Here's the answer: seven days, live and selling. Not pretty. Live. Functional beats beautiful, because you can polish after you have revenue, and nobody polishes their way to a first sale.
The platform decision takes ten minutes: physical products go on Shopify, digital products on a creator storefront. The platform is a commodity. What actually makes the store work is the part most founders skip: the automated messages. A welcome series, an abandoned-cart series, and a post-purchase series, eleven emails total, all written and working before your first visitor arrives. A store without them is a brochure with a checkout. Add text messages for the welcome and the abandoned cart, because at launch, when every visitor is precious, the channel that gets read in minutes saves the almost-lost sale.
AI writes all of it in your brand voice in one sitting. You review everything once, properly, before it goes live. Automated never means unsupervised.
Two more moves separate the professionals from the hopeful. Answer your customers' actual objections in plain text right on the product page, because every unanswered doubt is an abandoned cart scheduled in advance. And before launch, buy from your own store with a real credit card and check every single thing that's supposed to happen. Your first customer should never be your quality control department.
The full seven-day build is Volume 5 of our Founder series.
By day seven, a stranger can find you, buy from you, and hear from you afterward, without you touching anything.