— — —

A year ago, Preston Cox hit 1,000 sales in his laser engraving and embroidery shop. It felt huge. It was the first time we’d done a shop update on the podcast.

This year, we sat back down together. As of recording: 7,697 sales.

Preston is one of Lizzie’s very first students — number one or two, depending on who you ask. He spent years experimenting with different shop types before finding his lane in laser-engraved and embroidered patches in 2024. This is his second appearance on the podcast. If you haven’t read his first story, start there — it’s Post 6 in this archive. This one is about what happened next.

From 1,000 to 7,697 sales — what actually happened.

A few things stacked on top of each other:

Q4 finally hit the way it was supposed to. The year before, he’d missed the Q4 boat because his shop was just starting to heat up in October. This year, he was ready. Stocking tags and giftable versions of his laser products converted heavily through the holidays.

He added embroidery. Mid-2025 he bought embroidery machines and added them to the shop. His primary product is now embroidered bag patches — name tags for purses. He A/B tested two versions. Both went bestseller.

He went hard on digital files. This is the big one — and the reason for this post.

1,000 digital laser files in 5 months — the full story.

After Preston’s last episode, he and Lizzie talked off-air about adding digital laser engraving files to his shop. He’d already uploaded 20-30 generic designs and made a handful of sales. He knew there was something there.

Lizzie told him: 100 listings is good. 500 is great. 1,000 and you dominate the market.

“Let’s do 1,000,” Preston told his wife Sarah.

Sarah — an Enneagram 3, as success-driven as they come — made a thermometer to track their progress and stuck it on the refrigerator. She rewarded milestones with Chipotle. The nearest Chipotle is 40 minutes away. That’s how motivated she was.

Preston woke up at 4am every morning and designed. Sarah set up a walking pad under a standing desk and walked and designed alongside him. Neither of them is a morning person. It didn’t matter. They were machines.

“We got the last 100 done in a week. That was stupid. But we were so close we couldn’t stop.”

Five months after they started: 1,000 listings live. Preston’s shop graph shows exactly where it changed — around 300-400 listings, the sales curve bent sharply upward. At 1,000, it shot.

He’s added about 60 listings since then. He’s coasting. The 1,000 are doing the work.

What $2.49 laser files actually make per month.

Preston prices most of his digital laser files at $2.49. His bestsellers just moved to $2.97 as a test — he’s watching the data, comfortable going up slightly but not above $3 for a line art file.

At those price points, the digital side of his shop generates close to $100/day — roughly $3,000/month in passive income. Zero fulfillment. No machines running. No shipping. Etsy delivers the file, the payment arrives, and Preston is sleeping, working with a local client, or watching his dogs try to fit into one dog bed.

And — most importantly for handmade sellers considering this move — the digital listings did not hurt his physical product sales. He still processes 8-20 physical orders per day. The digital side didn’t cannibalize the handmade side. It added to it.

📸 IMAGE: Lizzie brand photo — mid-post visual break (suggest lizzie-brand-session-131.jpg, laptop photo)

How he gets a listing up in 5-8 minutes.

Preston built a custom GPT — using ChatGPT’s premium account feature — trained on designs he already liked. He fed it examples, taught it what laser-engraving-appropriate line art looks like, and it now generates designs in a consistent aesthetic. You can often spot his shop because all 1,000 designs have the same visual signature.

From there, his process: generate image in ChatGPT → drop into Canva → create mockups → vectorize → write Etsy listing → publish. The whole thing takes 5-8 minutes when there are no hiccups.

It took about 200 listings to really get that process smooth. By 300, they were a machine. A few things slipped through — a deer with three antlers, a double word in one of his bestsellers he didn’t catch until hundreds of units had sold (customers were kind, he sent updated files). Quality control is the hardest part when you’re moving that fast.

He hasn’t moved to Kittl or Claude. His system works. His response to feeling FOMO about new tools: “Don’t change if it’s working.” He’s right.

Why his summer didn’t slump like everyone else’s.

Summer is typically slow for handmade sellers. Not for Preston this year. A few reasons:

The digital files kept the algorithm warm. People buy laser files year-round. Constant daily sales signaled activity to the Etsy algorithm — which kept his physical listings surfacing too. At one point he had nearly 20 bestseller badges across his shop.

He found the hair bow market. Parents who make hair bows for baby girls started buying his embroidered name patches to add to the bows. Some ordered in bulk. He didn’t go looking for this customer — they found him.

He did a four-day local rodeo. The biggest annual event in Stamford, Texas. He sold hats at the rodeo for the first time. Made a full month’s income in four days — while his Etsy shop kept running in the background the entire time.

The honest conversation about success feeling weird.

This is the part of the episode I think matters most — and that almost never gets talked about.

Preston came into this conversation feeling behind. Not because his business was struggling — it’s doing incredibly well. But because the tools are moving so fast that even a seller who can get a listing up in 7 minutes feels like he’s falling behind someone using Kittl automations.

“On paper, I’m super successful on Etsy. And I’m proud of that. But I also feel such imposter syndrome. I’ve had to really push back against the feeling that I have to do the next thing right now.”

Lizzie’s response: the sellers who are doing multiple six figures with the flashy tools are not necessarily in a better position than Preston. He has a proven system. He can get a listing up in 7 minutes. He has 1,000 digital files compounding for him. He has a growing local business. His shop survived a slow summer.

“You’re building an incredible business. Incredible. And you can still do it without Claude and Kittl. Don’t change what’s working.”

The broader principle Lizzie laid out: if your goal is a good life and growing income, follow where your energy leads. Don’t chase every new tool out of FOMO. If a tool energizes you and you want to explore it, go for it. If it feels like homework, skip it. The business you want is the one you can sustainably build and sustain.

Her own version of this: in the evenings her family goes analog. Scrabble. Pontoon boat. Campfires. She knits. She barely looks at her phone. The businesses that work are the ones built by people who take care of themselves. That’s not a soft message — it’s a strategy.

What he’d tell himself a year ago.

Lizzie asked Preston what advice he’d give the version of himself who was at 1,000 sales a year ago, about to have the year he just had.

Price yourself right. He was still riding the pricing of the previous owner of his embroidery business. When you’re full-time, you can’t charge part-time prices.

Start the digital files sooner. He kept putting it off because he was afraid it would hurt his handmade shop. It didn’t. It changed everything. If you’re a handmade seller who also makes files, SVGs, templates, or any kind of reusable digital asset — add it to your shop now.

“There may be a future where I don’t sell physical product on Etsy anymore. And I’d be cool with that.”

— — —

Preston started this podcast in 2021 as Lizzie’s first or second ever student. He worked four jobs. He tried multiple shop types that didn’t work. He stuck with it for five years before things really broke open.

Now he works from the back room of his home in rural Texas. He’s full-time. Sarah is working with him. They’re looking at an RV for the dogs. And his digital files make money while he sleeps.

You can find Preston inside Scaling Society — he runs the Handmade Hangout, a monthly co-working and meetup series for handmade sellers. Come find him there.

👉 Learn more about Scaling Society → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/scaling-society

Use code 50SCALE to get your first month for $97 (renews at $147)

👉 Listen to the full episode → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/blog/248

If this was helpful, there’s plenty more where that came from. Subscribe for free — I’m holding nothing back.

Now go make something awesome.

— Lizzie

— — —

Ellie Blake was standing at a checkout, about to place her first wholesale order for someone else’s greeting cards to sell on her blog — when she stopped herself.

“I think I might be able to make these on my own.”

She launched As Told by Ellie — a greeting card company for the moments the card aisle ignores — on April Fool’s Day 2021 with six cards. Five years later she has nearly 40,000 sales, monthly revenue between $8,000 and $18,000 across Etsy, Shopify, and Faire, and her cards are in over 500 stores around the world.

Her specialty: cards for the hard stuff. Pet loss. Divorce. Cancer. Sobriety. Things the Hallmark aisle doesn’t touch — made funny by someone who has always coped with humor.

Why greeting cards — and why this particular kind.

Ellie has been a writer since she was little — everyone outside playing hide and seek while she sat at the dining room table writing a book. She started a blog in 2021, bartending to pay the bills while sharing stories from regulars and drunk people and general bar chaos, building toward her real goal of publishing a book someday.

Around the same time, she was four years into an infertility struggle when a doctor called her with blood work results and said she thought Ellie had a brain tumor. Between that phone call and her first specialist appointment was five weeks. Five weeks of spiraling.

“I’m going to die. What do I want to leave on this earth?”

What she kept coming back to: she wanted to make people laugh — specifically about things that are hard. She always copes with humor. So that’s what she built. Her bestselling cards are pet loss cards, cancer cards, and divorce cards — all funny. The hardest things made a little lighter.

“Greeting cards are a billion-dollar-a-year industry. Oversaturated, sure, but definitely not outdated.”

What the business actually looks like right now.

518 active listings on Etsy.

Nearly 40,000 total sales.

$8,000–$18,000 months across Etsy, Shopify, and Faire.

500+ retail stores worldwide.

Full-time income. Home with her son. No traditional job since fall 2025.

Year one on Etsy: under $3,000 in revenue. Year two: just under $30,000. Year three: over $100,000. She could have quit in year one. She didn’t.

The research strategy that fills her ideas notebook.

This is the most original research strategy I’ve heard on this podcast. And it works for any product — not just greeting cards.

Ellie scrolls TikTok and reads the comments. Not to find viral sounds. Not to copy trends. To find the phrases and words that keep showing up over and over in how real people talk to each other right now.

Examples: “feed me and tell me I’m pretty” — kept showing up in relationship content comments. She turned it into a card. “No notes” — she kept seeing it in comment sections, meaning something is perfect as-is. She turned it into a card. Neither phrase was forced. She spotted the pattern, gave it the Ellie twist, and it sold.

“The TikTok comment section is a gold mine. You’re not looking for the viral video — you’re looking for the phrases people keep repeating. That’s where the culture is actually living.”

This is copywriting 101 applied to product creation: use the words your customer already uses, not the words you’d think to use. It works for PNGs, print-on-demand shirts, laser-engraved gifts, stickers, journals — any product where the words on the thing matter.

The pivot that doubled her wholesale two years running.

Ellie’s brand started as mouthy, edgy, and frequently containing words that can’t be said on network television. It was her voice. She loved it. And then her marketing manager came to her with a problem.

He couldn’t run a single paid ad for her. Every card had a cuss word or was too inappropriate for Meta to approve. He asked her to make a few cards he could use for ads — tamer, broader, still funny.

She hated the idea. Her brand was her brand. But she made three PG-13 cards for him. The ads worked. Wholesale took off. She kept making more. Now the majority of what she creates sits in what she calls the PG-13 zone — still funny, still Ellie, just accessible to a wider audience and to more store buyers.

“I came to a point where it’s like, that’s cool, but that’s your hobby. If you want to be a business, you have to shift at some point to think of your customers more than yourself.”

The intersection she now works within: what do I love making + what am I good at + what do customers actually want. She still has cards she keeps that she loves and that never sell much. They’ll always be there. But she designs with the customer in her head now — what’s the occasion, what’s the relationship, would I actually send this to my coworker’s birthday or my mom’s retirement?

The packaging experience that earns her reviews.

Ellie thinks of packaging as part of the product. Here’s what a customer receives:

The card itself in a clear cello sleeve (ordered from ClearBags.com, twice a year in bulk, higher quality than Amazon).

A free envelope — craft style, included with every card.

An insert postcard — rotated three or four times a year. Her current one is an affirmation card that says something like “I hope you have good food today and catch all the green lights.” Not a coupon. Not a pitch. Just warmth.

A free envelope sticker — retro-designed, seasonally themed. She sells them on Etsy too. People put them on their cars and mirrors. They’re a thing.

For larger orders requiring a box, she wraps it in brown paper and writes something ridiculous on the outside — a badly drawn luxury brand logo, a note that says “this paper is made from the tears of people who don’t buy their friends cards.” Something that makes you laugh before you’ve even opened it.

The investment is modest. The impression is enormous. She gets reviews specifically about the packaging. And in a world where people expect to tear open an Amazon box and move on, a moment of delight is genuinely memorable.

The inventory lessons learned the expensive way.

Ellie still has 2,500 stickers from a first order she placed before ever selling a single sticker. Five years later. Learn from her.

New card, uncertain demand: order 40.

Proven bestseller: order 100.

Holiday card with confidence: 100–250 max.

Also worth knowing: you don’t have to order inventory to list on Etsy. Ellie’s tip — and Lizzie echoed from her own handmade experience — is to create the mockups first and list them before ordering anything. Find out what sells, then order that. For a product like cards, you can use Canva to create realistic mockups of cards that don’t exist yet. Test demand before spending.

How she scaled beyond Etsy — and what actually drives each channel.

Faire (wholesale):

Think of Faire as Etsy for wholesale — brick-and-mortar shops browse and order from makers on the platform. Ellie’s first year was slow. The pivot to PG-13 cards changed everything. Wholesale has doubled every year for the past two years. 500+ stores.

Meta ads to Shopify:

Around $600/month. A healthy ROAS is roughly 3 — meaning $3 in revenue for every $1 in ad spend. Go higher and you’re leaving money on the table; go lower and you’re losing money. She works with a marketing manager who watches this closely. Paid ads were the traffic engine that made Shopify viable.

Pinterest:

Her virtual assistant handles this. Long-term, slow-build traffic. One of her birthday milestone cards from 2024 still drives traffic in 2026 — people click through looking for their own year. That’s the longevity of Pinterest doing its thing.

Email:

She almost quit email before her marketing manager showed her the data: email was 24% of her revenue last year. The weekly sends weren’t driving the sales — the automations were. Welcome series, abandoned cart, abandoned checkout. The weekly send exists to keep people from forgetting they subscribed and marking her as spam. Both matter. Don’t skip either.

What Ellie would tell someone just starting.

She started with six listings thinking that would teach her something. It didn’t. She’d tell a beginner to aim for 100 listings before expecting to really understand what works. Some will flop completely. That’s part of the tuition.

She’d also tell them: the good news about being bad in the beginning is that Etsy is a search engine. If you stink, nobody sees it. You’re not posting to your Instagram followers and embarrassing yourself. You’re posting to an algorithm that hasn’t found you yet. You can iterate privately.

“You can sit there and try to make everything perfect and have everything planned. Or you can be okay with being bad at first, learn as you go, and look back in a year amazed at how far you came.”

She tried furniture flipping (one coffee table, never again), various side hustles, and multiple entrepreneurial experiments before greeting cards clicked. The failures didn’t disqualify her. They taught her what clicking felt like. When she started the card company, she just knew.

— — —

Ellie launched on April Fool’s Day 2021 with six cards. She’s now home full time with her son — the son she spent four years trying to have, during a health scare that clarified exactly what she wanted to build.

If you’d told her on day one that five years later she’d be in 500 stores worldwide, she would have laughed. She started anyway.

Find Ellie on Instagram at @astoldby.ellie and shop her cards at the link in the show notes.

👉 Instagram → @astoldby.ellie

And if you want the community, the coaching, and the roadmap to build your own version of this — that’s Scaling Society. Use code 50SCALE for $50 off your first month.

👉 Learn more about Scaling Society → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/scaling-society

👉 Listen to the full episode → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/blog/247

If this was helpful, there’s plenty more where that came from. Subscribe for free — I’m holding nothing back.

Now go make something awesome.

— Lizzie

— — —

Attorney Paige Hulse is back. And if your shoulders just crept up toward your ears a little — same.

Paige is an intellectual property attorney who started as an Etsy seller herself, which makes her the exact right person to have this conversation. She gets our language. She knows what we’re actually doing inside our shops. She’s represented some of the highest-earning Etsy sellers in the country. And she’s back because the AI legal landscape has changed dramatically in the past year — and most sellers have no idea.

This is going to feel heavy in spots. I promise there’s good news at the end. Read the whole thing.

The landmark AI case — and what it means for small sellers.

The New York Times sued OpenAI in December 2023, claiming that with the right inputs, OpenAI could reproduce NYT articles verbatim — articles that were behind a paywall. Two and a half years later, that case is still in the discovery phase.

Here’s why Paige brings this up: the New York Times is arguably one of the best-funded plaintiffs in the world. And they still can’t move fast through this litigation.

“If one of the most well-funded plaintiffs in the world is two years into this and still in discovery — you won’t be able to out-litigate AI related legality issues either. It’s more important than ever to protect yourself proactively rather than retroactively.”

This year alone there was a 35% jump in AI-related legal cases. Copyright is at the heart of every single one. The legal system is moving fast but the laws haven’t caught up — and different courts are issuing opposite rulings on identical cases. You cannot rely on the courts to protect you right now. You have to protect yourself before something happens.

The one thing courts agree on: you don’t own what AI creates.

This is the most important legal update in this episode and the one most sellers don’t fully understand.

If you use AI to create something — an image, a design, a written piece — you cannot copyright it. The Copyright Office will not register it. You have limited common law rights to it at best, and even that is actively debated.

“Intellectual property is going to become one of the rarest and most valuable assets a company can own. I’m going to see some of my clients become millionaires in the next couple of years because they’ve taken the steps to own what they’re creating.”

This doesn’t mean stop using AI. It means be strategic about when you use it. Designs, listings, marketing copy generated entirely by AI — you don’t own those. Designs you create yourself, even with AI as a tool for part of the process — that’s a grayer area that courts are still sorting out.

Paige is working on a case right now where the Copyright Office accused a client of using AI in her product listings — and she didn’t. The technology is so advanced that even regulators are struggling to tell the difference. That problem is only going to get harder.

Etsy shops are getting suspended for undisclosed AI — weekly.

Paige is seeing this at least weekly now. Shops and listings flagged for AI-generated content that wasn’t properly disclosed. And here’s the compounding problem:

If the AI you used to generate your design accidentally pulled from someone else’s protected work — a trademarked fabric pattern, a licensed illustration element — you’re now dealing with both an IP dispute and a terms of service violation simultaneously. Two problems at once, often without even realizing you created either one.

This almost happened to Lizzie a few years ago with a Louis Vuitton pattern she didn’t even recognize. It can happen to anyone. The AI doesn’t warn you when it pulls from protected sources.

Two things to do right now:

1. When setting up any listing with AI-generated content: toggle on “created with the help of AI” in Etsy’s listing setup. This tells Etsy. It does not tell the customer — you still need a disclosure in your listing description.

2. Add a written disclosure in your listing description: something like “this design was created with the assistance of AI tools combined with my own creative direction.” Clear, honest, and covered.

The subpoena reality — your AI chats are not private.

This is the part of the conversation that made Lizzie physically squirm. Every chat you have with Claude or ChatGPT can be subpoenaed — even if you’ve deleted it.

