Transcript: Make $1000/month ASAP | DS590

Doug: Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug Show. I’m Doug Cunnington and I’m pumped to catch up with Cody today over at Gold City Ventures. And how are you doing today?

Cody: I’m doing awesome, man. I’ve been looking forward to this. I’ve been looking forward to this for a while, and I’m glad we finally made it happen.

We, uh, aligned our calendars and we’re ca we’re chatting and catching up.

Doug: Yeah, and you know, we saw each other in person. A few, uh, it must be a month and some change ago, but it’s at a conference, so it’s you pass each other. A few times, but we, I think we only said like 20 words to each other, so it’s good to catch up.

And it’s funny, even though we see each other in person, it’s like. There’s so much going on out there. So yeah, today we’re gonna talk about a pretty cool really like a, a sprint of work that you did to try to earn a thousand dollars per month with digital products, essentially as soon as possible. So we’re gonna step through that case study and.

We will, I mean, really get the play by play and you did cover all this stuff, so we’ll be able to link up if people want to dig in and, and learn a little bit more. Now, before we hit record, you were telling me that you were, you’ve been on the road a little bit and actually like traveling some, so what have you been up to?

And there’s a reason why we’re bringing it up, but yeah. What have you been up to?

Cody: Yeah, so we were gone, me and my wife Lauren, for the entire month of October, pretty much. So we had back to back to back weddings. We had a wedding for my podcast, co-host Justin in Austin, Texas. We spent a couple of days there.

Then we flew over to Malta actually as kind of the. In between. For the next wedding from Malta, we flew to Amalfi in Italy. We had our second wedding there, our friends Taylor and Regan. Then we went to Capri as our kind of in-between again. Then we went to a third wedding in Central Italy, below Florence.

My friends Gabby and Matt from college ended in Spain and I actually just got back two days ago. So it has been a whirlwind of a trip. It was a lot of fun. It’s a bittersweet feeling, being back, getting back in a routine. Being on my computer. It was like health and fitness, all the things. But, uh. The Etsy shops, the digital products, they were still making me money day in and day out, despite really not working on them whatsoever on this trip.

I think in the month of October, like all my digital products together made over $10,000.

Doug: Amazing. Yeah. And. You know, when we, when we first met, I was working on Amazon affiliate sites, and that was a, a great side hustle, turned into a full ki full-time gig, and then things changed. SEO changed, AI came around.

Things are completely different. I don’t really know anyone right now who’s. Doing the Amazon affiliate website or niche sites or content websites, they’ve all shifted to different areas. And one of the cool things, the things that people are looking for are, you know, once you get things set up, it’s a lot of work to get it going, but once you do.

It is passive and there’s maintenance, but it’s way less work. Like once you get the flywheel moving and the momentum going. So very cool. And I didn’t realize it, it was that much money. ’cause that’s obviously, that’s significant. That is full-time income for a lot of people. Or at least, you know, it takes the pressure off from having a full-time corporate job or something like that.

So we’ll dig into those details now. Side note with all the travel. How do you manage your, your fitness and stuff? Because the times that we saw each other, I think it was in the gym. So even though we’re at a conference, we probably stayed up a little too late. Like we still saw each other in the morning and I was still, you know, shaking the cobwebs off and needed more coffee.

But like, what do you do when you’re traveling? Do you just, are those rest weeks, what do you end up doing?

Cody: The first thing I do when I either book a place or when I get to a new place if I don’t have control over the area that I’m booking is look for a gym. I can’t find a gym and I’ll just get like a day pass or a week pass or whatever I can get my hands on.

If I can’t find a gym, I do what’s called Cody’s Bootcamp, and that is using chairs, that’s using tables. Whatever I can get my hands on to a. 30 minute at home workout, try to do that most days if I can. Sometimes it doesn’t quite work out. Also use running to my advantage, like I’m typically eating more. I mean, especially in Italy, I was definitely overindulging a bit, so I was running as much as I could.

So yeah, I, I try to keep health and fitness at the top of my priority chain while I’m traveling. It’s definitely not as easy when I’m not home, but I still do make sure I carve out like some me time because I just feel kind of like blobby and gross if I don’t do any physical activity throughout the day.

Doug: Yeah. And, and I think I, I wanted to talk more about, uh, pasta and pizza, and I was just like, man, how, how do you do? But in July, like, all the stuff, but, um, so many things. It’s so good and it’s so fun. And I love eating a little bit more than I love exercising and stuff. And, and you’re quite dedicated. I, I enjoy it as a.

As a pastime and it, I know it’s good for me and it’s good to keep me grounded. So like even when I’m traveling, I’m like, the workouts are not gonna be as hard or anything like that, but I still show up and keep the habit going and all that stuff. Okay, so let’s talk about this thousand dollar per month challenge.

Can you, um, let us know what digital products in the Etsy shop and how, how they all kind of work together? Assuming people, you know, this is new for them.

Cody: Yeah, so let’s just take it from the top. So when I’m talking about digital products on Etsy, I am talking things like trackers, planners, spreadsheets, invitations, cards, games, and a word that you might hear is printables Now.

A printable would be something that you actually print out. Like I act, I’m, I’m starting to get into, it’s funny, we talk about fitness. I’m trying to like bulk and put on some muscle. Like I’m trying to gain like 10 or 15 pounds in the next couple of months. So I am like getting really into like meal tracking and like Yeah, calorie tracking, workout tracking.

So like I’m using these trackers and planners. Now, some people might actually print these out, some people might use them on an app or on the phone, whatever. But when we’re talking about like printables or digital products, I might use those words interchangeably. I just want people to know, we’re just talking about like.

Anything digital. So whether you’re actually printing it out, hence the word printable. Even when I say printable, it could be something that you’re using on your phone or a spreadsheet, like when I, a budgeting spreadsheet. I’m, I’m gonna use the word printable as a blanket term to describe that, and I’m sure, Doug, I know we’ve talked in the past, like you probably have some printables, some digital products in your business that you use that you could easily then like FY and sell to other people.

Like if you had any kind of media kit, if you have any kind of social media templates, if you had any kind of tracker or planner, you know, water intake, fitness meal tracker like that you use for yourself, you could easily then kind of. Templatize that, put it in an Etsy shop or a Shopify store and sell that to other people.

