15 Business Milestones for a Strong First Year (2026)

Perhaps the most important business milestone of all is the eureka moment that leads you to a truly great idea. There are many points on a milestone road map, but your unique business idea leads to the others. As you travel from idea to business plan to successful business, you’ll face uncertainty. So, how do you know you’re heading in the right direction?

Business milestones are the results of a set of actions, rather than a checklist for starting a business. Some are cause for celebration—like being one of the 80% of businesses that survive their first year—while others are challenges to overcome. Either way, if you’re hitting these company milestones, your journey is on the right course.

Below, you’ll learn important milestones that most new business owners can expect to encounter in their first year. This article breaks them down by period so you can judge whether you’re on track. 

What is a business milestone?

A business milestone is a checkpoint that shows progress towards a bigger goal, like hiring your first employee or passing $10,000 in sales. It shows what you’ve accomplished, helps you stay focused, and shows whether your strategic business plan is working. 

A milestone differs from a goal or task, because it’s a rite of passage for all entrepreneurs. A milestone applies to any company. It differs from a business goal, which is more specific, e.g., increasing profit margins by 10%. Tasks are mini actions you take to achieve them, such as negotiating terms with suppliers or increasing retail prices.

What makes a good milestone?

A good business milestone is a checkpoint that every business owner works hard to achieve. They should be measurable, confirmable, and achievable. For example:

❌Bad milestone: “Get better at marketing.”

✅Good milestone: “Make my first sale from a Facebook advertising campaign.”

Business milestones should also be tied to your overall strategy and timed appropriately. Using the same example, plan this milestone after you’ve found a product or service to sell, validated your offer, or built a basic marketing funnel. 

Consider tying the milestone to an event—like “launch my first Facebook campaign after I validate my product by making my first 10 sales.”

How to set effective business milestones

Before listing the milestones you might achieve in your first year of business, create your own checkpoints to adapt the examples to your specific context. 

Refer to the SMART framework while milestone planning. Each one should be:

• Specific: What does the achievement look like?
• Measurable: Is it easy to judge whether you’ve hit the milestone? If so, what’s the metric?
• Attainable: Is it realistic based on your resources, business progress, and industry benchmarks?
• Relevant: Is it related to your overall business strategy? 
• Time-bound: Does it have a clear time frame or deadline?

Here’s what that might look like in practice:

My milestone is to hire a part-time assistant to help with order fulfillment after we reach $5,000 in consistent monthly revenue.

Learning how to create milestones is just one part of the puzzle. Set time aside to review your progress. You might need to review or adjust them as you learn and your business evolves. 

If you experience an influx of holiday sales and need an extra pair of hands to get orders out of the door, for example, you might change the milestone. Perhaps you hire seasonal staff instead of a part-time employee to help with demand instead. 

Business milestones: first month

It’s common to feel overwhelmed during your first month in business. Focus on these milestones to build a strong foundation. 

1. Create your monthly budget

Before diving into marketing and sales efforts, it’s important to establish a clear financial plan. 

Use details from components of your business plan—such as market size, marketing plans, and sales forecasts—to create a conservative revenue assumption. This North Star figure acts as a financial goal you’ll aim toward in your first year of business. 

Create a monthly flexible budget to manage your finances efficiently, set spending limits, and anticipate early losses. This will help you allocate funds for your business activities and milestones throughout the year. Assuming flexibility in your budget allows for adjustments based on variable costs, seasonality, and other possible learning curves in your first 12 months.

Key budget components to include:

• Estimated revenue
• Fixed costs and variable costs
• One-time expenses
• Allowance for unforeseen costs
• Projected profits (or losses)

Total these figures to create a budget constraint—the total amount you want to spend on a particular activity or project. Include a buffer to account for unforeseen expenses, whether that’s rising shipping costs, merchant fees, or replacing equipment.

By creating a budget early, you’ll better understand your financial constraints and opportunities as you pursue other first-month milestones.

2. First paid marketing effort to generate positive ROI

Congrats—you’ve launched your store! Now what? Think return on investment, or ROI. Your single business strategy objective this month is to discover a repeatable and profitable approach to marketing.

For most companies with zero brand recognition, the fastest way to get noticed and start acquiring new customers is to launch a paid marketing campaign. 

The good news is that many paid channels allow you to pay per click, and you can start with a budget as low as $100. And while there’s typically a lot of upfront work behind a profitable paid advertising campaign, it can run autonomously once launched.

Begin by choosing one core channel your target audience uses. If you’re targeting Gen Z, for example, that might be TikTok. If you’re going after business buyers, it might be LinkedIn. Test one or two creatives or offers on this core channel and double down on what wins. This is known as performance marketing.