There’s a real case: United States v. Heppner. A defendant who was facing a lawsuit ran his situation through an AI tool to get legal strategy. His attorneys used some of that AI-generated strategy. During discovery, the court subpoenaed his AI chat history. The judge then ruled that because the defendant had shared the information with a third party — the AI — he had broken attorney-client privilege. That protection no longer existed for him.

“Everything you put into any AI tool could be subpoenaed — even if you delete that chat. Treat everything you type into Claude or ChatGPT the same as if you were talking to a stranger.”

For Etsy sellers specifically: if you have any kind of confidentiality provision in a client agreement or terms and conditions — even a standard one on a Shopify site — uploading any customer’s purchase history, personal information, or confidential data into an AI tool is technically a breach of that agreement. Don’t do it.

Don’t write legal contracts with AI — here’s why.

Paige sees this regularly and it’s causing real problems. People use ChatGPT or Claude to write NDAs, client agreements, terms and conditions. The AI writes something that sounds completely authoritative. They use it. And they’ve unknowingly created a document that may be entirely unenforceable.

Here’s the legal specific: if you use an open AI tool to write a contract that includes a confidentiality provision, and you’ve typed confidential information into that AI tool to get it to write the contract — according to the Heppner ruling, you have already shared that information with a third party. The confidentiality provision may already be null and void before anyone even signs it. If you wrote an NDA using an open LLM, Paige’s position is that it may be entirely ineffective.

The New York AI mockup law — and yes, hands count.

New York passed a law requiring disclosure when any commercial image or video contains what the law calls a “synthetic performer” — meaning any AI-generated human likeness. And here’s the part that catches people off guard: any part of a person counts. A hand holding a mug. A shoulder in the background. If there’s a human body part in your AI-generated mockup image, this law applies.

And even if you’re not in New York — it doesn’t matter. If a New York resident visits your Etsy shop and sees a listing with an undisclosed AI human likeness, the law covers them. Similar to how GDPR protects European users regardless of where the business is located.

What the disclosure has to look like: standalone text that clearly states the image is AI-generated. Not buried in your description. Not faded into a gradient. Visible, legible, and not obscured by anything else in the image. You can make it stylized — Paige has seen calligraphy-style disclaimers that are fine — but it has to be clearly readable.

Paige’s position until we have more case law: add the disclaimer to every image in your listing gallery that contains any human likeness — not just the thumbnail.

Lizzie’s practical take: use real photography mockups wherever possible. Invest in mockups featuring real human models from talented photographers. It sidesteps this issue entirely — and on an art-forward platform like Etsy, real photography may perform better in the long run as AI saturation increases and buyers start to notice.

Okay — here’s the actual good news.

Two pieces of genuinely encouraging news from Paige:

1. Human-created IP is becoming more valuable.

As AI generates more and more content that no one can legally own, genuinely human-created intellectual property is becoming rarer and therefore more valuable. Paige is currently working on a multi-million dollar merger where the IP portfolio — all human-created, all registered — tripled in valuation compared to what it would have been worth in 2023. If you are creating original work and registering it, you are building something increasingly rare.

2. The Copyright Claims Board.

A case just came out in May 2026 — involving a copied saddle pad pattern (Paige’s horse-loving ears perked right up) — that expanded the utility of the Copyright Claims Board. Think of it as small claims court for copyright disputes. There’s a $30,000 cap on damages, you don’t need an attorney to fight a case there, and it’s a dramatically more accessible and affordable way to protect your work than federal court. Most creatives don’t know it exists. Now you do.

Paige’s resources for legally protecting your business.

Two things from Paige worth bookmarking:

The Creative Law Shop — a library of contract templates for creative entrepreneurs. If you need an LLC agreement, client contract, or terms and conditions, this is where to start.

The Foundry — launching August 2026. A custom-coded contract generator built on 10 years of Paige’s own IP — not a generative AI tool. You input your situation, it builds a contract tailored to your business. As close as you can get to having Paige in your back pocket. Lizzie will send a notification when it’s live.

👉 Creative Law Shop → https://www.shopcreativelaw.com/

Use code SMILEY10

👉 The Foundry (coming August 2026) → https://cart.shopcreativelaw.com/the-foundry-membership/?fpr=smiley

Use code SMILEY10

👉 Paige’s legal topics playlist (all past podcast episodes) → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/legal-topics

Find Paige at PaigeHulse.com and on Instagram at @paigehulselaw and @creativelawshop.

— — —

If you made it this far, go pour yourself something. You earned it.

The takeaway from Paige is not to be scared of AI. It’s to use it strategically, disclose it honestly, and protect what you actually own. The sellers who build legally sound businesses right now — while everyone else is in the free-for-all — are going to be the ones still standing when the dust settles.

If you want the community and coaching to help you build that kind of business — Scaling Society is where it all lives.

👉 Learn more about Scaling Society → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/scaling-society

👉 Listen to the full episode → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/blog/246

Heads up: some of the links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you purchase through them — at no extra cost to you. I only ever recommend tools I actually use and love. Promise.

If this was helpful, there’s plenty more where that came from. Subscribe for free — I’m holding nothing back.

Now go make something awesome.

— Lizzie

— — —

Ren Zeringue set a quiet goal for herself when she first started listening to this podcast in 2021: someday I want to be a guest.

She decided she’d apply when she hit 100 sales. She did. Then life moved, she kept building, and by the time we finally recorded this episode she’d blown past 4,800 sales and $14,500 in revenue — selling digital downloads of junk journal ephemera in a niche she stumbled into completely by accident.

Ren spent over a decade as a foster care social worker. She’s a serial hobbyist. She was selling textbooks on Half.com in college before Half.com was Amazon. Something inside her has always pulled toward building something of her own — and now it’s paying her daughter’s preschool tuition.

What junk journal ephemera actually is — and who buys it.

A junk journal is essentially the evolved, less structured cousin of a scrapbook. Instead of planning everything out perfectly, you go with the flow — layering papers, pockets, and little cut-out pieces in a messy, collage-style way. The aesthetic you’ve probably seen in trending PNG designs lately — that vintage collage, layered paper look — that’s junk journaling translated to a shirt.

What Ren sells are the printable papers and ephemera that junk journalers use to make their books. Think of it like patterned paper, pockets, and fussy cuts — clusters of little illustrated elements laid out on a page, easy to print and cut out. People buy them as digital downloads, print them at home, and get crafting.

Her core customer is older women — a little more time, a little more disposable income, and a deep love for nostalgic aesthetics. One customer messaged her at 89 years old saying she was printing pages to make crafts for everyone at her nursing home.

The holiday stuff is her bread and butter. That very first junk journal listing she almost didn’t bother making — a Halloween bundle she threw together impulsively after seeing someone in Scaling Society post one — is still selling today.

Her deliverable system — and why customers love it.

Here’s something most digital product sellers don’t do — and Ren discovered it works really well:

The Etsy download is a one-page PDF with a link to a Google Drive folder.

Inside the Google Drive folder are two versions: a single large printable PDF with all the pages, and a folder of individual JPEG files. Some crafters want to deal with the PDF. Some want the individual JPEGs. She gives them both.

This wasn’t a grand strategy — she just started doing it based on customer feedback and kept going because it worked. That’s a pattern you’ll notice with Ren: she listens to her customers, makes small changes, and compounds those changes over time.

The Claude automation that fixed her biggest headache.

Anyone who delivers products via a Google Drive link knows the pain: you copy a listing, forget to update the link, and a customer clicks through to the wrong bundle. Ren had this happen. A lot.

So she built a Claude automation. She created a Canva template for her download PDF, connected it to Claude through Claude’s desktop app (called Cowork), and set it up so that whenever she creates a new listing, she gives Claude the link and the bundle name. Claude opens the Canva template, inserts the correct link, exports it as a PDF, and delivers it ready to upload. The right link. Every time. Without her touching it.

“It always has the right link — because it’s not dependent on me going and pasting the link into the doc.”

For anyone unfamiliar: Claude Cowork is Claude’s desktop app — instead of using it in your browser, it’s installed on your computer and can connect to other tools like Canva directly. That connection is what makes the automation possible.

Her Monday morning Etsy report — run entirely by Claude.

Every Monday, Claude automatically pulls a week’s worth of Etsy data, compares it to the previous week, and delivers Ren a briefing.

Sales this week vs. last week.

New listings and how they’re performing.

Which listings to turn ads on or off.

Specific listing recommendations — things like “this one isn’t converting, consider changing to this.”

She’s not manually pulling reports or building spreadsheets. Claude does it for her before she even opens her computer on Monday morning. She reads the report, makes the adjustments it recommends, and moves on with her week.

The rolling keyword bank she’s building inside Claude.

Ren is building something I haven’t heard anyone else describe: a living keyword database inside a Claude project.

Any time she finds a keyword — from Everbee, E-Rank, or anywhere else — she feeds it into Claude with the source, the search volume, and the competition level. Claude keeps a rolling list of everything she’s added across every session.

The goal: eventually Claude will be able to pull from that keyword bank automatically when writing her listing descriptions — using keywords she’s verified herself, from real data, in her specific niche. She’s not there yet, but she’s building toward it. That’s the kind of long-game thinking that separates sellers who scale from those who plateau.

How she found her niche — and almost talked herself out of it.

Ren had researched junk journals. She saw the keyword data — low search volume, intimidating competition from shops doing multiple millions of dollars. She’d been buying junk journal supplies herself but assumed it was out of her league.

Then someone in Scaling Society posted a listing in the niche and she thought: if they can do it, I can do it. She threw together a Halloween bundle, listed it, and two weeks later it had its first bestseller badge. Her very first junk journal listing.

“I dove into that niche and the keywords are terrible. There aren’t many great-looking keywords. And there are some multimillion-dollar shops in there. But somebody in the group posted a listing and I was like — well, if they can do it, I can do it. Two weeks later, bestseller.”

What the keyword data couldn’t tell her: that her nostalgic, vintage-inspired aesthetic was exactly what this audience craved. Sometimes the right niche doesn’t look right on paper until you’re in it.

The bundling system that keeps growing her average order value.

Ren doesn’t create one-offs. Every single thing she makes is designed from the start to become part of a system.

Individual listing → part of a bundle.

Bundle → part of a mega bundle.

Mega bundle → part of a vault (everything she made in that season, priced at $10).

She recently vaulted everything she made for Christmas last year — all of it in one $10 listing. She listed it, barely promoted it, and sold 10 copies in a week. Existing content, new revenue. That’s the compounding power of building a system instead of a collection of one-offs.

Her two best research habits — including one most sellers skip.

1. The favorites breadcrumb trail.

When someone favorites one of Ren’s listings, she clicks into their profile and looks at everything else they’ve favorited. What aesthetics are they drawn to? What other shops are they saving? What products are they considering? Following that breadcrumb trail in the early days gave her some of her best early design inspiration — not copying, just understanding what her actual buyers gravitate toward.

2. Reading reviews on competitor bestsellers.

There are two multimillion-dollar shops in her niche. One sells expensive products, the other sells cheap ones — both wildly successful. Ren studies both. She reads their reviews. She looks at the newer listings they’re putting out to see where they’re heading. She’s not copying them — she’s learning what her market loves so she can add her own version of it.

“Brain cache is a non-negotiable. You have to do it. Especially in my niche — you have to constantly be in the bestsellers seeing what people are buying.”

Her single most important tip for someone just starting.

Don’t post two or three listings and wait to see if they sell before you keep going. Ren did this in the early days and it cost her momentum every time.

Etsy needs activity to keep showing your listings. When you stop posting, it stops showing what you already posted. And you stop learning — because the data from a handful of listings isn’t enough to tell you anything meaningful. You need 100 listings before the data starts talking to you.

“Post it and don’t wait to see if it’s going to sell. Just keep going. There’s a lag — 30 to 60, sometimes 90 days — but if you keep going without waiting for feedback, you will not waste any time.”

What fills the gap while you wait for data? Build your brain cache. Study the bestsellers. Before you sit down to design anything, spend 10-20 minutes in Etsy looking at what’s working in your niche. What fonts? What colors? What mockup styles? What do the reviews say people love? Your listings will be better before the marketplace has even weighed in — because you’ll be making smarter decisions from the start.

— — —

Ren’s daughter is starting preschool this fall. Paid for by Etsy.

That’s the kind of thing that sounds small until you realize what it means: a business she built around her family, her creativity, and her own schedule is now paying for something real in her real life. One listing at a time.

You can find Ren inside Scaling Society — come say hi. She’s one of the most generous people in the group.

If you want to join her — and get into the community, the coaching calls, the trend reports, and everything else — use code 50SCALE for $50 off your first month.

👉 Join Scaling Society → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/scaling-society

Not ready for Scaling Society yet? Start with Trendspotting — use code KEEP20 for your first month at $17. Ren credits the weekly trend reports as a major factor in her growth, even though she doesn’t sell PNGs. The trends translate to every product type.

👉 Join Trendspotting → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/trendspotting

👉 Listen to the full episode → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/blog/245

If this was helpful, there’s plenty more where that came from. Subscribe for free — I’m holding nothing back.

Now go make something awesome.

— Lizzie

— — —

I have been terrible at keeping this secret.

For years, one thing has been missing from how I teach Etsy. I help sellers in the handmade space. I help sellers in the digital space. I’ve danced in print on demand — I had a successful shop — but I never became a six-figure POD seller, so I always tread lightly. I’d answer basic questions. I’d point people elsewhere for the deep stuff. And it nagged at me, because my mission has always been to send you to one place where you can get everything you need.

That missing piece is now officially here.

Jenny P. — @jennyfromtheshopp — is joining the How to Sell Your Stuff family as our Print on Demand head coach. She’s creating a full POD course that goes straight into the Scaling Society library. She’s joining coaching calls, contributing to the community, and coming on the podcast regularly. And I almost cried when I said her name in the intro.

Who Jenny is — and why she’s the only person for this.

Jenny was a teacher. She started print on demand in 2020, built her shop through the messy middle — including a moment where she almost quit and jumped to Amazon FBA — and kept going. Within months of coming back to Etsy she was matching her teaching salary. Then she surpassed it. Then she was making enough that her family could move to Greece. She’s been there ever since.

She has taught thousands of POD sellers. She has a YouTube channel with a massive following in this space. She is one of the most ethical, honest, generous people I know.

“I wouldn’t do this with anybody else. We’re going to be a great team and we’re going to help so many people.”

She told me she didn’t take on a partnership like this before because she couldn’t give it her all. She’s ready now. And honestly — I’ve been waiting for her to be ready for years.

Is print on demand too saturated? Here’s Jenny’s honest answer.

Yes and no. Here’s the distinction Jenny draws:

It’s saturated with people who try it expecting fast money and then fade away. It’s not saturated with people who are willing to treat it like a real business and learn the ropes.

“There’s so much room at the table. Saturation should never be the word that scares you from print on demand.”

The sellers who make it are simply the ones who stay long enough to figure it out — and get good advice while they do. Those are the two things, every time. That’s it.

If Jenny could only sell three products forever.

I asked her to pick three. She didn’t hesitate: sweatshirts, t-shirts, and mugs.

On apparel: yes, it’s a competitive category. But just like you can open another pizza place next to a pizza place — because people always want pizza — people always buy t-shirts and sweatshirts. The niche matters more than the product.

On mugs: her favorite Printify mug costs a few dollars. Start at competitive pricing, build sales, raise the price as it converts. Personalized mugs can hit $19.99 and still fly off the virtual shelf because personalization justifies the price every time.

The pricing strategy that quietly builds margin.

This one’s worth writing down.

When you list something new and you’re not sure how it will perform, start the price lower. The moment it sells — raise it a dollar. It sells again — raise it another dollar. Keep going until you find the ceiling. By the time it’s a bestseller, you’re at bestseller pricing. By the time you’re confident it converts, your margin is healthy.

Jenny aims for around $8 profit on a sweatshirt. She uses Everbee’s profit calculator to factor in Etsy fees, Printify cost, and shipping so nothing surprises her. It showed her early on she’d priced herself too low — and adjusting it changed everything.

Why “mom niche” isn’t a niche — and what to do instead.

The single biggest beginner mistake in POD: going into a broad niche and expecting to stand out. “Mama shirt” is not a niche. “Mom” is not a niche. Those are the most competitive searches on the platform.

Jenny calls them sub-niches — the layer underneath the big broad category that reveals the real customer. Instead of mom, try inked mama (moms with tattoos). Instead of teacher, try school librarian, NICU nurse, guidance counselor. Instead of dad, try bearded dad. These feel absurdly specific. They convert because they speak directly to someone who immediately thinks: that’s me.

How to find them: type a broad niche into Etsy search and scroll through the results. You’ll start seeing the sub-niches appearing naturally in the listings that are selling. Follow the data, not the hunch.

Jenny’s honest take on AI in POD — and where she draws the line.

Jenny’s shops are currently 50/50 — half AI-generated designs, half ones she created herself the old-fashioned way. She’s deliberate about that ratio.

“Use AI as a tool to help you — but not to replace you. I think the pendulum is about to swing back. People are going to get really good at recognizing what’s AI and what’s not, and they’re going to crave real creativity again.”

She uses Kittl for AI image generation and ChatGPT for prompting help when she’s stuck. But she’s choosy with tools — she’d rather go deep on two than chase every new thing that launches. Her husband still makes his bestselling designs in GoDaddy Studio (formerly the Over app). The old school way still crushes it.

The single most important mindset for beginners.

I asked Jenny what beginners overthink. Her answer was immediate:

“List and move on. List and move on. List and move on. Never get too attached to a specific listing. The ones I thought were going to be bestsellers were crickets. The ones I almost didn’t bother listing sold out.”

Your first 100 listings will probably not be good. That is not the point of them. The point of them is the data they give you — what aesthetics work for you, what niches convert, what products have legs. After 100 listings you start to know. Before that, you’re just learning.

Jenny’s rule: get to 100 listings before you even try to slow down and evaluate. That’s your tuition. Pay it.

Myth-busting: true, false, or it depends.

We ended the episode with a rapid-fire round. Jenny’s answers:

You need graphic design experience to be successful. False.

AI ruined print on demand. False.

You need hundreds of listings. False.

Etsy only shows established shops in search results. False.

You need social media to succeed on Etsy. False.

You have to run Etsy ads. False. (Jenny doesn’t run any paid Etsy ads at all.)

You can still build a full-time income with print on demand. It depends — but you can. Jenny’s caveat: I can’t promise it to everyone, but I can tell you it’s possible. She’s living proof.

What’s happening inside Scaling Society this month.

August is Print on Demand month in Scaling Society. Jenny’s full POD course is being added to the member library right now. We’re doing shop audits, live trainings, and group calls with both of us. If you’ve ever wanted to add POD to your handmade or digital shop — or start from scratch in POD — this is the month to jump in.

