21 KiB
S01|02 - my ai print on demand business strategy
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Review
Summary
This lesson explains the overall AI print-on-demand business model: use AI to create designs, use print-on-demand to fulfill products, and use niche/product strategy to get traffic without relying primarily on ads.
Core Idea
The business combines:
- AI-generated product design
- Print-on-demand fulfillment
- Etsy / Shopify distribution
- product-first traffic strategy
Practical Value
- Explains how POD profit works
- Explains why AI reduces product creation cost/time
- Explains why Etsy is attractive for unique/niche products
- Explains the difference between ads-first and product-first strategy
- Introduces “gap in the market” thinking
Business Model
- Use AI to create artwork
- Prepare print-ready files
- Upload to POD products
- Sell through Shopify and/or Etsy
- Printify fulfills orders automatically
- Profit comes from markup after fees and production costs
Key Strategy
Product-first strategy:
Instead of creating generic products and forcing sales with ads, create specific niche products that fill market gaps.
The product itself becomes part of the traffic strategy.
Important Insight
AI is useful for creating products quickly, but humans are still needed to identify good product opportunities.
AI is good at:
- generating art
- drafting listings
- finding patterns
Humans are better at:
- noticing what is missing
- understanding desire
- spotting niche gaps
- judging emotional appeal
Warnings
- AI does not remove the need for strategy
- Generic AI products will still fail
- Product creation is easy; product selection is hard
- Do not assume “AI-powered” means fully automated
- Market gaps must be judged by human taste and customer insight
My Take
This is one of the most important strategy lessons in the course.
The key point is not “use AI.”
The key point is: → use AI to quickly create products that a human strategically identifies as worth making.
Bottom Line
AI gives speed.
Print-on-demand gives low-risk fulfillment.
But the business depends on:
- niche understanding
- product judgment
- identifying gaps
- creating specific products for specific customers
Transcript
#+begin_ex00:00 Hey, everyone, and welcome back to another video in this
00:02 course. In this video, I am gonna be explaining
00:05 what exactly my AI print on demand business is, how
00:09 it makes money, and how it utilizes AI tools from
00:12 start to finish. I'm going to explain how I use
00:15 AI to make the products I sell and how I
00:17 use AI to drive free traffic to them. Because these
00:20 days, because of the new AI era we're living in,
00:23 you don't actually need to pay for advertisements
00:25 if you don't want to. Plus, in addition, I'll also
00:28 explain how I'm using AI tools to run this as
00:30 a solo 1 person business
00:33 requiring
00:34 0 employees.
00:35 And my hope is that by explaining my business in
00:37 a nutshell, that it will make other video lessons in
00:40 this course make more sense. So let's get started. And
00:44 basically, in a nutshell, what I do is I use
00:47 AI tools to generate art for me and I also
00:49 use AI tools to turn it into high definition digital
00:53 art files that can then be printed onto clothes in
00:56 high definition,
00:57 which is actually kind of crazy for me if I
00:59 think about it. Because before AI, I used to have
01:02 to hire graphic designers and artists to draw specific pictures
01:05 for me if I couldn't find any clip art myself
01:08 to use for it. But now I can literally get
01:11 exactly the image I wanted within seconds. But of course,
01:15 having these digital files isn't enough. To actually sell them
01:17 onto clothes, I come to print on demand tools. And
01:20 of them all, Printify is the biggest and most popular.
01:23 And by the way, if you aren't quite sure what
01:26 print on demand is, it's basically a product fulfillment method.
01:29 So you take t shirts for example, the most popular
01:32 print on demand product with customers by far. Well, there
01:35 are 2 ways you could make and sell t shirts.
01:37 1 way is you could literally get a bunch of
01:39 t shirts printed in advance by a printing company from,
01:43 say, China and store them in, say, your garage and
01:46 then list them for sale online. And if somebody went
01:49 and bought a t shirt from you, then you in
01:51 your house would package it up and then ship it
01:54 out with the postal service manually.
01:56 So that is 1 way. The other way, of course,
01:58 is that you could use a print on demand service
02:01 like Printify. What these services do is they let you
02:04 upload your t shirt prints to the website. They'll then
02:06 give you a product mock up photo of what the
02:08 t shirt will look like printed. You can then advertise
02:11 online your t shirt for sale and if somebody buys
02:13 it, Printify's print shop will see the order. They'll then
02:16 print the design onto the t shirt, package it up,
02:19 and ship it out to the customer for you. So
02:21 for me, since I'm running a 1 person business, print
02:24 on demand is a great way to do it because
02:27 to scale, I don't have to hire any employees to
02:29 be running a print shop for me or managing a
02:32 warehouse for me. The print on demand app is the
02:34 1 managing that. And the way that you profit with
02:36 this is that you have a markup price on your
02:39 products. So you take t shirts. Right now on Printify
02:42 with a premium account, they cost about 6 to 10
02:44 dollars to buy and sell. And then most sellers, myself
02:48 included, will charge the customer the shipping price as a
02:51 separate charge. Well, most t shirts online sell for about
02:54 17 to 23 dollars with a medium price being around
02:57 20 dollars So that's how print on demand stores like
03:00 mine make money. We add a markup to our products.
