August 18, 2025 • 34 mins
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I sat down with Cody Schneider and we broke down what might be the easiest business you can start online right now. Cody walked me through how to launch a fully automated print on demand business using AI-generated graphics, Etsy, and tools like Everbee, Printify, and N8N. We talked about how to find winning products with data, spin up thousands of listings without touching a design tool, and scale the whole thing using automations and zero inventory.
Then we riffed on a killer idea: building a merch automation agency for creators. Cody showed me exactly how he’d pitch creators, find their catchphrases, design the merch, cold email them, and even handle all fulfillment using platforms like Fourthwall. If you want a smart, low-cost way to make money with AI and automation, this is it.
You can follow Cody on YouTube and X to see more of what he’s building.
Enjoy!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
It's a great first business. It's not complicated, basically
0 startup costs and like has a ton of opportunity to grow.
You can make 100 grand a year doing this strategy.
The goal here is just like, I'm just trying to make passive
income, right? That whole thing could be
automated. ChatGPT can go in one shot fees
now. I love print on demand,
especially when compared to dropshipping.
All this stuff's coming from China.
It takes a month to get to work,it's probably crappy quality,
(00:21):
weird packaging, and then the seller is hardly making any
money because you really have touse paid ads to make drop
shipping work. Worst case, you learn and you
make money on the next thing because of what you learned.
In best case, you make a lot of money.
So what do you have to lose? OK, I have my friend Cody
Schneider on the podcast. And if you like idea guys, AI
ideas, tactical ideas, how to start a business, how to grow a
(00:43):
business, unique business ideas that you can start with very
little money, he's your guy. I had some of the most fun I've
ever had while recording an episode.
I'm not exaggerating. I already know Cody's going to
be a returned guest today. We talked all about print on
demand business opportunities. He's had Etsy stores for
addiction decade, he's done all kinds of print on demand and now
with these AI image generation capabilities, it is easier to
(01:05):
start a print on demand businessthan ever before.
We got super tactical nitty gritty.
I breakdown terms for you in a more simple way.
Here's a quick glossary. He mentions ROAS, that's return
on ad spend, how much money you make from the money you spend on
ads. He mentions Jason, which is just
a way of displaying data, and hementions N8 N, which is a piece
of software that offers automation capabilities.
(01:27):
You're going to love this one. Enjoy.
Everything that I'm going to share today is like, you could
learn this in a weekend if you put like 8 hours into it.
Yeah. So first one I want to start
with because I think it'll be just different for your audience
is do you know a lot about like print on demand?
Do you know that category? Cool.
So like Etsy is a huge place forprint on demand, but
traditionally, like if you wanted to go and create like a
(01:49):
ton of graphics for print on demand, it used to take, you
know, hours or you'd have to have like some type of.
Tedious. Yeah, like design, you know,
skill set. So there's this opportunity
right now, but I think this is like a weekend business you
could start that's like basically 0 startup costs and
like has a ton of opportunity togrow.
So it's basically it's doing Etsy print on demand, but using
AI generated graphics. I'm going to break down all of
(02:11):
this for how you do this is basically you need to go and do
product research on Etsy for which are the best selling
products. So there's tons of tools that do
this. My friend owns one of these
companies, it's called Everbee. And let me bring it up and I can
show you what this looks like. So basically it's Matt.
Do you know jungle Scout Chris? Oh yeah, for Amazon, right?
(02:34):
Totally. So it's basically Jungle Scout,
but for Etsy. And what it does is it helps you
identify like best selling products on Etsy.
So it's a Chrome extension. They also have like a web app
version of it. But what it does is it'll show
you the products. So you go to Etsy and you search
a keyword like we'll say like horse shirt, you know, or we'll
say horse sweatshirt, something very generic.
(02:56):
And then from here, you're goingto find these like these
products that are selling well. And how you identify those is
using a software like Everbeat that basically will show you
like the estimated search volume, It'll show you the
estimated sales, the estimated revenue.
So what this allows for you to do then is that say we identify
like, hey, this, this one is working, you know, selling super
(03:18):
well, right? I can then take that image.
So I'll take a screenshot of this and I go to the Chat GPTAPI
and I say, you know, generate a version of this basically.
So now to break this down, what this ends up looking like, you
have the keywords that they're like basically optimizing for.
So all of these, you put those in the title, the description
(03:38):
ends up being exactly the same, do the exact same pricing
structure. And then now you can, because of
these AI tools, you can go and generate these images for this
print on demand catalog that like before, like you would have
to have, you know, some type of skill set to even be able to
like, you know, like design thisor like some type of like
drawing capability, right? It's, you know, ChatGPT can go
(04:01):
in one shot piece now. And what we're doing this or the
experiment we've been running with is like just vector style
images. So stuff where it's like very
like black and white. An example of this would be, you
know, something like this as an example.
Less variables for ChatGPT to screw it up.
Exactly. Yeah.
But like, you know, of course, running in this direction, it's,
it's going to like perfectly make a version of this, but it's
(04:23):
an entirely new version. Now you said ChatGPT API, are
you just using the app or using like something that you've?
You could use just the ChatGPT app.
We're doing this at scale, right?
