How I Built Nakikiramay PH from Zero: The Real Story Behind a Local Ecommerce Brand

There's a specific kind of helplessness that comes with watching someone you love grieve.

In 2021, my fiancé lost his mom. I didn't know what to do. Not in a vague, uncertain way, but in a genuinely lost, searching-at-2am-on-Google kind of way. I typed in things like "how to support a grieving partner" and "what to say to someone who lost a parent." I read articles. I watched videos. And somewhere in that rabbit hole, I found out that journaling is one of the most powerful tools for processing grief.

That discovery should have been the end of the story. Find journal, buy journal, give to fiancé.

Except there were no grief journals in the Philippines. At least none that I could find.

That gap — that quiet, frustrating absence of something that should have existed — is where Nakikiramay PH began.

From July 2022 to July 2025, that gap became a business. One hero product. Three years. Over ₱5 million in sales. And now, a hiatus — and this blog, where I'm writing down everything I learned about how to start an ecommerce business in the Philippines so you don't have to figure it out alone.

Messages like this were why I poured everything I had into Nakikiramay PH. Not the ₱5 million. Not the sellouts. That letter.

If you're building something and you're in the messy middle — the part where the margins don't make sense and the ads are getting expensive and you're paying your mom ₱50 per order and wondering if any of it is worth it — save the messages like this one. They'll carry you through more than any revenue milestone will.

Three Years Later: ₱5 Million in Sales & Hiatus

From July 2022 to July 2025 — almost exactly three years to the month (which I only realized as I was writing this!) — Nakikiramay PH generated over ₱5 million in sales. One hero product. Selling across the main ecommerce platforms in the Philippines: our Shopify website, Shopee, Instagram, and Facebook.

I want to sit with that number for a second, because when I was printing 100 copies in 2022 and wondering if anyone would buy a grief journal from a brand they'd never heard of, ₱5 million was not a number I let myself imagine.

The business is currently on hiatus — why, and what comes next, is a story I'll cover in a future post.

But what I want you to take from this is that the foundation of those ₱5 million in sales was never a big team, a huge ad budget, or any special advantage.

It was a product that addressed a real pain, sold to people who genuinely needed it, built by someone who figured things out one expensive mistake at a time.

That's the most honest version of this story I can give you.

Starting with Almost Nothing (And I Mean Almost)

Here's what my starting budget looked like: limited. Very limited.

I asked my fiancé to design the logo. I built the Shopify website myself, my first attempt at running an ecommerce store in the Philippines with zero prior experience.

I handled the accounting (such as it was), the packaging design, and the social media. My mom helped with packing orders. That was the team — three people, a laptop, and a lot of prayer.

I was paying my mom ₱50 per order packed.

I only realized much later what that was doing to my margins. With packaging materials, printing costs, and ad spend already eating into every sale, ₱50 per order to my mom left me with almost nothing in actual profit for a good stretch of those early days.

I had spent around ₱150 on ads to get that sale. That was everything.

The sales kept coming. Four, five orders a day. The ads were working, and for a while, the numbers made sense.

But if you've ever run Meta ads, you know what happens next: the cost starts creeping up. An ad that once cost ₱150 to convert starts costing ₱300, then ₱600. The audience gets saturated. The creative gets stale. You have to keep feeding the machine with new angles, new visuals, new hooks — always chasing the performance you had when everything was fresh.

That cycle — the constant experimentation, the creative burnout, the budget anxiety — became one of the defining rhythms of running Nakikiramay PH. More on that in a later post.

But in that first month? The ads worked. All 100 copies sold out in 30 days.

From 100 to 3,000: How the Business Actually Grew

After the first batch sold out, I did what any person who just survived their first print run would do: I found a better supplier.

The second batch was 200 copies. Then 500. Then 1,000. By the fifth batch, I was printing 3,000 copies of the Dalamhati journal.

Each batch taught me something the previous one couldn't. Batch 2 taught me that canvassing suppliers is not optional. It's the difference between a viable margin and printing at a loss. Batch 3 taught me that packaging at scale is a completely different operation than packaging 100 orders on your dining table. Batch 4 taught me what cash flow actually means when you're fronting print costs weeks before revenue comes in.