03:03 And most print on demand stores these days that I
03:05 know are usually after transaction fees and printing fees left
03:09 with a profit margin of, on average, around 20 to
03:13 50 percent. And for me, my profit margin these days
03:16 is generally sitting around 30 percent on average. And for
03:20 me, as I show in step 3 of this course,
03:22 I've chosen to sell my products on 2 platforms.
03:24 Firstly, I set up Shopify stores and I list my
03:27 products for sale myself online. If you've never heard of
03:30 Shopify, it's basically an AI powered online store builder. You
03:33 can build your own online store that you host on
03:36 your own domain name that you own and it has
03:39 a great integration with Printify.
03:41 And then secondly, I list and sell my products on
03:43 Etsy. Now, Etsy, if you've never heard about it before,
03:46 is 1 of the biggest online marketplaces in the world.
03:49 The only ones that are bigger as far as I'm
03:51 aware are Amazon and eBay. And honestly, if you want
03:54 to sell your products on those marketplaces too, you can
03:57 as all 3 of the big marketplaces
04:00 have integrations with Printify. For me though, I've picked Etsy
04:03 to focus on over those 2 because I prefer the
04:06 customer base. Because unlike Amazon and eBay, Etsy doesn't allow
04:10 most mass produced products on the platform.
04:12 All products require some form of human creativity,
04:15 and print on demand products, including designs made with AI,
04:19 fall under the design section of their allowed product categories,
04:23 which is why, of course, Etsy has a direct integration
04:26 and close relationship with Printify.
04:28 But basically, by not allowing most mass produced products on
04:32 your platform, it means that the customer base that Etsy
04:34 attracts is usually happier to pay higher prices
04:37 because they know the products they're buying are individually made
04:40 to order, which also means that Etsy has become popular
04:43 as a place to buy gifts on. People like the
04:45 fact that the items you find on there are unique
04:47 and not mass produced in China. So every month, Etsy
04:51 attracts hundreds of millions of visitors, and every year, Etsy
04:54 brings in billions of dollars in sales and products sold
04:57 through their marketplace. For example, in 20 24,
05:00 Etsy sellers like me sold over 12600000000.0
05:03 dollars of products on there combined.
05:06 But because mass produced products are not allowed, it means
05:09 then that there is a lot less competition
05:12 for these sales, which is a big reason why a
05:15 lot of print on demand sellers such as myself, like
05:18 to use Etsy. But, of course, the question a lot
05:20 of people often have at this point is this. Okay,
05:23 Sarah. I see what you're doing. You're using AI to
05:27 create InDesign products that you then list for sale online
05:31 in your own stores.
05:32 That's great and all. But having products, whether they're AI
05:36 generated products or not, is not a guarantee for success.
05:40 For example, if I set up a lemonade stand, that's
05:43 great. But if no 1 buys my lemonade, I won't
05:46 make money. Right? You actually need to convince people to
05:50 buy your lemonade.
05:52 Now most people assume that to sell lemonade, you would
05:55 need to spend a lot of money to advertise it.
05:57 But let me ask you a question. What if you
05:59 opened your lemonade stand on the side of a busy
06:01 street on a hot day with lots of people walking
06:04 past it already?
06:06 And even better, what if those people couldn't get access
06:09 to water so their only good easy option that they
06:11 could see to quench their thirst was to buy your
06:14 lemonade?
06:15 Chances are people would just buy it from you. No
06:18 advertising required. That is my approach. You see, many people
06:22 don't take this approach. They open their lemonade stand on
06:25 a cold, empty street and they try to brute force
06:27 their way to success with advertisements.
06:30 For me, I call this the advertisement first strategy whereas
06:34 I instead, of course, try to open my lemonade stand
06:36 on a hot, busy street so that it can sell
06:39 itself.
06:40 And I like to call this the product first strategy.