So we're like, OK, let's go generate 1000.
Like we're going to find 1000 winning products and we're going
to go generate 1000 different, you know, images.
But if you wanted to start this out manually, you could go to
(04:43):
ChatGPT and here let's just likedo it actually cuz I'm.
Curious now, are you? Are you using Everbee for like
the scale and automation part orjust for the research?
Just for the research, once you've identified the URL, so
like and Everbee, you can have it where it basically you can
download the research as a CSV. So the Chrome extension runs, it
shows you the best winning products from this page you
downloaded as a CSV. We'll take those top ten winners
(05:05):
and then we'll go and generate, you know, graphics based off of
those top ten winners. Something to think about for for
people if they're going to do this is I would stay away from
words and like phrases as much as you can and kind of turn into
a just a nightmare to like from a trademark standpoint, you can
look up these trademarks. So like, for example, dogs and
(05:26):
horses make me happy. So like some random person
probably owns that trademark. And occasionally they'll just go
to all of the main like sellers.Like, of course, this make me
happy trademark, So we'll go to all the main sellers and ask for
like the sellers to take them down and you'll get flagged as
like a Yep, like basically, you know, abusing the trademark,
(05:49):
which gets a like a negative like mark against your Etsy
shop. And so if you get like three of
them, you typically like, yeah, you get shuts down.
They flag your social and you have to like, you know,
basically restart the whole process.
So I would just stick with generics.
Those just safer. And again, because this is the
scale of volume game, like how can I get 10,000 listings on
Etsy live? That's, you know, that's what
you're trying to do here. So but yeah, but you can do this
(06:11):
with the ChatGPT like just the the web app or you can use the
ChatGPT image API, you can provide the image type and all
this can be done with no code like it can be done with
likemake.com. Super easy.
Which is an automation. You can do this with N8 N which
is an automation. And N8 N is a little bit more
complicated unless you know thistrick.
So with N8 N there are leaning. Forward trick.
(06:34):
So with N8 N, it's just Jason ishow they structure the the
flows. So like with make, you basically
have to go through and like set up each of the nodes, but I can
just go and tell AI to make an N8N Jason file for the the flow
that I'm trying to create. So we're going to just do this
right now. I'm using perplexity Pro
(06:54):
Perplexity Pro is Claude 4. And so I'm going to say make N8N
Jason file or Jason flow for thefollowing workflow.
And we'll do take image from Google Drive sends to Chat
GPTAPI, save image to new GoogleDrive folder.
(07:20):
And what it's going to do right here is it's basically going to
go and write the NANJ song code.And then I can just take that
into my NAN instance. I can copy and paste that in and
it's basically going to like work right out-of-the-box is
like what we're seeing. It's like Claude is so good at
writing this type of Jason code,it's ridiculous.
So you. Can see this thing.
(07:41):
Rendered here. Let me see if I can break that
down for everyone. So stuff like Zapier or was the
automation platform pre AI? Of course they do AI stuff, but
that's like they invented automations, right?
NA then is the AI first, more complex but more feature rich
version of Zapier or make.com. You're saying NA N is kind of
tricky, difficult to work with if for non coder because of
(08:03):
these Jason files. But if you pay 20 bucks a month
for Perplexity Pro, which uses Cloud four on the back end, and
you prompt it as you just showed, which we'll put in the
show notes, you can get around that confusion and anyone, even
the layman like myself, can use N8N successfully. 100%
absolutely. That's exactly it.
Why N 8 N is so powerful is because it has a ton of
(08:25):
community notes so and it can also just do web hooks really
easily. So even if there isn't a node
like for example, there's no Zapier or make.com integration,
but with a web hook you can callmost AP is.
And an API is just basically like an endpoint that you can
say, hey, I want this back from you, right?
And then you like. Just a way for softwares to talk
(08:45):
to each other. Exactly, exactly.
And then it sends that information back.
And so that is how you can basically like this is a really
small version of this where thisextends to and you can even get
further. It's like, OK, cool.
I identified all of the winning products on Etsy.
I extracted the photos from all those winning products.
You know, scraping using something like scraping Bee or
(09:07):
you know, any of these like scraping softwares.
Honestly, Appify would probably work for this as well.
And then once I have all those images in a Google Drive folder,
I can be like, OK, like do this flow, but I want to extend this
flow out even further. I want you to also upload this
to Printify automatically for me.
Add it to, you know, shirts to sweatshirts to mugs, you know,
(09:30):
all the different variations that you could sell of the same
graphic. And then within Printify, you
can just bulk select one, click publish and it goes live on
Etsy. And so that's like the whole
like, you know, process that youcan do with this so.
So it's your automation. Sorry.
Go ahead, you. Know I was just going to say you
have questions, happy to answer anything so.
So with what you're doing, you're using NAD N and other
(09:52):
similar tools to scale this thisEtsy strategy.
What is your goal? Like?
Are you just reselling stuff on Etsy?
Are you cross selling, you know,best sellers on Etsy, on other
platforms, on your own Shopify site?
What is your whole goal with this?
