Is It Possible to Make $1,000 Per Week With a New Print on Demand Shop?

Let’s find out

So I’m curious. For anyone that knows me and has talked to me on an interview, class, or otherwise, knows that I enjoy a good side hustle.

And what a better challenge than to try to come up with one that is in my wheelhouse of photography.

To be honest, this is not my first rodeo with shirt making. I started a shop called 79 Punks back in 2020 working on creating artistic designs of whatever I wanted to create at the time.

However, that story is for another time. Today, I am going to publicly take you on a field trip and experiment to see if it is possible to make $1,000 in shirt sales on a brand new print on demand shop on Etsy.

If you missed it the other day, I posted a tutorial on how to set up a print on demand shop using Printful and Etsy. If you need help with one, or have not seen the article yet, check it out here. And if you need any help beyond that, I also build custom websites for folks on all platforms, and am happy to chat about building you a money making print on demand shop filled with designs of your own ideas.

Now, onto the parameters of our experiment for this week.

Is it possible to make $1,000 in a week on a brand new Etsy shop?

First off, let me be transparent. The reason that I am doing this experiment is because a client gig fell through this month. Sometimes folks commit to things verbally, but are not so good with the follow through.

Hence, I would like to try an experiment and take you along for the ride to share what it is like to create a print on demand Etsy shop and to see if it is possible to make up the grand that I would still like to make for my goal this month.

If you have never heard of Etsy, it is a great place filled with artists and creative folks that sell different and unique things. The more unique and niche based the better in fact.

When I tried my other shirt endeavor back in 2020, I made two huge mistakes.

1. I put my shop on Design by Humans which has little to no organic traffic even though they have great quality shirts that they print on.
2. I went straight to a Shopify account that I could not afford because I had no income whatsoever to fund the account for the project, and even worse, I had no idea what I was doing at the time after finding myself exiled from NYC after a personal roller coaster of a divorce.

So, here’s the thing. I have learned a heck of a lot since 2020. I have tried over 46 different website projects so far since then in fact, and I have mastered SEO, website building as a certified front end developer, and I am no slouch when it comes to marketing and finding creative spots to share my projects to drive traffic. Most of my sites pull around 2–3000 new visitors daily with the ones that I have kept alive.

So when my client went awol on me this month for a website build I was going to do for him, I figured why not use the time productively and hit the gas to see what I could do.

What do I need to set up this experiment?

Get your pen and paper ready. Here is our list of what we need.

For the sake of my experiment, I am using 4 things.

1. A Photoshop account.
2. Canva Pro (you can do it on yours with Canva free, but you just have limited graphics).
3. A ChatGPT account.
4. An Etsy account.
5. A Printful account.

If you are wondering about what all this is, or how to get signed up for it, go back to the top of this article and visit the tutorial that I posted before which will have all of the things to get going.

Let me explain also.

Photoshop is clearly for graphics and design that I can’t get done in either ChatGPT with Dall-E or in Canva Pro.

For starters, the built in things that you can do with Dall-E are insane in ChatGPT, and not to mention that it currently gives you a commercial license to do what you like with the images that you make, hence win win.

Now I know that some of you naysayers are moaning and growing about the AI thing. Here’s the honest answer. It is coming whether we like it or not. I personally think it is pretty slick for working on composites in Photoshop, and it is like a friend that you can brainstorm ideas with.

So before you go knocking it, get yourself a free ChatGPT account and play around. If you want to use what I am using, you can get the plus account for just $20 per month which gives you access to ChatGPT 4 and which blows the free version out of the water in my opinion.

Canva Pro (or free) is pretty slick also. You can select any t-shirt template for example, and customize it, or you can make your own. Canva says that commercial use terms must make a combination of elements on their site in order to count as making it your own. So, for example, a graphic and some smart text. Wham, bam, shazammmm! We have lift off and one awesome t-shirt waiting to hop over to the store!

And I decided to go with Printful for the print on demand services because they have one of the most user friendly integrations with most sales platforms that are out there. You can use Etsy like I am going to use, or you can choose your Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, or even GumRoad to list your designs on.

