change it from doubling our users and page views, to tripling it.
We have so much content planned for February which includes:
- Record and release more Podcasts
- Release the Premium Membership
- Launch the UnderstandingE Store
- A Webinar on how to start from scratch to processing an eBay order in 40 minutes
- Release the Order Management guides
- Release the Outsourcing guides
- and much much more
January 2014 has been incredible so far and we have achieved a lot. However there is no slowing down for us, as you can see we have plenty to keep us busy in February along with some insane targets to aim for.
Thanks again to you for being a part of the UnderstandingE journey, it truly does mean everything to us. You never know if February goes well, Matt might not feel too guilty about that London trip!
Speak to you soon
Matt & Dave
PS. Note from Matt, with Passion you can do anything.
The Listeners Who Reached Out
One thing we didn’t fully expect in January was just how quickly you’d start talking back to us. Within the first week, our inbox filled up with emails, tweets and even a couple of handwritten-style DMs from folks who’d listened to the launch episode or used one of the guides. What struck us most was the tone — so many of you wrote things like “I’ve been waiting for something like this” or “this finally explains it in plain English,” which is exactly the reaction we’d hoped for but never want to take for granted.
We had one listener, a small business owner from Manchester, who told us she’d printed off three of our guides and stuck them on her office wall. Another person shared how our Day 1 story convinced them to stop overthinking their own launch and just go live with what they had. Those messages genuinely kept us going on the late nights when we were still fixing formatting or re-recording a section of the podcast for the fourth time. If you reached out in January and we haven’t replied yet — we’re sorry, we read every single one, and we’re working through them properly.
We also noticed a pattern in the feedback: most of you wanted more real examples, not just theory. So we’ve started keeping a shared doc of listener questions and the specific guide requests that came in. That doc is now shaping what we create next, which feels far better than guessing in the dark.
Our Favourite Behind-the-Scenes Bloopers
Recording a podcast as two people who are also running the site at the same time is chaotic in the best way. We thought we’d sound slick and composed, but the reality involved a lot of tea breaks, a few accidental swears that had to be edited out, and one memorable moment where one of us leaned back and knocked a full mug onto the floor mid-sentence. You can actually hear a faint clatter if you listen closely to the section where we talk about January’s traffic spike — we decided to leave a tiny bit of that in because it’s honest.
There was also a twenty-minute tangent about whether “practise” or “practice” was correct in British English that we thankfully cut from the final version. And we lost count of how many times we said “you know” or “sort of” — the raw recording was nearly three hours long before we trimmed it down to the episode you can download today. We’re not proud of the amount of editing that took, but we are proud that we didn’t fake any of the energy.
One blooper that didn’t make the cut: at one point we both forgot the name of the web host we’d switched to and just called it “the fast one.” That’s now a running joke between us, and we’ll probably reference it again in future episodes.
What the Analytics Really Told Us
Beyond that headline number of 1,736 unique visitors on Day 1, the deeper analytics from January told a more useful story. We spent a good chunk of the first week staring at the dashboard, trying to understand where people came from and what they actually did once they landed. The biggest surprise was how much traffic arrived via direct shares in private groups and WhatsApp — not Google, not social ads, but people sending links to each other one-to-one.
Here’s a quick breakdown of what stood out to us:
- Over 60% of January’s visitors came from direct referrals, not search engines.
- The average time on a guide page was just under four minutes, which told us people were actually reading, not just bouncing.
- Mobile traffic accounted for nearly 70% of all visits, which meant our initial desktop-focused design needed a rethink fast.
- Three specific guides accounted for almost half of all page views, and none of them were the ones we’d have predicted.
The mobile stat hit us hard. We’d tested the site on our laptops and a couple of phones, but not enough real-world devices. So in the last week of January we pushed a handful of urgent fixes, rebuilt the navigation for smaller screens, and made the guide pages load faster on 4G. That work wasn’t glamorous, but it definitely showed up in the repeat-visit numbers.
The Guide That Surprised Us Most
When we launched with 35 guides, we each had our own secret favourites. One of us bet on the step-by-step “Setting Up a Basic Email List” guide, the other thought “Choosing Your First Domain Name” would be the quiet winner. Neither of us predicted what actually took off: a short guide called “What to Do When Your Website Goes Down.” On the surface it’s a bit dry, but it ended up being shared more than anything else in the first month.
We think we know why. That guide wasn’t written for experts — it was written for the moment of panic when someone’s site drops offline and they don’t know where to start. It lists five simple checks in plain order, with screenshots and exactly what to say to your hosting support team. One reader told us they’d used it at 11pm on a Sunday to get their shop back online within forty minutes. That’s the kind of outcome we can’t measure in page views alone.
It also changed how we think about future guides. Instead of always writing the “how to start” content, we’re now planning a whole series around “what to do when things go wrong” — because that’s clearly where some of the biggest real-world value sits. It’s a small lesson from January, but it’s already reshaping February.
Chances are you have heard a lot mentioned about Cross Border Trade over the past few years and there are no signs of the trend dying down.
We also talk about what opportunities are going to be presented in the emerging eCommerce markets.