06:44 And the way that I do this, the way that
06:46 I open on a hot busy street is I focus
06:48 on finding this, a gap in the market. A gap
06:51 in the market is a phrase in the business world
06:53 that means that you identify a product or service that
06:56 people would like to buy that doesn't yet exist or
06:59 that it does exist, but that people would like more
07:02 of or better options for. For example, in 1 video
07:05 tutorial I made, I identified that a popular style of
07:08 t shirt was 1 where you have a retro style
07:11 anime painting of, say, cats eating ramen and that this
07:14 was very popular. So what I did was I created
07:17 the same style of t shirt that is popular on
07:19 Etsy and Amazon. But this time, I had it feature
07:22 a cocky dog eating the ramen and I used AI
07:24 tools to create this. And so this is an example
07:27 of how I look for gaps in the market that
07:29 I can fill. I call this the cross niche formula.
07:32 By doing this, I had taken a proven popular design
07:34 concept of cat seeding ramen but now made it available
07:38 to an entirely new customer base, corgi owners. And so
07:42 this is what I do. I spend most of my
07:44 time looking for these gaps in the market and then
07:46 trying to create a good product to fill that gap
07:49 rather than spending my time creating ads and testing ads.
07:52 Because from my experience,
07:53 creating great products is a traffic strategy in of itself
07:57 thanks to AI. You see, this is a slide from
08:00 1 of Etsy's investor meetings and this slide is very
08:03 interesting. It shows how previously Etsy's recommendation
08:06 algorithm,
08:07 which would recommend products to customers,
08:09 used to heavily favor products that were already popular. And
08:13 this is how most people seem to assume,
08:15 in my experience,
08:17 how these algorithms work. They assume that these algorithms are
08:20 designed to keep popular things, well, popular,
08:24 and so they often actually get quite defeatist.
08:27 They say, if I open up a new store, Sarah,
08:30 no 1 will know who I am, so I will
08:33 have no sales and I will have no reviews.
08:35 Because I am a nobody, surely the algorithm is just
08:39 going to ignore me. And that used to be largely
08:42 true, to be fair, but there was a big problem.
08:45 When algorithms only favor things that are already popular, people
08:49 get bored, And for Etsy, this was bad. People saw
08:52 the same items over and over again and they got
08:55 bored and they stopped buying new things. And so what
08:58 the slide was showing was that Etsy was announcing a
09:00 change in direction.
09:02 Rather than favoring items that were already popular, they were
09:05 now going to be shifting gears to try and identify
09:08 new products that, while were not widely popular, were potentially
09:13 more specific
09:14 to an individual's own wants. And this all happened around
09:17 the same time as the TikTok algorithm revolution.
09:20 This pretty much changed the game for the Internet. The
09:23 TikTok algorithm was the first to do this concept. TikTok
09:26 is famous for the fact that random people with no
09:28 followers
09:29 can become viral hit sensations overnight, and it's because TikTok
09:32 figured out that rather than just showing the most popular
09:35 videos over and over again, it's much better to take
09:38 all videos that get posted to the platform and give
09:41 them all a small amount of views as a test.
09:44 And if that test goes well, the algorithm will keep
09:47 showing the video to more and more people. Well, this
09:50 is exactly what Etsy's algorithm is designed to do too.
09:53 It now gives all new products what is often called
09:56 test impressions.
09:58 So for example, do you see this homepage here? You
10:00 can see that Etsy has showcased a bunch of products
10:02 to me as part of its recommendations.
10:05 Well, Etsy can now pop new products in its recommendation
10:07 slots like these to test if anyone will click on
10:10 a new product or even better, if they'll actually go
10:13 and click and buy it. And so if people do
10:15 click on your new product that they test with these
10:17 test impressions,
10:18 the algorithm will keep showing it to more and more
10:21 potential customers. And here's the thing. The AI is getting
10:24 better and better at choosing who to recommend your products
10:28 to as part of its test. Etsy has announced that
10:31 they have integrated AI machine learning into the algorithm, and
10:34 it is now even better at anticipating
10:36 what unique, interesting product
10:38 might be best suited to specific individuals
10:41 to recommend and promote on their Etsy home feed and
10:45 their search results.
10:47 Basically, AI is incredibly good at figuring out just by
10:50 looking at your product listing which customers in its database
10:54 based on their data that they should match it to.
10:57 They figure out basically who they should show your products
11:00 to. Not only this, but increasingly, more and more people
11:03 are finding products to buy through AI chatbots themselves such
11:06 as ChatchePT
11:07 by asking it to recommend products to them too. So
11:11 with all this in mind, this is why I believe
11:13 that in our new AI era that a product first
11:16 strategy is a fantastic way to get traffic because with
11:19 AI algorithms,
11:20 the goal isn't for them to find the most popular
11:23 product. Instead, their goal is to find and identify the
11:26 most specific product that can meet their users' individual needs.
