HeyJaredShopkeeper Stories
Reflections and real-life business tips from a neighbourhood shopkeeper and PhD sociologist.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 4
- Latest publication
- Jul 28, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 5, 2026
Latest issues
How to keep the business alive (opens the original)
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Editor’s Note: I’m a sociologist who spent 18 months running a snack stall in a traditional wet market in Singapore to learn how small businesses actually work. This is a visual diary of what I learned on the ground.Making the shop financially sustainableOnce I figured out which snacks people kept returning to get, the next hurdle came up: how can the shop make enough money to sustain itself (and scale)? It was time for the next step in my product strategy i.e. to drive up revenue.<a class
Learning from the failure of avocado chips (opens the original)
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Editor’s Note: I’m a sociologist who spent 18 months running a snack stall in a traditional wet market in Singapore to learn how small businesses actually work. This is a visual diary of what I learned on the ground.Roll up the shutters… lights, action!I opened my shop in the simplest possible way: rolled up the heavy metal shutters and displayed snacks for sale, hoping to catch the interest of customers streaming past. Wow, it felt surreal to have a real, live, running shop! For the first time,
The path to finding product-market fit (opens the original)
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Editor’s Note: I’m a sociologist who spent 18 months running a stall in a traditional wet market in Singapore to learn how small businesses actually work. This is a visual diary of what I learned on the ground.In my last post, I wrote about how hard it was to find wholesalers as a first-time shopkeeper. This was a critical milestone. What’s cool is that, eventually, the suppliers themselves started reaching out to me once they saw a living, breathing shop. Once I figured
How do small shops figure out what to sell? (opens the original)
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