Full transcript of “I Just Made My First 10k+ Month on Etsy (Here's How You Can Too)”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 Guys. It finally happened after almost two years of selling on Etsy. I hit my first $10,000 month, actually a little over 12,000, almost $13,000, which feels kind of surreal to say out loud because if you've been watching this channel for a while, you probably know that this whole thing started as an experiment. Like, I didn't know if I was ever going to make real money doing this, although that was the goal. But I definitely did not think I'd be sitting here one day. Look at my dashboard that says almost $13,000 in revenue. And truth be told, this didn't happen because I suddenly became a better designer overnight.
0:46 There was no magical number of listings to hit, and it wasn't because of a listing that went viral, though. Having a few vessels does help, and there wasn't some secret Etsy hack that changed everything insanely. If anything, this happened because I started to approach Etsy in a different way. Over the past few months, especially when it came to product research and competition. And I think that's one of the biggest reasons that I finally hit this number. So today, I want to show you guys some behind the scenes look at my best month. Like I usually do and more importantly, the strategies that got me there. So first let's jump into the stats. So in April I got 9842 visits, and with a conversion
1:36 rate of 4.1%, that got me 403 orders for the month. Now, of course, there are some good days and there are some bad, with my worst performing days having only four orders, such as on Easter and then again on April 24th for some reason. But on really good days I got up to 22 orders as my highest number of orders in terms of revenue. That got me almost $13,000. So that's $12,948 in revenue. But my worst performing day getting me only $59 or almost $60 in revenue. But my best performing day got me $750 in revenue for that day.
2:25 Which is wild because just a year ago. That's how much profit I would make in one month. And it's crazy to think that that's the amount I'm getting in revenue in just a day. Now, as you may know, I like to run ads, so let's jump into my board. So from my ads I got 205,000 views, 3716 clicks, which got me 191 orders. Now that's almost half of my total orders for the month in terms of spend. I spent almost $1,800 in ad spend. Now, what's interesting is that I had actually set my budget to $1,000 per day, but I've been spending
3:10 less than $100 on average per day, despite having such a high budget set. And the most that I've spent is actually just $99 in one day. So I honestly don't have an answer. Whether there's a difference between setting it to $300 per day, $500 per day, versus $1,000 per day as a daily ad budget. But in terms of my role as it is at 2.88. All in all, I would say that my ads have been profitable. Now, finally, when we go to my monthly statement, it says here that my net profit on Etsy for April was $609,000. Of course, we still have our costs.
3:55 And for this month, that came to a total of 405,800 vessels. So if we subtract that, that leaves me with $203,700, or about $3,339 in profit for the month. And if we compute the profit margin, that leaves us with about 33.4% in profit margins, which I am very happy about, considering that the average profit margin for print on demand products is around 20 to 30%. So despite even spending on ads, I still have a profit margin that I'm very, very comfortable with. And this month has been so amazing. I'm so happy I finally reached this point, and I'm
4:43 so happy to share with you guys what went down. Now, the biggest thing that changed for me was finding gaps in the market. I feel like one of the hardest things about Etsy right now is that everyone is selling the same stuff. Same shirts, same mugs, same ornaments come Christmas time and no shade. But I don't even honestly blame people for it. Because if you're new, most of the advice online basically tells you to look at what's already selling and make your own version of it. And yes, I do admit that these product types will always have demand, like people are always looking for shirts. Of course, mugs is a simple, reliable gift and ornament. Well, who doesn't love a custom ornament to hang on their Christmas tree?
