My business summed up in 6 Minutes ("High Leverage Crafting")

[spiritofdiscernment]

Crafting for profit probably conjures mental images of desperate artists, farmers markets, and people selling themselves short offering $1 (free shipping) custom stickers on Etsy that took 20 minutes to make.

I'm an programmer by day but I sell handmade crafts for profit on the weekends. I built a tool using Etsy's API to find opportunities. That is, listings with a proven market demand that I could pull inspiration from.

So with market research I've come to find that the starving artist trope is indeed the case for most people. The distribution of success is incredibly one sided, however, for the folks who do it well there's ample opportunity here.

It's not for everyone but if you have the skills and the right tools it can be a surprisingly high wage part-time job.

In 2022 I earned 32k profit selling handmade goods online @ roughly an hour per day of effort. It definitely skilled work but totally worth it for the time invested. (I lean heavily on digital fabrication)

I've been crafting for a hobby for years but what I do now is so much different than when I started. AMA

I put together a video series on this topic, I call it High Leverage Crafting. This clip is as succinct as I can get at 6 minutes

any feedback is welcome!

 

[xiaolian]

@spiritofdiscernment I love this, and great thought.

 

[davekind77]

@spiritofdiscernment Great idea!!

 

[misty27]

@spiritofdiscernment Does your process work on Shopify as well as Etsy?

 

[spiritofdiscernment]

@misty27 While I cant parse shopify shops to find ideas, you can definitely take winning ideas from etsy & branch out into your own shopify store and I recommend it. I did the math on the fees for both and you only have to do ~$5000 in annual revenue before they break even (less & etsy is cheaper, more and Shopify becomes a better deal). The only catch is youll have to bring your own traffic to your Shopify site which is easier said than done. (Etsy brings ~80% of my etsy shop traffic)

 

[misty27]

@spiritofdiscernment Makes total sense. Thank you!

 

[misty27]

@spiritofdiscernment I'm Interested. Where can I go to learn more? Thanks!

 

[spiritofdiscernment]

@misty27 Cool, well I dont want to trigger mod bots with a gumroad link but if you google search "High Leverage Crafting" Im the only one who uses that phrase. And the youtube video from this post has more links in the description.

 

[sadd]

@spiritofdiscernment Thank you for sharing!

 

[seets]

@spiritofdiscernment Can I have a link to your Etsy please?

 

[apollyx]

@seets 32k with one hour per day is amazing. Checking out your YT channel!