So that’s kind of the, the gist of digital products. It’s a digital file. So you’d create like a PDF or a PNG in a platform like Canva or whatever you like to use. And I, I like to use Canva. And then you’d list that product once it’s created on a marketplace like an Etsy, you’d put like a product title, a description, tags, just like a bunch of things to describe the product, listing images to kind of show people what the product is all about.

Once you have that product created and then listed in a marketplace like Etsy, when someone buys that product, it gets automatically delivered to them. So that is the key thing here. I was a physical product guy in the past. I know you’ve dabbled in some physical product stuff, Doug. It is not fun. It is not passive.

You have shipping concerns, you have product defects. There’s just like a whole bunch of stuff with digital products. I create this like digital file. I create this. Let’s use a budgeting spreadsheet. For example, a thousand people could download that budgeting spreadsheet and I don’t have to worry about it being defective or not getting to their house on time, or there’s delays in postage ’cause it’s Black Friday, like it just gets automatically delivered the second they click the buy button on a platform like Etsy.

So that is why I’m such a huge fan of this side hustle digital products ’cause. Once you kind of do the legwork of creating the thing and listening to the thing, as long as you understand keyword research and SEO, which we’ll talk about a bit today, and this is how I was able to ramp up that new shop with that Etsy shop challenge.

That’s how I was able to get to a thousand dollars per month so fast is because I understood those things. But you know, once I created the things that put ’em in my shop, there’s really no extra legwork on my end besides the occasional customer message. Which I’ve done the math on this. I get a message one in 20 sales, so I like to say it’s a 95% passive side hustle, and of the 5% that message me, it’s like, how do I download my file and I just have like a canned response.

I click one button, shoots it out, and usually that stops the issue.

Doug: Yeah.

Cody: Check your email. There’s

Doug: a link, right? Yes. Is that it? Did I do a good job covering that? Doug, any any questions from you? That. Yeah. Great summary and good examples. So that, that’s perfect. Now the follow-up is how many years of experience did you have?

With Etsy before in this business model, before you started this challenge, which I, if I have the dates right, it was in 2024, starting in August. Mm-hmm. Not that long ago. And this is after, you know, SEO on Google has shifted. This is after AI has been a really prevalent force, you know, for websites and content creation and otherwise, and then.

You were able to do it in 116 days. So basically you did this really fast. I mean, this is like the old days, but how many years of experience.

Cody: Yes, so I started selling digital products in 2018, so six years of experience, which obviously helped and helped me get there faster. But the whole reason I did this, Doug, I had a hater comment on one of my videos and they were like, of course you were able to, you know, I had this big $700 week.

It’s kind of my origin story where I like made $700 one week while I was skiing in Lake Tahoe. I love to tell the story. It was like during Valentine’s Week, blah, blah, blah. One person like commented on a video or like a webinar, and they were like, well, of course you did that back in 2018. It was so easy.

Back then, Etsy wasn’t saturated. I was like, okay, challenge accepted. Like bet I’ll try to build a new shop from scratch in a silo without like mentioning it anywhere, without promoting it on social media. Now, I did. Kind of track the shop on social media and I would like share screenshots and stats, but I didn’t promote the shop, meaning like put my products in front of buyers.

So I did this in a silo to see if I still had the chops to see if I could get people to buy my stuff using this good old keyword research. And SEO wasn’t like pumping ads and again, wasn’t like promoting this on an email list or anything. And it kind of went slow at first. Like the first couple of days, no sales.

And then day three, I had like two sales and made like eight bucks. And then the flywheel started turning and. You know, month one, I think, let’s see if I can remember these numbers off the top of my head. End of month one, I had $185 in revenue, which I was pretty happy about. I wasn’t spending like all my time on this thing.

I was spending like five to 10 hours per week. And some people might think, well, doing mental math, that’s terrible. ROI fair, it’s not great. 185 on like, you know, whatever, whatever. That was, 20 or 30 hours in that first month. But then month two, I think I made like 400 bucks. Month three I made 900 bucks, and month four I made.

I think it was like almost $4,000. So somewhere in between month three and month four is when I hit that on Etsy. There’s like a last 30 days and I was taking screenshots of it every day, and that’s when I hit that $1,000 in the last 30 days. That was the whole goal of the challenge. And yeah, we can talk about any and all of the strategies that I used to do that, but I know I, this is a very long tangent, six years of experience beforehand and then use that experience to create that new shop.

Hit a thousand dollars per month in 116 days.

Doug: Perfect. No, you’re a podcasting pro, so you’re leading into other questions and Perfect. Okay, so you were tracking along with the the revenue, so mm-hmm. Can you give us a couple other benchmarks, maybe like six months, nine months, 12 months, something like that, whatever is most relevant.

So you can let us know the, the trajectory here.

Cody: So the craziest thing was right after the, like right after the challenge, 116 days, that next month, and it was Christmas month, the shop did, I think it was like 4,100 or something like that in revenue for that month. So I went from like. A thousand dollars in the last 30 days to $4,000 in the last 30 days.

And the number just kept climbing and climbing and climbing. And honestly, after that challenge ended, I was like, okay, prove my point. I don’t need to really work on the shop anymore. The shop has still continued to put up. A thousand plus dollar months every single month since then. So I really haven’t spent much time on it.

I’m actually thinking of doing another holiday challenge this year in 2025, just seeing like how crazy I can go with the revenue. ’cause the holidays are a perfect time to start selling digital products. But yeah, man, it’s, it’s just been this little like extra income stream where I have now like 400 plus products in that shop.

And I know that probably sounds like a ton. I’ll explain how I was able to amass so many products so quickly. But, uh. Yeah, it’s, it was, it was a great little experiment. It proved that the methods that I used to build my first shop up still work today in 2024 and beyond. And yeah, we can get into any and all of it.

Doug: Alright. Yeah, we’ll definitely get into it. But I, number one, I’m glad you saw my comment on social media and I’m glad that I spawned you too, uh,

Cody: on your burner account, you’re like, screw you man.

Doug: You, yeah. You’re a faker. So that’s, uh, that’s awesome. It’s like you, you take that. Energy, the negative energy, and you’re like, oh, let’s, let’s see what we could do.

