Maybe for you, but not for me...

An inside look at starting a digital printable business from scratch

“Though you may hear me holler, and you may see me cry– I’ll be dogged, sweet baby, if you gonna see me die.” – Langston Hughes.

I imagine myself falling backward down a flight of stairs, crumpled at the bottom lying in a pool of blood with a twisted body and broken neck, never able to get up again. Yeah, a little dramatic but giving myself permission to feel this deeply so I can officially let it go without regrets.

I’m giving up my printable business side hustle. For now. Maybe forever.

Eleven months ago I started (seriously) working on this experiment. The side hustle was (also) the inspiration for creating my Substack back in May. I was 8 months into creating digital printable products, and still getting nowhere. Starting PaanPrintables was a way to help keep me accountable. The idea was to share updates, give you tips and tricks for starting an online business, and to give away a free printable to subscribers each month.

It was also a way of marketing and showcasing products. It was one of many ideas I’m implementing to create passive income so I could stop working for the man. Passive income from an online business has been a long-nurtured desire, and (also) to create something tangible for people, instead of working to hustle tips.

“I experiment and fail often.

Maybe I’ll save you the agony, maybe I won’t. You will journey with me through my trials, tribulations, and successes in creating a new way of life.” — May Newsletter, PaanPrintables

Let’s start with the cost of startup

I signed up with Gold City Ventures back in November, 2022. The goal was to open an Etsy store and earn an average of $1,360 a month. Originally it was suggested in the course that we use the free versions offered from the various platforms needed for tools of creation.

• Initial Cost for the course that teaches how to create, design and sell digital products on Etsy: $247

• Join the Facebook support group: $145 (which is the blood, sweat, and tears of this course), because unless you have prior in depth experience, you will be forever lost trying to learn and understand each aspect — all completely separate components — of starting an online business. And like that gym membership you signed up for with good intentions and never got around to using, the course will gather dust, and go down as yet another useless waste of well-earned money that might have been better spent elsewhere.

• Canva Graphic Design Platform: $12.99 monthly

• E-Rank, SEO, Tracking, and Trending Tool: $9.99 monthly

• Creative Fabrica used for commercial elements and fonts in design: $4.99 monthly

• Elements and Fonts Vary per printable: $.60 to $30 each

• Coaching: $75 - $300 an hour

• Templates: $11 to ⬆️

• Bundles of Templates: $20 - $75

• Storage (Drop Box) $11.99 monthly

• AI, MidJourney, Kittl, and Chat GPT: $10.99, $15.99, $20 monthly

Many of the above tools are optional. This was (and is) ultimately part of the experiment, to learn what tools worked best to save time and create professional products worthy of selling.

Time and Talent

An online class requires watching videos. I found the best way to learn online (for me) was to quickly go through all the videos in succession, take notes, and get everything set up before getting into the deep dive. It took about 2 weeks to complete the initial process, so I had confidence it was going to be something I could handle.

Stop.

The first obstacle I encountered was learning how to navigate and design on Canva. Anyone who claims no graphic design experience is necessary to start creating a marketable is full of shit.

Sellable is the key word in creating printable products.

“Side hustling has literally transformed my life. On January 31, 2019 I quit my corporate banking job when my side hustle income started to cover the cost of my lifestyle… and since then I’ve never looked back!

When Julie told me about Etsy printables, I thought there was no way I’d be any good at making and selling them… I’m just not creative and I had never even bought a printable..but I gave it a try anyway since it sounded fun.

Then the craziest thing happened. Only a few months after opening my printables shop, I made over $800 in 7 days during Valentine’s week 🙌 ! I was hooked.

Let’s not forget, I had ZERO graphic design skills and I’d never even been on Etsy before starting this side hustle. If I can do it, I know that you can too. Don’t miss an opportunity to get in on this side hustle while it’s still a hidden gem.

You could sell kitchen jar labels, coloring pages, cleaning binders and household organizers, stickers, you name it! I’ve seen people make printable sales of $15 per order – it’s incredible!”