And I’ll mention that I chose Etsy because it is a wonderful creative place. It is not as cold and expensive as Amazon is to get into, or other mistakes like I had made by setting up only my own .com with my former 79 Punks project.

Let’s get into the nitty gritty

So I will give credit where credit is due here. I got really inspired for this idea after I saw the Wholesale TED channel over on YouTube where the host (Sarah) talks about print on demand tips and making money online.

Let’s be honest here, most tips that you will find online on how to make money online are simply hogwash. Trust me, I have sifted and sorted through a lot of them, and I have a handful that I am currently working on that actually work, while I have trashed many because they are not feesible or otherwise. But Sarah really knows her stuff over on that channel and gives great tips to get going.

Hence, I followed her challenge to launch a shop and do 4 designs in a day. She mentions that you can do 40 in 4 hours if you really want to, but in more detailed and custom designs, you can pull off about 4 in a day.

I already had an Etsy account from a different project that I worked on during Covid times that I will re-open one day making handmade tables, knives, lamps, etc in my shop back in Michigan. Yet, hold your horses because my family and I have a rough ride ahead getting out of Colombia with this year being the final ride to get visa things done.

So I decided to rebrand my current Etsy shop to give it a go. It is now where I test merch before I decide if I want to put it on the real https://www.coffeexcameras.com site.

What I have learned so far to help you avoid time consuming mistakes

First things first. Find a couple quick tutorials on using Canva, Etsy, Printful, ChatGPT, etc and watch them or consume them. I already knew about how to do graphic design, and I am a pro in ChatGPT and use it for other projects to brainstorm also.

So now that you have learned the basics of these tools, you will have an easier time without wasting a ton of time on one simple design.

Another big thing is that when you create your designs in Canva, ChatGPT, etc, make sure that you upscale them. There is a wonderful website that a fellow Medium writer that I briefly crossed paths with turned me onto called Big JPG. Search this, and use it to scale up to 8x for FREE. You’re welcome!

This will give you great resolution to work with on your shirts, mugs, or whatever you decide to design and put in your shop.

Another big takeaway so far is that when you get into Printful make sure that you create a product template. This is so much easier to import your design and quickly add it to multiple products than if you go through the shop directly and create a product there.

For example, lets say you want to expand past Etsy for our experiment. By creating a product template, you can add to an Etsy store, Ebay, Shopify, or any other platforms that you want within minutes. Let me repeat that… minutes. It would have taken half a day for one product to individually list on each of these platforms directly. Hence, thank you Printful people for the solid platform and using the APIs to push and make our lives easier.

Now that we have that out of the way, I am going to tell you about what has happened so far.

What has happened in these few days since starting this shop?

So first of all, the one sale that you see on the upper left is from a lamp sale that I made a few years back. I am not going to lie that on day 1, I have not made any shirt sales yet.

I do have some of my Ebooks available as a test in the shop also, but perhaps those do better on my other platforms. So for this week, I am going to stick to just shirts.

As you can see, I have 7 shirts currently in the shop. One less than Wholesale TED’s challenge of 4 a day. Quite honestly, I just started today with the four a day thing, so tomorrow I will do another four, etc.

Overall, I am quickly getting significant traffic though for just a few days at this:

You can see that in just a short time I have had 168 visits, and that my traffic increased 442%.

My main traffic is Direct and Other traffic which comes from me writing on my main https://www.coffeexcameras.com site on my blog there, and then aggregating it to wherever I can find to drive traffic online.

I put a $1/day marketing budget down just to experiment with Etsy Marketing to see if it is worth putting anything into that, or if it tanks just like my experiences on Facebook and Instagram marketing. One does not want to pay a hefty sum, and not get a return on the experience. I will experiment with that a bit more to see where it goes.

In the Etsy App and Search, I am starting to get some organic traffic there from my SEO efforts. Having good copy is really important to get that going. And in all transparency, I decided that for this experiment, I am going to use ChatGPT 4 to write a short one paragraph description of each shirt that I design, and let it ride. It does a pretty good job for what it is worth and had me rolling laughing at some of the descriptions. People like funny.