And yeah. Pretty amazing results. Okay, so, and to be clear, like you started a new shop, this was a new shop. Fresh. Yep. Zero

Cody: sales, zero background. Yep. Completely new everything. I didn’t even use any like existing. I get this question. So I obviously have a lot of products in like my main shop. I didn’t use any product templates.

Like I built everything from white blank page, from white screen.

Doug: Yeah.

Cody: Okay.

Doug: Yeah,

Cody: so it was completely built from scratch

Doug: and you have a a bunch, you have a course which we’ll link up to for folks, but I was gonna say, there’s a ton of success stories where people are like, Hey, I got started and I was able to make this happen.

So you did have a lot of experience, and obviously you weren’t using the specifics like you said. But there’s a lot of know, like you have a lot of business chops and SEO and keyword research chops and all that stuff. So yeah, let’s get into it. So how’d you start off like choosing the niche keyword research and let’s focus on kind of the early part of, of what you were working on in those whatever first couple, few weeks.

Cody: Real quick before I get into niche research, keyword research, all that stuff. ’cause you mentioned student success. So some people might think, oh, this guy has six years of experience. Of course he was able to do this. I documented this publicly, and so we had a student who like joined the course because of this challenge and her goal was to beat me, and she ended up getting to the $1,000 per month milestone in 92 days.

So she beat me By no way. What is that? By 24 days? Something like that. Yeah. I was like, honestly, I’m kind of mad, but I’m kind of pumped. That’s. Pretty awesome. So yeah, just wanted to, that’s a quick aside, but it was just a cool win that we had from our community. So, oh

Doug: yeah,

Cody: back to product selection. So what I did was I used the template method, is what I call it.

So I would do some keyword research and kind of think of a product. So let’s just use meal planner and workout trackers or like top of mind, let’s use a meal planner, for example. So I would say, okay, I want to create a meal planner. So I would go and. In the Etsy search bar, literally just type in meal planner.

This is a hack for those who like don’t wanna use other keyword research tools. Maybe you’re just gonna start in your journey. There are other ones, we can get into that in a sec, but back to Etsy search bar, type in meal planner. The Etsy search bar is going to return What the most like keyed in things are to the Etsy search bar.

So you might see like keto meal planner, you might see intermittent fasting meal planner. You might see carnivore meal planner, you might see paleo meal planner. And based on what the Etsy results are showing you, like, you know that people are typing for those things a lot. So that gives you a really good indication, like, okay, maybe I can create one nice base meal planner template and then I can tweak it and use the template method to then diversify into all these different niches.

So I would kind of do what I’m saying right now where I’m I type in like meal planner or meal tracker or whatever into the Etsy search bar, get some ideas. Then I would go to a more powerful keyword research tool. Like Eran is the one I like and use. But there’s also Insight Factory. Ever be Marmal lead.

There’s a whole bunch out there. Sales Samurai. Pick your poison, whatever one will work. But then from there, it’s just an even more powerful tool. So you type in like meal planner, and then you’ll have 50 results versus like the 10 that the Etsy search bar will give you. And it’ll tell you like how many people are selling this, how many people are searching for this every month?

And it just gives you a really good idea. So what I would do is I would think of one like pretty generic product. So. I’ll just keep running with the meal planner example or meal tracker. Create a really good one that I was really proud of. Like, okay, this looks really good. Like the colors are great, the boxes are perfect.

Like this is everything that I would want in a meal tracker, and this is everything that like the competition and the best sellers are doing. And then I would just basically rinse and repeat for every single variation of that product that I possibly could. So like from One Meal tracker template, I could then create.

20 different ones based on what other people are searching for. So I would have the keto version, the paleo version, the intermittent fasting version, one for men, one for women, one for old people, one for people losing weight. Like there’s all these different variations that you can make based on keyword research, and it’s just so much faster when you use the template method.

I remember one product in particular I made was like a gift card holder. And with a gift card holder. I mean, just think about how many different people in your life you could. Give a gift card holder to, so basically a gift card holder. It’s a little piece of paper that you then stick a gift card to, and it would say some like qsy phrase or something about that.

Person or that profession. So you could have like one base template for a gift card holder. You could make one for your son’s football coach. You could make one for a teacher, one for a nurse, one for your grandma, one for your 4-year-old. Like there’s so many different variations and it doesn’t take that much work.

Like you just have to change a couple of the words. Maybe you change the fonts, maybe you change the colors, you change the title and the description and the tags on Etsy. But like. Once you start to get good at that, I was creating a new product in 10 to 15 minutes with that base template. So I could very easily create, you know, make a Mother’s Day thing, a Father’s Day thing, a Thanksgiving thing, a Halloween thing, and it just made the product creation, creation process so much faster and easier.

So by the time I reached that a thousand dollars per month milestone, I had. 350 products listed, but a lot of those products just came from the same base templates. That was, that was kind, I know I’m, I’ve been going on for a long, here, a long time here, but that was kind of the, the method to my badness.

Doug: Gotcha. Okay, perfect. And I’m curious with this specific niche that you picked. Like a lot of people, they’ll work online and, and I was gonna say, a lot of the audience super familiar with SEO keyword research and they’ve done, you know, similar, like Google Auto suggest is similar to the kind of key keyword.

Same thing. Yeah. It’s this same idea. So how many, um Oh, oh yeah, the, I have a few questions around this. So the first one before I, okay, I’m ready. Uh, did you have this niche. On your list, on your radar already. ’cause a lot of times people like us, we have a list of business ideas that we’ve set aside for some time in the future.

So was it a fresh one or was it one that you had on the back burner for some time?

Cody: So I think this is actually a key difference between. Like an Amazon business versus an Etsy business is, I did not pick just one specific niche. So the way that customers behave on Etsy is a little bit different than other platforms or other business models.

Where typical customer behavior is they type in something to the search bar, the thing comes up, like your result might come up, and then they click on it, they buy it, and that’s it. It’s not usually where they are searching out your shop name unless you have a really prominent shop, which takes up years and years of dedication to kind of get there.

Or maybe you have a big email list. It’s not very typical customer behavior where someone clicks on your shop and then kind of browses to see like, oh, what items do they have for sale? So you actually don’t have to niche down. Like you can totally do the throw spaghetti at the wall approach. And maybe you sell invitations, but you also sell games and you also sell like spice jar labels and you also sell spreadsheets.