—Cody Berman, Co-founder Gold City Ventures

The first tutorial inside the course started with creating date night cards from scratch. They’re a nice, personalized Valentine’s Day or anniversary gift.

Who will buy the date night cards, and why?

If you randomly create a product without an end buyer in mind, you’re throwing mud against the wall and hoping it sticks… or worse yet, you create a product you fall in love with and proudly put it up for sale only to find your labor of love is like the ugly face that only a mother could love, all the work, time, and energy for nothing.

First you must research. Who might be looking for such a gift? Probably not a 55-year old man married for 30 years, or a 40-year old divorcee. Drill down to who might be looking for the product, and more importantly, who will actually buy them?

You will spend time researching on Pinterest, Etsy, Amazon, Google Trends and Analytics, Uber Suggest, and AHREF, to name a few. Since this is about selling on Etsy you’ll spend most of your time looking at what other shops are selling. You will look at color, design, how much the product sells for, and the reviews other customers are providing. You must be careful not to copy, but take inspiration from the information and use it to help create your own product.

You will also do keyword research. It’s beyond the scope of this article to explain the importance and process of understanding and learning keyword research. In a nutshell: It is an in-depth research to discover what people are searching for by words, phrases, queries, and images to find products.

There is much more involved with using and implementing research tools, and this is all done before you start designing.

Let’s begin designing.

You open the Canva application and stare at all the options. You don’t know where to start. So. You spend at least a week or two learning the basics of the platform. Once you understand the basics of how and where to start you then you can start tackling the steps alongside the video tutorial to create your first digital printable.

Size and Design Matter

• The page size you use to create the cards matters

• Each card must be precision oriented otherwise it looks like a 1st grader did the work

• The elements (hearts, lines, borders, squares) must be perfect in synch, down to pixel size… I didn’t even know there were measurements for pixels in designing. Colors must be esthetically appeasing.

• The font and text size must complement, and it’s important to choose what is pleasing to the eye for the customer… you wouldn’t use Fingerprint Paint font for an adult… believe it or not there were many of us who chose what we liked instead of what was needed to sell, a crucial part of the learning curve. Do you know you should never use more than 2 different fonts in a single project?

  

  Author’s first project. (18 Date Night Cards similar to this listed for $3.75 on Etsy)

  Does the above design look professional? Seriously? And to make the product more marketable, I provided a list of ideas for date nights.

Example of the list provided to accompany the Date Night Cards on Etsy (Time spent creating this well thought out list: 2 days)

Who will pay $3.75 for the tangible product thought to provide this small value to the customer? And, how many more hours and days would it take to create more products, invest in and to learn additional software to make my goal of $1,360 a month?

Files, Formats, Printing, and Editable

Another confusing issues is understanding what files to choose. You must get end product from the design platform, to the Etsy shop, and finally to the buyer. Choices can be confusing as alphabet soup with acronyms like JPEG, PNG, PDF, SVG, GIF, MP4 - video. I made the mistake of sending out a video format of date night cards to my beta testers — instead of a downloadable PDF, which was such an embarrassment. They couldn’t download and print the cards out. Imagine making this first impression to a buyer. You can’t afford to make mistakes on Etsy. Bad reviews and low ratings will kill you. And there is no coming back from it. Etsy punishes.

There are also print variations you must be mindful of, that include RGB, CMYK, crop marks and bleed to contend with printing, and flattening the file. Everyone’s printer is different, including having your creation professionally printed, for example, wedding invitations. Also, editing for private label and personalized versions of the product creates an entirely new set of issues. I never got into the latter, as it was an entire separate section of the class, and one I needed to pay for, and learn additional software.

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Let’s imagine you created date night cards from scratch with pen and paper. You would need to grab a sheet of high quality card stock, pencil in the individual cards, cut each one out, use stickers or simple hand drawn designs to embellish, and write suggestions on each card. Time consuming and likely wouldn’t look professional unless you’re artistic or have an eye for design; or you’re content with slapping something together… after all it’s the thought that counts, right?