Use code JENNY50 for $50 off your first month — that’s just $97 to access the full library, four live calls a month, the Etsy Seller Roadmap, the coaching community, and now Jenny’s expertise directly.

👉 Join Scaling Society with code JENNY50 → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/scaling-society

We’re also exploring a beginner POD cohort this fall — a six-week intensive with Jenny and me, shop audits, live sessions, and a private community for people who are just getting started or just getting unstuck. If that sounds like something you’d want, drop your name and email at the link in the show notes so we know there’s interest.

👉 Interest list for beginner POD cohort → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/interested-in-POD-cohort

— — —

Jenny told us the pivotal moment in her own journey was joining a live mentorship group — 40 people, every Tuesday night, at the beginning. She’s still best friends with people from that group. Some of them you might know: Cassiy Johnson and Angel were in it with her. They all became successful together.

That’s what we’re building here. Come find us. You don’t have to figure this out alone.

You can follow Jenny at @jennyfromtheshopp on Instagram and TikTok and find her YouTube channel at the link in the show notes.

👉 Jenny’s YouTube channel → https://www.youtube.com/@JennyFromTheShopp

👉 Listen to the full episode → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/blog/244

If this was helpful, there’s plenty more where that came from. Subscribe for free — I’m holding nothing back.

Now go make something awesome.

— Lizzie

— — —

I want to introduce you to Jason Pagliaro — we call him Pags.

Jason is a United States Marine Corps veteran who served in Desert Shield and Desert Storm. He then spent 20 years as a police officer in Savannah, Georgia, rising to sergeant and leading the Homeland Security office, the Dignitary Protection Unit, and serving as chief pilot of the Drone Unit. He just retired.

He is also married to Tina — you may know her from episode 102 — who runs Wreaths of Bloom, a wreath and floral design Etsy and Shopify shop that just cleared seven figures in sales this month. Jason handles all the shipping, all the tech, and now coaches inside Scaling Society alongside Tina.

He came on the podcast to talk about Kittl — specifically, the automations that are making it possible to do in five minutes what used to take hours. This one’s for the sellers who know what they’re doing and just need to do more of it, faster.

How much AI has changed — even in the last year.

Jason and I used to spend entire evenings in Discord trying to get Midjourney to give us a yellow bow with a pencil on one end and an eraser on the other. We never really got it. We spent an hour and came out with something “close.”

The tools now — Kittl, Nano Banana Pro, ChatGPT image generation, Ideogram — are operating in a completely different universe. You don’t need to know the exact magic words anymore. Kittl just added agentic AI, which means you don’t even have to write a prompt. You describe your concept — “I want a cat on a t-shirt doing this” — and Kittl writes the prompt and generates up to four results from your idea.

“We spent probably an hour trying to get that yellow coquette bow. You think about where it is now — it’s night and day.”

And that’s just the image generation. The real story is what Jason has built on top of it.

What AI can actually create now — the list will surprise you.

I asked Jason to rattle off the file types and product types he’s been creating with AI in the last three months. Here’s the list:

Cross-stitch patterns — outputs the full pattern as a PDF, specifies the DMC thread colors, tells you exactly how to stitch it. A fully functional craft pattern.

Stained glass designs — tells you what color glass to cut, what pieces go where, how the leading is placed.

Laser engraving files — SVGs and line images for laser cutting. Jason uses these for Tina’s shop to create leather journal covers, cutting board designs with family names and live oak trees, custom tumblers.

Clip art packs — 25 coordinated pieces on a single theme, mockup showing each element on party decorations, invitations, and photo booths.

Coloring books — 50 pages, all cohesive, mockups showing pages half-colored, listing video, PDF packaged and ready to deliver.

Garden flags, tumblers, POD shirts, tote bags, coloring pages, wall art, PNGs.

If you’re thinking this sounds like a completely different world from PNG files in Ideogram — you’re right. It is.

What a Kittl automation actually is — explained simply.

I asked Jason to explain this to my 11-year-old daughter Lorelai, who knows what a PNG is and what a listing needs but isn’t a tech person. Here’s the best version of his explanation:

A Kittl automation is you teaching Kittl what you want it to do — once. Then every time you need to create a new product, you just change the prompts and hit play.

Here’s a farmhouse coloring book as the example. In Kittl you start with the cover — your reference image. Everything else in the coloring book will be generated based on that cover so it all looks cohesive. You drag an arrow to the next artboard and give it a prompt: “farmhouse barn, the animals that live there.” Another arrow, another prompt: “the cow from image one, page two.” You do that 50 times for 50 pages.

Then you build the mockups in the same flow. Six coloring book pages on a school desk with crayons — Kittl knows which pages to use because they’re connected via arrows. A video of a child’s hand coloring one of the pages, the color filling in as they go, 4-10 seconds suitable for Etsy.

Then the export: Kittl packages the coloring book as a PDF, the mockups as separate images, the video, your “this is what you get” listing graphic, and your “thank you for shopping” slide. All in one folder.

Drag that folder to Etsy. Done.

“The time it took to generate that is a minute and 40 seconds per image. You’re five to ten minutes in and you’ve got all your images, your product file, and your listing video — all packaged and ready to go.”

Compare that to what the same process used to look like: generate each image separately in Ideogram, upscale it, remove the background, drag it into Canva, place it on a mockup, export each mockup individually, create a video somewhere else, build the PDF in another tool, find all the files in six different folders and upload them one by one. The time savings aren’t incremental. They’re transformative.

What the same workflow looks like for a POD t-shirt.

For a print-on-demand shirt, you’re only generating one image — the design that goes on the shirt. From there, Kittl can:

Generate realistic mockups on specific shirt colors — Comfort Colors 1717 in Blossom, Plum, Butter, Bay — using the exact hex codes, with the image flowing naturally with the shirt’s fabric wrinkles.

Place those mockups on AI lifestyle models — specify the ethnicity, setting, activity. Bay shirt on an African-American man walking in a park. Butter shirt on a white man walking on the beach. Asian female on a pier overlooking a lake. All generated, all cohesive.

Create a shirt-on-hanger video — blowing in the breeze, showing the design. Looping, 4 seconds, Etsy-ready.

Generate a color chart — all available color options displayed in your brand theme, labeled, ready to drop into the listing.

All of that exports in one folder. All of that flows through Claude, which is watching the Kittl output folder and writing your listing description in your brand voice. You’re not switching between six tools. You’re not hunting for files. You drag a folder to Etsy and you’re done.

The byproduct nobody talks about: cohesive branding, automatically.

Here’s what I didn’t expect when I started seeing Jason’s workflows: every single listing looks like it came from the same brand. Same fonts. Same logo placement. Same “what’s included” graphic. Same “thank you” slide. Same color palette across all mockups.

When Jason builds a done-for-you flow for a Scaling Society member, he pulls their Etsy shop colors, pulls their logo, uses the accent elements they already use in their listings, and bakes all of it into the automation. So when they hit generate — every listing, forever — automatically carries their brand.

“You’re not only scaling your shop — you’re building your brand at the same time. And when people see that cohesive scroll on your Etsy main page, they recognize you.”

That level of branding used to take a full-time designer and hours per listing. Now it’s a byproduct of doing the work efficiently.

How to use Kittl without burning through tokens.

Kittl runs on a token system — different actions cost different amounts. Here are Jason’s tips for making your subscription go further:

Use lower-tier models for simpler products. ChatGPT 2.0 inside Kittl is producing great PNGs and SVGs right now at a lower cost than Nano Banana Pro. Save the top-tier models for when you genuinely need photorealism.

Keep listing videos short. Kittl charges per second of video. Etsy allows 4-10 seconds — prompt your video to loop at 4 seconds. You’re not making a film. You’re making an Etsy listing.

Reuse standard listing images. Your “this is a digital download” graphic, your “how to download” slide, your “thank you” image — generate them once, keep them in your flow. They don’t cost you tokens again.

Reuse videos across color variants. Selling the same design on a green shirt, a blue shirt, and a red shirt? Use the same video. People understand what a t-shirt looks like.

Earn free tokens by attending Kittl’s live sessions. They give away tokens at their community events — Jason has gotten up to 5,000 free tokens at a single session. Jason and the Scaling Society coaches post in the group whenever a Kittl live is happening.

The alt text trick that makes one PNG reach five audiences.

This was the moment in the conversation that made me go — wait, we should be talking about this more.

When you sell a PNG, it’s not just a sublimation file — it’s also a tumbler design, a tote bag design, a garden flag design, a coffee mug design. Your one PNG works for all of those applications. And Etsy is a search engine. If someone is searching for a garden flag design and your listing has alt text that says “garden flag design,” your listing shows up — even if the listing itself is primarily about the PNG.

Create mockups showing the design on each application. Add alt text describing each one. Now you’re not competing in one search — you’re competing in five. And Kittl can generate all of those mockups in the same automation flow. Claude can write the alt text for each one.

Instead of five separate listings for five product types, you have one listing that surfaces in five different searches. That’s not a hack — that’s just smart.

Want Jason to build your automation — or teach you how?

Jason built a course called the Listing Automation Blueprint. He used the coloring book as the teaching vehicle — because it’s the most complex automation you’d ever build. If you can do a 50-page coloring book, a PNG or a POD shirt is simple. The course covers all product types, provides prompt sheets and worksheets, and is yours to keep forever.

If you’d rather have Jason build it for you — done for you. He pulls your Etsy colors and logo, designs two custom flows based on what you sell, builds in your brand elements, and includes a one-hour coaching call to walk through it live. And if something breaks down the line, email him and he’ll send you a fresh copy.

The done-for-you option also includes the course, so you can always go back and understand what’s happening under the hood.

Use code KITTL50 for $50 off either option — links are in the show notes.

👉 Listing Automation Blueprint (DIY course) → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/listing-automation-blueprint

👉 Done-for-you Kittl automation → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/offers/qM7RLgpT/checkout

👉Get a Kittl account → https://kittl.pxf.io/y22q9N

— — —

Jason and Tina are two of the loveliest humans I know. He’s a Marine, a retired police sergeant, a drone pilot, a graphic design legacy kid, a tech whiz, and one of the most generous coaches in the Scaling Society community. He’s available for one-on-one coaching calls through my website if you want his eyes specifically on your shop.

If you want to be around Jason, Laura, Carrie, Becca, and the rest of the coaching team every day — and dive deep on Kittl all month — that’s Scaling Society. Use code 50SCALE for $50 off your first month.

👉 Learn more about Scaling Society → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/scaling-society

👉 Listen to the full episode → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/blog/243

Heads up: some of the links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you purchase through them — at no extra cost to you. I only ever recommend tools I actually use and love. Promise.

If this was helpful, there’s plenty more where that came from. Subscribe for free — I’m holding nothing back.

Now go make something awesome.

— Lizzie

— — —

Heather Studio is one of my most trusted people in this space. Top 1% Etsy seller, multiple six-figure store owner, massive YouTube channel, dear friend. We talk on Marco Polo. She’s the real deal.

I brought her back to the podcast because I wanted to talk about the thing nobody talks about: not how to get started with print on demand, not how to build a six-figure shop, but the messy middle. The sellers who’ve figured out the basics, they’re making some sales, but they can’t seem to break past $500 a month. What’s actually happening there?

Heather worked with an accelerator group last year — intermediate to advanced sellers, one on one — and noticed the same patterns showing up over and over. Here’s what she found.

The three things that separate sellers who scale from those who plateau.

These aren’t the obvious ones. They’re not about SEO, or design quality, or which products to sell. They’re about who you are as a business owner.

1. They’re willing to try new things.

The sellers who scaled were willing to expand — new product types, new niches, new design styles. When Heather gave them a personalized roadmap, their response was consistently: “I trust you, I’ll try anything.” And then they actually did.

The sellers who stayed stuck were the ones who had too many conditions. They were only willing to try things within very narrow parameters. Growth requires reaching beyond what’s comfortable.

2. They execute — without overthinking.

“The sellers who grow get things out the door rather than asking: is this perfect? Is this the perfect listing? They list it and move on.”

This is what I call the Canva graveyard — designs sitting finished and unposted because the seller isn’t sure if they’re good enough yet. Every design in the graveyard is a lost 20 cents.

You get better by listing and learning from the data. You do not get better by sitting on designs and overanalyzing them before the market has weighed in. The market is the judge. Let it judge.

3. They reinvest in themselves and their business.

Fresh mockup images. Better software. Coaching. The sellers who hit $8,000 months — like one of Heather’s clients who reached out earlier this year — were the ones who kept leveling up their tools and their knowledge as their income grew. They treated profit as fuel, not just a reward.

“But I thought I was supposed to niche down.”

I still hear this constantly. And I want to put it to rest — at least for Etsy.

The “niche down” advice comes from the world of Shopify, personal websites, building a brand. When you own your own storefront, staying focused makes sense. On Etsy — a marketplace where every listing gets evaluated individually — sticking in one narrow niche is leaving money on the table.

Heather put it plainly: if you have a design that’s working and you don’t scale it to other niches, someone else will. She found her own designs showing up in niches she hadn’t entered yet — picked up by other sellers who saw the opportunity she’d left open.

“The worst thing that can happen is you lose 20 cents. The best thing that can happen is you get a sale.”

Test broadly. Even adjacent products — v-necks instead of just crew necks, dresses alongside t-shirts — capture customers who can’t find what they want anywhere else. The cost of testing on Etsy is almost nothing. The cost of not testing is every sale you didn’t make.

The metrics that actually matter — and the ones that waste your time.

Here’s what Heather watches weekly:

Return on ad spend (ROAS): if you’re running Etsy ads, this is the most important number. Every week or two, review which listings are getting clicks and sales — turn off the ones that aren’t converting. You can activate ads on individual listings (Etsy spreads your daily budget across whichever listings you have ads activated on), so curate ruthlessly.

Conversion rate: how many of the people who click on your listing actually buy? A low conversion rate usually means your listing gallery, pricing, or positioning needs work — not your SEO.

Search terms pulling traffic: inside your Etsy dashboard you can see exactly which keywords are sending people to your listings. Check this periodically to understand whether your SEO is actually matching what buyers are searching for.

What I’d add: stop spending time staring in the rearview mirror at listings you’ve already posted. The most valuable time you have is the 10-20 minutes before you design something new — studying bestsellers, building your brain cache. That activity directly improves the quality of everything you make going forward. Analyzing old listings that aren’t performing is a much lower-leverage use of your time.

How Heather uses Claude — and it changed how I think about AI.

This part of the conversation went somewhere I wasn’t expecting. We’re both what I’d call Claude girlies now — but we’re using it differently.

My version: Claude for business strategy and anything requiring real analytical thinking. ChatGPT for more conversational things — it’s basically become my creative brainstorm partner and occasional therapist. I still prefer ChatGPT or Gemini for image generation.

Heather’s version goes further. She uses the Claude Chrome extension to literally navigate her Etsy shop — clicking into listings, auditing them, and reporting back what needs to be fixed. She told me something I’d genuinely never thought of:

“You can ask Claude to check all your new listings and give you a briefing — what’s missing tags, what doesn’t have an AI disclaimer, what could be improved. And then ask it to fix the gaps while it’s in there.”

She’s trained Claude with her complete SEO system — must have all 13 tags, try to fill all 20 characters, no repeated keywords, include a mix of micro and broad niches. She can now run a batch of 20 new listings through that system automatically.

The honest caveat: Claude isn’t fully autonomous yet. It’s slower than doing things yourself. But the point is you don’t have to be there while it runs. You set it working and go do something else. That’s the leverage.

The AI divide that’s coming — and which side you want to be on.

We ended the episode talking about something bigger than print on demand or Etsy specifically.

Heather and I both believe a real split is coming between sellers who use AI and those who don’t. Not a gradual fade — an actual divide. The shops that learn to harness these tools are going to operate at a level that manual-only shops simply can’t match for efficiency and output.

“Instead of being scared and fearful of AI, learn it and use it to your advantage. We’re going to see a big separation between sellers who harness it and those who run away from it.”

The alternative path is going fully analog — deeply handmade, deeply personal, irreplaceable by AI. That’s a real and valid choice too. But the middle ground — not using AI, not being irreplaceably handmade — is going to get harder.

— — —

Heather’s YouTube channel is one of the best free resources for print on demand and AI on Etsy. Go find her at Heather Studio on YouTube. She also has free prompt guides and her Claude plugin available — all linked in the show notes.

👉 Heather Studio on YouTube → https://www.youtube.com/@itsheatherstudio

👉 Heather’s Claude plugin (AI Magic)→ https://aimagic.heatherstudio.com/

And if you want the community, the coaching, and the strategy to get out of the messy middle — Scaling Society is where that happens.

👉 Learn more about Scaling Society → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/scaling-society

👉 Listen to the full episode → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/blog/242

Heads up: some of the links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you purchase through them — at no extra cost to you. I only ever recommend tools I actually use and love. Promise.

If this was helpful, there’s plenty more where that came from. Subscribe for free — I’m holding nothing back.

Now go make something awesome.

— Lizzie

— — —

I’m going to say something that might surprise you for a July post: your Q4 success is earned in January. Or right now in July. Not in October.

Q4 is October, November, December — the most important sales window of the year for most Etsy sellers. And the people who crush it aren’t the ones scrambling in September to get listings up. They’re the ones who’ve been building all year.

Here’s the month-by-month timeline I’d follow — plus the mindset shift at the end that separates the sellers who grow from the ones who stay stuck.

First — a few WINS from inside Scaling Society this month.

I want to share these before we get into the timeline because they’re the whole reason I’m doing this episode in July instead of waiting.

Alex, handmade seller: (she was on episode 222)

Fatima, digital and POD seller:

Joanna, brand new seller:

Juli, digital products:

This is what happens when you start early and don’t quit.

If you need help with your Etsy strategy, want support, or enjoy positive helpful community to help you get results faster, check out my Scaling Society Membership: https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/scaling-society

Now here’s your plan.

To help you refer back to this info, I created a free Q4 Planning PDF. Everything from this post is in there as a checklist you can actually work from.

July + August: Build the Foundation

Step 1: Audit your top performers.

What’s selling right now? What sold best for you last Q4? Look at your actual data — not your gut, not what you hope is working. Then ask: how can I niche blast these? What other customers would love a version of this product?

Example: a kitchen sign that said “our kitchen is for dancing” in a farmhouse style became the anchor of an entire product family — different sizes, different backgrounds, different phrases. The concept scaled because I leaned into what was already working instead of chasing something new.

If you have no sales yet, audit the bestsellers in your niche instead. What aesthetics keep showing up? What’s the pricing? What do the reviews say? Catalog it all. This is your market research.

Step 2: Identify gaps for gift-giving occasions.

In Q4, Etsy is a gift-giving platform. Full stop. How could you position your products as stocking stuffers, teacher gifts, hostess gifts, personalized gifts? The more clearly you frame something as giftable, the more it sells.