Another quick way to achieve this marketing milestone is pay someone with an existing following to promote your business for you. Influencer marketing (through Instagrammers, YouTubers, bloggers, etc.) has become a popular form of online advertising.

The success of influencer marketing involves finding the right influencers to promote your business. The challenge is identifying those who have an active, engaged following that would be interested in your product, as well as the ability to create content that reflects well on your brand.

Influencer marketing works especially well for trendy products (fashion, food, tech, for example) or those that benefit from a little hands-on demonstration.

A variation on this method is affiliate marketing. With an affiliate program, for example, a blogger links to your product page, and receives a payment or commission if their readers or followers use the link to make a purchase.

💡 In-depth guides on paid marketing

• Brand new to paid advertising? Check out no-nonsense guides to running Facebook ads and Google ads. 
• If you prefer to get help, find an experienced professional from the Shopify Experts marketplace.
• If influencer marketing piques your interest, head to this beginner’s guide to influencer marketing on Instagram.

3. First sale to a complete stranger

Your next milestone is making your first sale to someone completely outside your family and social circle. Your first real sale provides invaluable feedback on your purchase experience, marketing tactics, and more.

Fortunately, there’s a lot more science than art (or luck) to making your first sale. For starters, you’ll need to set up your online store and actually start selling. 

This sounds obvious, but lots of first-time business owners get caught up trying to perfect their storefront before hitting Publish, whether it’s overanalyzing their color palette or second-guessing pricing. Don’t get stuck picking out new shoelaces before going on your first run.

Instead of guessing what your audience wants, spend time experimenting with marketing strategy and tactics as soon as possible. 

As mentioned above, paid advertising is a straightforward way to get in front of your intended audience and gain data to assess whether you’re on the right track.

Use the first sale opportunity as a way to forge a bond with a real, bonafide customer. Send them a personal note of appreciation, and don’t hesitate to ask for feedback. If it’s positive, you could even ask if they’d be willing to provide a testimonial for your store or a public review site. If you have a retail store, use it to optimize your Google Business profile.

💡 Learn how to target audiences with paid advertising to get your first sale in 30 days or less.

Business milestones: first three months

As your business begins to grow and you become more comfortable running a company, milestones evolve. You’ll shift your focus from early traction to building momentum.

4. First support snafu

While company milestones worth celebrating are great, setting milestones for failure is just as important. Making sales that let consumers down is never fun. 

Nevertheless, good customer support isn’t about always being right: it’s about being willing to make it right. An unhappy customer is an opportunity to create a stronger relationship with exceptional customer service.

According to the service recovery paradox, there’s evidence that if you can recover with a positive support experience, you’ll create even more goodwill and gain customer loyalty.

Traditional customer support books tell you to be empathetic and apologize. But these days, an “I’m sorry” can feel like a dead end. Instead, start from a place of customer advocacy. This requires spending time understanding the full issue, exploring solutions, and proposing next steps to rectify the situation.

That said, the best way to manage angry customers is to prevent issues with self-serve elements. A consumer survey found 67% of respondents preferred self-service over speaking to a company representative. Empower customers with tactics such as an order status page to track packages, automatic shipping alerts, or a robust FAQ page.

Always give customers a way to contact you as well. Forms are acceptable, but a live chat channel is far more personable and sometimes the only way to resolve the issue.

👀 TIP: Layer on proactive customer support to stop complaints before they happen. Also, Shopify merchants have loads of choices for marketing, conversion, and support in the Shopify App Store.

5. First testimonial

There’s no better advertising than a genuine, positive review from a real customer. Best of all, it’s free.

No matter what you sell, today’s shoppers are more skeptical of marketing claims than ever, which makes candid testimonials and product reviews an essential part of any marketing strategy. This is especially the case for high-ticket items like mattresses, or products that can’t easily be returned or exchanged, like for personal hygiene.

Nuud, a Dutch deodorant maker, showcases happy customers on its homepage through a carousel and video montage of positive reviews. For many website visitors, this gives them the confidence they need to hit the Buy button.

💡 Automate your testimonial collection! Check out our guide to unlocking customer testimonials, with tips for automating email requests, social media outreach, surveys, and more.

If you’re a Shopify user, you can easily collect and import testimonials to your site with an app:

• Loox. Add product reviews with photos (free trial).
• Yotpo. Collect product reviews, photo reviews, site reviews, and ratings (free plan available).

6. Establish your bookkeeping system

For most entrepreneurs, accounting isn’t the most exciting part of running a business. But keeping accurate records is good practice for several reasons. 

