How This Store Was Built on Coffee, Tears & Pure Fucking Stubbornness..And Something Else Stuff..

23 January 2026

I started making the products already in mid-December. I was still working on them up until a couple of days ago. I had to wake up at 4:00 a.m. so there would be enough hours to make those products, because I’m extremely slow at doing things and I can’t really do anything about it. So basically, I spent almost six weeks making the first five products, working from early morning until late evening, on weekdays and a bit on weekends. And the amount of work was absolutely insane. That’s also one of the reasons my prices are high — I’ve genuinely put an enormous amount of work into making them.

On top of that, I bought a domain and Hostinger on 4 January 2026, when I finally had money to afford it. I bought them from hostinger.com.
The idea was that I should be able to build the shop in two or three days. I had built a WooCommerce store once before, some years ago, and it was insanely difficult. I did it together with my mom’s husband, who is more rational than me, and even then it took us well over a month to build it. After that, I kept adding products for the next couple of years, until Printify deleted almost a thousand products I had made, because apparently they don’t store them for more than two years. That completely crushed me, and for a long time I didn’t even want to think about the whole thing, because years of work were just gone. Then I also lost myemail password and couldn’t log in for many months, and during that time my entire store disappeared from the face of the universe because I couldn’t access my email to pay the hosting fees. Those fees were also expensive, something like €15–17 per month, because I was using a Finnish domain host back then.

So now, when I decided to open the store again, I watched a ton of very long YouTube videos about how to build the shop and how to use a cheaper foreign host like Hostinger. I thought that since I had already built a shop once, surely this time it would work out in at most three days, especially since I had watched way more tutorial videos beforehand. Even while building it, I kept watching instruction videos and copying what they did. But holy shit, hostinger.com looked completely different, and the options were not the same as in the videos. Somehow I still managed to buy 48 months of hosting and a 3-year domain, which cost €2017. And I couldn’t connect WooCommerce at all, because that part was also totally different from the tutorial videos.

So then I called my mom’s husband crying, saying everything went to shit and all my money was gone on top of it, and basically begged him to come help. But what the hell could he even do? He doesn’t really know about hosting or online shops either — he had only ever encountered those things once in his life, when we built the first shop together. He didn’t know anything about foreign hosts or any of that stuff.

After that, I had a really heavy “thinking and smoking” moment. For about an hour I was just thinking how the hell I was going to survive this alone, especially with that foreign Hostinger. Then it occurred to me that I might still have some remaining time on the mihonostore.com domain I had previously bought from a Finnish domain host. I searched for my login details, logged in, and saw that the domain was still valid until 17 January 2026. Then I spent ages going back and forth in my head, thinking: what if I just buy hosting from a Finnish provider again, even though it’s more expensive?

I also thought about the fact that I had already created a custom email for the new domain, paid for everything, and it would be cheaper overall. But they have a 30-day money-back guarantee, so I emailed them saying I want a refund. This alone turned into a complete fucking circus. First I had to send several different confirmation messages to say that yes, I really want my money back and the domain and hosting canceled. Then they said the refund would arrive in 3–8 banking days. On day ten I asked where the money was, and they said it might already be in my bank, or my bank might be holding it. So I contacted my bank, and they said no, there is no refund visible and I should contact Hostinger. Then I messaged Hostinger again, and they replied that some “expert” is reviewing our messages and might send me an update. And nothing else. Absolutely nothing. I’ve been crying every day because I’ve had to deal with these messages. I’m starting to suspect this is some kind of scam company that just steals people’s money. And this has made me really depressed, anxious, and stressed, because I’m poor and I really can’t afford to lose that money. I keep thinking: shouldn’t they at least say how long this “expert” process takes? And what if it goes past the 30-day refund window — what the hell happens then?

Anyway, I decided to switch back to the same Finnish hosting provider I originally used and bought one year of hosting. But for fuck’s sake, there isn’t a single YouTube tutorial that explains how to use it or how to connect WooCommerce, and I don’t remember anymore how we did it years ago. So I called my mom’s husband again and asked if he could come help me connect the hosting and WooCommerce and find the login button, because I can’t do that myself. Thankfully, he came to help.

