19 KiB
S01|02 - my ai print on demand business strategy
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#+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