For digital products specifically: create a bundle listing for your target niche — say, kindergarten teachers — and update the thumbnail and SEO to emphasize the gift angle. Add a printable gift certificate they can physically give on the day. This combination has made me hundreds and hundreds of dollars in digital sales in Q4, year after year.

Step 3: Duplicate bestsellers and add holiday versions.

This is a non-negotiable rule: never update the thumbnail, title, or tags on a listing that is already selling. Changing any of those triggers Etsy to re-evaluate the listing — and you lose the momentum you’ve built.

Instead, hit copy. Create a duplicate. Give that one the holiday flair and holiday SEO. Now you have both — the original keeps performing, and the new one catches the seasonal traffic. Best of both worlds.

Step 4: Keep adding new listings consistently.

Think of the algorithm like a friendly monster. It needs to be fed. New listings feed it. Sales feed it. Daily activity, however small, keeps it moving.

Your listings need time to be indexed before October — meaning Etsy needs to evaluate them and decide where to rank them in search. Get them up now. You could start in October and still make some sales, but you’ll make more if you start now.

If you batch your work, create everything at once and save to drafts — then publish one or two per day from the app. You feed the monster without having to show up to create every single day.

September: Get Operational

Step 5 (Print-on-demand): Vet your supplier turnaround times now.

What were their turnaround times last Q4? What colors tend to sell out? What’s the shipping cutoff date approaching Christmas? Find out now. Join the Facebook groups (Printify POD Rockstars is a good one). Check Reddit — but use your judgment. You’re looking for patterns across multiple complaints, not one extreme story.

Also: draft your customer response templates now. What will you say if there’s a misprint? What’s your shipping cutoff message? What do you do if a color sells out? Decide it now, write it now, save it as a reply in Etsy conversations. You don’t want to be figuring that out mid-panic in November.

Step 6: Start building your email list.

You want at least a few people on a list before Q4 so you can tell them what’s new in your shop — new products, holiday sales, Black Friday offers. You don’t need thousands. Even a small list of people who’ve already expressed interest in your shop is incredibly valuable.

Fastest way: upgrade your Everbee account to include Everbee Email. They have YouTube tutorials to walk you through setup and automations.

Free way: choose a free email provider (MailerLite is a solid option), set up a simple opt-in page, create a QR code linked to that page, and place a graphic in your listing images. Offer 10% off as the incentive. When someone scans the code and joins the list, an automated email sends them the coupon. Done.

Step 7: Draft your Q4 email sequences.

Before the rush hits, get your email skeletons into drafts. You won’t know exactly what you’re launching yet, but you can set up the base emails and plug in product details later. Do this before October so it’s not something you’re scrambling to set up when you’re already overwhelmed.

Step 8 (Handmade): Stock up on packaging and shipping supplies.

This sounds small but I’ve been caught without shipping supplies more than once — all my orders ready to go and nowhere to put them. Shipping supplies can get backordered in Q4. Get a surplus now while it’s available.

Step 9 (Handmade): Create extras of your bestsellers.

Anything you can pre-make or pre-stage right now — supplies organized, base products assembled, components prepped — do it. Future-you will be so grateful when you’re overwhelmed in November and some of the work is already done.

October: Go Time

Step 10: Plan your holiday sales events early.

Don’t decide your Black Friday strategy the week before. October can feel deceptively slow — people spend so much on Halloween that holiday planning stalls. Plan your sales events in early October while you have headspace.

One key thing: Black Friday now creeps earlier every year. Sales that start two weeks before Black Friday often outperform the actual day. Don’t wait until the week of to launch.

A few more things that made the biggest difference.

The 80/20 rule:

80% of what you create should be evergreen — not tied to a specific holiday or season. Things that sell to teachers, or dog moms, or wakeboarders, or nurses — any time of year. The beautiful thing about evergreen products is that in Q4, people gift them. So your year-round products naturally get a Q4 boost without any extra work. Only 20% of your catalog needs to be seasonal or holiday-specific.

For handmade sellers — set a shipping cutoff:

December 15th was my line. It gave enough buffer for USPS to make a few mistakes. After that, vacation mode — and I’d enjoy the rest of the holiday season without stress.

On vacation mode: it won’t ruin your shop. I used it for three to four months during COVID and came back to full throttle afterward. You’ll just need two to three weeks of slower activity when you come back out of it while Etsy re-indexes you. Expect that. Plan for it.

DM every customer who orders:

Especially in Q4. Something like: “Hey, thanks so much for your order! We’re so excited to make this for you. It will ship on or before [date] via USPS priority mail.” Set this as a saved reply so you’re not typing it 40 times a day. In an Amazon-culture world, setting expectations proactively is the difference between a five-star review and an angry DM.

The one thing that separates sellers who grow from those who stay stuck.

I promised I’d save this for the end — and I want you to actually sit with it.

The sellers who stay stuck have one thing in common: they create in a vacuum. They design what they like, what they think is cute, what they would personally buy — and they never close the loop back to demand. They never verify that what they’re making is what the market wants.

The sellers who grow? They train their eye. Not once. Every single day.

“The sellers who grow aren’t necessarily the most talented or the most creative. A lot of times they’re not. What they’ve done is study meticulously.”

Here’s what training your eye actually looks like in practice:

On Etsy: before you create anything new, spend 10–20 minutes searching your product type filtered by bestseller. Study what’s ranking. What fonts? What colors? What mockup style? What do the reviews say? What makes you click on one listing over another? This isn’t casual scrolling — it’s intentional study.

On Instagram: follow graphic designers, illustrators, t-shirt sellers, and bigger lifestyle brands that match your aesthetic. Create a separate account just for trend research so your personal feed doesn’t get muddled. What you see there will often be ahead of what’s hitting Etsy.

At Target or Walmart: walk the front gifting section, the bedding aisle, the mugs and graphic tees. When Becca and I did this in May, everything from the trend report was already showing up in physical stores — stripes, fish, all of it. Trends in the wild before they peak online.

Every time you do this, you’re building your brain cache — the mental library of what works. The longer you do it, the more automatic your instincts become. You stop guessing and start knowing. And when you know, everything gets faster.

— — —

I recorded this episode sitting at our lake house looking out at the water. Two loons were swimming in the bay. And I found myself thinking about how Etsy opened a door I never thought I could walk through.

I don’t know what that door looks like for you. Maybe it’s covering Christmas without stress. Maybe it’s paying your mortgage. Maybe it’s full time freedom. Maybe it’s just knowing that if something happened at your job tomorrow, you’d be okay. Whatever it is — I want it for you. And this is the season to build toward it.

If you want to go into Q4 with a plan, with feedback on your shop, with people who will help you make faster decisions — that’s Scaling Society. Use code 50SCALE for $50 off your first month.

👉 Learn more about Scaling Society → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/scaling-society

👉 Grab the free Q4 Planning Guide → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/interest-q4-planning-guide

👉 Listen to the full episode → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/blog/241

Heads up: some of the links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you purchase through them — at no extra cost to you. I only ever recommend tools I actually use and love. Promise.

If this was helpful, there’s plenty more where that came from. Subscribe for free — I’m holding nothing back.

Now go make something awesome.

— Lizzie

— — —

Sweary Carrie is back. And honestly, this conversation went off the rails in the best possible way.

Sweary Carrie Designs is a multi-passionate, snarky, horror-and-feminist-niche sticker brand built by a woman from Iowa City who goes by the title QEO — Queen Executive Officer — and has recently been approved to start selling wholesale on Faire. She’s been selling on Etsy since 2022 and is one of the coaches inside Scaling Society. She also has absolutely no filter, which is the main reason everyone loves her.

We talked trends, profit margins, an Etsy tool most sellers don’t know exists, the most unhinged reviews she’s ever received, and — at the very end — something important for this whole community. Buckle up.

What’s blowing up in stickers right now.

Carrie stays deep in sticker SEO research every week, and she broke down two big trend categories she’s watching:

Animals — especially retro/vintage ones.

Think curio cabinet-era illustration style — the kind of creature you’d see on a vintage greeting card or in your grandmother’s china cabinet. Cherub-adjacent vibes, soft and old-fashioned. Frogs specifically are having a massive moment — every aesthetic, every style, photorealistic to kawaii — and Carrie is here for it.

Fonts — metalcore and Old English.

Metalcore fonts: almost hard to read, viney, lightning-esque. Think old band t-shirts — if you know what it says, you know what it says. Old English fonts: showing up heavily in Renaissance Faire, dark academia, and Gothic aesthetics. Not typewriter (which Carrie personally loves) but definitely old-world.

Her current bestseller? A glitter sticker with horror-font drippy text and grunge distressing. The grunge effect is different on every single sticker because of how glitter catches the light. No two are exactly the same. That uniqueness is part of what keeps it converting.

The smartest thing Carrie does that most sellers aren’t doing.

Before Carrie commits to getting stickers made, she tests new designs as buttons first — they’re the cheapest thing she can produce. If a button sells, she knows the design has legs. Then she expands: stickers, keychains, magnets, bottle openers — all using that same circular design she already knows converts.

“A lot of my designs are circular, or fit well into a circle shape — because that’s what I use to test with buttons first. Everything downstream from that is easier.”

It’s the exact same principle I teach about testing broadly before committing narrowly. You’re not sinking money into a design until the market has already told you it works.

She starts with 10 units of any new sticker design — the minimum her manufacturer requires. If she has a really good feeling about one, she’ll buy more during a sale. But generally: test before committing. New products are always a gamble.

How she thinks about profit margins on low-ticket items.

Carrie starts with a 30% profit margin as her baseline. That’s before sales, before bundling, before volume discounts. She doesn’t remember where she landed on 30%, but it held up — and it’s a solid place to start.

Where the margin actually goes up is on bundles. If someone buys five stickers — five things that go into one envelope, one shipping cost, one transaction — the cost per sticker to Carrie goes down while the customer gets a better per-unit price. Everyone wins. And the bigger she gets, the more she can buy in bulk, which drops her per-unit cost further. Volume begets volume.

On sticker quality: Carrie uses premium vinyl — dishwasher safe, car safe, tumbler safe. But she’s clear that this isn’t the only way to run a sticker shop. The most important thing isn’t your material quality. It’s that you’re transparent about it in your listing. There are plenty of bestselling paper stickers on Etsy charging nearly as much as premium vinyl. Sticker people buy stickers. Just be honest about what they’re getting.

The Etsy promo tool most sellers don’t know about.

This one genuinely surprised me. Inside Etsy seller tools, there’s a promotion option that lets you run automatic bundle discounts — no coupon code required — for up to 30 days at a time.

Carrie ran something like “buy 2 items, get 22% off” or “buy 3, get 33% off” for the entire month of May. When a customer adds qualifying items to their cart, the discount applies automatically at checkout.

Here’s why it’s powerful for stickers specifically: when someone buys a 2-pack of one sticker and a 5-pack of another, that’s two “items” according to Etsy. The automatic discount kicks in. Average order value goes up, shipping cost stays the same, profit margin improves.

For anyone selling low-ticket physical or digital products where bundling makes sense — this is worth looking into. Find it inside your Etsy shop manager under Marketing → Promotions.

Her all-time bestseller? She made it on her phone on a break at work.

Before she knew anything about market research, before ProfitTree, before any of the strategy — Carrie had a funny idea during a break at her day job. She opened her phone, made a text-based sticker design, listed it, and thought: I’ll probably sell a couple. That’ll be it.

Years later. Still her number one bestseller.

“I was just designing what I like. Creating out of flow. And it just... went.”

Carrie’s honest about it: for every one that takes off like that, there are probably ten she made in the same inspired, go-with-your-gut way that didn’t sell at all. The same goes for research-based listings. Nothing is guaranteed. The whole game is testing — whether the testing is data-driven or gut-driven or both. That’s what makes it a game worth playing.

The three reviews that live rent-free in her head.

Carrie has a review spreadsheet (she exports her Etsy reviews as a CSV — yes, you can do that). Her top three favorites, edited for broadcast:

“So [effing] cool. Thank you so much. Love this.” — with approximately 17 O’s in the word “cool” and a zillion exclamation points.

“Sweary Carrie never disappoints. I’m a return customer and her [stuff] is legit.” — which rhymes, which she appreciates.

“Somebody gotta match my freak.” — five words. The Etsy minimum. That’s all they needed.

This is what happens when your brand voice is this clear and this consistent — your customers start speaking your language back to you.

The name. (This is the important part.)

We’ve been chatting in the Scaling Society coaches Slack about what to call this community — the people who listen to the podcast, read this Substack, show up in the group. Preston Cox had the idea. Carrie brought it to the pod.

The name is Stuffies.

As in, How to Sell Your Stuff. Stuffies. And before you get there — yes, I also thought they were talking about stuffed animals for a brief moment. That’s not the reference. But also Carrie has already suggested the mascot should be a hedgehog. A hedgehog named after Pecan. And I may have agreed to commission her to design it.

“What’s up, mother stuffers?” — Sweary Carrie, coining the greeting

Hereby and thus: you are Stuffies. Welcome to the family.

— — —

Carrie is one of the coaches inside Scaling Society. If you want to spend more time with her — get her eyes on your shop, access her spreadsheet brain, watch her deliver a critique sandwich with zero sugarcoating — that’s where she lives.

Use code 50SCALE for $50 off your first month.

👉 Learn more about Scaling Society → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/scaling-society

You can follow Carrie at @swearycarriedesigns on Instagram. She has no filter. You’ve been warned. You’re welcome.

👉 Listen to the full episode → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/blog/240

If this was helpful, there’s plenty more where that came from. Subscribe for free — I’m holding nothing back.

Now go make something awesome.

— Lizzie

— — —

I want to tell you something that might completely reframe why you’re here.

We talk a lot in this space about $10,000 months. About replacing your income. About going full time. And those are real, achievable goals that real people in this community have reached. But there’s another reason to build an Etsy shop — one that doesn’t get talked about enough — and Cody Berman came on the podcast specifically to talk about it.

Cody is a digital nomad, a seven-figure digital products seller, and now a bestselling author. His book is called Retire by 30. And the math he dropped in this episode is the kind that stops you mid-sentence and makes you want to go find a calculator.

What $20 a day actually buys you over time.

A lot of people dismiss a small Etsy income. “It’s only $600 a month. That’s not going to change my life.” Cody’s response to that:

“If you invest $20 a day — $600 a month — for 30 years at a standard stock market return, you end up with $1.25 million. Type it into a compound interest calculator if you don’t believe me.”

The key word is invest. Not spend, not save in a checking account — invest. The people who use a side hustle income like Etsy to fund their investments rather than their lifestyle are the ones who hit financial independence. The people who let it trickle into everyday spending don’t.

This is the whole FIRE movement in a nutshell. Financial Independence, Retire Early. The math works when you’re patient and consistent. And the boring, consistent stuff is exactly what Etsy is built for.

The two paths to financial freedom — and which one Etsy fits.

Cody breaks financial independence into two main approaches:

The Nest Egg Method:

Calculate your annual expenses. Multiply by 25. That’s your target number. Reach it — invested in low-cost index funds — and you can withdraw your annual expenses from it indefinitely. The portfolio’s growth replaces what you take out. It’s not that $1.5 million sits there forever untouched — it’s that invested properly, $1.5 million makes more money than you pull from it. Your money works for you instead of the other way around.

The Cashflow Method:

Instead of building a nest egg, you build income streams that are mostly passive — real estate, a running Etsy shop, a small business with systems in place. Once those streams cover your expenses without requiring a large chunk of your time (Cody’s benchmark is 80%+ passive), you’re functionally financially free. This is where Etsy lives. A well-built Etsy shop doesn’t need you there every hour of every day. It makes money while you sleep, while you travel, while you read your book on the couch.

The actual numbers Cody used to retire at 25.

He’s never shared these publicly before. Here’s what Cody had built by the time he called himself financially independent:

$500,000 invested in the stock market.

13 rental units bringing in $3,700/month after all expenses.

A digital products business generating $10,000+/month in mostly passive income.

He didn’t get there by making a lot of money at once. He got there by making Etsy income and immediately routing it into assets that compounded. The Etsy shop was never the destination — it was the engine funding the assets that eventually set him free.

How he got a brand new Etsy shop to $1,000/month in 116 days.

Cody recently started a new Etsy shop from scratch — no connections to his existing brand, no social media promotion, just the shop — to prove it was still doable. Here’s what it took:

Time: 1-2 hours per day, Monday through Friday. Around 5-10 hours per week.

Output: 3-4 listings per hour using the template method — roughly 20+ listings per week.

$600/month milestone: roughly 60-70 days in.

$1,000/month milestone: 116 days. Just under four months.

The method: create one product, turn it into a template, then make 50 variations of it. What I call niche blasting. It’s the same principle — build something once, then scale it across multiple audiences. This is the highest-leverage way to list quickly without starting from scratch every time.

📸 IMAGE: Lizzie brand photo — mid-post visual break (suggest lizzie-brand-session-131.jpg, laptop photo)

The most important distinction most side hustlers miss.

Cody draws a sharp line between scalable and non-scalable side hustles — and once you hear it, you can’t unhear it.

Non-scalable: freelancing, consulting, trading time for money. The second you stop, the income stops. You can grind hard for two months and then take two months off, but during those off months you get nothing from the grind months.

“With a scalable side hustle like digital products on Etsy, you can put in the work for a couple months, really go after it, and then rest on your laurels for a couple months — and still make money from the work you already did.”

This is why Cody works in seasons — some months 60-80 hour weeks (during the book launch), some months barely 30 minutes a day while traveling. Etsy lets you do that. The listings you put up in January are still making sales in July. The asset you built doesn’t require your presence to keep generating.

Etsy as a launchpad — not just a destination.

Both Cody and I have said some version of this before, but we laid it out clearly in this episode: Etsy is the easiest place to fail forward and learn the fundamentals of building an online business. Product research, graphic design, marketing, SEO, customer service, listing optimization — all skills that transfer.

“Skills are future currency. They can never be taken away from you.” — Grant Sabatier, from Cody’s book foreword

Cody has over 30 side hustles in what he calls his “side hustle graveyard” — things he tried and shut down. Freelance podcast editing, video editing, website building, white paper writing. None of them still exist. But every single one made him a better entrepreneur for the next thing. You are never starting over. You are never starting at the same baseline.

I’ll add something personal here. When my first baby was three months old, my husband lost his job. The house went into pre-foreclosure. We had three kids’ responsibilities, no income, and no runway. I figured out Etsy in that moment. And now, on the other side of it, the thing I feel most grateful for isn’t a number — it’s knowing I can never truly fail again. Not that I won’t have failures. But I have the skills. I will always be okay. I want everyone who’s listening right now to eventually have that same feeling.

The exercise that makes all of this make sense.