But when I went to my site, it looked absolutely horrible. The domain wasn’t even mine — it was completely wrong. So I didn’t dare touch anything on the site before I got help from the domain host, whom I contacted by message. It took almost a week to get a reply. When the reply finally came, it turned out that I had to delete the most recently installed WooCommerce from somewhere in the domain host, and then reinstall it. So fuck — everything had to be done from scratch, including all the parts where I would need my mom’s husband’s help again. And he couldn’t come for a couple of days, and I was already crying again because the shop should have been open ages ago. Even though he has his own life and I can’t expect him to rush over every time I panic. At that point my nerves were so tight that I could only see the negative sides of everything. And I couldn’t even find the “delete WooCommerce” button myself.

So my mom’s husband had to come help me again. We had to redo everything we had already done before, and also delete the shop and find the login button. This time we searched for that damn button for hours. This time I took a photo of the login button. I was also insanely hungry, to the point where I started feeling dizzy, because I can’t do two things at once — I can’t be on the computer focusing on building the site and eating at the same time. I have to do those things separately.

After that, it was just YouTube videos and building the shop once I finally got everything connected with my mom’s husband’s help. Otherwise, I’ve managed on my own. But those YouTube tutorial videos are over four hours long, and I’ve had to watch several of them because each one covers different things. And on top of that, I’m really “talented” in the sense that when I have the tutorial video on one tab and my shop on another, I copy things one click at a time, otherwise I forget. So instead of stopping the video, I’ve changed the playback position a million fucking times and then couldn’t remember where I was. You’re supposed to pause the video, do something on your site, start the video, pause it again, go back to your site — but it’s super easy to accidentally move the video instead of pausing it, and then you have to search again. So my nerves have been completely shot, and I’ve cried a lot. Building this shop has honestly been pure hell.

On top of that, I still had to write things like the privacy policy, about us pages, etc., and those are stillunfinished.

The day before yesterday, I finally managed to add all the products I’ve made so far to the shop. First of all, my product images are the wrong size and the whole image doesn’t show, so I still need to adjust them, make them smaller, and re-upload them.

Then, the day before yesterday, my products didn’t show up on the shop page when I checked on my phone — there was just some annoying text there — and they didn’t display properly on the computer either.

So I immediately messaged ChatGPT asking what was wrong, and from early morning until late evening we went through every single possible option of what it could be — and there were a lot. I had to go through the entire damn shop. It was made harder by the fact that ChatGPT didn’t know the exact terms used there, so just figuring out the right words took forever. I deactivated my plugins one by one, then activated them again when that didn’t help. I checked whether it was WooCommerce or the theme. I went through every single setting, in every single place and tab. I deleted and recreated the shop page. I checked that the shop page was set correctly in WooCommerce settings. I searched for reasons on the domain host’s site. I sent support messages to the domain host and to WooCommerce.

WooCommerce replied, and again I tested a few options to find the problem. And then — holy fucking hell — I finally found the damn section where the page visibility was set, and I clicked “active.” The day before yesterday, with ChatGPT’s help, we got it to display properly on my computer. And now, when I checked the site on my phone — thank fucking god — the products are visible. And I cried again, but this time from relief.

Because my life is always like this — no matter what I do, there are always endless problems.

I still need to add more pages and probably tweak the site for a couple more days, and then maybe I’ll dare to publish the shop on social media. Phew. And I still need to create social media accounts for it and make videos and stuff.

The first time I built the shop years ago, I was also really angry, tired, exhausted, and pissed off. I think I maybe cried once back then, but I wasn’t alone figuring everything out. This time, I’ve had the same feelings, and I’ve cried basically every day. It’s probably because this is just so insanely difficult to do. And also probably because I’ve stayed up too late and woken up too early — especially since I’m an evening and night person. Mornings are hard for me. The later it gets, the more awake I become and the more I feel like doing things.

But hopefully things will get a bit easier now that the shop is built, and I won’t have to think about it anymore.

With all my bleeding love