I should also mention something I don't see talked about enough in Filipino business spaces: Nakikiramay PH was never my main source of income.

I ran it after work, on nights and weekends, with just one assistant helping me. It was a side business — built slowly, managed carefully, on stolen hours. The ₱5 million didn't come from going all-in and quitting my job. It came from showing up consistently for three years while also holding down everything else life required. I say this because I think the "quit your job and go full-time" narrative sets an unrealistic bar for a lot of people. You don't have to choose. At least not at the start.

The product line grew alongside the journal. I added a grief comfort card deck, digital grief journals, and a grief comfort candle.

And eventually, the In Case Something Happens workbook, a practical guide designed for breadwinners and parents who want to make sure their loved ones know what to do if something happens to them. It's a different kind of grief product; not for after the loss, but for before it.

Each product came from the same place the first one did: a real need that wasn't being met.

How to Start an Ecommerce Business in the Philippines — What I Wish I Knew

With a few years of hindsight, here's what I know now that I wish I'd known in 2021:

#1: Canvass your suppliers before you produce anything.

Talk to at least 5 suppliers. Get quotes, ask for samples, understand the per-unit cost at different quantities. The difference between a good supplier and a bad one can be hundreds of pesos per unit, and that margin is everything when you're just starting.

#2: Price for your real costs, not just your printing cost.

₱1,499 felt scary to charge. But when I look back, I wasn't pricing for profit. I was pricing for survival. Learn your COGS (cost of goods sold) properly, including packaging, shipping, platform fees, and ad spend, before you set your price.

#3: YOU DON'T NEED A WEBSITE OR SHOPEE AGAD!

I'm ashamed to admit this but I spent ₱8,000 on a Shopify theme that I replaced anyway! As for Shopee, the seller fees are now stupidly high you'll need a huge markup to make any profit. Here's what I realized: When you're starting, Messenger is enough. You can run Meta ads and directly lead prospects to message you. You close the sale in chat, pack their orders, and send shipping updates also via Messenger. That's all you really need!

#4: Learn how to run Meta ads before you hire someone to do it for you.

I took a Meta ads course — AdsLevelUp by Coach Jungie Gumiran — before I ever handed the ads over to anyone else. That investment in my own advertising skills is one of the best decisions I made for the business. Ads are the fastest way to validate demand, and if you don't understand them yourself, you're essentially flying blind when assessing whether your hired expert is actually doing a good job.

I did eventually hire an ads specialist down the road. But because I know how ads work, I knew how to read the metrics, spot when something was off, and have an informed conversation about performance. You don't have to become an ads expert forever, but you should be one first.

#5: Be ready for BIR and DTI registration eventually.

I didn't register my business agad because in my mind, I was testing the waters pa lang. Eventually though, I had to because it was growing na. I registered the business when I wanted to partner with bigger companies like cemetery parks and they needed BIR-registered sales invoice. So here's my point: registering your business is not absolutely necessary when you're just starting out and testing the waters, but as it grows and you want bigger opportunities, it will be an absolute necessity.

The Message That Made Everything Worth It

I want to share something a customer sent me, because no amount of sales figures explains why I kept going the way this does.

The Year I Spent Making Something That Didn't Exist Yet

When I told my fiancé about the idea, he didn't hesitate. He said it was incredibly thoughtful and meaningful. And then he did something I didn't expect: he offered to shoulder half of the printing cost. The man who had just lost his mom became one of the first believers in a grief journal I was building partly for him. I think about that a lot.

I'm not someone who moves fast. I'm someone who moves carefully.

So instead of launching in a month, I spent all of 2021 writing and designing the Dalamhati: A Guided Grief Journal — a journal made specifically for Filipinos navigating loss. The name dalamhati means deep sorrow in Filipino, and I wanted every page to honor that weight honestly, not paper over it with generic self-help prompts.

The journal follows the 4 Tasks of Mourning framework, a grief model I found meaningful enough to structure the entire book around.