And like you could sell all of this within your shop. And the cool thing about Etsy is if you are someone like me who likes to stay organized Etsy, Etsy does have shop sections. So if you wanted to like have your spreadsheet section, if you wanna have your invitation section, if you wanna have your gift section, like you can do that.

And that’s exactly what I did in this new shop. Just kind of literally threw things at the wall. ’cause I didn’t know what was gonna work the fastest. But I just like, I mean obviously I was very motivated to get this to this 1000 per month milestone ’cause I was publicly documenting it. So I was like, if I don’t get here fast, it’s gonna be kind of embarrassing.

So like what’s gonna be the highest likelihood that I’m gonna get there? And then once I started to get traction with like one certain type of product, I just create like a million different variations. But yeah, long story short, you do not have to niche down with a new Etsy shop. Perfect.

Doug: Okay. And interesting, although this is just a historical note now, it’s essentially the same kind of behavior that people would have for the niche site model and people niche down really in the interest of Google, SEO, versus customer or visitor behavior because.

People would type in, you know, best wireless keyboard and then they would end up on the site, read a couple things, and then go buy something. So they were not Yeah, browsing. Yeah. They’re not like

Cody: clicking around to find the best vacuum after that, you know?

Doug: Exactly.

Cody: So you could have just like all these different things.

Doug: Yeah, totally. Totally. Okay, great. So the other secondary question, you mentioned about 400 products and then it sounds like you took your foot off the gas a little bit, which is. The holidays were coming around, you don’t wanna make these products all, all the time. And the challenge was over. You won.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I won. So how many like unique templates did you have? Because it sounds like you created you know, a bunch of stuff, some things worked, and then you probably did variations of those, right. Do more of what’s working. But how many like unique products did you have?

Cody: Probably like, I don’t have an exact number for you, Doug, but maybe between 30 and 40 base templates.

And then honestly, some of those base templates could create 50 different product variations, which is crazy. And some of them might only be able to produce 10, but I did, I never made a standalone product where I’m like, all right, I’m done. I made this thing. No, like I already went through the. Arduous process of making sure that like this thing is up to my standards, so let’s like replicate it for every trend holiday season keyword that I possibly can find.

Doug: Okay, gotcha. And it sounds like there was a lot of growth when you were adding more products and then it kind of dropped down. Is that like a seasonal thing? Like will it come back when that season comes back around or is there some like recency bias on the Etsy algorithm where like if you keep making more products, they like it or it’s kind of a social media idea, but like what are your thoughts on that?

Cody: There are differing schools of thought on this. I think Etsy definitely rewards you for putting up new products, but we also have students in our community, and myself included, like I have products that still sell. Though I haven’t had activity in the shop for a while. Like, and like I mentioned, yes, the, we had that like 4,000 plus dollars month in December of last year and then it kind of tapered off ’cause the holidays died off.

But it’s not like the shop went to zero, like it’s still making a thousand, $2,000 a month pretty regularly without me doing anything. So, yeah, to answer your question, it will probably kick back up for this holiday season, and I might try some like social media experiments, maybe some ad experiments to see how high I can pump the revenue and do like another sort of mini challenge.

But yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s still making money and people still do make money with just dormant shops, even if they aren’t. Constantly adding new products. So it, yeah, to, to answer your question, some people do say, oh, you know, Etsy will kind of juice the algorithm a little bit in your favor if you are constantly putting stuff on their platform.

’cause they’re like, oh, this person’s motivated to keep pumping stuff out. Like, we’re gonna make more money if they more make more money. It makes sense. Psychologically, I just, Etsy is very, uh, secretive with this algorithm, so I don’t have any hard data to tell you.

Doug: Right. Very interesting. Alright, so. A few dozen like unique products.

You scaled up some. How did you decide, if you can be more specific, how did you decide which ones to make more templates of because they were working

Cody: just. Honestly sales. Like if one thing worked, I have an example from my like main shop where I had these love coupons that took off, and so I was like, okay, let me just make every single possible variation of these love coupons that I can, and I made them into birthday coupons.

I made them into Christmas. I made them into Mother’s Day, father’s Day, like. Every single variation you could possibly think of. I turned those coupons into and a lot of those variations sold. I mean, some of them kind of fell flat in their face. And that’s one other thing I’ll mention is I know I mentioned I had like 400 products, probably 40 to 50 of them sold regularly.

So there is like. Just a graveyard of products that were like well researched. It wasn’t like I would waste my time creating something I didn’t think would sell, but for whatever reason, like they just didn’t hit, but the, you know, the 50 soldiers that kind of carry the whole army on their back, those are the ones that, you know, drew me to the finish line and made me hit that a thousand dollars per month milestone.

So don’t get discouraged. Folks out there who are listening, if you like, have like a couple of products listed and some they aren’t selling. All you need is like a couple unicorn products to take off and they’ll carry the rest of the team.

Doug: And you never know which one it’s gonna be. Right.

Cody: You never know.

It’s so funny. I know it’s probably the same with niche sites, right? Like you might have some like freak article that takes off and all of a sudden your site’s blowing up and you have all this ad revenue or affiliate commissions or whatever. You just never know. So it’s like keep throwing spaghetti at the wall and just see what sticks.

Doug: Yeah. And it’s funny, again, this is all just historical interesting information ’cause this shit doesn’t work anymore. But you would do the keyword research and you’re like, oh the, it’s very few searches. You know, whatever, 10 per month. But then it would bring in so much more traffic or it would convert really well, or just something happened in the algorithm and then you got way more traffic and just everything worked out and then it would just disappear.

You know? That’s, that’s the bad part. So let’s talk about maybe some mistakes that you made along the way. ’cause obviously you did this pretty quick. You have some experience, but. Things still go wrong. So any issues that you ran into? Any mistakes, anything that you would do different if you were doing the sprint now?

Cody: I think I maybe. Dabbled versus doubled too much. So what I mean by that is to your question before, like if I had a product that worked, like why am I even bothering creating like these other random products that have no proof in the pudding? Just ’cause I like, in my head I’m like, oh, this is a great idea.