I have not really hit up socials yet because I have been hesitant to blanket this to mixed audiences. I have a good amount of direct traffic built up, so if I can get away without wasting a lot of time posting for nothing, I may try that, or I may also at least incorporate TikTok. I am curious on what that platform can do for funny shirts like this if I really niche down and start engaging people in the photography realm. There is a lot of things that I don’t like about TikTok, but there are a lot of folks that use it as a search engine these days, and with the right strategy, I think that it has a way better possibility to sell shirts for me than any other social platform.

How I come up with my ideas:

If you watch the Wholesale TED videos, she talks about searching your niche in Etsy to start.

For example, my niche is photography shirts and I want to make them funny and different than your typical distressed looking camera print. Nothing wrong with those, but they are more serious. I want something that will make people laugh.

Hence, I searched “unique photography t-shirts” on Etsy, and I made a general list of ones that I liked the idea of that already have a lot of sales.

Sarah teaches over on her channel to make a twist on your version of these ideas to make them your own which sets you apart. You never want to copy the ideas verbatim because not only will you over saturate the shirt on Etsy and no one will really sell any, but yours will get drowned out by the more popular ones.

Hence, I decided to roll the dice for an experiment with ChatGPT in all transparency.

I entered a list of the ideas that I liked into ChatGPT, and I told it to come up with shirt ideas that went beyond the original idea and that were awesome or funny. I asked it to spit out 50 ideas for starters in a numbered list.

I took that list and copied it over to Google Sheets where I am systematically marking each one green that I have done, and when I am all finished I will have 50 shirts in my shop, and maybe ask it to generate 50 new ones if things start to pick up.

Now again, for all of you naysayers going on about AI ending the world and such. Trust me, there is still plenty of hard work to do after you generate things to make this all happen. The AI is not there by a long shot for you to type in a prompt and it sets up everything in Etsy for you with the perfect SEO and marketing ploy. Nope, not by a long shot.

Hence, this is not a quick way to make money, and quite honestly, I feel like it will take some substantial time to make money on this project like it has on my other projects. Long and steady growth is the best way to go. A quick buck is what everyone seeks, but it comes and goes and then you don’t have sales for another 6 months or never.

Here is what I have created in my shop so far if you would like to see:

I just realized that I need to update my shop description, but I will indeed get to that. :)

Conclusion

So, will I hit my $1,000 goal in one week to meet my deadline? Honestly, highly doubtful if you want me to share the truth. I probably have a higher probability of winning the lotto as of today’s date.

However, I can see this project and my other project that I am running tandem with it about funny donkeys in a series that I call Jester Jackass realistically picking up and making some nice wins in anywhere from 6 months to a year.

And just maybe, just maybe this will be part of an extra push that will get my family on the final leg of our Colombian journey to head safely to the States.

If you enjoy reading and learning about what I have shared today, don’t forget to follow me here, and subscribe to get my newsletter so you get all of my posts in your inbox when I share them.

You can also visit https://www.coffeexcameras.com and get Mentorship in photography, business, I design custom websites for people there, I sell Colombian coffee there, and I have a ton of photography books and challenges for you to check out as well as my new on demand classes that drop at the end of February. Don’t forget to join the email list there also, and you can grab a free copy of the January Blues Challenge if you enjoy creative challenges.

And last but not least, I have a quick favor to ask please. Please take a moment to visit https://coffeexcameras.etsy.com and follow the shop. If you enjoy my designs, maybe even grab a shirt for yourself or a fellow photographer in your life. If you do, I greatly appreciate the support! I am down here in Colombia doing what I can to fuel the last part of what I call the grand visa extravaganza. I thought we would be married and out of here after 6 months originally, yet here we are 2 years (going on three) later, and I just want to get my family safely home. Colombia is beautiful, but there are many reasons that I would like us to safely relocate to the States again and to give our children stability.

Thanks for reading! I will see you in the next update on this experiment!

Charlie https://www.coffeexcameras.com