The practical piece Cody wanted to make sure we covered is one of my favorites in the book. He and his wife did this early in their relationship and it changed how they made every financial decision since:

Independently write out the top 10 things you value most.

Bring the lists together and compare.

Pull up your bank statement, credit card statement, and calendar.

Ask: is what I say I value in alignment with how I’m actually spending my time and money? Cut what doesn’t align. Add what does.

Once you know what your ideal life actually looks like and what it costs, you can reverse engineer your Etsy income goal. You might find out you don’t need $10,000 a month. You might find out $2,000 a month invested consistently over 15 years gets you exactly where you want to be.

Everything becomes more clear when you know your number.

One practical Etsy warning before we go.

Etsy has been suggesting sellers update their listing titles using AI-generated recommendations. We both have the same advice:

“I have definitely not done the automatic listing updates. I’ve just seen people’s shops get crushed. These LLM-suggested titles just might not make sense at all.”

The algorithm hasn’t caught up to the recommendation. People who changed their titles are watching their views tank. Until Etsy’s search results visibly shift to favor conversational, sentence-style queries over traditional keywords, do not touch your titles. If it’s working, leave it alone.

— — —

Cody’s book, Retire by 30, is available on Amazon now. If you want the full breakdown — calculating your retirement number, cutting the right expenses, investing strategies, and what early retirement actually looks like — it’s all in there. I bought it the day it came out.

👉 Grab Retire by 30 → https://amzn.to/4g6WzoX

Cody also runs ePrintables with his business partner Julie — a course on building passive income with printables on Etsy. They open it a couple times a year. In the meantime, you can grab their free masterclass to get started.

👉 Watch the free ePrintables masterclass → https://lizziesmiley--gold-city-ventures.thrivecart.com/etsy-printables/5f7f6464870b7/

And if you want the Etsy strategy, coaching, and community to help you build the income that funds that future — that’s Scaling Society.

👉 Learn more about Scaling Society → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/scaling-society

👉 Listen to the full episode → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/blog/239

If this was helpful, there’s plenty more where that came from. Subscribe for free — I’m holding nothing back.

Now go make something awesome.

— Lizzie

Heads up: some of the links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you purchase through them — at no extra cost to you. I only ever recommend tools I actually use and love. Promise.

Some conversations don’t follow an outline. They just wander wherever the energy takes them — and somehow that’s exactly what makes them the most useful.

Laura Geissert is a speech language pathologist and private practice owner who’s been building Etsy shops on the side since 2023. She runs two shops now — one is a tightly niched destination for fellow speech therapists, the other is a wide-open PNG shop where she lets herself make whatever she’s in the mood for. She’s also one of the coaches inside Scaling Society.

This conversation went everywhere — workflow, AI tools, personality types, niches, mindset. Here’s what stuck with me.

Why she opened a second shop — and called it her “palate cleanser.”

Laura’s main shop is built entirely around speech therapists — a tight, specific niche. It works beautifully. But it also meant that every time a fun trend came along that didn’t fit her audience, she had to let it go.

“I’d get all this FOMO seeing other people create these great designs, but it wasn’t going to work for who my audience is. So a PNG shop allows me to do whatever I want. One week I could be creating beautiful Christian designs, and the next week I’m doing feral raccoons.”

She started the PNG shop in October after watching Trendspotting and hearing other sellers in the coaching group talk about their digital shops. It was an experiment — how fast can you actually get a PNG shop making real money? The answer surprised both of us.

From $100/month to over $1,000/month — and it accelerated fast.

Laura was making $100-$200/month within the first two to three months of her PNG shop. Steady, modest, normal. Then something shifted.

“It just started in April that it jumped up to like 800-something. Right now if I look at my last 30 days, it’s over $1,000.”

She’s at 321 listings. That’s faster than typical — most sellers need 500 to 1,000 listings before hitting that kind of income. Why did it happen faster for her?

Because she’d already spent two years building her eye on Etsy before she ever started the PNG shop. She wasn’t starting from zero — she was starting from two years of brain cache. That’s the advantage experience gives you: you skip straight to better decisions because you’ve already learned what doesn’t work.

Why PNGs are still the smartest place to start.

If you don’t already know exactly what you want to sell — no crochet obsession, no sign-making background — PNGs shorten the learning curve dramatically. They’re low ticket, which makes shoppers more willing to take a chance on a new, unproven shop. No product photos, no Printify connection, no shipping. Just design, mockup, list.

“You quickly get good at listing, mockups, design, SEO. And from there, you can get a bunch of listings up and get a lot of data fast.”

Laura agreed completely — and pointed out something I hadn’t fully named before. When you go straight into print-on-demand with one specific product idea already locked in, you don’t have any data yet on whether it’ll actually sell. You can think a design is going to be huge and watch it never sell a single time. PNGs let you test broadly before you commit narrowly.

Starting price for new PNG listings: under $1. As you build a track record and a bestseller badge starts forming, you can move up to $2.97, $3.97, $4.97.

Type A, Type B, and the secret third option.

This part of the conversation went somewhere I didn’t expect — but it explains so much about how different sellers actually run their businesses.

Type A is fully structured, everything has a system. Type B is gut-feeling chaos, nothing organized. But there’s a Type C — a blend. Some parts of your life are deeply structured, other parts are total disarray, and somehow it works.

“My business and the podcast — always scheduled ahead, structured. But if you saw my office, it looks like a toddler came in here and threw things everywhere.”

Laura’s version: she’s not a tab person (Lizzie definitely is), she organizes her Chrome profiles so her tools auto-open by shop — but she’s also got a Kittle account so disorganized she once spent an hour searching for a custom design she couldn’t relocate, and ended up recreating it from scratch.

If you’ve ever felt like you’re “doing business wrong” because your systems don’t look like someone else’s — you’re probably just a different blend of structured and chaotic. That’s not a flaw. That’s just your type.

Laura’s actual design workflow, step by step.

She does both niche-first and trend-first research, depending on her mood. Her process when she’s trend-first: incognito search for what’s trending in PNGs, screenshot the best examples into Canva, then brainstorm a giant list of phrases and niches that trend could work for underneath each screenshot.

From there, she takes the whole brainstorm document to ChatGPT and asks where to start. She generates prompts, brings them into Kittle, and tests Nano Banana Pro 4K (her current favorite generator) against other tools to see which gives the best result for each style.

“I like to just use elements and do my own text usually. You can have one design that you repurpose as a template — you can easily switch it to a different niche.”

On a good day she creates 10 designs in 30 minutes using this template approach. But she still does all her mockups manually in Canva — she’s not ready to fully trust AI-generated mockup videos yet, and that’s a completely valid choice. Not every part of your workflow has to be automated.

Her honest average: at least 5 listings a day across both shops — though some days it’s zero, some days it’s 10. Once a shop is established, Etsy stops requiring daily consistency the way it does for brand new shops. What matters then is that things are selling regularly, not that you’re listing every single day.

The line that’s the real takeaway of this whole episode.

Laura’s main shop sells speech therapy designs. If you look at the actual bestselling speech therapy shirts on Etsy, hers aren’t even on that list — the ones that sell 40 a month come from giant print-on-demand mega-stores that just slapped a trending design on a speech therapy phrase.

But Laura has loyal repeat customers who message her directly asking for custom requests — because she’s an actual speech therapist. She understands the inside jokes, the frustrations, the specific things that resonate emotionally with that community in a way a generic mega-store never could.

“When you have really strong emotional connection on a design, even if the design isn’t perfect, people will choose yours because the emotional connection is there in a way that no one else can duplicate. Emotional connection covers a lot of sins.”

This is the exact same lesson from Shannon’s story — she got her first sales because she was a paramedic designing for paramedics. It’s the same lesson from Becca — she built her invitations niche because she was already making them for her own daughter. Your lived experience is not a limitation on Etsy. It’s your unfair advantage.

Her goals — and why “staying exactly here” is a completely valid answer.

I asked Laura where she wants to take this. Her answer was refreshing in its simplicity: she’s happy. Revenue keeps increasing year over year. It’s never felt overwhelming. She hasn’t needed to hire anyone. She’s thought about building her own website off Etsy but keeps coming back to the same conclusion — she doesn’t want to do social media, marketing, or paid ads. Etsy drives the traffic. The fees are worth it for what she gets in return.

Not every seller needs to scale to seven figures or build an empire off Etsy. A sustainable, growing, part-time business that fits your actual life is a completely legitimate goal — and Laura is proof you can build that without burning out or overcomplicating things.

— — —

Laura built two successful shops around a full career, a fiancé, two miniature dachshunds, and a clear sense of what she actually wants from this business. No burnout, no overextension — just steady growth on her own terms.

Laura is one of the coaches inside Scaling Society — if you want her eyes on your shop, or just want to be around people figuring this out the same way she did, that’s where you’ll find her.

👉 Learn more about Scaling Society → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/scaling-society

👉 Listen to the full episode → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/blog/238

➡️ Book a One on One Etsy Coaching Session with Laura (or one of our other specialty coaches): https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/private-etsy-coaching

If this was helpful, there’s plenty more where that came from. Subscribe for free — I’m holding nothing back.

Now go make something awesome.

— Lizzie

I want to talk about something we’ve never really covered on this podcast before.

In-person markets. Craft fairs. Farmers markets. Those Saturday morning events where real humans walk up to a table and fall in love with something they’d never have found scrolling on their phone.

Ginny Bracht reached out and said: Lizzie, we need to talk about this. She’s a potter and artist in Albuquerque who sells at local markets — and she discovered a way to make every in-person sale boost her Etsy shop at the same time. She went from 40 sales to 140.

Whether or not you’re already doing markets, this one is worth reading. There’s a strategy in here that most handmade sellers have no idea exists.

The first thing Ginny taught me: what sells in person is different from what sells online.

Potters have a phrase for it: craft fair blue. Blue mugs sell consistently at every single market. It’s not that other colors don’t sell — it’s that nobody dislikes blue. Ginny makes extra blue mugs specifically for market weekends.

But online? Blue mugs are harder to move. Ginny’s best-performing listings online are utensil holders, butter dishes, and salt cellars — things people are specifically searching for to match a kitchen aesthetic. They come to Etsy with intention. They come to a craft fair to browse.

This is actually the same thing I teach about Etsy being a search engine marketplace — people arrive with something already in mind. At a craft fair, they don’t have a checklist. Something catches their eye and they buy on impulse. The platforms reward completely different things, and Ginny has learned to show up differently at each one.

The strategy that changed everything: linking Square to Etsy.

This is the one most handmade sellers don’t know about. And it’s a big deal.

You can link your Square account directly to your Etsy shop — inside your Etsy seller dashboard, under the “sell in person” option. When you do, every sale you make at a market counts as an Etsy sale. Here’s how the fees work:

No Etsy transaction fee on in-person sales.

Just a 20-cent relisting fee per sale — and it’s per transaction, not per item. Sell three mugs to one person? Still just 20 cents.

Standard Square processing fees (around 3%) — the same you’d pay with any card processor.

You can even sell items that aren’t listed in your shop yet — like pottery fresh from the kiln you didn’t have time to photograph. Scan it through Square, it logs as an Etsy sale, you pay 20 cents. Done.

Bonus for new Square users: if you set up Square through Etsy, you get your first $1,000 in Square processing fees waived.

Why does this matter for your Etsy shop? Sales history builds credibility. More sales signals to the algorithm that your shop is active and trustworthy. And for Ginny, those in-person sales were the push she needed to earn her Star Seller badge for the first time — she finally had the volume.

“I had my customer service stats great and all five-star reviews. I just didn’t have the volume of sales to get the badge. Linking Square changed that.”

She went from 40 sales to over 140. Not overnight — but consistently, as the market sales stacked up alongside her Etsy organic sales. The two channels started feeding each other.

How she converts market browsers into email subscribers.

Ginny has a pottery newsletter — and she’s figured out the exact right moment to invite people to join it.

Not by waving a sign. Not by asking everyone who walks by. She waits until the moment she’s packaging up a purchase — and while she’s doing that, she says: I have a newsletter, here are the benefits, here’s the signup page loaded on my iPad. Do you want to sign up?

It works beautifully for a few reasons: the customer already likes Ginny enough to buy from her, they have something to do while she wraps their pottery, there’s no pressure because she’s busy, and they don’t have to remember to sign up later.

“It’s a kindness to them to have the signup page loaded. They don’t have to keep track of my card, they don’t have to remember to come back. All they have to do is click confirm on the first email.”

What does her newsletter offer? Behind-the-scenes content from her studio. First access to new work. A perpetual 10% off code for her Etsy shop. And her market schedule, so local customers know when to find her.

She also does an annual mug giveaway. It’s not aggressive, it’s not promotional — it’s just warm and human. Exactly the vibe that makes people want to keep getting her emails.

The “first dibs” move that gets sales without feeling pushy.

When a market customer says “if you ever make one of these, I want it” — Ginny writes it down. And when she makes it, she messages them: hey, you mentioned this, it’s ready. I wanted to give you first dibs before I list it.

“I know it’ll sell eventually anyway. I just want to give you the opportunity first.”

That framing — first dibs, not a sales pitch — changes the whole energy. And usually they say yes immediately. It’s one of the simplest, most human sales moves I’ve heard in a long time.

For every introverted maker who’s scared of markets.

Ginny is an introvert. She told me that at her early markets she tried to cosplay as an extrovert — big smile all day, high energy, calling out to people walking by. It was exhausting. Her face hurt from smiling.

Now she just shows up as herself. A little quieter. Calmer. Welcoming rather than performing.

“Not every shopper wants the same experience. The boisterous booth two doors down — sometimes people come over to me and say, it’s so great that you’re here, this peaceful little corner in the middle of all the busy.”

You are not going to be everything to everyone. You might as well be yourself — and let your people find you. That’s not just good market advice. That’s good life advice.

Practical logistics for getting started.

Booth fees:

Beginner markets start around $50 or less — lower attendance, but a great training run. Most of Ginny’s regular markets run $70–$120. She says the first hour or two always feels nerve-wracking, then it’s fine by the end.

Price points:

Always have a low-ticket option. Ginny sells $15 tea light candle holders and they always sell out — they give people a way to support her even on a tight budget. And here’s the psychology: having low, medium, and high-ticket items actually makes people buy the medium-ticket thing more often.

Booth setup:

Different heights make a big difference visually. Ginny started with cardboard boxes wrapped in brown paper to create tiers — worked great. Now she has handmade shelves and plant stands. The booth evolves over time. Don’t wait until it’s perfect.

For fall markets — start now:

Applications for fall markets typically open in June and July. Get on market mailing lists now so you don’t miss the window. Search for markets in your area, visit a few this summer to scope out what’s working, then apply for fall.

How to learn markets the same way you learn Etsy.

Ginny’s advice for new market sellers is the same thing I teach about Etsy: be a student of what’s working. Walk into a market and notice what booths draw you in — even if they’re selling something completely different from you. What caught your eye? Was it the height of the display? The color palette? The signage? That’s your curriculum.

Talk to other vendors. Most of them are generous with what they know. If you’re worried about being in competition, go to markets in other cities and ask vendors there — no competition, just learning.

“There’s room for everyone. Abundance mindset. I’m very much that.”

Also — show people how to use your products. Ginny puts a tea light in her candle holders so people understand what they are. Don’t make your customer work to figure out what they’re looking at.

— — —

If you’re a handmade seller who’s been thinking about markets — or if you’re already doing markets but haven’t linked Square to Etsy yet — this episode is your green light.

And if you want the full strategy for growing your Etsy shop — the SEO, the trends, the community, and the coaching — that’s what Scaling Society is built for.

👉 Learn more about Scaling Society → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/scaling-society

👉 Listen to the full episode → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/blog/236

If this was helpful, there’s plenty more where that came from. Subscribe for free — I’m holding nothing back.

Now go make something awesome.

— Lizzie

I do these Etsy FAQ round ups a few times a year and they are genuinely some of my favorite episodes to record — mostly because I get to bounce from subject to subject at full speed, which is basically my natural state.

These questions came straight from you guys. Real questions, real situations. Let’s dig in. And if you want to submit a question for the next one, you can do that here!

Q: My shop just hit 100 sales in its first month. Everything about taxes feels overwhelming. Help.

First — 100 sales in one month is incredible. Congratulations.

On taxes: I’m not a tax expert, and this is not intended as tax or legal advice. But here’s what I can tell you. Keep receipts for everything — Etsy fees, listing fees, subscriptions, supplies, shipping, any equipment you buy. All of it. Because those are business expenses you can write off.

When it comes to actually filing: if it’s in the budget, a CPA is worth it. If not, TurboTax will literally hold your hand through the whole process. It’s what my husband used for years before we hired an accountant. You can even search ‘Etsy shop business’ in their help section to get ahead of it now.

Whatever you do — track expenses as you go. Don’t wait until April to try to remember what you spent in January.

Q: My shop is almost two years old, 350 listings, 700 sales, and I’ve never had a bestseller badge. Does it actually matter?

Bestseller badges come down to the velocity of a single listing — how many people buy it within a certain window of time. Some sellers get one in their first few months. Some never do. It’s all over the map.

Here’s the thing though: I’d actually be excited in your position. Sellers with bestseller badges get copied constantly. Competitors use them to find what’s selling. Flying under the radar with a bunch of quietly performing listings? That’s a real advantage.

What I’d focus on instead of the badge: look at which listings are performing best and let those teach you what to make more of. At 700 sales you have real data. Use it.

And for your income goals — print-on-demand sellers hitting $5,000–$10,000/month typically have 1,000–2,000 listings. That’s where I’d be putting my energy.

Q: Should I use the same keywords in my title and tags, or should they be completely different?

Different — for the most part. The goal is to cover as much SEO ground as possible across your title and all 13 tags.

That said: the first part of your title should read like a mini sentence that makes sense to the shopper. If that phrase directly matches a tag, that’s totally fine — the beginning of your title is for the customer first, the algorithm second. Use the rest of your title and your tags to bring in other relevant keywords.

The big strategy: mix low, medium, and high competition keywords. Don’t stack all high competition tags — you’ll never rank. Don’t stack all low competition — not enough traffic. Blend all three.

Q: Is SEO case-sensitive? Do capital letters, apostrophes, periods, or dashes matter?

Nope. Etsy’s search is not case-sensitive and ignores all punctuation. Don’t waste a single second thinking about this one.

Q: Is it okay to sell digital and physical products in the same Etsy shop?

Absolutely — especially if they’re for the same type of customer. If your whole shop is faith-based, having both digital prints and handmade goods in there makes total sense. Etsy’s algorithm cares about serving the shopper, and a shopper who wants faith-based products wants all of it.

I’d go even further: if you’re brand new, test different product types in the same shop while you figure out what works. What you start with is rarely what ends up being your thing. Let the data show you.