5:30 But I think the problem is that by the time that most people discover those ideas, the market is already insanely saturated. And to be completely honest, I am the type of person who hates competition, even if it's a strong signal for demand. So instead of trying to compete harder in crowded product categories, I started looking for places where fewer sellers were paying attention. And the best place I found for this was in a place that was already familiar, already reliable, and that is actually inside the file I've been using five for over a year now, and is constantly adding new product types to their catalog, and every time they do, I get really excited because there's this small window where demand exists,
6:17 but not that many people or sellers are making products for it yet. And that is the opportunity that I found. Most people stay in familiar categories because that's what they know to design for. Again, like the shirts, mugs and ornaments. But newer products are usually lower in competition simply because people haven't adapted to them yet. There aren't many mockups available. There aren't many design examples to copy from, and honestly, a lot of people just ignore them because they feel unfamiliar. But for me, that became the entire strategy. So I started thinking, what product types are people under utilizing right now, and what product types have other YouTube gurus not talked about yet? And once I found a product type that look promising and would fit
7:06 well in my shop for my target market, I didn't even start from scratch creatively. That's another thing that changed for me. I stopped trying so hard to invent completely original ideas. Now, I don't mean I was going to copy designs, obviously I hate that, but I started paying more attention to concepts that were already proven to work. Because if you spend enough time on Etsy, especially in massive niches like moms, teachers, or bachelorette products, you start noticing patterns. Certain art styles start repeating, certain typography styles keep showing up. And of course, certain colors are popular for different contexts. So those niches move so much volume that trends usually show up there
7:52 before they spread into other categories on Etsy. So once I started realizing that, I stopped looking at those products as things to copy and started looking at them as more like inspiration libraries, because at that point, the goal wasn't to take the exact design. The goal was to take the idea behind it and adapt it to a completely different prototype that wasn't gaining traction yet. Because when you think about it, designing for shirts follows completely different design rules compared to designing for something like blankets, tumblers, or even hats. There are some nuances there, like, sure. Technically, you could just slap a shirt design onto a blanket, but when you actually think about how people use blankets,
8:39 they usually lean more into full artwork, repeating patterns, software compositions, or designs that feel more decorative. Overall, a shirt design usually has to catch attention, but a blanket has to feel more immersive and fit inside a room. So instead of directly transferring designs from one product to another, I started translating them based on the product itself. And honestly, this is where it remains a huge part of my workflow. So let me show you what I mean. For example, if I just released this cotton waffle throw and it is an embroidered product. So this is something that I would want to add to my shop, because when we think about blankets, of course we already know about the fleas,
9:27 the velvet and the woven tapestry type of blanket. Right? So this is one of the opportunities that I think would make a great addition to my shop. And so when we look at the personalization options, we could add some embroidery here. And the bottom left in the bottom center or in the bottom right. Not the design for this product. I'm just going to search for inspiration on Etsy. I just typed in Mother's Day shirt and see what is trending for mothers right now. And of course we have the goose. It's still popular. It's still trending. Okay, we have strawberries and I feel like last year lemons was sort of big.
10:15 So our strawberry is now the biggest fruit for the year. You also have coffee and okay I like this one. We have the seagulls yelling Mrs. Brown. This is probably a reference to Finding Nemo, but I think it's safe to say that Disney can't own seagulls as a species. So maybe seagulls. It's their time to shine. I think I want to play with this for our waffle blanket. So I'm just going to copy this and paste this into a workspace. I'm going to crop the art from the shirt just so we could have a cleaner reference image.
11:03 Because what I'm going to do next is I'm going to actually throw this into an AI image generator. I'm going to click on remix and let's say using the same art style. Create a drawing of a screeching seagull a few moments later. So something to note when it comes with AI is that sometimes it takes a few tries for it to really get to your vision, and sometimes it's a matter of refining your prompt and giving it the most specific
11:48 instructions that you could. So I'm just going to play around with my prompts until I get something that I'm happy with. One utility. Later, after a bit of trial and error and a few weird outcomes, I finally landed on this character. Now, because this is going to be an embroidered product, we need to prepare it a bit. So first I'm going to remove the background and then I'm going to click on vectorize. I will max out the colors and click on vectorize. Because one thing to note about embroidery products is that there is a limit to the color palette. So what we're doing now is we are going to change the colors
12:38 in this character to match the available thread colors or embroidered products. So I have this chart here of the viable colors of embroidery threads. And the maximum it could go in one image is six color. So I want to change a few of these colors to narrow it down to six. So we have black. I'm going to keep the black. Then we have this gray shade. Let's make that black this one as well. For gray I'm going to use this shade. Of course we have white. We will keep it at white. Then we have our yellows and oranges. And just making sure that all the colors follow this pre-made palette.
