It’s easy to change out images on a website, so send the web developer 👩‍💻 images that are “good enough” for now and then you can upgrade them later.

If you’re in the U.S., look up SCORE. A mentor could be really helpful.

Communicate with your husband. Talk about his concerns. Talk about your goals. Schedule a meeting for this. Springing it in him after a long day of work is asking for a negative reaction.

Analysis paralysis is a bitch isn’t it!?

Find Like minded people who won’t bs you. I’m in a different industry but I’m more than happy to talk honestly if you wanna pm me. I’ve tried but gave up on my own business ideas before they went anywhere. I have definitely learned since then but I’m now overthinking things associated with basically the same feelings lol. I’d love to bounce ideas back and forth w you!!

No business will succeed with this mentality.

You don’t need support. No one will give it to you. Your expectations are wrong.

You have to be able to hunt and kill your own food to survive on your own. Small business is similar.

Any pictures that you send will be better than sending him nothing.

Take a few hours today to work on them and get it done. Stop thinking and start doing. 1

For the pictures, write down why people should buy what you’re producing. High quality? Patterns? Fit? Make sure your pictures align with those values. Eg: if it’s high quality, show the stitching.

Your business is your story. When you don’t have a firm grasp of your story, every decision is hard. When your story is solid, every decision will use your story as the way of figuring it out. Should you use this one or this one? Well, what story are you telling, and which shows it?

Things like a website, pictures, etc… are worth about 0.05% of your energy. Get it out today, make sure you can easily change them later and add more if need be, move on to the next decision. When you get through everything, then you do another sweep and make incremental improvements, especially after getting some data. Oh look, more people are clicking on the picture of the model turned sideways then to the front? Great, let’s get more pictures from the side, upload, done.

Also…and this is important. Have a budget and an eject point. Businesses fail, there’s no shame in that - only lessons learned to apply to the next one. But you don’t want to keep pouring money into something failing (unless money is limitless in your case). If you have a budget of…$15k, and it looks like you’ll blast through that without even launching, then stop and see if what you’re spending money on is actually mission critical or just distractions.

Either drop the project completely before you run out of all funds, or white knuckle your way through it and get the pictures out TONIGHT, and get it going. You can always revise the pictures.
Believe in yourself. Make some money on your own and show him you don’t need his to do this.

I believe in you.

I wish you had a supportive husband. All the best for your business. Try to find a co-founder maybe with a similar vision as you.

Go to www.score.org. they have a lot of free info including mentoring, for small businesses

DM me if you would like to some free advice and strategy for your business. I’m a small business mentor and do it for free for some businesses

If your husband is destroying your self esteem you need to deal with your relationship issues first. Fiscal boundaries are one thing, tearing your partner down is another. You deserve a partner who is at least emotionally supportive of you.

This all sounds like you’re making it very high stakes early on. I would slow down and strategize first. Wait on the website and start building out your social media channels instead. This will help you find out who exactly your target audience is. Focus on creating a community that will eventually become customers. This will give you actual data to take to a brand designer who can develop all of things you are currently struggling with. Hire a professional photographer, THEN go to a web designer with your brand guidelines and photos ready to go. Although as some mentioned above, Shopify is relatively easy and if you have brand guidelines you could do this yourself.

But for now I would just start my business on social media. You can sell on there for now and the community can grow with you. This helps them feel like part of your brand and then when your website launches they will celebrate with you! Right now you’re creating a website but it sounds like there may not be any traffic once it’s complete.

Fix your mindset ASAP. You arent cut out to be an entrepreneur if you have this much trepidation. I would get a 9-5, build up your business on the weekends and evenings and over time it will take off.

Contact SCORE and find a mentor, or search for local small business incubator in your area!

I know exactly how you feel. I started my decal business five years ago not knowing the first thing about running a business. The anxiety is real. Look for Youtube courses on running your business and listen to Podcasts. For pictures, I recommend Placeit. Make mockups for your products with that site.

Be careful with finding support in other places. If the people closest to you don’t think you are on the right path, they could very well be right. As well as those who aren’t close, don’t know the specifics like the close ones do. Meaning their encouragement could be dangerous.

My advice is to listen to the reasons he is objecting. Be ultra careful to avoid involving emotion and look at it from a black and white perspective. Is there merit to his objections?

Then, I would start reading business books. Probably start with “The Lean Startup”. Because if you are stressing about the picture already, that is a very bad sign. Makes me Lean more towards this likely isn’t a good idea to proceed.

Don’t look for validation or support elsewhere. If you don’t have your husband’s, it’s not going to succeed. It just isn’t. And you absolutely need him to be on board if you want to succeed. Entrepreneurship is about personal sacrifice. Which includes family sacrifice. It almost always strains relationships and always requires your family to pick up the slack while you work. Doesn’t sound like that would happen.

Have a heart to heart. Is it the business he doesn’t like? Is it that he doesn’t think you can do it? What exactly is it. Then work together to figure out what the two of you can do together that he would be on board with. If it really is you, then you need to read up and show him you do have it in you. Or, start way way way smaller, in a more Lean way.