Yeah, I mean, you could take thesame graphics and go to like
Amazon merch, which is a second another category Etsy we found
(10:13):
is this like I've also sold, sold on Etsy for like the last
whatever it is like 10 plus years.
So I we just know the platform way better.
But the thing with this is basically it's just a volume
game, like you're trying to get 10,000 listings up and the
margin on these shirts. 50 of them will be good and the rest
of them won't make any money. Exactly.
You know what? It's the classic rule, like 8020
(10:34):
rule, right? Where it's like 20% of your
products are gonna make 80% of your revenue.
It's gonna be the same strategy.You don't know what's going to
win. But the arbitrage here is that
to create these graphics like I used to, like we used to do
this, we would hire like offshore talent.
They were like, you know, doing like illustrator files that they
could only do like one a day. So I got 10 of them working in
(10:54):
the Philippines doing 1A day. I mean, it was just like a
massive operation. Now you can do that same thing,
but like without any humans, maybe one person running this,
just a 1, you know, just you basically running this and get
to a scale where the listings are at a volume size that you're
just creating more this area andreally the to break down like
why this works? So Etsy is a platform that
(11:16):
already has a bunch of organic search traffic for a lot of
these keywords. Like if I go and search, you
know, horse sweatshirt on Google, like Etsy is going to
come up in those top listings, you're going to see them here.
That's that's Amazon. So what you're doing is
basically what they would call parasite SEO.
You're using the domain authority and the the current
(11:38):
rankings of these websites to get like sales.
So for example, as he's here, somebody clicks into horse
sweatshirt. If you rank in that top position
for horse sweatshirt, you're going to just get sales.
As long as the graphic is something that people want to
buy and you know what people want to buy because we already
did the research with Everbee toidentify those things, right?
(12:00):
And So what you're basically like this is solving as the cold
start problem of how do I get, you know, like how do I get
trust enough for people to buy this from me?
And when I lean on a platform, Ican solve that that cold start
problem. So.
Yeah. And for those listening,
parasite SEO is just like a parasite.
It's just SEO where you don't have any authority, you have no
(12:20):
reputation online. Google doesn't know you exist.
You just latch on to someone like Etsy and say hey, I'm
relevant now. Exactly, exactly.
And you're, you're really just using like you could, we could
go and look at this actually like for all of the, let me
bring this up. So like, do you see this forward
slash market URL? So that means they have this
like subdirectory on the entire website.
(12:42):
Like that's where all of their product collection pages is what
they would be called are made. So Etsy has created 19,000,000
of those and we have the opportunity basically to go and
build products for all 19,000,000 that we can then show
up in front of, right? So they have all this traffic
that they're trying and like howdo they make money?
They make money when somebody comes in and makes a purchase.
(13:04):
So if your products somebody comes in and they make a
purchase, you rank higher withintheir internal search algorithm
and then they're doing all the work for you, though to show up
for, you know, 18K gold chain for grounding shoes for briar
rose ring for I mean it also, ifyou're trying to find product
categories that are like new andlike like quickly, like becoming
(13:26):
like a like like searched. That's he's actually a great
place to do research for this. So do that search.
What I did is cite Colon at etsy.com/market.
You select tools on Google and then I can say show me in the
past 24 hours. And so it's going to give me all
of the pages. Yeah, that's it.
That's made it for Cody. That's why people watch this.
(13:49):
Totally and so here's some of them that come up.
It's gag portraits, tweeter bird, phone case, gold filled
shoot or gold filled Canada. Some of them don't make any
sense, right? But at least this gives you an
understanding of the like Etsy is seeing that people are
starting to search these and so it is building out these pages
programmatically based off this data.
(14:10):
That is their real business is basically huge marketplace
looking at the data, building pages to like get this free
traffic and then, you know, categorizing all the products
appropriately to increase the sales as much as possible,
right? And so this is like a really
quick and easy way to like, you know, find a product category
that's growing quickly offense like offensive get well soon
(14:32):
cards. This is a great one like that
you could just literally only build a shop around that use AI
to generate the graphics and theimages like Canva, right and use
a print on demand company, some like Gelato, I think they have
these that will actually print these cards and send them to
people so. You know, what's crazy to me is
so many of these trends start with short form video.
(14:54):
Like all of a sudden someone posts on TikTok about Dubai
chocolate, which no one's ever heard of.
And this video goes mega viral, gets 100 million views.
And then it just starts disseminating out on TikTok and
you have hundreds and thousands of people posting out Dubai
chocolate. And then you go to this tool,
you go to Google with this trickand you search Dubai chocolate.
And then days, weeks, months later, you start to see it down
(15:16):
to kind of filter down the funnel.
Now people are making purchasingdecisions based on this, what
started as one viral video and then it becomes more and more
saturated. And you can look at the Google
Trends chart and it goes up and then it goes down.
But what you're showing us enables people to get ahead of
that, right? Because as soon as people go
from TikTok to I want to buy, it's going to show up right here
(15:36):
and you won't be too late. A. 100 percent, 100%.
And if you're the whole point ofthis too is you're not guessing
right, you're not guessing aboutany of this.
Like all of this is data-driven.The only AI part of this is the
human labor. There's nothing else that's
happening. The goal here is just like, I'm
just trying to make passive income, right?