13:25 So we were able to narrow this down to one, two, three, four, five colors. That's good enough for me so that it would print well when embroidered. Now I'm going to take this design and export it as an SVG. Then I'm going to upload this because I want a personal element to this. I'm actually going to make it scream out the name of the mom. So I'm going to add a personalized element which is personalized text. And let's just say for example, this is going to be the mom's name. But for now let's just say Linda and I just want to change the font a bit to make it prettier.
14:13 I think I'll go with this one. As you can see, there is a needle icon that means it is embroidery ready. And I'm just going to turn it a bit and just it like so. And it's as simple as that. You know I didn't have to reinvent the wheel. I just took some Q so that seagulls are trending. I added personalization, which is always a huge point of appeal and made sure that it was embroidery ready. Now let's say, for example, your product covers more space. Maybe the design takes up the whole canvas or the whole blanket. Here's how I would adapt the design to that. So back in our workspace, I'm just going to make a new artboard
15:00 that is 5000 by 6000 pixels, because that is one of the standard blanket dimensions. And I still want to use this character, but I want him to be doing different things. And so I actually generated this image of the character doing different actions. And I'm just gonna isolate these and crop them out. So I have these four that I want to use. I want to actually make this a repeating pattern on the blanket, but I want to elevate this some more and bring back, for example, the customizable element. Now this would be a bit harder to do on 25, but here on Kittle
15:45 that would mean having this as a template live here on Kittle. And every time someone would make an order, I would have to just change the name of the customer. So let's say Linda and I'm going to change the font to this one for now. Increase the font size for the seagull. I want to make it say something like, look mom, I want to make it curve slightly. There we go. Now to make this a pattern, I don't actually have to like group everything and then paste it and make it repeat manually. I can do that on file. So what I'm going to do is group these four
16:33 and export it as a PNG. And let's say you're designing for this sweatshirt blanket I'm just going to add the group of seagulls. And here I'm going to click on Create Pattern. And just like that it's super easy. Duplicated the image lots of times. And I could resize it, make it as big or as small as I want. And because the image has a transparent background, I could change the color however I like. And in just 10 to 15 minutes, I already found two unique angles to adapt the design that I found in the niche. And now I have a unique product that I don't think a lot of people are doing it.
17:23 Okay, so you've got these designs adapted to different products, right? What's next? It's time to infiltrate the market. If I'm testing a new product type, I'm not just uploading five listings to kind of dip my toes into it. I'm uploading at least 20, sometimes 50, and within those 20 listings, I'm testing multiple angles inside different micro niches like different graphics, different patterns, different layouts, and of course, different colors. Because 1 or 5 listings is not enough to gather data, sometimes the product type works, but the graphics don't. Sometimes the niche works, but the design style doesn't. And I found that sometimes even just one tiny
18:09 tweak can completely change how people respond to a product. But to be clear, we are not treating listings like lottery tickets. Think of it more like market coverage. More listings mean more entry points, more keyword opportunities, and more chances for Etsy to understand that your shop is the go to place for that product type, and this gives us more opportunities to learn what customers actually respond to. And honestly, I think a lot of people quit Etsy too early because they never give themselves enough surface area to succeed. One of the biggest bottlenecks when you're introducing new product types is mock ups. A lot of the time, there just aren't enough good templates available yet because the market is still early, which is actually why in the next video,
18:59 I want to show you guys how I make my own drag and drop mock up templates for products that don't already have these kinds of resources available. Because honestly, that became one of the biggest advantages for me when testing newer products. So do subscribe if you don't want to miss this. And look, I also want to end this video. Realistically, I'm not going to sit here expecting every month from now on to magically be at least $12,000 or more. I've learned the hard way that business doesn't work like that. There are, of course, good months, there are bad months, and there are seasonal spikes. And that's just part of running any kind of business online. But I think what gives me a bit more confidence now is that I finally understand my own process better.
19:46 I'm getting better at spotting opportunities earlier, testing ideas quicker and getting my foot in the door before things get too overcrowded. And I still have a lot to learn, obviously, but compared to where I was two years or even just one year ago, I don't feel nearly as lost anymore. Anyway, that's all for today. I hope you found this video helpful and maybe even a little inspiring. If you did, please do me a favor and give this video a like and I will see you in the next one.