Q: Should I revive an old Etsy shop or start a new one?

Both can work — here’s how I’d decide.

Reviving an old shop: you have reviews, sales history, and time on the platform, all of which build shopper trust immediately. The downside is that your listings take a bit longer to build traction when you restart. You’ll need to list consistently — several times a week if not daily — to wake the algorithm back up.

Starting fresh: slightly easier to get early traction. But you’re starting from zero trust.

My rule of thumb: if it’s the same niche, revive the old shop. If it’s a completely new direction, start fresh and don’t confuse the existing one.

One honest thing I’ll add: restarting an old shop requires extra patience. I’m doing it myself right now and it’s a slow burn. Just know that going in.

Q: At what point should I start seeing views? I’ve heard to wait 30 days but I’m not sure what normal looks like.

There’s no universal answer here — it genuinely depends on your SEO, your thumbnails, your product, and even the time of year. Sometimes I put up a listing and it sells the same day. Sometimes a seasonal listing doesn’t sell until the following year.

Here’s what I’d actually recommend: until you hit 100 sales, don’t go back and analyze what you’ve already made. Look forward. Before every new listing, do market research — study bestsellers, refine your thumbnails, improve your SEO. Use your energy on what you’re making next, not auditing what you’ve already made.

Once you have some sales under your belt and you know what works, then go back and look at old listings with fresh eyes. You’ll be able to see clearly what needs updating. Not before.

If you’re really stuck, a one-on-one with one of my coaches is the best investment you can make — they can look at your actual shop and tell you what’s specifically holding you back.

Q: I see listings with a play button icon in the feed. Is having a video as the first image beneficial?

Quick clarification: the play button in the feed doesn’t mean the video is the first image — it means the listing has a video included. Your first image is always a static thumbnail. The video shows up when someone hovers (on desktop) or scrolls through the listing gallery.

Should you have one? Yes. Etsy’s own research shows listings with videos are about 20% more likely to sell.

For print-on-demand and handmade: always include a listing video.

For digital products: I never used to do them, but now I use Kittle Automations to create them automatically — it’s so fast there’s no excuse not to. Go check out the YouTube video I just published on exactly how to set that up. It’s a game-changer.

Q: How do I spot trends in the digital invitations niche specifically?

Two ways. First — use my Trendspotting membership. The same visual aesthetic trends I track in PNGs translate directly to digital invitations. The trends are happening in the same creative ecosystem.

Second — do your own research right in Etsy. Search a specific type of invitation, filter by bestseller, and study what patterns keep showing up. Fonts, colors, layouts, aesthetic styles. You’re building your brain cache for that specific product category.

Becca, one of my coaches, sells digital invitations and does incredibly well. She uses both of those methods together. That’s the combination.

Q: I’m British but selling to both US and UK markets. Should I list UK and US English variations as one listing or separately?

Separately. Every time.

The SEO will be completely different — searchers in each country use different terms. ‘Torch’ vs ‘flashlight.’ ‘Autumn’ vs ‘fall.’ ‘Maths’ vs ‘math.’ If you combine them, you can’t optimize for both properly.

Two listings, two sets of keywords, two audiences. You’ll reach more people and rank better in both markets.

Q: Etsy seems to be testing a forced physical item filter for some searches. My digital products are getting buried. What do I do?

Yes, this is real — Etsy has been testing a filter that automatically applies ‘physical products only’ to certain searches when a buyer doesn’t specifically type ‘digital.’ It’s primarily affecting digital invitations and a few other categories.

Important context: as of right now, Etsy is treating this as a test. They haven’t committed to keeping it. And sellers I know in this space — including Becca, who sells digital invites — haven’t seen a meaningful drop in sales.

If you are seeing a real impact: the most practical move is to start creating additional digital product types where this filter isn’t applied. PNGs, coloring pages, wall art, printable stationery. Diversifying what you sell protects you from any single platform change.

Don’t panic. Keep watching it. Pivot if the data tells you to.

Q: I have a bestselling handmade item I can’t keep up with while working full-time. If I let it sell out, will it hurt my ranking?

It won’t permanently hurt you, but there will be a lag when you relist — the algorithm will need to rebuild momentum for that listing. Just know that going in.

Better options, in order of preference:

1. Push out your production/turnaround time. Extend it as far as you need to so the listing stays live without you drowning.

2. Raise your price. More revenue for the same effort, and higher prices often signal quality to buyers.

3. Let it sell out. When you relist, the algorithm remembers that the listing was popular — it just needs a little time to warm back up.

Vacation mode is a last resort if it’s happening across multiple listings at once. You’ve got options.

Q: I turned off offsite ads and then quickly realized I shouldn’t have. I turned them back on but lost a ton of views. How do I recoup?

Glad you turned them back on — especially for digital products, there’s generally no reason to have them off since there’s no shipping cost eating into your margin.

On the traffic loss: honestly, I haven’t personally seen offsite ads being on or off directly cause a significant drop in views. What you might be seeing is a normal platform lull — things slow down around holidays, after big shopping events, around payday cycles. It’s not always the ads.

The best thing you can do to bring views back: keep listing. New listings are the single biggest stimulus for Etsy traffic. That’s the answer almost every time.

Q: How much does star seller status actually help sales?

Honestly? Not much — at least not directly. Most shoppers don’t even notice it.

Where it matters: it improves your trust score with Etsy internally, which can have indirect effects on how the algorithm treats your shop. And if a buyer specifically goes to your shop page (rather than just clicking a listing), it adds a little credibility.

Don’t chase it. Take good care of your customers, respond promptly, ship on time, and the star seller status will follow naturally. It’s a byproduct of good business, not a strategy in itself.

Q: What AI tool is best for creating digital art? I find MidJourney’s prompting frustrating. How do others get consistent results?

I don’t use MidJourney anymore. My go-to right now is Nano Banana Pro — you can access it through Kittl, or use it for free through Google Flow (search ‘Google Flow,’ log in with a Gmail account, and you get a daily free image allowance). The quality is genuinely miles ahead of MidJourney for the kinds of designs that sell on Etsy.

On prompting — the issue usually isn’t ChatGPT, it’s how you’re feeding it information. Here’s my process:

Find three to five Etsy bestsellers that match the aesthetic you want to create (same style — don’t mix doodle with watercolor). Screenshot them. Upload them to ChatGPT and say: ‘Describe this design aesthetic for me.’ Let it describe the style back to you in detail.

Then say: ‘I want to create a design for [niche] in this aesthetic with [specific elements]. Write me a prompt for Nano Banana Pro.’

That’s it. You’re not asking it to copy anything — you’re asking it to describe an aesthetic and then translate that into a prompt. Ethical, specific, and it produces dramatically better results than typing freeform prompts from scratch.

— — —

I hope this helped clear the air on these topics! We covered a lot of ground.

And if you want more personalized help — a real set of eyes on your specific shop — my coaches do one-on-one sessions and they’re incredible. You can find the right one for your product type at the link in the show notes.

👉 Book a one-on-one coaching call → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/private-etsy-coaching

And if you want the community, the coaching calls, the trends, the courses — all in one place — that’s Scaling Society.

👉 Learn more about Scaling Society → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/scaling-society

👉 Listen to the full episode → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/blog/235

If this was helpful, there’s plenty more where that came from. Subscribe for free — I’m holding nothing back.

Now go make something awesome.

— Lizzie

I want to tell you about sardines.

A while back, I was chatting with my friend Melissa — Melissa Mary Jenkins, a Canadian artist who’s been selling on Etsy since 2010. She paints moody, vintage-inspired landscapes and still life pieces. Utterly beautiful work. And I said offhandedly: have you tried painting sardines? It was trending.

She did. Etsy featured them in their summer trend report. Then again in a workshop video. Then on their seller success app — multiple times. And this spring, Melissa received an email from Etsy marketing: we want to fly you to Brooklyn for International Women’s Day at our headquarters.

I nearly lost my mind when she DMed me to tell me. I am still not fully recovered.

Who Melissa is — and what makes her work special.

Melissa lives in rural Ontario, Canada. She was a high school teacher until 18 years ago when her twin daughters were born. She’s been an Etsy seller since 2010, running her current art shop since 2013.

Her work is genuinely unlike anyone else’s. She paints landscapes and still life pieces in acrylics — but she also hand-makes her own walnut ink from the walnuts on her farm property. She lets the acrylic layer dry, applies the walnut ink, and wipes it off. It seeps into the surface and gives the painting the quality of an old world vintage piece.

She has one of my paintings hanging in my home. That’s how much I love her work.

How she uses trends without selling out her aesthetic.

This is the part I want every artist to hear.

Melissa doesn’t chase trends that are outside of who she is. She studies what’s trending and asks: where does this intersect with what I already love to paint? Two years ago it was the coquette bow — she incorporated a tiny bow into a miniature painting she was already making. Last spring it was sardines — still life, vintage, exactly her world. Right now vintage and grand millennial is everywhere, and that’s been her aesthetic all along.

“I’m not putting aside my own aesthetic for trends. I’m just incorporating the ones that appeal to me. It’s not constraints — it’s actually exciting.”

She also loves Wuthering Heights. So when moorcore was trending — that dark, moody, literary aesthetic — she painted a series of paintings to go with it. Because she was actually rereading Wuthering Heights and wanted to paint it. The trend and the passion aligned. That’s the whole game.

The email that changed everything.

In March, Melissa received a message in her Etsy inbox from the Etsy Seller Program. They wanted to fly her to Brooklyn for International Women’s Day — a day at Etsy headquarters with six women shop owners from across North America.

She was the only Canadian.

“When we were doing the workshop, they asked us beautiful questions. And at one point I broke down crying — because it was just the acknowledgement of all the hard work I’ve put in. My daughter had texted me the night before: I’m so proud of you, Mom.”

Six million shops on Etsy. Six women invited to Brooklyn.

What a day at Etsy headquarters actually looks like.

Melissa walked me through the whole day and I could barely contain myself. Here’s what she experienced:

Breakfast in a conference room with Etsy women in leadership — each one sharing her story, the group going around introducing themselves.

A building tour — ending on a rooftop balcony overlooking Brooklyn. Every window frame in the building is green, intentionally, so every view inside the office has something living in it.

Lunch with women in leadership, seated one-on-one with people from different departments — marketing, product, seller success — who were asking the six sellers every question they could think of.

A shop optimization session, where two Etsy team members sat down with each seller and reviewed their shop with fresh eyes. Melissa found out she’d left free shipping on for years because Etsy had once recommended it — and quietly got that fixed. She also got a suggestion to explore frame TV art, something Etsy told her has enormous demand and low competition.

Time with CEO Kruti Patel-Goyal, in her office and then at a paper flower workshop. Melissa described her as soft-spoken but powerful, genuinely curious about every seller’s story. At the end of the day, Kruti said: I’m going to go home and tell my kids the stories you told me today — just to remember the human side of all the work we do here.

A photo shoot in front of a green screen. (Melissa mentioned she was lying on a table at one point. We didn’t get further into it. The workshop video is on Etsy’s YouTube channel — link in the show notes.)

📸 IMAGE: Lizzie brand photo — mid-post visual break (suggest lizzie-brand-session-145.jpg, chin on hands, storytelling energy)

The moment at the round table.

This is the part that got me. I’m covered in goosebumps writing it.

Six women around a table. Etsy asking questions about their shops, their inspiration, their challenges. And at some point someone looked around and noticed: they were all mothers. Every single one of them was doing this so she could be home with her family.

“The woman beside me said — I’m the breadwinner of my family now because of Etsy. All of us were mothers. All of us doing this so we could be with our families and make something we’re passionate about.”

This is exactly who I serve. And sitting here, I just feel so grateful that a platform like Etsy exists — and that the people running it are sitting around a table genuinely wanting to know those stories.

What Melissa wants skeptics to know about Etsy corporate.

There’s a lot of negativity in seller Facebook groups. Etsy is just taking from us. They don’t care about sellers. It’s all about the shareholders.

Melissa was inside the building. She sat with the people. She asked the questions. Here’s what she came back with:

“It was so wonderful to put the human part of Etsy in front of me. The people working there were so passionate and so lovely. Now whenever I get frustrated about something, I just remember — there are people who care at Etsy. People who care about the shop owners.”

There was a mural at the front of the building. “Keep Etsy handmade” — something close to that. They’re leaning into the handmade identity. They wanted six makers in that room for a reason. And they’re still in touch — the six sellers have their own group chat on Instagram.

The traffic stat that made our jaws drop.

When Melissa pulled her traffic stats for our conversation, this is what she found:

70% of her traffic comes from Etsy’s organic search. No ads. Just SEO.

Of the 30% she drives herself: Pinterest accounts for 96% of it. Instagram — where she has over 11,600 followers — accounts for 1%.

She has barely touched Pinterest. She has a few pins up. She hasn’t focused on it. And it’s almost singlehandedly driving her self-generated traffic.

This is why I keep telling you Pinterest is the move — and why I dedicated a whole post to it (see Post 11 in this archive). The proof is right here.

The upsell hiding in plain sight.

Melissa shared something brilliant that I want every handmade seller to hear.

She sells prints — not framed. But she’s obsessed with vintage frames and has a whole collection in her studio. So in her listing photos, she added a note: if you’d like this print framed, Melissa has a collection of vintage frames she’d love to share with you.

People started messaging. They chose frames together. She takes them to her local print shop, which does the professional framing with museum-quality glass. The customer gets something beautiful. Melissa gets to justify her enormous frame collection.

“I felt justified for having all the frames lying around my studio and into my house.”

It’s a genius upsell. And it came from paying attention to what customers were asking for, then creating a simple way to say yes. Look at your own shop — what are customers asking for that you could build a natural upsell around?

One more thing — because it’s important.

Melissa mentioned, almost offhandedly, that her Etsy sales are down right now. At the very moment she’s being recognized by Etsy’s own leadership as one of the most exemplary sellers on the platform.

I want you to sit with that for a second.

Entrepreneurship is cyclical. Everything goes in seasons. What goes up comes down and comes back up again. The skill isn’t avoiding the dip — it’s not letting the dip mean something it doesn’t.

“Success isn’t always measured the way you might see it on Instagram. Look at your stats once a quarter. Remember all the paintings you sold last week. Resilience is remembering that.”

Melissa is at the top of her game and navigating a slow patch at the same time. That’s not a contradiction. That’s just the truth about building something real.

— — —

If you’re an artist wondering whether Etsy is for you — Melissa is your answer. She never sold out her aesthetic. She found where the trends met what she already loved. She painted sardines in vintage frames and ended up in Brooklyn having lunch with the CEO.

You can follow Melissa’s work on Instagram and find her shop linked in the show notes. She is, without question, one of the most generous and gifted people in this community.

And if you want to be in a community where stories like Melissa’s happen — where you get the strategy, the trend reports, the coaching, and the people who will talk you through the hard patches — that’s Scaling Society.

👉 Learn more about Scaling Society → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/scaling-society

👉 Listen to the full episode → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/blog/232

Heads up: some of the links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you purchase through them — at no extra cost to you. I only ever recommend tools I actually use and love. Promise.

If this was helpful, there’s plenty more where that came from. Subscribe for free — I’m holding nothing back.

Now go make something awesome.

— Lizzie

I’m going to be honest with you about where I’m at with Meta ads.

I’m just starting to learn. I have never claimed to know everything — that’s why I bring in people who do. And when I met Jackie Ellis, I knew immediately she was the one to take us into this conversation. She’s spent 10 years managing over $10 million in ad spend for more than 200 business owners. She has seen every mistake. She’s fixed most of them.

Here’s what we covered — from someone who’s as green as most of you, asking the questions you actually need answered.

The most important thing to understand first.

On Etsy, shoppers come to you. They type exactly what they want into a search bar and you show up. That’s the beautiful, powerful thing about Etsy — built-in demand, built-in intent.

Meta is completely different. You are entering someone’s scrolling experience. They’re on Instagram with Netflix on in the background and a bowl of ice cream in their lap — and your ad just appeared in their feed. They weren’t shopping for you. They didn’t ask for you. You interrupted them.

“Ads are naturally disruptive. That makes it all the more important that they actually catch attention.”

This changes everything about how you create an ad. On Etsy, your job is to match the search. On Meta, your job is to stop the scroll.

How Meta decides who sees your ad.

Here’s where it gets fascinating. Meta used to let you manually check boxes — target people who like this, follow that, have this interest. That era is largely over. Now it’s machine learning, and Meta is watching your creative to figure out who to show it to.

Visual signals: What’s actually in your image or video. If you’re selling a dog product and there’s no dog in the visual, you’re leaving targeting clues on the table. Meta reads what it sees.

Text signals: The words in your ad copy, the text overlaid on your video, even the text on a t-shirt in your image. Meta picks up on all of it.

Action signals: When people click, Meta learns. When people buy, Meta learns even more — and starts showing your ad to more people who look like those buyers. It’s an algorithm that gets smarter the more data it gets.

Why running Meta ads to Etsy is tricky.

Here’s something most people don’t know: Etsy doesn’t allow you to install your Meta pixel on their platform. The pixel is basically a digital fingerprint that tracks customer behavior and tells Meta when someone made a purchase — which is how the algorithm gets smarter.

Without the pixel on Etsy, the only type of Meta campaign you can run is a traffic campaign — which just gets people to click. Traffic campaigns are less targeted, attract more lookie-loos than buyers, and don’t teach the algorithm what a purchase looks like for your business.

Platforms like Shopify and Everbee Store do integrate with Meta’s pixel. So when someone buys from your website, Meta knows — and gets smarter about who to target next.

“Ads are a system of scale. They’re not going to fix a sales problem. You have to have the product people want first.”

My honest recommendation: master Etsy organic first. Then Etsy ads. Then — once you’re around 500 sales and ready for your own website — that’s when Meta ads start making real sense.

Etsy ads vs. Meta ads: the simple breakdown.

Etsy ads — turned on from your Etsy seller dashboard. They boost your listings to people already searching on Etsy. You set a daily spend. It stays on the platform.

Etsy offsite ads — run by Etsy, not by you. They promote your listings on Meta and Google. If you make under $10K/year you can opt out. Over $10K, you’re in and Etsy charges you a fee when they drive a sale. Price accordingly.

Meta ads — run by you, from your own Meta Business account. These appear in Instagram and Facebook feeds of people who are not on Etsy and weren’t looking for your product. You’re creating the demand rather than meeting it. Best paired with your own website.

The unsexy secret that saves you money: testing first.

Most people want to skip straight to running purchase conversion ads — the type that tells Meta to find buyers. But Jackie says those are the most expensive ads to run, and the worst place to start when you don’t know what messaging works.

Her recommendation: start with traffic testing. Spend $20–50 running five to ten different versions of your ad against each other. Which one gets the most clicks? That’s your winner — and that’s the creative you scale.