Like this is a passive income type of business.
That's just an online business version.
(15:57):
And you know, I'm not saying you're not going to get like
crazy wealthy doing this except you.
I know you can do that. Right, but it's like in.
Reality, the average person likeyou, I mean, you can do it.
It's just, it's just, it's a lotof work.
But like realistically, like youcan, you can make another 100
grand a year doing this strategy.
It's not unreasonable. This was like one of the first
businesses that I ran was basically a version of this.
(16:19):
So anyway, yeah. So let me summarize the
opportunity. So you're going to Etsy, you're
using that tool ever be you're finding winning products, then
you're using an N8 N template, which you make in perplexity
pro. That template will go out and
connect your research with your Chat GPTAPI, find winning
products. And then once you find them,
(16:39):
you're using the same keywords, similar pictures to post them on
the same platform. And that's something that a lot
of people are like, all right, this is retail arbitrage.
I buy on Amazon, selling Walmart, buy on eBay, sell on
Facebook. Like no, like you just find the
winners and sell them on the same platform where the demand's
already proven. And then the magic of print on
demand is you're not buying any T-shirts.
You're not making possession of any of this stuff.
(17:02):
Like, you're just sending all ofthese orders through an API,
through an automation to a big warehouse in, you know, Kansas
City, MO. And they're shipping out the
hats and sweatshirts all over the world, right, While you
make, you know, cents to dollarson every little transaction.
100% I mean, the cost for this are so cheap too, right?
I think Etsy listing now, I don't know if it's 20 or 30
(17:23):
cents, I can't remember. But again, you you pay that
premium because they have all the traffic.
So you don't have to solve the traffic problem.
You just have to make the product that's most likely to
sell. So their cost is basically like
the subscription for something like an ever be the cost to
generate the image and then basically the listing fee on
Etsy. A last thing too, on the image
generation side, an actual like technical thing, you'll go and
(17:45):
remove the background from thoseimages that they provide back.
One of them is like BG back. Of services.
Yeah, hundreds of those, but basically get into that that
version where it's like a PNG where it has a clear background.
That's what you're what you're actually doing in a printer 5,
but just making sure you know, trying to get so.
You remove the background. You remove the background before
you sent it. Send it to ChatGPT through the
(18:07):
API. Remove the background before you
send it to printfy. So you would scrape it from
Etsy, send it to ChatGPT, get the image back, send it to a
background remover, get the image back, send that to
Printfy, send that to Etsy. OK, at what point, if any, is
your manual involvement needed throughout this process?
That whole thing could be automated like they would just
(18:29):
be the the research on the frontend.
In reality, you could probably automate that in some capacity.
There's just like, not a great tool out there for it, but you.
But The thing is, like a lot of this stuff is so fun.
Like why automate the research? It's so fun.
Totally, totally. And then the posting, the final
process of like posting them live within Printfine or within,
you know, Printfull, those are the two pieces, that whole
middle section, which is all thelabor like that can basically be
(18:52):
removed, right? So yeah.
OK, first of all, like this isn't like very tangible, but
for those listening, this stuff that he's describing, like
setting up an automation, your first automation for the first
time and just seeing it work, it's just the best feeling in
the world. It's just so fun.
Like it's, you know, skydiving level fun.
So this isn't like, you know, yeah, you can make money
(19:13):
scrubbing toilets. I talk about that stuff.
That's not fun. Scrubbing toilets objectively is
not fun. This is fun.
And you know, worst case you make no money, but you learn
when you make money on the next thing because of what you
learned, best case you make a lot of money.
So what do you have to lose? No 100%.
Have you ever found a situation since you've been on Etsy for so
long, where there is an advantage to take a winning
(19:36):
product that's just winning organically, copy it, and just
put paid ads behind it because you know that your cost per
acquisition will be low enough? Yeah, great question.
Google ads in particular are like shopping ads, absolutely
right. If you're saying like this horse
shirt is absolutely crushing it on Etsy, we know that like you
know, Etsy ranks for horse sweatshirt on Page 1 and like a
(19:56):
majority of the traffic has to be coming from that.
You throw up a Shopify store andyou know, run like Google
shopping ads directly to that and Google shopping ads, just so
like people understand what those are, are the ads.
Let me screen share and I can show you what they look like in
the actual like search results. But it's the ads that look like
like again with you horse sweatshirt.
(20:18):
It's these here where it's like these like.
You know, the images, these are all Google Shopping ads.
So how you do these is you basically set up like a Shopify
store. You then connect it to Google
Shopping so it pulls in all of your SKU data.
And then within Google Ads you can say, hey, I want you to bid
on this keyword horse sweatshirtand show this specific product
for that keyword. So you could double down on
(20:39):
this. And then what this turns into is
it's just like a arbitrage game and you're like, it's a Roaz
game, right? So it's like I put a dollar in
and maybe $2.00 comes out. So like maybe my margin isn't
crazy good, right? And what I mean by that is like
for every dollar I spend in ads,I get like, you know, $2.00 back
in revenue and that so and say your margin on that second
(21:01):
dollar is only, you know, 20%, which is like probably what
you'll end up seeing. So it's like I'm only making
like $0.20 off of every dollar Ispend.