Each chapter = 1 task. Within each chapter, I wrote mini topics about grief, like the common emotions people feel when they lose someone, what self-love actually looks like when you're grieving, how to talk about loss when everything feels unspeakable.

And after each mini topic, the prompts. Questions like: "What is the biggest emotion you feel when you remember your departed loved one?"

I wanted it to do more than just give prompts. I wanted it to teach gently, and then invite reflection. A reader shouldn't need a therapist on call to use it. The journal itself should hold their hand through the process.

A whole year. Twelve months of writing, reworking layouts, second-guessing myself, and eventually deciding that it was ready — or at least ready enough.

I named the brand Nakikiramay PH because I wanted the brand identity to be unmistakable from the first glance. Nakikiramay is what Filipinos say when they offer condolences. It literally means "I grieve with you." It felt right. A grief brand for Filipinos, named in Filipino, built around the way we actually show up for each other in loss.

I'm laughing writing this now, but at the time I genuinely thought that was how it worked.

It's one of those things nobody tells you when you're starting out: you have to actually sit down and compute what each sale costs you, end to end, before you can know if you're making money or just moving it around.

My first big decision was the print run. I decided to print 100 copies lang for the first batch because, honestly, I wasn't sure if anyone would buy a grief journal from a brand they'd never heard of. A hundred felt like enough to test, small enough to survive if it failed.

What I didn't know yet was that I had chosen the worst possible printing supplier.

Back then, I had no idea what I was doing. I didn't know that you're supposed to canvass at least five suppliers before committing to one.

The clueless me found a supplier, got a quote, thought it sounded reasonable, and said yes. It was only later that I realized how mahal it actually was compared to the market rate!

I spent ₱75,000 to print those 100 copies — ₱750 per journal. 😣🤧

With printing costs that high, plus packaging and Meta ads, I had no choice but to price each copy at a whopping❗ ₱1,499❗ just to recover my investment and have something left over.

It felt like a lot to charge for a first product from an unknown brand. I wasn't sure people would pay it.

The First Sale, and What ₱150 Bought Me

July 2022. After a year of writing and designing and second-guessing, it was time to launch.

My launch was simple and quiet. I ran Meta ads. That's it.

I launched from my bedroom in my parents' home. I didn't have a big budget, no fancy strategy, no media buyer. I set up a campaign, wrote copy that came from the same place I wrote the journal — honest, direct, and rooted in the real experience of grief — and I let it run. It was around 2AM when I finally launched. Then I went to sleep.

Then, I woke up to my first sale! A Shopify notification I couldn't believe was true.

Someone I had never met, somewhere in the Philippines, had found this journal in the middle of the night, read what it was about, and decided to buy it!

Why I'm Writing This Blog

Nakikiramay PH didn't come from a business plan. It came from love — from wanting to help my now-husband through one of the hardest seasons of his life, from noticing a gap that nobody had filled, from believing that Filipinos deserved a grief resource that actually spoke their language.

But love doesn't teach you how to negotiate with printing suppliers, set up a Shopify website, run a Meta ad that doesn't drain your budget, or file your taxes correctly. Those things I had to learn the hard way, mostly alone, mostly through expensive mistakes.

This blog exists so you don't have to make all the same ones.

If you're building an ecommerce business in the Philippines — whether you're still in the idea stage or already shipping orders — this is written for you. I'll be sharing everything: the branding, the ads, the finances, the platforms, the mental load of doing this mostly solo.

Starting with the next post: how I built the Nakikiramay PH brand identity on a budget — the logo, the name strategy, and what I'd do differently.

Follow me in my Facebook page for updates on new posts!

AJ De Guzman

Chief Daydreamer & Yapper at Build with AJ
Owner, Nakikiramay PH
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🐶Furmom to Willieboy & Yukigirl 🪴Plantmom 👩‍❤️‍👨 Wife to a handsome husband (no you can't see his pic)

Thank you for reading! Did you like this piece? Yes or yes? Got questions or anything nice to say? Let me know in the comments!