“Most times that I think an ad is going to work, it’s usually not the ad I expect. And I do this for a living.”

Test these variables against each other:

A talking head video — you on camera talking about your product

A silent product video — music only, displaying your product

A carousel — multiple products scrolling through

One more thing worth knowing: a 1–2% click-through rate is a good result for a Meta ad. It sounds depressingly low until you realize that’s completely normal — and that only 2–5% of those who click are likely to buy. Meta ads are a volume game. That’s why you need proof of concept and existing sales before you add ad spend.

What products work best for Meta ads?

Jackie’s answer surprised me: almost anything can work — as long as someone can look at your ad and immediately understand what it is.

“A fifth grader should be able to look at your ad and understand what you’re selling. Don’t make your customer work for it.”

Digital products can absolutely work — but you can’t just show a flat mockup. Print it out, flip through it on camera, show it in action on screen. The goal is to tell the story of the product visually, not just show what it looks like.

Videos outperform static images right now — but the style of video matters less than whether it’s engaging. Talking head, slideshow, product display, lifestyle — all can work. The question is whether it stops the scroll.

And here’s the creative shift Jackie wants you to make: on Etsy, follow demand. Don’t get too creative. Match what people are searching for. On Meta, flip it. That’s where your creative energy belongs — because standing out is the only thing that works.

“Different is better than better. Someone can always out-better you. They can’t out-different you.”

My recommended roadmap for ads.

Stage 1 — 0 to 500 sales: Focus entirely on organic Etsy traffic. Learn demand, nail your SEO, figure out what converts. No ads yet.

Stage 2 — 500 sales: Turn on Etsy ads for listings you already know are converting. Build your email list. Start thinking about your own website.

Stage 3 — Website live: Install the Meta pixel on your Shopify or Everbee store. Start with traffic testing at $20–50. Find your winning creative before scaling.

Stage 4 — Proof of concept established: Run purchase conversion ads. Scale what’s working.

— — —

If you want to go deeper on Meta ads, Jackie has a podcast called So Worth It and a free ads training you can watch on demand right now.

👉 Jackie’s free ads training → http://www.soworthit.co/easyads

And if you want the strategy, support, and community to get from organic Etsy to actually being ready for ads — Scaling Society is where that happens.

👉 Learn more about Scaling Society → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/scaling-society

👉 Listen to the full episode → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/blog/234

Heads up: some of the links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you purchase through them — at no extra cost to you. I only ever recommend tools I actually use and love. Promise.

If this was helpful, there’s plenty more where that came from. Subscribe for free — I’m holding nothing back.

Now go make something awesome.

— Lizzie

I want to say something before we get into this.

It’s May. Summer is coming. And I know the temptation is to ease up a little — take a breath, slow down, wait for Q4. And I understand that impulse. But I need you to hear this: the sellers who blow up in Q4 are the ones who planted seeds in May.

A farmer doesn’t plant seeds and harvest them the same day. They sweat without immediate gratification. They trust the process. And then they get the harvest.

Pinterest is that seed. And Emily Moravec is living proof.

How Pinterest saved her Etsy shop.

Emily Moravec is an Etsy seller turned Pinterest manager. She scaled two digital shops in the wellness niche to over 13,000 sales — and much of that growth came from one strategy shift.

About a year before we first talked on the podcast, Emily had taken her foot off the gas on creating new listings. Her Etsy organic traffic was slowing. So instead of grinding out new products, she went all in on Pinterest.

“I shifted from cranking out new printables each week to figuring out: how do I sell what I’ve already created using the power of Pinterest? It kind of saved my shop.”

The result: 2025 became her biggest year ever. Pinterest boosted her overall Etsy traffic by 35% — without a single new listing. And it’s now growing her traffic two years after she posted some of those pins.

Pinterest is not social media. This changes everything.

This is the most important thing to understand before you start — and the thing most people get wrong.

On Instagram, you open the app and you receive. You scroll. The algorithm decides what you see. You’re passive.

Pinterest is completely different. Emily describes it like walking into a curated library. There’s a beautiful front display — that’s your feed. But then you go deeper. You go to the search bar. You type in what you want. The platform delivers exactly that.

“Pinterest is intentional. It’s like a visual Google. A big magazine. People come looking for something — and your product can be the answer.”

Pinterest users aren’t just shoppers. They’re also planners — people who are building a board for an event months away, saving gift ideas for holidays they haven’t thought about yet on other platforms. Emily plans her husband’s annual bocce birthday party on Pinterest — in January — for his May birthday.

That planning behavior is exactly why Pinterest works so well for Etsy sellers. Someone saving your Christmas design in July will come back and buy it in November.

Is Pinterest right for your shop right now?

Here’s my honest answer: don’t start Pinterest until you have traction on Etsy first. Get organic sales. Figure out what’s working. Then add Pinterest to amplify it.

Digital products or print-on-demand: aim for 500 sales before adding Pinterest. You want to know your bestsellers before you amplify.

Handmade products: 100 sales, and you should feel confident this is the product you’re sticking with for a while.

One-off handmade products (unique vintage, one-of-a-kind pieces): Pinterest works differently for you. Because when your item sells, the pin still exists — and it sends traffic to a sold-out listing. Emily recommends pairing Pinterest with a simple website (even an Everbee store) so traffic can still land somewhere active. Another option is pointing your pin to a shop section instead of a specific listing.

For everyone else — digital, print-on-demand, prolific handmade sellers — Pinterest is almost always a yes when you’re ready.

How to think about your Pinterest boards.

Pinterest boards are categories — and the simplest way to think about them is this:

“Think of your Etsy sections as your Pinterest boards.”

If you sell PNGs in five different niches — teachers, nurses, dog moms, bookworms, western — you create a board for each one. Your pins for each niche go into the matching board. Pinterest’s algorithm uses boards to understand what you’re about and who to show your content to.

Even if you’re a niche blaster selling for hundreds of audiences, Pinterest can work — you just organize your boards around your product categories or top niches. The more organized and intentional your boards, the more Pinterest trusts your account.

Pinterest SEO: where to research keywords.

Since Pinterest is a search engine, keywords matter — but they work slightly differently than Etsy. Here’s Emily’s three-step research process:

1. The Pinterest search bar. Type your product in and watch the auto-suggest dropdown. These are high-demand phrases real Pinterest users are searching. Take one general keyword and one specific keyword and combine them — you’ll find your sweet spot.

2. The top 15 pins. Read the titles of the first 15 pins that come up for your keyword. Notice how they’re phrased — more conversational than Etsy, more like a magazine headline than a keyword list.

3. Pinterest Bubbles. The colorful clickable bubbles that appear at the top of Pinterest search results — these are your long-tail keyword suggestions. Click through them to find related search terms that buyers are actually using.

One important note: don’t use ChatGPT to generate your Pinterest SEO. Just like with Etsy, ChatGPT isn’t connected to Pinterest and can’t tell you what’s actually being searched. Do the research yourself — it only takes a few minutes and the quality difference is significant.

What a great pin actually looks like.

Pinterest reads your pin from top to bottom. Here’s the anatomy Emily recommends:

Top: Your shop or brand name in small text. Tiny, but it trains the algorithm and builds brand recognition.

Middle: A conversational headline with your keyword in it. Think magazine title, not Etsy keyword string. Something like “The Best PNGs for Teacher Appreciation Week” rather than a raw keyword dump.

Image: Your product photo or mockup — the visual that stops the scroll.

Bottom: A simple call to action. “Download here” or “Shop now” — not a clickable button technically, but Pinterest auto-generates an arrow that users naturally click to go to your listing.

The timing secret that most sellers miss.

Pinterest users are planners. They’re thinking months ahead. Which means if you’re pinning Christmas content in November, you’re already too late.

Minimum lead time: 12 weeks before a holiday or seasonal event.

Ideal lead time: 6 months. Halloween content in May. Christmas in July. 4th of July in January.

For evergreen content — products that sell year round — you can pin anytime. Those pins can drive traffic for two, three, even five years. Emily has pins still sending buyers to her shop two years after she created them.

This is also why Pinterest is the perfect summer project. Pin now, warm up the algorithm, and by Q4 you’re not starting from scratch — you’re harvesting.

The domain claim shortcut (and why it matters).

Pinterest gives extra trust to accounts that have claimed a domain — meaning a website URL you own. You can’t claim your Etsy shop URL (fingers crossed that changes), but you can claim your own website.

Emily ran an experiment: she opened an Everbee store with just four products, claimed that domain on Pinterest, and saw a significant jump in her Pinterest views — which then fed back into more Etsy traffic. She wasn’t actively driving people to the Everbee store. The domain claim alone did the work.

If you’re already using Everbee for SEO research, an Everbee store starts at $29/month and syncs automatically with your Etsy listings. It’s the simplest way to get a claimed domain without building a full website. Not required, but a meaningful upgrade when you’re ready.

Why right now is the perfect time to start.

“Get your Pinterest business account set up in May. Practice pinning all summer. By Q4 you could blow the top off your sales. The timing is not an accident.”

Pinterest’s algorithm needs time to learn your account, trust your content, and start distributing your pins. That takes months — not days. The sellers who win Q4 on Pinterest are the ones who were consistently pinning in May, June, and July.

Summer on Etsy is slower. Use it. Learn the platform. Start pinning. Warm up the algorithm. Plant the seeds now and trust the harvest is coming.

— — —

This month inside Scaling Society we’re going deep on Pinterest — Emily is doing a live training where you can watch exactly what she’s clicking, ask questions in real time, and get her eyes on your specific shop.

If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to join — this is it. Use code EMILY50 to get $50 off your first month.

👉 Join Scaling Society with code EMILY50 → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/scaling-society

You can also follow Emily on Instagram at @emmypins for more Pinterest strategy straight from someone who’s done this with a real Etsy shop.

👉 Listen to the full episode → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/blog/233

If this was helpful, there’s plenty more where that came from. Subscribe for free — I’m holding nothing back.

Now go make something awesome.

— Lizzie

— — —

One of the most overwhelming things about starting on Etsy is the sheer number of tools people talk about.

Memberships, subscriptions, software, plugins, AI generators — if you consume enough content, it starts to feel like you need $500/month in tools before you even make your first sale. You don’t.

So I’m going to break it down the way I do it with my students: what’s free, what you actually need to start, what makes the biggest difference as you grow, and what’s a luxury for when you’re scaling.

This is 10+ years of Etsy experience in one post. Zero gatekeeping. Let’s go.

Tier 1: Free Resources (Start Here)

Etsy Seller Handbook

Completely free, completely underrated. It’s inside your Etsy account and covers everything from listing best practices to fees to photography. When you have a basic question, go here first.

Etsy’s Search Bar (as a research tool)

Type in your product idea and watch the auto-suggest dropdown — those are high-demand keywords real shoppers are using. Filter results by bestseller. Study what’s at the top. You’ll learn more about demand from 10 minutes in the Etsy search bar than from a week of Googling.

Google Drive

If you have Gmail, you already have this. Use it to store your files, designs, and downloads so you don’t choke your computer’s hard drive. Essential for digital product sellers.

Your Phone Camera

I’ve made hundreds of thousands of dollars on Etsy and never used a professional camera. iPhone and Samsung cameras are incredible. That’s all you need for product photos.

YouTube

Incredible resource for learning — but one word of caution. Don’t consume too many different people’s content at once. Find one or two voices you resonate with and go deep. Too many perspectives creates overwhelm, not clarity.

Free ChatGPT Account

Great for writing listing descriptions, drafting your About Me section, brainstorming product ideas, and crafting professional customer responses. Just don’t use it for SEO — it’s not connected to Etsy and can’t tell you what’s actually being searched. More on that below.

My Free Product Picker GPT

A custom ChatGPT I trained on 10+ years of Etsy experience. You tell it what you’re thinking, it asks the right questions, and gives you actual product and listing ideas. It’s like sitting down with me for coffee — for free. Try it here!

Tier 2: Need to Have (Budget for These from Day One)

An Etsy Shop ($15–$30 startup fee)

There’s a one-time startup fee that varies depending on your account type. It’s not crazy — but plan for it. Use this referral link and you’ll get 40 free listings automatically, saving you about $8 right off the bat.

A Laptop (or Chromebook)

You can technically hack together some things from a tablet or phone, but the Etsy seller app is limited compared to the browser. A Chromebook ($150–$300) is a perfectly reasonable starting point. You can always upgrade later.

I do a lot of designing and need a lot of “horsepower” 🩵 so I use this gaming laptop.

Canva (Free to start, Pro eventually)

The creative design platform you’ll use for everything — mockups, listing graphics, banners, product creation. Start with the free version. You’ll want to upgrade to Canva Pro ($15/month) when you need to export transparent backgrounds, remove backgrounds, or use their AI design tools. Worth every penny.

ProfitTree ($67 one-time, lifetime access)

The only paid research tool I think every beginner needs — and the only one with a one-time fee instead of a monthly subscription. It gives you real Etsy data updated every 24–48 hours: how much competitor listings have made, how old they are, how many sales they have. You can’t get this from Etsy itself. It also has an Etsy fee calculator so you always know your actual profit margin. Here’s a tutorial video so you can see exactly how it works.

Flow (Free images using Nano Banana Pro)

If you’re selling digital products or print-on-demand and using AI to create designs — which these days most sellers are — Nano Banana Pro is literally the-best these days.

Professional Mockups (~$3–$7 each)

Your mockup is the first image a shopper sees — it’s your storefront. A good one can sell a mediocre design. A bad one can kill a great one. Here’s a free resource that tells you exactly which mockups convert best across digital products and apparel. Start with a $20–$50 investment and build from there.

Tier 3: Best to Have (These Make the Real Difference)

These aren’t strictly required to open a shop — but they’re the tools that separate slow, grinding growth from faster, more confident progress. My students who use them consistently get better results in their first six to twelve months.

Trendspotting Membership ($17 first month, then $37/month)

Every Monday you get a visual PDF showing what’s trending on Etsy right now — new trends, hot trends, steady trends, and holidays to design for. Plus a trend training video, six done-for-you listing ideas with pre-written SEO, and a monthly group coaching call with shop audits. This is the biggest differentiator I’ve seen between students who get early wins and those who struggle in silence. Use code KEEP20 for your first month at $17.

Canva Pro ($15/month)

Worth the upgrade once you’re creating regularly. Transparent background exports, background removal, and the Magic Studio AI tools (including the text editor that lets you fix AI-generated misspelled words) are genuine time-savers.

Everbee (Free to $29/month)

My go-to SEO research tool. It integrates with Etsy and lets you see the actual keywords competitors are using on their bestselling listings, along with how many searches those keywords get per month and how much competition exists. This is how you build a real SEO strategy — not guessing, not using ChatGPT (which isn’t connected to Etsy). Start with the free version and upgrade when you’re ready.

Paid ChatGPT ($20/month)

The free version is great to start. The paid version unlocks image generation and higher usage limits — genuinely helpful once you’re creating listings regularly. Just remember: use it for descriptions, responses, and ideas. Not for SEO keywords.

An LLC for your Etsy shop (cost varies by state)

This is legal protection, not a business tool — but it matters. An LLC separates your business assets from your personal ones so that if anything ever goes sideways legally, your home and personal finances aren’t on the table. I recommend attorney Paige Hulse’s resources for this — she’s an intellectual property attorney who specializes in exactly this. All her episodes on my podcast are here. Use code SMILEY10 for a discount on her operating agreement templates.

QuickBooks ($10–$57/month)

Bookkeeping is not optional once you’re making money. QuickBooks tracks your income, expenses, and Etsy fees and makes tax time manageable. You can sign up through your Etsy dashboard at a discounted rate.

Printify Premium ($29/month, for print-on-demand sellers)

Once you’re moving volume, Printify Premium reduces your base product costs and improves your profit margin on every single sale. It pays for itself fast.

Tier 4: Nice to Have (Luxury Upgrades for Scaling Sellers)

These are the tools I use now that I’m at scale — or tools I recommend once you’re past 500 sales and need to go faster and more efficiently.

Scaling Society ($147/month)

My all-inclusive membership — every course, every workshop, the weekly trend reports, daily design prompts, done-for-you resources, two monthly coaching calls, shop audits, and access to my Etsy Seller Roadmap that tells you exactly what stage you’re at and what to focus on next. The biggest feedback I hear from members isn’t just about sales — it’s relief. They finally know what to focus on.

A high-powered gaming laptop (~$2,800)

For serious AI users — once you’re generating hundreds of images and processing lots of files, a Chromebook gets weighed down. I use an Alienware. This is big leagues, but it’s worth it when you get there.

Kittl ($15–$30/month)

Gives you access to multiple AI image generators in one place — so you can test which one works best for different design types. Super helpful once you’ve gotten comfortable with Ideogram and want more options.

SimplyListed ($15–$30/month)

A massive time-saver for print-on-demand sellers. You upload your mockups once, then upload your design, and it automatically places the design on every mockup and bulk-downloads them. What used to take 35 minutes takes five. They also have a 14-day free trial when you enroll here.

Hello Custom ($67 one-time)

For print-on-demand sellers offering personalized products. Hello Custom connects your Etsy shop to Printify, reads the customer’s personalization field, automatically applies the name in your chosen font, and sends it to production. You just approve. No more manually updating a Canva file for every single custom mug order. One-time fee, enormous time savings.

Creative Fabrica (~$9.99/month)

Millions of pre-made graphic elements, fonts, and bundles for commercial use. Before AI became what it is now, this was the secret weapon of the best print-on-demand sellers. Still extremely useful for piecing together high-quality designs fast.

Email List (500+ sales: Everbee Email or MailerLite)

Don’t worry about this until you hit 500 sales. I mean it. Focus on mastering Etsy first. Once you’re there, start building an email list using Everbee Email (free up to 250 subscribers if you’re already on Everbee) or MailerLite (free to start). Add a QR code to your listing photos offering a discount for subscribers. That’s your flywheel.

Your Own Website (1,000+ sales: Everbee Store or Shopify)

This is a legacy seller move — diversifying off of Etsy when you’re ready to own more of your customer relationships. Everbee Store syncs automatically with your Etsy listings. Shopify gives you more control. Either way, don’t think about this until you’re at 1,000 sales (or 500 for handmade sellers).

— — —

Here’s the truth: you can open an Etsy shop today with a free Canva account, a free ChatGPT account, the Etsy search bar, and your phone camera. That’s it. The tools come as the income comes.

What you actually need more than any tool is clarity — knowing what stage you’re at, what to focus on, and what to do next. That’s what I built Scaling Society for.

👉 Learn more about Scaling Society → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/scaling-society

And if you’re brand new and want help figuring out what to sell first — try my free Product Picker GPT. No email required, no catch.