But if I go and spend, you know,100 grand and it's like that 20
cent starting to look suddenly looks big.
The arbitrage here as well. And I'll just again, just more
sauce for everybody is that ad spend.
(21:22):
If you have an Amex or a Chase Sapphire card, they're the Amex
card. I can't remember the name of it,
but they get Amex gives you 4X points on every dollar you spend
on paid ads and Sapphire gives you 3X points on every dollar
you spend on paid ads. And So what that translates into
is like, yeah, maybe you're making the Super small margin
and like, Oh yeah, we're getting25, yeah, whatever, like 20
(21:44):
grand a month off of this shirt or, or yeah, 2 grand a month off
this shirt. But you can use this as a way to
like go and stack points. So it's like, oh, you want to
take a, you know, a trip to southern France and want to fly
business class, you know, all the way there and then also stay
in a hotel for free. You're basically spending money
to make small fractions of money.
(22:05):
And then the byproduct of that is like layering on.
So I I have friends that do this.
I've done this in the past as well so.
I love print on demand, especially when compared to drop
shipping. You know, 10 years ago drop
shipping was everything. But when you really break down
the business model, it's pretty crappy.
Like all the stuff is coming from China.
Some woman in in middle America,you know, buys this $30 thing.
It takes a month to get to her. She's likely chart filed dispute
(22:28):
against her credit card by then.By the time it gets there, it's
probably crappy quality. It comes to this weird
packaging. The branding is not the same as
the person she thought she bought it from.
And then the seller is hardly making any money because you
really have to use paid ads to make drop shipping work.
And then like, you might be selling these handheld blenders
that were all the rage on TikTokat the time.
And then by the time it arrives,it's not cool anymore.
(22:49):
No one wants it. But with print on demand, as
long as we're wearing T-shirts, sweatshirts, hats, there's going
to be a business there. And they're not coming from
China, they're coming from any number of factories in these big
companies like Printfy have a half dozen factories all over
the country, so you can still get the shirt in a few days.
If the design or the pattern goes out of style, you lose
nothing. Totally.
You have no inventory you're sitting on, you have no sunk
(23:11):
cost. I think it's also just a Better
Business. Like the biology of the business
is better, right? Like I always just crazy to me
all the like everybody that goesinto drop shipping because it's
like you can never sell a drop shipping company, right?
Like full stop, period. But I could sell a print on
demand company like I could sellyou all the IPI own all the
graphics I own and also the likecash flow that I own and like
(23:34):
flip that like on a marketplace or sell it to.
Well, NAN templates have value now a. 100%.
Three months ago they didn't exist.
Today, they're actually valuable.
People sell them. Totally.
Yeah. It's a great first business.
It's low, it's low cost. It's very approachable, it's
very clear, like it's like it's not complicated.
The math is easy. So anyway.
(23:54):
You acquire 1/2 a dozen skills that you can use with so many
other things. 1000% dude, 1000%.I say this all the time on my
podcast. Like generally speaking, this
first business, whatever it is that you do, it's not going to
work. Like statistically speaking,
everything we're talking about right now won't work because
that's numbers law of large numbers.
I mean, most businesses don't work, but the idea is to get you
(24:15):
started, get your foot in the door, get get in the game so you
can acquire these skills and pivot towards something that
does eventually work. A. 100% it's not just hoodies
and sweatshirts. Like there's so many things that
you can create. Stickers.
Notebooks. Stickers, custom notebooks,
Printables, right hoozies. Have you done anything with
(24:36):
printables? Like yeah, totally, absolutely.
Yeah. Like, you know, cut kids
coloring books. There's also like this, I
wouldn't call it print on demand, but it's like digital
assets. So like Excel templates and like
Procreate color palettes, like there's, there's thousands of
these different like categories that you can go into.
(24:57):
And the, the idea here is that it's like it's a non asset type
business, But like I can go downthe like anything that's digital
and anything that you could sellon the print on demand side.
There's like a ton of opportunity there.
But I think the thing to remember is like, don't get
pigeonholed into like, oh, it's got to be sweatshirts and
T-shirts alone. Like you can make really good
margins on stickers, you can make really good margins on like
(25:20):
even mugs, right? Or like whatever.
There's so many of these companies now that are competing
against each other. So they're always adding new SKU
types like, you know, baby jumpers and like a huge, a big
piece of this too that like a lot of people make a lot of
money is doing custom ones like print on demand custom.
And what I mean by that is. With laser engraving or.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something like that or even
(25:41):
like, you know, brides like, youknow, are going out like they
want to get custom jackets made that are embroidered.
So it's like a like you go and you find a like a embroidery on
demand company and you like custom embroidery their names to
denim jackets so that when they go to Nashville, like they all
are matching right or whatever. Like there's that.
That's a huge category of this too, is that custom component.
(26:03):
And so I don't think you just have to do like, you know, that
graphic thing that I was describing.
There's all of these different layers to this that you can kind
of, I kind of unravel. Yeah, it's really just finding
and what's it's easier than everto find these print on demand
companies, right? Like when I started out, there
was like two companies. Now it's like I go to perplexity
and I'm like list 100 print on demand companies and the unique
(26:24):
things that they sell and it's like boom, like here's a list.