Knowing how money flows in and out of your business helps you identify how you make (or lose) money. You’ll also need accurate accounts to file business taxes, and create accounting reports—like a balance sheet—to present to investors if you want to secure funding.

Mini bookkeeping milestones within this checkpoint include:

• Opening a business bank account. Split your business and personal finances by opening a dedicated bank account for your company. This makes it easier to write financial statements and track business transactions.
• Choosing a software. Accounting software lets you invoice suppliers, track receipts, record sales, and pay yourself. It can also generate accounting reports and help submit tax returns. Choose accounting tools that integrate with your ecommerce platform, such as QuickBooks or Xero.
• Categorizing expenses. Expenses are costs incurred by your business. Examples include website hosting, insurance, marketing, inventory, and rent. Map these to the IRS list of allowable expenses to lower your tax liability.
• Tracking cash flow. Use your reports to create a cash flow forecast—an estimate of how much money will enter and leave your business. 

Remember, you don’t have to do this yourself. Outsource to a CPA or bookkeeper to keep track of your business finances and prepare accurate financial reports. Their guidance can help you document or save what’s needed along the way. No one wants to miss deductible opportunities or dig through paperwork later. Many entrepreneurs consider this a milestone in itself.

7. Positive ROI from your organic marketing channels

Among marketing milestones, organic efforts (social media, SEO, content marketing) take longer to seed, but eventually, they should make up a sizable amount of your total marketing budget to keep costs sustainable. 

As Taylor Holiday, founder of Common Thread Collective, writes, “Fight the temptation to scale your paid spend independently of your organic demand. Your margin will disappear.”

That organic traffic acquisition work starts in month one, and frankly, it never ends. The good news is that there are endless ways to attract buyers from your ideal customer profile to your website. The tactics are the same whether you’re seeking your first customer or your 100,000th. These include:

• Running contests on social media platforms
• Offering referral bonuses
• Partnering with influencers

💡 Whether you’re trying to attract your first customer or your 100,000th, this guide to customer acquisition is packed with ideas.

8. First repeat customer

Generating a sale from a first-time customer is a checkpoint in itself—but when that same customer returns to place another order, that’s a milestone in its own right.

Repeat customers are known as a business’s Holy Grail because they’ve already tried (and love) your products. Per Gorgias, they generate 300% more revenue than first-time customers and generate 46% of all orders, despite accounting for only 21% of the average business’s customer base.

Tactics to reach this high-value customer and business milestone include:

• Personalized follow-ups. Follow up with new customers post-purchase with genuine advice like a mini tutorial on how to use your product (and cross-sell items related to their first purchase). 
• Exclusive incentives. Discounts and promotions to lure in new customers may upset those loyal to your brand, so extend offers only available to loyal customers. 
• Subscription models. Subscriptions lend themselves to retention because customers agree to have their card charged for repeat orders on a predetermined schedule. 
• Customer loyalty program. Offer free shipping, store credit, or merchandise to repeat buyers as incentives for them to continue buying. 

💡Tip: Use Shopify’s dynamic segmentation feature to create a list of VIP buyers. Set your criteria—e.g., customers who spend more than $100 or have made more than three purchases—to easily identify your most profitable customers.

9. Outsource something outside of your core competency

Few of us are experts in every aspect of starting and growing a business. 

Within your first month, you’ll likely learn what you’re good at—and what you’re not (turns out, logos are hard!). That’s why one of your big company milestones should be looking outside for certain tasks.

This is the time to focus on refining your place in the market, so if you find yourself spending more time pushing pixels than talking to loyal customers or exploring a new marketing strategy, you may want to turn to a professional who’s done this before for help. 

You may enjoy tinkering with website design, but consider the value of your time (including do-overs, learning curve, research) and software cost versus someone who already owns the tools and has experience using them. Is your mental and physical energy better spent on something else?

Experts exist across a wide range of fields, from web development to business strategy, and there’s usually one to fit any budget.

💡Not sure where to start? Explore our marketplace of Shopify-vetted experts who specialize in web development, marketing, branding, and more.

Business milestones: first six months

Celebrating six months in business is a milestone in itself. At this point, you’re becoming more comfortable as an entrepreneur and ready to increase investments in what’s working. Here are the milestones you might encounter at this stage.

10. Daily (or consistent) order flow

Of all the business plan milestones, this probably varies the most depending on what you sell. The real outcome to aim for here is product-market fit.

How do you know if you’ve achieved an effective business model with product-market fit? There’s no end to formulas, templates, and doctrines about the ultimate business model, but at its core, you know you’ve found it when you can “feel” your product being pulled by the market.