👉 Try the free Product Picker GPT → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/what-to-sell-on-etsy

👉 Listen to the full episode → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/blog/215

Heads up: some of the links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you purchase through them — at no extra cost to you. I only ever recommend tools I actually use and love. Promise. Read my full affiliate disclosure here.

If this was helpful, there’s plenty more where that came from. Subscribe for free — I’m holding nothing back.

Now go make something awesome.

— Lizzie

I want you to meet Rose.

Rose Thomas is 66 years old, a mom of three, and an Oma to six grandchildren. She and her husband John retired to Southwest Virginia with their flock of sheep. She bakes, she creates, she’s been married 45 years. She’s the kind of person who runs a half marathon with her daughter just because it was a good challenge.

She also just hit 395 Etsy sales in seven months. Zero advertising. Zero social media promotion. Purely organic, purely on her own timeline.

If you’ve ever thought you were too old, too late, too not-tech-savvy enough to do this — Rose’s story is the one I want you to read.

It started with a children’s book about a sheep.

Rose had an idea for a children’s book about lambing season on their farm. She wanted help organizing her thoughts — and someone mentioned ChatGPT. So she opened it up, typed in what she was thinking, and asked it to help her put her ideas in order.

That’s it. That was the first step. No technical background required.

“I didn’t know what was going to happen. You type in this little question and it spits out all this stuff and you think — wait a minute. But then you realize, oh, this is going to be helpful. So you just take the next step.”

That book became Wooly’s Big Adventure — illustrated with AI, organized with AI, full of characters inspired by the actual animals on their farm. And using AI for the book got Rose curious about what else it could do.

One idea always germinates the next one. That’s the entrepreneur’s secret — and Rose is living proof.

June 20th: shop opens. July 13th: first sales.

Rose opened her Etsy shop, Black Ridge Designs, on June 20th. Her first sales came three weeks later — July 13th. A couple of sales. Not huge. But real.

And then each month, a few more. And a few more. By the time I sat down to record this episode with her, she had 395 sales and 234 listings — all digital products, all AI-generated, all kid-friendly designs inspired by farm life, homesteading, seasons, and celebrations.

“I didn’t advertise this at all. I didn’t use social media. None of my family, other than my kids, even know I have this Etsy shop. I wanted it to be organic and see if I really could do it.”

395 sales. No ads. No social media posts. Just consistent listings and Etsy’s search engine doing its thing.

She doubled her listings — and her sales doubled with them.

In September, just a few months after opening, Rose took on a listing challenge inside Scaling Society. She had 59 listings. Her goal: add another 59 in one month. About two a day.

“The more you put up, the more ideas you get. It’s amazing how it just grows.”

When she doubled her listings, her sales doubled. That’s not a coincidence — it’s the math of Etsy working exactly as it should. More listings, more surface area for Etsy’s search engine to find you, more chances for the right shopper to find exactly what they were looking for. The reps compound.

How Rose actually uses AI in her shop.

Rose’s AI workflow is simple, practical, and completely replicable — even if you’ve never used any of these tools before.

ChatGPT — for organizing ideas, writing listing descriptions, and focus sessions. She literally asks it: “Give me a two-hour focus session on what I need to do to get this listing up.” It tells her. She does it.

Ideogram — her primary image generation tool. She loves that different versions have different strengths: 2.0 is great for coloring pages, and Ideogram is better than most tools for generating readable text within designs.

Artistly — a newer tool she discovered that lets you select the style you want (retro, 3D, watercolor, clip art, crayon) without needing to know all the prompting language. She used it to create adorable crayon-style Valentine’s Day lamb designs.

Canva — for sizing and final touches once the AI image is generated.

The mindset that makes all the difference.

I asked Rose what she would tell someone who thinks they’re too old, too late, or too overwhelmed by technology to start.

“Always let curiosity beat fear — because that’s what keeps you going. Don’t be afraid of it. Just be more curious. Ask the questions. Take the tiny steps.”

She also said something that really stayed with me:

“We don’t realize how much we know at our ages. We have so much wisdom, so much experience, so much that we can give to people — and sometimes we sell ourselves short because of a little bit of fear.”

Your life experience isn’t a disadvantage on Etsy. It’s an edge. Rose didn’t just know about farm life — she lived it. She understood what those designs meant emotionally. That’s exactly why they connect with buyers.

For everyone who thinks AI is too technical.

Rose started with a completely free ChatGPT account. She typed in a question like she was talking to a friend. That’s it.

She didn’t upgrade to a paid account until mid-summer when she needed more prompts per day. She didn’t start using Ideogram or Artistly until she’d already gotten comfortable with the basics.

“Start out small. Tiny steps are better than no steps. And anything you’ve learned before — it layers, like an onion. Everything you know comes back to help you.”

Her suggestion if you’re not ready for Etsy yet: practice by asking ChatGPT something you already know about. How to organize a pantry. A favorite recipe. Anything. Just get used to talking to it. That’s how you build the comfort before you need it to help you build a business.

— — —

Rose came to Etsy at 66 with zero design background, zero tech experience, and a children’s book idea about a sheep. Seven months later she had nearly 400 sales — and a shop that keeps growing.

There is no too old. There is no too late. There is no too not-creative-enough. There are only tiny steps — and the curiosity to take them.

Rose found her people inside Scaling Society. If you want that same community, those coaching calls, those daily prompts, and someone to walk with you through every stage of this — come find us.

👉 Learn more about Scaling Society → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/scaling-society

👉 Listen to the full episode → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/blog/218

If this was helpful, there’s plenty more where that came from. Subscribe for free — I’m holding nothing back.

Now go make something awesome.

— Lizzie

I want to tell you something that might surprise you.

I am not naturally trendy. At all. I was the theater kid crocheting a scarf in the hallway at lunch. I don’t have a naturally good eye for design or décor. I spent time in art school and it did not come easily to me.

And I became known as the Etsy trends queen.

This is learnable. All of it. It’s pattern recognition and training your eye — just like anything else. And when you learn it, it changes everything about how fast your shop grows. Let me show you exactly how.

The three gaps that keep Etsy sellers stuck.

After years of coaching and shop audits, I can tell you the same three things show up over and over when someone’s struggling to make sales:

Gap 1 — Patience and consistency. People come in expecting results in 90 days. When it doesn’t happen, they quit. But here’s the thing: everyone who’s made multiple six figures on Etsy had a slow start. Everyone. The question is whether you’ll push through your learning curve.

Gap 2 — Design quality. Your designs aren’t good enough yet — and that’s completely normal. Mine weren’t either. You have to give yourself permission to be in the messy middle while your skills develop. This is why I talk about building your brain cache so much. The eye develops, but only through reps.

Gap 3 — Understanding demand. On Etsy, you have to sell something people are actively searching for. Not what you love. Not what your friends said was cute. What shoppers are already typing into that search bar — with proof of concept to back it up.

Trends are the bridge.

Here’s what I’ve seen over and over: when a new seller pairs a trend with a micro niche, they bridge all three gaps much faster than someone just guessing their way through.

Let me break that down.

A trend is a design aesthetic — elements, colors, styles that are showing up all over Etsy bestsellers right now. Think patchwork, 90s retro, chunky paint effects.

A niche is a type of customer — teachers, nurses, book lovers, pickleball players.

A micro niche is a more dialed-in version of that — not teachers, but pre-K teachers. Not book lovers, but spicy book lovers. Not moms, but doodle moms.

The formula: micro niche + trend = faster sales.

When you combine a trend with a micro niche, something powerful happens. You’re in a smaller pond — less competition — but the shopper who finds you has incredibly high emotional connection. They see your design and think: that is so me. I have to have it.

And when emotional connection is that high, people care less about price. They care less about perfection. They add to cart.

This is the recipe that gets my students their first sales — and their first consistent sales — much faster than anything else I teach.

Real students, real results.

Here’s what this looks like in practice:

Jelena had 24 listings and made her first sale — from a listing she created directly from a trend report, using the done-for-you SEO that came with it.

Jessica had been on Etsy for two and a half months with little traction. She leaned into the patchwork trend. It became her first really good seller.

Shannon — who you’ve read about here — embraced trends from day one. Now when I study the Etsy bestsellers every week, I see her shop in there. She’s not just following trends anymore. She’s setting them.

Fatima almost quit Trendspotting because she wasn’t opening the reports. Something told her to get back to it. Within one week of listing a trend-based product, she made 11 sales including a bulk order of four.

Becca took the glam animal trend and put her own spin on it. It sold within three days.

Rose took an old listing that had never sold, reworked the layout with the vertical stripe trend, aligned the SEO with what buyers actually search — and it finally sold.

None of these are flukes. They’re the formula working exactly as it should.

5 trends blowing up on Etsy right now.

Here’s what my students are using to get sales faster right now. These are the trends I’m seeing in bestsellers across every niche — and what I’d be designing for if I were starting fresh today.

Trend #1: Vertical stripes.

Narrow vertical stripes as the background of a design — some uniform and precise, some organic and hand-drawn-looking. On top of those stripes, sellers are layering elements, text, and other trends. We’re seeing it in every single niche right now.

Pro tip: if a design worked well for you in the past 12-24 months, recreate it for your micro niche and put it on top of vertical stripes. It’ll sell again.

Trend #2: Patchwork.

3D textile aesthetics have been big since early 2026, and patchwork is the one with the most staying power. Sometimes clean edges (very 90s), sometimes jagged and frayed (very 80s). We’re seeing it for summer, fall, holidays, Q4 — it’s making the whole year.

What I’d focus on right now: Q4 patchwork. Football season, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas. Get those listings up early.

Trend #3: Impasto / chunky 3D paint.

Designs that look like thick, textured paint coming off the surface — even though they’re completely flat. It’s working in every niche right now. I’m seeing it on American flags with wildflowers, summer fruit, trending animals like raccoons, and holiday designs. If you’re not experimenting with impasto yet, start.

Trend #4: Retro pop.

The 90s trend has grown up. Instead of thin horizontal checker strips, we’re now seeing big vertical blocks of slightly distorted checkers framing entire designs. The elements on top are chunky, bubbly, doodle-style — very 90s but updated. Celestial stars, daisies, groovy fonts all fit perfectly here.

Try this: vertical checker background + maximalist colors + 90s elements (stars, daisies) + your micro niche. That’s a winning combination right now.

Trend #5: Vintage collage.

The thrifting niche is exploding — and vintage collage aesthetics are at the center of it. Think vintage kitchen items, saucers, doilies, fringe, anything grand millennial. But it’s crossing into homesteading, teaching, faith, summer, and the bookish niche too.

Where it works best: granny hobbies, homesteading, book lovers, faith. Where it doesn’t: kids’ sports. When in doubt, ask yourself if your customer would recognize vintage elements as part of their world.

What to do with this today.

Don’t just read this and move on. Here’s the exact next step:

1. Pick one micro niche you understand — something from your own life or experience.

2. Pick one or two trends from the list above that feel right for that audience.

3. Create three to five designs that combine them.

4. Watch what the data tells you. Double down on what works.

5. Once something works — niche blast it. Take that same design and apply it to 10 adjacent micro niches.

— — —

Trends have been the number one differentiator I’ve seen in students who get sales faster. When you hit a sale, your confidence goes up. You start to believe you can do this. And from that belief, mega sellers are born.

If you want weekly trend reports — with the visual examples, the done-for-you SEO, the listing ideas, and my eyes on your shop — that’s exactly what Trendspotting is. It’s the tool that makes this whole strategy actionable every single Monday.

👉 Learn more about Trendspotting → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/trendspotting

Use code KEEP20 to get your first month for $17.

And if you want everything — the trend reports, the courses, the coaching calls, and the community — Scaling Society is where it all lives.

👉 Learn more about Scaling Society → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/scaling-society

👉 Listen to the full episode → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/blog/231

If this was helpful, there’s plenty more where that came from. Subscribe for free — I’m holding nothing back.

Now go make something awesome.

— Lizzie

— — —

I have done a lot of coaching. A lot of shop audits. And I spend hours every day on Etsy — researching, testing, studying what’s working and what isn’t.

And the same mistakes keep showing up. Over and over. Across product types, niches, experience levels.

Here are 11 of them — with exactly what to do instead. Big sister energy, zero gatekeeping. Let’s go.

Mistake #1: Selling something you don’t have the legal right to sell.

This is the biggest one. And it’s so tempting because you’ll see bestsellers doing it — Disney shirts, Taylor Swift invitations, song lyrics on Tumblers. They’re making money. They look fine.

Here’s what you don’t see: when the legal team sweeps the internet and finds them. The cease and desist. The lawsuit. The shop shut down. And here’s the kicker — a lot of these lawsuits are retroactive. They come for what you already made too.

My rule of thumb: if someone would buy it because they recognize it from someone else — a character, a song lyric, a quote, a logo — it’s not yours to sell. Just don’t do it.

Mistake #2: Making emotional decisions instead of data-led ones.

You make something you love. People at the craft fair bought it. Your friends said you should sell it on Etsy. So you list it — and it doesn’t sell.

Etsy is a search engine marketplace. People come with something already in mind. If they’re not searching for what you’re selling, it won’t sell — no matter how beautiful it is.

Before you create anything, verify there’s demand for it. Filter Etsy search results by bestseller. Look for new listings (under six months old) that are already making sales. If demand is there — create. If it’s not — pivot.

Mistake #3: Having no SEO strategy.

Your keywords — in your title, description, and tags — need to match what real shoppers are actually typing into the search bar. Not what you think they’re typing. What they’re actually typing.

Two common mistakes: using terms that are too broad (”mama shirt” has millions of competing listings), or using the wrong words entirely (I was using “reclaimed wood sign” when shoppers were searching “wood sign” or the quote they wanted on it). Both will tank your visibility.

Use a tool like Everbee to check actual search volume and competition for your keyword phrases. Don’t guess. The data is right there — use it.

Mistake #4: The designs just aren’t good enough yet.

I know this one’s hard to hear. But it’s the most loving thing I can say — and it’s true for almost everyone starting out, including me.

Think of it like a new barista. Their first 30 days on the job, the drinks aren’t as good as the one who’s been doing it for a year. That’s not a failure — it’s just where you are. Why would Etsy be different?

The fix: practice. Study the bestsellers. Recreate them just to learn (not to sell them — just to practice). Use AI tools to help. Build your brain cache. The eye develops. It just takes reps.

Mistake #5: Not paying attention to detail.

The fonts you choose matter. The placement of your design on the mockup matters. Whether your text arch is the right degree matters. Whether your design elements have the same line weight as your font matters.

I’m not giving you permission to sit and stew and never publish anything. But I am telling you that these tiny details are often the difference between a listing that converts and one that sits there with zero sales.

Build your mental archive (I call it a brain cache) by intentionally studying bestsellers every day. Pay attention to what fonts they use with what design styles. Where the elements sit. What makes you stop scrolling. That is your curriculum.

Mistake #6: Using bad mockups.

Your mockup is your storefront. It’s the first thing a shopper sees before they even read your title. A really good mockup can sell a mediocre design. A bad mockup can kill a great one.

I see people buy the cheapest shop bundle of AI mockups just to get something up fast. I get it — but it’s often hurting you more than helping. Spend the $20-30 on a couple of high-converting mockups. Let those first sales pay for the next round.

Your thumbnail — that first image — is the most important image in your listing. Treat it like it is.

Mistake #7: Burying important info in the description.

Here’s a hard truth: most shoppers don’t read descriptions. Especially on mobile. If they have a question — is this a digital download? What size does it come in? What colors are available? — and they can’t find the answer quickly, they don’t DM you. They scroll to the next listing.

Put everything important in your photo gallery. Make graphics that answer common questions. “This is a digital download — nothing will be shipped.” “Available in sizes XS–3XL.” “Delivered instantly to your email.” Answer it in the images. That’s where your customer is looking.

Mistake #8: Poor customer service — especially in reviews.

Shoppers are skeptical. They can’t touch your product. They don’t know you. The only way they get a sense of who you are is through your listing copy, your tone, and how you respond when something goes wrong.

The biggest mistake I see in reviews is defensiveness. I totally understand it — sometimes the complaint isn’t even your fault. But when you respond defensively, you’re not just talking to that one person. You’re talking to every future shopper who reads that review.

Before you reply publicly to a bad review — try to resolve it privately first. Once you reply publicly, it’s locked. Write your response for the next shopper, not the person who left the review.

Also: the way you word things matters everywhere. “Absolutely NO REFUNDS” in all caps is not customer centric. “Due to the digital nature of this product, refunds are not available” says the exact same thing — and doesn’t make the customer feel like you’re screaming at them before they’ve even bought anything.

Mistake #9: Not having enough listings up.

If you’re new to this and you want to make $5,000-$10,000 a month from digital or print-on-demand products — you’re probably going to need around 2,000 listings. Here’s the math:

About 10% of your listings will become consistent sellers.

A solid listing might make $100/month.

At 2,000 listings, 200 sellers × $100 = $20,000/month.

The listings are also practice. By the time you’ve made 100 designs, you are a dramatically better designer than when you made your first 10. Stop waiting to feel ready and start getting the reps in.

Mistake #10: Giving up too soon.

My first six months on Etsy? About $25 a month. A random sale here and there — I think my mom’s friend bought a sign. I had a great product by then. I had decent photos. I just hadn’t figured out SEO yet. Once I did — I went from $25 to $6,000 a month. Biggest month: $12,000-$13,000.

What if I’d quit in month four? Etsy is not a vending machine. You don’t put in a listing and get out a sale. It’s a skill. Give yourself time to develop it. Everything is figureoutable — but only if you stay.

Mistake #11: Underestimating your own long game.

We overestimate what we can do in six months. We underestimate what we can do in two years.

Most people come in expecting it to take off in 90 days. When it doesn’t, they decide it doesn’t work. But then there are people like Preston — four years, four iterations, now making more on Etsy than he was at his other jobs combined. People like Shannon — six months of showing up every day, then $1,500 months. People like Becca — 39 sales in July, $1,500 in November.

The timeline is different for everyone. I can’t tell you how long it’ll take — I don’t know what skills you’re starting with or what blocks you’re working through. What I can tell you is: anyone willing to put in the work long enough has a real shot at this. You’re already in the 2% who even tried.

— — —

There’s no shame in any of these. I made almost every single one of them. The difference is knowing what they are so you can fix them faster than I did.

If you want help navigating all of this — the strategy, the trends, the feedback, the community — that’s what Scaling Society is built for.

👉 Learn more about Scaling Society → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/scaling-society

👉 Listen to the full episode → https://www.howtosellyourstuff.com/blog/172

If this was helpful, there’s plenty more where that came from. Subscribe for free — I’m holding nothing back.

Now go make something awesome.

— Lizzie

Heads up: some of the links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you purchase through them — at no extra cost to you. I only ever recommend tools I actually use and love. Promise. Read my full disclosure.