Let's do a little a little ideation freestyle, no prep.
I'm in the middle of launching astore like for myself called TKO
store.com where you can buy shirts and stuff because it's a
no brainer. I'm using a company called 4th
Wall to do it and it's basicallyprint on demand for creators.
(26:45):
What opportunity did you see? If I were to say gun to your
head, Cody, I need you to come up with a business idea that
merges print on demand with creators because most creators
out there aren't selling merch, right?
A lot of them are. A lot of times it's like the
first thing they go to, like howdo I monetize?
Let's sell AT shirt. But Even so, like just
statistically, most creators aren't selling anything.
Maybe they do brand and stuff for other companies or
(27:07):
something. They're collecting emails.
But how would you do that? What type of an automation would
you set up to go out to all the creators?
Say on Instagram, they have over100,000 followers.
Maybe pick a niche, not pick a niche.
DM them and say hey I will make like a I'm answering the
question for myself. I will make a fully a fully
functional store for you and allI charge is 5% of revenue.
(27:29):
Pay me nothing upfront and then you just use something like 4th
wall on the back end. What do you?
Yeah, I think it's brilliant. I'll walk you through how I
would do it exactly, like play by play.
So the first thing I would do isI would go and I would look for
like phrases or like keyword phrases that they say often in
their content. So like one that's one of mine
I. Was going to say that.
Dang it. Yeah, so one.
(27:51):
One of mine on my. Channel is I say 1000 percent,
1000% and I always like in the comments, people will just like,
you know, basically like flame me about it and like even my
family. It's like you say, it's just,
it's one of those things. So you go and identify, you take
the transcripts of all the things that they published.
You identify those phrases that are recurring and you basically
(28:12):
analyze that. Cool, here's these ones that
they're saying. Often that's what the merch
turns into, right? Like, I'm just imagining a dad
hat that says 1000% comma, 1000%or something ridiculous, right?
So then you take that and you now have these merch ideas.
I would go to the creator and I would be like, I would pitch
them literal, like examples of the ideas, like, hey, you're
(28:33):
yeah, you say this a lot. You have to make it real for
them exactly. They're not going to be able to
imagine what you have in mind. Show them and dad had that has
some, you know, something on it,right?
That is like a part of their community.
Is there something you say often, Chris?
Oh yeah. Yeah, I start every single short
form video with, look at this freaking guy right here over
1000 times. And I was just going to say
like, I have this now. If you're listening and you want
(28:54):
to start this with me, I'm sorry, it's too late.
You drop the ball. OK?
But if someone would have slid into my DMS and said, Chris, I
just bought TKO store.com, the domain, it's all yours.
I set up a site for you. Look at this shirt.
The shirt says, look at this freaking guy right here.
It's all yours. I just want 5% of revenue.
I'll add new designs. I'll do everything.
I'll manage it. I'll manage everything.
(29:14):
Logistics. I don't know how simple it is on
the back end. At least you know the average
creator doesn't. He's just using another company
to do this. I would have said yes, I want a
T-shirt store, event store. Eventually.
You just saved me all the hassle.
I have three and a half million followers like that.
Could have been a big customer for him, but I had to do it
myself. Totally, totally.
And I think that is the going tobe the differentiator is coming
(29:35):
to them with examples. It's not like pitching like this
esoteric like to your point likeyou bought the domain, the
Shopify store already exists, but you know we shut that down
too like ever. All this could be done in like a
weekend, right? It's a $10 domain.
Shopify's free trial for 30 days.
Like you don't need to spend hardly any money to do this.
Totally. OK, so you, you built this, you
got this set up. Now how do you actually reach
(29:57):
out to them? DMS is one of them.
If they're YouTube creators, youcan go and you can get the
e-mail addresses from their profiles you can use.
Appify for that. Yep, totally.
So let me look you up. Oh.
Man, you're so butcher in my name.
That's my it's spelling is not my gift.
(30:17):
You're not even subscribed to me.
What are you doing? I know dude, this is not my
personal, it's not my main, but anyways, I can do this.
I hit this, I get their e-mail. Awesome right there.
Cool. I reach out cold e-mail is I
built you a merch store all lowercase.
That's the subject line. Yeah.
I'm opening that e-mail 100%. I'm opening that.
Yeah, Yep. And then explain what you did,
(30:38):
link to the actual actual merch,give them a proposal, ask them
for an interview. So how do you do this at scale?
You can go and you can use something like Appify.
They have a YouTube channel, e-mail scraper.
There's an end point. I don't know which one it is.
You'll have to look through these, but basically you can go
and just imagine. I go and I scrape every one of
(31:01):
these channels, every creator, and then I cold e-mail reach out
to them. And what you could probably do
is be like, hey, if you want to see it like your store, just
like e-mail me back, yes, and I'll send you the URL.
And then you make it and. Then you build and then you
build, right? How do you actually do this cold
e-mail right at scale? Like say you're trying to e-mail
(31:21):
1000 people a month. So to do that, you go find that
e-mail and then you would go andyou'd validate that e-mail with
something called Million Verifier, which is e-mail
validation software, basically checks whether it's like, you
know, like a valid e-mail or DNS.