Like tons of people are gonna buy it. I should just stick with what works and create like. If I could create 100 variations of like a gift card holder and that’s gonna be the winning thing, then I should do that. Versus like getting excited about other product ideas. I know, I mean, I have that shiny object syndrome thing with entrepreneurship.

Sometimes I’m like, I know I should be doubling down on like the main thing, but I’m like, there’s this cool thing over here and it just gets my attention and sometimes I pursue it, sometimes I don’t. But if I could. Give myself advice, it would just be like, stick to what works. You know, double down, don’t dabble.

Use keyword research and data to your advantage, and, which I did, but like, I dunno, sometimes I would just get excited. I would like see that this certain product has like, it has a decent number of searches, no competition. Like maybe I could be the one person who’s selling it and other people are gonna come flocking, and it just didn’t end up being the right thing.

So if I could, yeah, I’d say stay focused and double versus dabble.

Doug: Would you rather be like the only one offering that product where it’s you are the unique unicorn there, or would you like to see some competition where oth you see other people are purchasing those kind of products?

Cody: I typically like to see a little bit of competition.

So when I’m in these keyword research tools like Eran, they’ll have kind of, they haven’t, they make it easy. They have ’em color coded, they’ll be like search volume, then they’ll be like, you know, competition. And so like search volume. You want to not be in the red. You want it to be green, so like you want a lot of search volume, but then competition, you want it to be low competition, which is green versus red, which means a lot of competition.

So. If you can find what we call unicorns or hidden gems at Gold City Ventures, it’s like has a ton of search volume and low competition. Those are few and few and hard to find. What, what phrase am I going for here? Those are very hard to find needle in a haystack. Yeah. Yes, I’m, I’m some, some combination of phrases I’m making up here, but yeah, those are very difficult to find.

So what I typically like to see is like at least 50 searches per month and pretty low competition, but at least a couple people. Selling the thing. So I know that like there’s actually some people making sales from it. Now, there are circumstances where you might be first to market with something. Like we had someone in our community, and we’ve been doing this for a while now, so when like COVID hit, people were making like the stay six feet away signs or like wear your mask signs or like random things that had no market before whatsoever.

And then there were just blowing up. So like if you were the first person with like these COVID themed or you know, COVID style printables. Oh my gosh. You made out like a bandit and the people who started selling masks first, like if you were to look at the, you know, historical data on that, like a physical mask, like you’re like, oh, you know, a couple people buy them a month, but then all of a sudden it’s like hundreds of thousands of sales.

So there are circumstances if you are like a person who identify, who can identify trends and know what’s gonna be hot, and like you’re the first one to do it, awesome. But for me, I like, I don’t know, I’m, I guess I’m not a trendsetter because I like to see a couple people doing it before I go and do it.

Doug: Yeah, and that totally makes sense. I mean, when you think about a couple levels up, you think about a new market. If you’re first. You have to educate people. Like usually it’s not the very first to market. It’s like the second or third after some iteration, and maybe like the first company just spends a lot of resources like educating.

It’s a little bit different with, you know, principals and Etsy, but at the same time it’s like if, if no one has these things out in the world, it’s not as likely for someone to go type in and try to figure out where they could buy one of those. So. A little competition, but not too much. Yeah. Alright. Are there any That’s what I like, red flags that you see where it is just like, oh, you know what?

It seems like it could be good, but like, you know what, I’m gonna stay away from this kind of product line, or niche or idea or something like that.

Cody: Where most people stumble and make mistakes is they’ll see something that has a lot of search volume, but also has a lot of competition, and they just think somehow they’re gonna be like the one that people pick, and the data’s just not in your favor.

So like a lot of people when they say s these two saturated, it’s because they’re selling saturated products. Like if you’re just selling a generic. Birthday invitation. Of course, you’re probably not gonna be making sales ’cause you’re competing with everyone and their mother who has an Etsy shop. But if you niche down just a little bit, I’m sure we’ve all heard the phrase, the riches are in the niches.

If you niche down just a little bit and you make. Let’s call it a seven, like a golf themed, 70th birthday invite versus just like a regular one. Like now you’re competing with so fewer people and the thing you’re, you’ve created is so much more targeted to that buyer who’s typing in, you know, 70th birthday golf invite, like for their dad who like loves golf.

You know what I mean? Versus just like this generic birthday invitation that like might look cool, might have a couple of. Banners and a little confetti on it, whatever, but like the more niched thing is going to sell better and have fewer people competing. So yeah, to answer your question, I think where most people stumble and I learned this lesson the hard way, was they just sell things that everybody else is selling.

And then of course, yes, Etsy is saturated for generic products, but the riches are in the niches. If you can niche a couple layers down. When I think of niching, it’s just adding adjectives onto the base product. So for a birthday invite, it’s like, you know, 70th birthday invite, golf themed, 70th birthday invite, and like you can just keep niching and niching and niching.

You can’t niche too much where nobody’s searching for that thing. But there are just like an endless number of niches where there’s not that many people competing for it, but like. Imagine you are buying a birthday card or birthday invite. You’re, you’re organizing a birthday event for your dad who’s 70 and he loves golf.

Like, which birthday thing are you gonna buy? The one that’s like completely niched to you and what you’re searching for or the like, just this generic one. So like as a seller it makes sense ’cause there’s fewer comp, there’s lower competition, but it also makes sense because the buyer’s gonna be so much more attracted and more likely to buy your product.

Doug: Makes a lot of sense in. Again, I mean, to keep drawing parallels to like the keyword research that we did for SEO and Google and stuff, but a lot of times those long tail phrases, it’s just like, you know, we would think of it as like product X for a certain thing and, and it’s similar, so it’s just like certain applications or.

Uh, certain avatars or people at the, at the end that would be purchasing it or for whom it’s for, and then it’s a very easy way and you could just pick anything. Like I’m, I’m into guitars more these days and like there are, you know, it’s a small, smaller niche, but it’s still like a whatever, many billions of dollar industry.

So like if people think, or golf or whatever, like, I don’t play golf, I don’t care, right. But. People could think about whatever they’re into and just like niche down in those areas. And maybe think about family members or other folks that you know in your, you know, community circle of friends or whatever.