11:30 It is hyper personalization.
11:33 So when I was talking earlier about opening your lemonade
11:36 stand on a hot busy street, this is what I
11:38 mean by taking a product first approach and designing niche
11:41 products that fill gaps. I'm creating exactly
11:44 what the AI recommendation
11:46 algorithms want and what they're looking for. So the AI
11:49 recommendation
11:49 algorithms,
11:50 they are the busy street with hundreds of millions of
11:53 users who are utilizing them, looking for unique gifts to
11:57 buy, and my niche products are the lemonade.
12:01 And if you think about it, right, before AI generation
12:04 tools, making all of these products would have been very
12:08 expensive.
12:09 Because you think about that Caughey Ramen t shirt, to
12:12 make it previously, it could have cost you hundreds of
12:15 dollars because someone would have had to have drawn it
12:18 by scratch.
12:19 And, well, that is slow, and you would have had
12:21 to have potentially waited a week for them to draw
12:23 it and then to send it to you. But now
12:25 I can literally come up with a product idea, make
12:28 it, and then list it for sale in less than
12:30 10 minutes because the AI generates the art and it
12:32 upscales it for print and then it even generates the
12:35 listing text for me. And by using AI, I've been
12:38 able to grow a large selection of niche products that
12:41 I've been able to use to grow and scale my
12:44 sales. And of course, because I'm choosing to use print
12:47 on demand apps to print and ship my products, it
12:50 also means that adding new products to my store is
12:53 very quick too because I can skip the traditional slow
12:56 process of having to produce t shirts in bulk and
12:59 then ship them all the way over from China. It
13:02 is this incredible combination
13:03 of AI combined with autonomous
13:06 print on demand stores, which has just been absolutely game
13:10 changing for
13:11 me. However, where people go wrong, in my personal opinion,
13:15 is that when they see an AI powered business, they
13:17 go, ah, it should just be run entirely
13:20 with AI and with no human ideas,
13:23 no human creativity,
13:25 nothing like that. But I tell you what, at least
13:27 for now, I am not approaching my AI powered business
13:32 like that at all. Nope. And that's because there's actually
13:35 a very important human part to a successful business, and
13:39 it's this part here, finding a gap in the market.
13:42 Right now, the truth is is that AI is not
13:45 very good at identifying these. If you ask Chat GPT
13:48 to find gaps in the market for you, it is
13:51 unlikely to do a good job. And that's because
13:54 identifying a gap is all about spotting what is missing,
13:58 whereas AI is all about looking at information that exists
14:02 and noting patterns within existing data. But us humans, well,
14:06 we're actually pretty good at spotting gaps because our brains
14:09 don't just analyze data. Our brains let us experience things
14:14 like wants and desires.
14:17 And so honestly, the easiest way for me to spot
14:20 gaps in the market is to create and sell products
14:23 in a niche in which I am a customer in.
14:26 Because that way, I can identify product gaps by looking
14:29 at what is for sale already in the niche and
14:32 thinking,
14:33 what product would I like to buy that doesn't yet
14:35 already exist? And then I can use AI to help
14:38 me create that product. I tap into my own wants
14:42 and my own desires.
14:43 And so because I think that this is really important,
14:46 I've decided to make step 1 all about how I
14:49 choose a new niche for a store. Because by choosing
14:53 a store niche, it lets me do 2 things. 1
14:55 of those, of course, being the opportunity
14:58 to build a store around something of which I'm passionate
15:01 about, which then, of course, makes it easier for me
15:03 to come up with product ideas because I can think
15:05 to myself, okay,
15:07 well, what product or design would I like to buy?
15:10 But that I can't because it doesn't currently exist. But
15:13 secondly, as I'll explain in another video in this module,
15:16 by starting a new store focused on a niche customer
15:19 base, it makes it easier for algorithms to figure out
15:22 who to recommend my products to. So yes, that is
15:25 my AI powered print on demand business in a nutshell.
15:29 And remember,
15:30 this is just an overall look at how my business
15:33 works. All of these ideas that I've talked about, picking
15:36 a niche, coming up with product ideas, optimizing them for
15:40 AI recommendations,
15:41 These are all topics which I talk about more inside
15:45 of the course. So don't worry if there is an
15:47 idea that you thought to yourself that sounds really interesting,
15:49 but I don't fully understand it yet because
15:52 I will be going more in-depth into these ideas in
15:56 dedicated videos.
15:57 And speaking of other videos, now that this video is
16:00 over, it is time to go and watch the next
16:03 video. So go ahead, open up my next video, and
16:06 I will see you in the next lesson.ample #+end_example