Score. Exactly, exactly.
So or you know, if it's a catch all or do not send right.
(31:41):
And this the reason you have to do this is if you send a bunch
of cold emails to like like bad emails, it'll basically just
like ruin the IP of that e-mail address that you're sending
from. And so to just ruin the
reputation from a deliverabilitystandpoint, since I validated
that e-mail, I then go into something like instantly AI and
I set up a cold e-mail campaign and I just literally that it,
(32:02):
I'm sending the exact same thingto all the creators.
And I'm just saying like, I built you a merge store, right?
Like that is the subject line and be like, you know, if they
like answer yes, like just, you know, respond yes and I'll send
you the link to the to the storeand then like they respond yes,
you quickly build you. Got the store on.
The line, Yep, you quickly buildthe store and then immediately
(32:24):
that turns into a lead and then you basically have a business
right out of this, that side. So it is a great idea.
Actually, this is like a really,really, really good idea, yeah.
Cody's proud of me. Cody's proud of me.
I'm a nobody, man. I just, I just see a lot of
stuff, right? Just like you.
So it's like when you see good stuff, you're like that is that.
Is I know. That's good content.
(32:46):
And what's going to happen is like, this is what I do.
Like let's say someone with a million followers response says
yes, and then I send it to him. And then they like it, say sign
me up. I send him a contract.
He signs up and now I'm crunching my numbers.
I'm just like, all right, I justneed 1%, one $15 profit per
shirt. I get 5% of that.
Yeah, I'm going to make $100,000a month.
And then you launch and you makelike $2000 a month.
(33:07):
And then you're like, and then you're like, I'm making $2000 a
month like from a cold e-mail just for my time, just like I
just, I just typed in the right words on my keyboard and I
created $2000 a month. I just need to do that 10 more
times and I've got a quarter million a year.
Like that's what happens. Like either in my experience,
(33:27):
either you don't get anywhere close to your projections, but
you still have an awesome business and you learn a ton, or
you, you 10X your projections and you're like, holy crap, so
many more people want this merchthan I ever imagined.
I thought I'd make 100 grand. I'm making 500 grand, you know.
One thing to add is like, I would focus on creators that are
long form too. I think that short form creators
don't have as much like per social relationship.
(33:51):
And so like I would go to, you know, all of these creators that
have long form content where it's like somebody's sitting
down and spending an hour listening to you talk, right?
Like, and they're doing that weekly.
Like you're basically brainwashing them over a 90 day
period. Like if they show up for 90 days
or they go and binge your old back catalog.
All right, you're in luck because Cody is coming back on
in a week. So be sure to subscribe, share
(34:12):
with a friend, and we're going to chat all things AI business
ideas.
It's a great first business. It's not complicated, basically
0 startup costs and like has a ton of opportunity to grow.
You can make 100 grand a year doing this strategy.
The goal here is just like, I'm just trying to make passive
income, right? That whole thing could be
automated. ChatGPT can go in one shot fees
now. I love print on demand,
especially when compared to dropshipping.
All this stuff's coming from China.
It takes a month to get to work,it's probably crappy quality,
(00:21):
weird packaging, and then the seller is hardly making any
money because you really have touse paid ads to make drop
shipping work. Worst case, you learn and you
make money on the next thing because of what you learned.
In best case, you make a lot of money.
So what do you have to lose? OK, I have my friend Cody
Schneider on the podcast. And if you like idea guys, AI
ideas, tactical ideas, how to start a business, how to grow a
(00:43):
business, unique business ideas that you can start with very
little money, he's your guy. I had some of the most fun I've
ever had while recording an episode.
I'm not exaggerating. I already know Cody's going to
be a returned guest today. We talked all about print on
demand business opportunities. He's had Etsy stores for
addiction decade, he's done all kinds of print on demand and now
with these AI image generation capabilities, it is easier to
(01:05):
start a print on demand businessthan ever before.
We got super tactical nitty gritty.
I breakdown terms for you in a more simple way.
Here's a quick glossary. He mentions ROAS, that's return
on ad spend, how much money you make from the money you spend on
ads. He mentions Jason, which is just
a way of displaying data, and hementions N8 N, which is a piece
of software that offers automation capabilities.
(01:27):
You're going to love this one. Enjoy.
Everything that I'm going to share today is like, you could
learn this in a weekend if you put like 8 hours into it.
Yeah. So first one I want to start
with because I think it'll be just different for your audience
is do you know a lot about like print on demand?
Do you know that category? Cool.
So like Etsy is a huge place forprint on demand, but
traditionally, like if you wanted to go and create like a
(01:49):
ton of graphics for print on demand, it used to take, you
know, hours or you'd have to have like some type of.
Tedious. Yeah, like design, you know,
skill set. So there's this opportunity
right now, but I think this is like a weekend business you
could start that's like basically 0 startup costs and
like has a ton of opportunity togrow.