And then you’ll, you’ll start coming up with a, a huge number of ideas. So,

Cody: yeah, even just like, even just a birthday invite, there’s just like endless things you can create or, or a tracker. Like, there’s so many different things you can track and a lot of the trackers have the same exact structure. So yeah.

Any idea that just interests you, just. Create that and then just pump out as many iterations as you possibly can. And that is, that is also my best advice for like just getting off the sideline sidelines and starting to sell digital products.

Doug: Back to the beginning, you obviously put in more time the front end, and then as it went on, I think you were able to see the data and then like optimize and create more.

Products with a template method. How many hours were you putting in in the first few weeks? And can you take us sort of on the timeline, like how many hours per week? Because the thing is like people are busy, they have full-time jobs, so how much effort are we actually talking about?

Cody: So I took that into consideration.

When I did this challenge. I was like, I’m not just gonna set aside, you know, 80 hours a week and just grind and not do anything else. I was spending like. Five to 10 hours per week, usually like an hour or two a day, depending on the day. But yeah, so that’s where I’m deriving the five to 10 from. So at the end of the month, it was like 20 to 30 hours had been dedicated to building that shop.

Doug: And then how long did you keep that up? Was it just like the first month or two and then you were able to scale it down?

Cody: It was until I reached a thousand dollars per month milestone. Like I was pretty motivated, so I was just like constantly working on it day in and day out until I, uh, reached that milestone.

And then after that I was just like, whew. Pulled the plug. Because it was a lot, like, not only was I like managing and running this shop, I was also like documenting the entire journey and making sure that I could, you know, have some good takeaways and lessons for folks. So I was like, once I hit that day, 116, I was like, thank God.

Like I am, I’m sick of doing this challenge. I already have a bus, I have multiple businesses that I’m running. Like this is just a little side thing. I wanted to prove that like the stuff we teach and the stuff that I do in my personal shop like still works. And it did. So that was a, that was also a relief.

Doug: You mentioned the couple tools and I, I’ve never used any of ’em. Is it possible for someone to not use the tools and still get enough information, or are the tools essential to do what you are doing?

Cody: To do what I’m doing, I would say you probably want to get some version of a tool. Now there are free versions of the tools I mentioned.

You don’t have to go and spend, you know, some of them are like 10 bucks a month though. They’re really not breaking the bank. They’re a lot less expensive than blogging tools. It’s a lot less expensive than like SEMrush or Hraf or some of these, like Eran is like a $6 per month plan. You can get away with, I guess just like using the Autosuggest Etsy search bar and like maybe Google Trends and Pinterest trends.

You’ll have like a decent idea, but I like getting into like the, okay, how much competition did these have? And you don’t get that with some of the other free tools that I mentioned. Like yeah, Etsy will auto complete the stuff, but you don’t know how many other people are selling those things. Whereas like an Eran or ever be your Insight factory can kind of compile that data and be like, okay, there’s only like a couple dozen people selling this thing.

It’s a good product to go after.

Doug: And just to confirm, so if you are not using a tool and you, you’re like, oh, this seems pretty good, is there any like reliable way to understand the competition level or how saturated it might be? Like, you know, you search for the product and you see like dozens and many, many pages of them, or do you just need to use the tool to be able to decipher that?

Cody: You could do the manual way that you’re talking about. Like I am a big fan of paying for convenience. Like you could, if you’re like, oh, I really want to create a keto meal tracker and you type keto meal tracker in, and like the first 10 pages are actually keto meal trackers. Just forget about it. Like create something else.

But if you type in keto meal tracker and there’s like, I don’t know, maybe 20 of them or like 10 of them, and then the rest of them are like different meal trackers. That means that the keywords don’t match up. Exactly. So like there might be an opportunity there. The whole page isn’t filled with the exact thing that you typed in.

Mm-hmm. Or like the 70th golf themed, 70th birthday card. If there’s like two of them and then the rest of them are just like golf themed or 70th, not in combination of the two. There might be some, some, uh, sure. Opportunity there. I was gonna say competition. That was the wrong word. There might be some opportunity there.

So you can’t do it the manual way, Doug, if you want. Like I was, I mean, I used to cut as many corners as humanly possible when it came to spending money, but now I’m more than happy to pay 10 bucks a month to like, not have to do that manual data work.

Doug: It’s

Cody: so much cheaper. Yeah. I

Doug: mean, you know, when I first started I was like, uh, should I pay for this one month?

And the thing is like, I mean. You could do it manually, but it’s not as reliable and it takes so long. So it’s just like you can’t, there’s no free ride. It’s either gonna take you forever or you’ll have to pay a little bit of money. And it sounds like these tools are extremely reasonable. I’m sure there’s a range and maybe like the amount of usage, but there’s several tools that do these kind of things.

Right. And you guys cover it in the course?

Cody: Yeah.

Doug: Okay.

Cody: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Etsy is just a, a niche or just like a platform that’s, again, it’s, it’s so much cheaper than some of these like Google tools that it scrape. I think they just have to scrape so much more data. That’s why they’re so much more expensive versus like, you know, an Eran or an ever Be or Insight factory that’s just like, it’s just Etsy.

They just specifically focus on Etsy,

Doug: right? Yeah. And the other. Completely off topic, but I was gonna say with, uh, Google, SEO and those tools, the customer, it’s more B2B, right? So it’s like agencies are using those, so they’re like, oh yeah, I’m, we’re gonna charge you whatever, $150 a month because you have six clients and you’re charging them whatever, $3,000 a month so you guys can pay for it.

But it’s like. Consumers and like normal people mostly. There’s some huge shops I’m sure, but like mostly it’s just normal folks. Right?

Cody: Exactly. Yeah, that’s probably definitely a huge factor too. If they started pricing the plans at a hundred dollars per month, they, I don’t think they’d have too many customers.

Doug: Right. Okay. So it sounds awesome. It seems like everybody should do this, but what are the cons, right? Not, not everything’s perfect. So what are the issues or obstacles with this business model?

Cody: I think one, I, I dunno if I wanna call it a misunderstanding, but one thing that people, maybe they get too happy and excited about it and they think that they’re gonna like replace their job in a couple of months, like.

And at, uh, Etsy digital product side hustle is not typically a quit your job type of side hustle. Like we, we have called our course like the e Printables Side Hustle course since inception because we want people to make an extra 500,000, $1,500 per month. It is not typical. There are people who do it that make like 10,000, $20,000 a month.