All of this was somewhat necessary before setting up and opening the Etsy store. It was encouraged to start (somewhere) by stocking products we created (whether good or less than) into our stores. It was suggested that we create 100 products to reach algorithm heights, competing against how many other stores? Yeah, again, that latter part wasn’t given to us in our curriculum. And unless you were a customer on Etsy (I was not), you wouldn’t begin to understand exactly how much competition you were up against… and maybe it was by design we were given broad statistics that never mentioned failure or what it would take to be a success, even a less than stellar one.

Etsy Statistics: WritersBlockLive.com

• More than 4.3 million active sellers are on Etsy.

• Nearly 69% of Etsy sellers consider their online shop a business.

• Women account for 83% of Etsy sellers.

• As of 2020, the UK constituted 30% of the global sellers on Etsy.

• Successful businesses on Etsy can earn over $10,000 per year.

• There were 81.9 million active buyers on Etsy in 2020.

• 40.1% of Etsy buyers are repeat customers.

• 50% of buyers don’t purchase on Etsy due to high shipping costs. (Which isn’t applicable to digital printable products.)

How much do Etsy sellers make on average?

It’s still unclear how much Etsy sellers make on the platform. While many successful shops make over $10,000 per year, about 65% of them don’t even reach $100  for their online sales. 
Moreover, many of these sellers entirely depend on their household income, accounting for an average of $56,000 per year. As a result, sellers feel discouraged by the numbers shown in these Etsy statistics, as the platform doesn’t guarantee a decent revenue for your business.

How many sellers are there on Etsy?

There were a total of 4.3 million people selling products on Etsy in 2020. The number is over half a million higher than the year before—in 2019, there were 2.7 million sellers on the platform. 
Founded in 2005, Etsy didn’t pass one million merchants on the platform until 2013 when 1.074 million people had a store. — CNBC, eRank, Etsy, Etsy, Marketplace Pulse, Merchant Maverick, Merchant Maverick, Similar Web, Skill Crush, Statista, Statista, Statista, TechPenny, The Motley Fool, The Verge

Random takeaways from this experiment

• Etsy isn’t my schtick. Conforming to Etsy standards is too confining. There are other options: Gum Road and Shopify. I’m on hold for now, but eventually planning to explore different sales platforms where it’s much easier to navigate through the selling process.

• I’m not a graphic designer. I love art and learning. I’ll continue creating and eventually do something with the products; in the meanwhile I’ll keep exploring and refining my craft on Canva.

• Everyone learns differently. Online courses depend upon video quality and instructors. If the video quality is poor, the detail isn’t there. The student can spend hours flailing around trying to create or find buttons or prompts that can take seconds to find, if the instructor takes time to show exact steps on how to execute. Many times the instructors speak quickly and gloss over the details assuming students can just hit replay. Not possible if the video isn’t a stellar quality.

• The experiment isn’t a total failure. The course taught me online skills that can be used for new experiments.

• Had the course mentioned the ability to purchase templates from outside sources the store could have been up and running almost immediately. It was never suggested in the course. Recently one of the top 1% Etsy sellers sent her offering to me and down the rabbit hole I went. It’s an untapped income stream if you are an artist (designs such as coloring pages, wedding invitations and greeting cards), or Excel-savvy (planners, charts and tables, etc.).

• Before purchasing an online course, be sure to confirm there is a (reasonable) money back guarantee if the business doesn’t seem like the right fit. I don’t care how much research and due diligence you do, it may simply wind up being the wrong fit for you. (My computer downloads are littered with courses that weren’t right for me. I keep a list to remind me of failed tries. It keeps me in check.

• And finally. The course creators are the real winners. Remote Work is an excellent source to check out if you’re interested in creating an online course or starting an online business. Camille from Remote Work recently had a podcast on Spotify Online Course Industry defining how, what, why, and the income potential in creating online courses. The potential is phenomenal.

How much does Gold City Ventures online course bring in?

Snapshot of Gold City Ventures Worth will give you an idea of what’s possible.

And me, I’m going back to poker until the next experimental side hustle opportunity presents itself.

See you next week!