For example, you’ll start seeing people talking about your brand and referring your brand to others. You’ll start building a loyal customer base and strong reputation in the market. You’ll spend more effort fulfilling orders and answering support questions than trying to “pull” customers to you.

You’ll know you’ve nailed product-market fit when you receive a steady stream of orders, whether that’s once a day for low-ticket items or weekly for higher-ticket items.

You’ll also see positive changes to a few key metrics, which you can find in your Shopify reports:

• Repeat purchase rate. This is the number of repeat customers who’ve made more than one purchase, divided by your total number of unique customers. The higher this number, the more you’re retaining. (Tip: if you have a lot of repeat customers, consider a subscription business model.)
• Customer acquisition cost. This is the amount you spend on marketing strategy (paid ads, design, branding, etc.) divided by your total number of unique customers. The lower this number, the more efficient your marketing plan.
• Lifetime value. The total profit you’ll make from your average customer during the time they remain a customer. This is important to know, because LTV is directly linked to a profitable business model. A company with high overall LTV is able to spend more to attract customers and will have a higher margin.
• Breakeven point. You’ll hit breakeven when your total revenue equals total costs. It’s a milestone for good reason: after you hit this point, any extra money you make is profit. 
• Positive cash flow. This means you have more money entering your business than leaving it. It’s a sign of a healthy business—one that leaves you with enough cash to sustain business operations.

Business milestones: first year

As your business celebrates its first birthday (congrats!), focus on creating systems to support scaling.

11. First shopping spike

Shopping spikes are exciting, adrenaline-filled affairs—unless you aren’t prepared for them. 

Whether it’s due to a flash sale, Small Business Saturday, Black Friday Cyber Monday, or another seasonal trend, a spike can increase sales temporarily or grow your business over the long term, depending on how well you prepare.

There typically are months of planning that help ensure a smooth shopping experience during expected spikes, whether that’s:

• Stocking up on extra shipping supplies early 
• Hiring temporary help
• Creating a seasonal forecast

It’s also easy for customer support to see spikes during this time, so prepare for a higher volume of inquiries. 

12. First employee

As your business begins to gain traction, it’s time to think about expanding your team. Hiring the right people can help accelerate your growth and bring in diverse skills and perspectives. Here are some key points to consider:

• Identify roles with the most impact on your business growth.
• Develop a clear job description and list of required skills for each position.
• Consider both full-time employees and freelancers/contractors based on your needs and budget.
• Conduct thorough interviews and check references to ensure a good fit.
• Start building your company culture from these initial hires.

Remember, your first hires will help shape your company’s future, so take the time to find the right people who align with your vision and values. Be prepared to offer training and development opportunities so they can help push your business forward.

13. Outsource an “always-on” function of business

Business ownership for the long-haul is all about balance. Sure, there will always be unexpected weekend shifts and late nights, but at this point, your goal should be fewer and fewer of those. That’s where outsourcing comes in.

If you’re ready to hire your first employee to handle a part of your business, like shipping and fulfillment, go for it! If you’re not quite ready for employees, but find yourself doing lots of routine tasks, like bookkeeping or having to manage social media, you could explore the increasingly popular virtual assistant route.

Learn to let go of certain functions so you can focus on making even more of an impact elsewhere, whether that’s product development, media engagements, branching overseas, etc. Or maybe to simply spend more time with the family and take care of yourself.

14. Year-end analysis

A lot of work goes into your first year of business. Take the time to look back with a year-end review that covers:

• Financial performance versus budget. Measure how your actual revenue and expenses compare to the budget you set. Where did you overspend? What ended up being less expensive than you originally thought?
• Sales analysis. Look at where your revenue came from: the products that sold best, the most-effective discounts, and the most productive customer acquisition channels. 
• Cost structure: Break down your expenses into categories, including fixed versus variable and direct versus indirect costs, to understand where your money goes.
• Cash flow patterns. Pay attention to periods where cash flow is slow, so you can round it out in the coming year. If sales drop during the summer but you have high outgoings as you source inventory for the holiday season, for example, you might secure funding in advance or use preorders for the coming year.
• Customer feedback. Find patterns in what customers like or dislike about your products. Use this as an opportunity to reach out to unhappy customers. Can you offer them a free product or discount code to give your business another chance?

The outcome of your annual report should be to establish clear priorities for year two. If your first report shows customers were thrilled with your existing soda range but expressed their interest in a new cherry flavor, for example, put that on your product development road map for the upcoming year. 

15. Take a vacation 

After months of business milestones and lessons learned, hopefully you’ll be able to take a much-needed break, and reflect on all you’ve accomplished in your first year as a business owner.