But it’s not typical. That is not typical results par for the course. So if you’re someone who’s like itching to quit your job, this is probably not. I mean, you could use it with other side hustles, but this side hustle alone is probably not the thing you’re looking for. This is perfect though, for someone who has a couple extra hours a week, who wants a fun, creative outlet?

Who, yeah, you’re, you’re cool with making like an extra 500 or a thousand dollars a month, but just getting to that like quit your job level money does take a lot of work and a lot of time. So I think that’s the biggest mis misconception is some people, sometimes people will come into our community like, you guys made this like, sound like I could quit my job.

Like, no, we, uh, we talk about making side hustle income. Like that’s, that was honestly part of the reason why I did the a thousand dollars per month. Side hustle, side hustle challenge. Like I’m not, I’m not doing a 10,000 per month challenge or a 20,000 per month challenge. Like, so I think that’s where a lot of people get hung up, is it?

It does take work. In the beginning, like I mentioned, I was spending. Dozens of hours and made $185 that first month. Some of you guys might hear that, or you might try that yourself without hearing a podcast like this. And you’re like, this sucks. Like, why, why am I working so hard for 180 bucks? I could go and freelance and make $30 an hour and do this in six hours?

Like this doesn’t make any sense. So it is a slow build. Like, it, it takes time, it takes dedication, motivation. It’s kind of like, I like comparing it to like the gym or eating healthy. It is the small daily consistent actions that. Produce results. It’s not just like one day you spend 10 hours doing stuff on Etsy and then you, you’re, you’re sitting there and you’re hoping that the next month you’re gonna make a thousand dollars.

That’s not how it works. It is the small, daily, consistent actions that add up and compound and build over time. So, yeah, I think unrealistic expectations are not really like a gotcha of the side hustle. But I think some people see some of the flashy numbers in the headlines, which the flashy numbers do make the headlines, unfortunately.

But it’s, it’s honestly more often than you know. This person is making $20,000 per month and they quit their job. It’s like, you know, Susie’s making $500 a month now and can cover her family’s groceries. Or like, Mike is now able to cover the mortgage. And it’s, it’s stories like that that we see a lot more in our community.

Even though the, you know, this person made $500,000 is the story that gets national headlights.

Doug: Right. This Emily. Right. That’s Emily, right?

Cody: Yeah. Yeah.

Doug: Somewhat. So she, and she’s been on the show. She’s great. Yeah. No, she’s awesome. We love Emily. Yeah. Adjacent. Um. You know, same business model idea overall.

Okay, so we’re coming towards the end. Couple other quick things. So great to mention. Expectations, you know, that’s a secret. It’s a happiness in life overall and for this business model, like having proper expectations is perfect. Okay. So what about experience with graphics and design or anything like that?

You mentioned Canva and I’m an avid user. I’ve been using it. I mean it, what a great tool and it’s been very good and not buggy. I mean, there’s some tools that I use and it’s, they’re buggy often. Canva has been fairly rock solid, but do you need like graphic experience or design experience to do this kind of thing?

Cody: To this day, Doug, I probably start out like a two. I am probably a five, maybe a six at best, outta 10 graphic designer, and this is someone who literally runs a course teaching people how to create digital products. You don’t have to be a rockstar graphic designer. You do have to. Understand some of the fundamentals, and that’s just through practice.

Like in our course we have like a bunch of over the shoulder tutorials where, you know, you’ll sit with me like on Canva and I’ll be creating a gift tag and you’ll do it at the same time. And like that’s just, it’s good practice. You start to learn like white space and font pairing and colors and all that stuff.

All you need is the basics though. Like really the real key to money in this ad hustle, unless you’re selling like wedding niche stuff or wall art, is understanding keyword research. Like someone, if you have the perfect. Birthday invite, or if you have the perfect meal tracker for someone like that’s just so hyper specified to what they’re searching for, as long as it’s like a five outta 10, it looks good enough.

It doesn’t have to be professional. Professional. They’re probably going to buy the thing. I mean, they’re not spending a hundred dollars on these printables like they’re spending, you know, $5, $10 on these things. So you do not, you do not have to be a professional graphic designer. You just have to be.

Good enough, which comes with practice, like your first couple might suck and that’s fine. Just like anything else, your first couple podcasts will suck. Your first couple freelance writing articles will suck. Same thing with digital products. Your first couple designs are probably gonna suck, but once you get over that hump, then they’re gonna start looking better and better, and eventually people will start buying them.

Doug: You’ve been doing this for a little while now. What impact has AI had on the business in general? Like. This e printables business?

Cody: Yeah, so good question. What’s great about Etsy, and I think this is where Etsy differs from. You’d mentioned like a lot of the guys in Amazon, they kind of dropped off. A lot of the guys in niche sites kind of dropped off.

Etsy is very pro handmade, meaning that they do not like AI and bots interfering with what’s going on in that platform. So it’s kind of nice that Etsy kind of hates AI, even though they’re building their own AI tools. But they do not like the idea of like just these, you know. Image generators, like these printable generators coming in and just flooding the market like they have very strict, you know, you have to, uh, take a picture of yourself, take a picture of your license to sign up.

Like it is very, uh, yeah, I guess strict is the only way to put it. They’re not huge fans of ai, so honestly, AI has not had too big of an effect on Etsy itself. Now there are like AI tools built into can, but now, so you can like. There’s like one called bulk create. So like you could create a bunch of different variations of one product with like the click of a button.

AI is great for ideation. I love using AI as like my thought partner. If I’m trying to think of like different products that I can create, I’m like, okay, I want to create a meal tracker. Like give me 50 different meal tracker variations. Then I’ll like take those ideas from ai, plug them into a keyword research tool like Eran and see where it takes me.

But honestly for product creation, AI is not quite there. It’s not quite as good as like. Someone who knows what they’re doing, going into Canva and then like using the template method that I mentioned and then kind of iterating and duplicating from there. AI still makes mistakes. So there might be a day, probably in the next year or two where you are able to create designs completely from ai, but with et.

