Should you believe ecommerce success stories?

Believe the mechanics, distrust the timeline. The steps described are usually real; the speed is compressed and the failures before them are left out.

The reasoning

Ask two questions of any story: what was already in place before it started — an audience, capital, a supplier relationship — and how many attempts preceded it. Both are almost always missing, and both are most of the explanation.

What most people get wrong

The businesses worth studying are the boring ones that lasted, not the ones with the dramatic first year.

What the durable ones share is almost never a growth hack. It is a category people buy again, and enough margin to survive being wrong.

Most published success stories are marketing. The numbers are chosen by the people telling the story, and the failures never get written up, so the pattern you read is survivorship.

How an app changes it

TicApp’s own record is deliberately stated as facts rather than figures: four client apps live on the App Store and Google Play, the oldest published in October 2021 and still updated. No revenue claims are made because none were given to us to make.