Etsy’s. Strictness, like you have to check a box like this was made by ai and I’m sure they have. Some kind of hidden algorithm that can detect when things are made with ai. I’m not sure how it works exactly, but I think they’re slightly anti AI stance, honestly Helps us sellers us, us real folk.

Doug: Who is this like not for? So assuming someone does have enough time, let’s say they have whatever, 15 hours a week or something like that.

They have, they have enough time. Based on what you mentioned, is there like a personality type or something? That won’t work this well and I’ll leave it kind of open, but that’s just an example. Like some people are like, you know what, I would just want to be outside, so you gotta sit at the computer for a few hours to do this.

Right? So who’s this not for?

Cody: That’s the exact type of person. I was gonna say, if you crave interaction, like if you are already trapped. Behind your laptop for 40 to 60 hours a week at a day job, and you’re like, the last thing I wanna do is hop onto Canva and create stuff. Not talking to anyone else. Like, I’d much rather go and, you know, work at some shop, or I’d much rather do some type of a sales role where I’m talking to people or whatever than this probably isn’t for you.

And that’s totally fair. I have a friend who I’ve been like throwing his hot hustle ideas at him for years and he is like, dude, I just don’t wanna hop on my laptop after I get off my laptop. I’m like, that’s totally fair. Like I completely get it. So. That’s probably the biggest category. I guess if you don’t like creating stuff, like, if you don’t, like, I don’t wanna say you don’t like graphic design.

’cause I don’t like, like graphic design. I, I mean this is like a means to an end. I’m not like, excited to go and create a design just because I’m like an art person. This is a soft hustle for me. Like I’m profit, profit first. Like, that’s why I do the keyword research and SEO stuff. But if you’re just like, I am not gonna, I’m not going onto Canva and creating a design.

Fine. Then this is probably not the side hustle for you, although I guess caveat you could like outsource the design, but beside the point, get rich quick people. Those are probably our biggest complainers of people who join and who are just like, I thought I’d be making $10,000 per month by now. Like, oh, when didd you start four months ago.

It’s like, okay, well it, it takes time to ramp these things up. Like I mentioned, I $185 a month, one as a guy was six years of experience spending, I mean, only five to 10 hours a week, but still like, still bad ROI in my time, but after. Six months went by the ROI was huge in my time. So it does take time to ramp up.

So if you’re someone who’s like looking to make, you know, you’re like, I need to pay rent next month. I need a thousand dollars, maybe freelancing or something that’s like, really fast cash is a better avenue for you versus something like this that’s kind of a, a slow passive income build. Yeah, those are probably some of the archetypes that would not be great for digital products in Etsy.

Doug: Got it. All right, so as we’re wrapping up, I’ll let you mention where people can find you and stuff like that. You do have a free, uh, workshop that people could check out and I’ll, I’ll link up to that. Right? That’s, that’s always active. People can check out the free workshop to

Cody: learn

Doug: more. Yeah,

Cody: check it out.

Okay. If they wanna dig in. I have another thing for you, Doug, that we were selling as an upsell, but I’ll give it to you guys for free. Here, lemme make a note to myself and I can get you a special link to give to you guys who are listening slash watching. I created an ebook on, it’s basically called Your First Hun, your First a hundred K, your first one K month on Etsy.

And it’s like, it’s a 17 page ebook of just like kind of all the lessons learned and stuff. We talked about it a lot today. There’s, but there’s a lot of other gems in there. Like there’s some visuals and things that you, uh, you wouldn’t get from a verbal conversation.

So I’ll, uh, I’ll make sure you have a link for that as well.

Doug: Perfect. Yeah, people could check that stuff out. So the last question here, I’m curious, and obviously this is just a hypothetical, fun, fun thing to consider. So you got to your a thousand dollars per month and then. You stopped ’cause that was the goal.

That was, that was like the finite scope of what you were trying to do. If you kept working on it, say five hours per week or something like that. Something minimal for the next, you know, until like this day. So we’re talking. 15 months of work or so, where do you think it might be? Do you think it would’ve topped out at a certain point?

Would you run out of ideas, but, you know, continued effort, this, you know, compound interest of, you know, couple percent growth. Where do you think it might be

Cody: realistically? Probably with the same trajectory, a couple thousand dollars per month. Maybe three, maybe four. I’m not sure exactly, but. I mean, what could I shoulda have?

I just, I didn’t keep up with it after the challenge. But yeah, probably somewhere in that vicinity. But then I’m very excited to see where it goes over the holidays. ’cause like a lot of my products are holiday themed, like I mentioned, I’m, I’m creating every single variation under the sun and, and Christmas and like, just the holidays does really, really well.

So, well, I’ll the check in. Doug, I’ll, I’ll send you a message. We can, yeah, we can update the people. Let me

Doug: know. Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s so interesting, like the, the trajectory is not what you think ’cause like it. You know, it doubled, doubled then, and then it like tripled and then you know, it, it’s always different depending on what business model, but it’s just like things plateau for a little while and then something happens, whatever.

Maybe it’s like you end up with 4,000 products and then like some something algorithmically like pushes even more, and then you end up getting more growth on products that weren’t selling before, and then you end up with. Unexpected results. But, um, yeah, that, that’s a lot of work. I, I’m so lazy these days.

Cody: Hey, nothing wrong with that man. Yeah. Enjoy the fruits of your labor.

Doug: Very good. Okay. Awesome to catch up. Where should people find you? If they want to, you know, check you out, learn more.

Cody: I am everywhere on social media at Cody d Berman, and you’ll find that like whole one K series. Like, like, like I said, I, I created the videos like every single day.

Well, I skipped a couple, but it was like day one, day two, day three, day 34, day 67, all the way up till day one 16. So you can go check that out. And then Doug, you will link up. We have a free workshop you guys can check out if this sounds really cool. We just learned more about selling digital products on Etsy.

Also, we’ll give you that free. Ebook, the one K that I’ll have to make sure I have that. I’m making a note to myself, Doug, give you the special link and make sure that it’s free for people. But uh, yeah, I think that’s everything.

Doug: Amazing. Alright, very good. I’ll link up to all that stuff and I am an affiliate for the course, so if you end up purchasing all the disclaimer stuff, I’ll put the fine print out there.

But Cody always good to catch up. Okay, thanks man. Yeah, thanks for having me. This was awesome. I’m always excited to be on the Doug show.