So it's basically it's doing Etsy print on demand, but using
AI generated graphics. I'm going to break down all of
(02:11):
this for how you do this is basically you need to go and do
product research on Etsy for which are the best selling
products. So there's tons of tools that do
this. My friend owns one of these
companies, it's called Everbee. And let me bring it up and I can
show you what this looks like. So basically it's Matt.
Do you know jungle Scout Chris? Oh yeah, for Amazon, right?
(02:34):
Totally. So it's basically Jungle Scout,
but for Etsy. And what it does is it helps you
identify like best selling products on Etsy.
So it's a Chrome extension. They also have like a web app
version of it. But what it does is it'll show
you the products. So you go to Etsy and you search
a keyword like we'll say like horse shirt, you know, or we'll
say horse sweatshirt, something very generic.
(02:56):
And then from here, you're goingto find these like these
products that are selling well. And how you identify those is
using a software like Everbeat that basically will show you
like the estimated search volume, It'll show you the
estimated sales, the estimated revenue.
So what this allows for you to do then is that say we identify
like, hey, this, this one is working, you know, selling super
(03:18):
well, right? I can then take that image.
So I'll take a screenshot of this and I go to the Chat GPTAPI
and I say, you know, generate a version of this basically.
So now to break this down, what this ends up looking like, you
have the keywords that they're like basically optimizing for.
So all of these, you put those in the title, the description
(03:38):
ends up being exactly the same, do the exact same pricing
structure. And then now you can, because of
these AI tools, you can go and generate these images for this
print on demand catalog that like before, like you would have
to have, you know, some type of skill set to even be able to
like, you know, like design thisor like some type of like
drawing capability, right? It's, you know, ChatGPT can go
(04:01):
in one shot piece now. And what we're doing this or the
experiment we've been running with is like just vector style
images. So stuff where it's like very
like black and white. An example of this would be, you
know, something like this as an example.
Less variables for ChatGPT to screw it up.
Exactly. Yeah.
But like, you know, of course, running in this direction, it's,
it's going to like perfectly make a version of this, but it's
(04:23):
an entirely new version. Now you said ChatGPT API, are
you just using the app or using like something that you've?
You could use just the ChatGPT app.
We're doing this at scale, right?
So we're like, OK, let's go generate 1000.
Like we're going to find 1000 winning products and we're going
to go generate 1000 different, you know, images.
But if you wanted to start this out manually, you could go to
(04:43):
ChatGPT and here let's just likedo it actually cuz I'm.
Curious now, are you? Are you using Everbee for like
the scale and automation part orjust for the research?
Just for the research, once you've identified the URL, so
like and Everbee, you can have it where it basically you can
download the research as a CSV. So the Chrome extension runs, it
shows you the best winning products from this page you
downloaded as a CSV. We'll take those top ten winners
(05:05):
and then we'll go and generate, you know, graphics based off of
those top ten winners. Something to think about for for
people if they're going to do this is I would stay away from
words and like phrases as much as you can and kind of turn into
a just a nightmare to like from a trademark standpoint, you can
look up these trademarks. So like, for example, dogs and
(05:26):
horses make me happy. So like some random person
probably owns that trademark. And occasionally they'll just go
to all of the main like sellers.Like, of course, this make me
happy trademark, So we'll go to all the main sellers and ask for
like the sellers to take them down and you'll get flagged as
like a Yep, like basically, you know, abusing the trademark,
(05:49):
which gets a like a negative like mark against your Etsy
shop. And so if you get like three of
them, you typically like, yeah, you get shuts down.
They flag your social and you have to like, you know,
basically restart the whole process.
So I would just stick with generics.
Those just safer. And again, because this is the
scale of volume game, like how can I get 10,000 listings on
Etsy live? That's, you know, that's what
you're trying to do here. So but yeah, but you can do this
(06:11):
with the ChatGPT like just the the web app or you can use the
ChatGPT image API, you can provide the image type and all
this can be done with no code like it can be done with
likemake.com. Super easy.
Which is an automation. You can do this with N8 N which
is an automation. And N8 N is a little bit more
complicated unless you know thistrick.
So with N8 N there are leaning. Forward trick.
(06:34):
So with N8 N, it's just Jason ishow they structure the the
flows. So like with make, you basically
have to go through and like set up each of the nodes, but I can
just go and tell AI to make an N8N Jason file for the the flow
that I'm trying to create. So we're going to just do this
right now. I'm using perplexity Pro
(06:54):
Perplexity Pro is Claude 4. And so I'm going to say make N8N
Jason file or Jason flow for thefollowing workflow.
And we'll do take image from Google Drive sends to Chat
GPTAPI, save image to new GoogleDrive folder.
(07:20):
And what it's going to do right here is it's basically going to
go and write the NANJ song code.And then I can just take that
into my NAN instance. I can copy and paste that in and
it's basically going to like work right out-of-the-box is
like what we're seeing. It's like Claude is so good at
writing this type of Jason code,it's ridiculous.
So you. Can see this thing.
(07:41):
Rendered here. Let me see if I can break that
down for everyone. So stuff like Zapier or was the
automation platform pre AI? Of course they do AI stuff, but
that's like they invented automations, right?
NA then is the AI first, more complex but more feature rich
version of Zapier or make.com. You're saying NA N is kind of
tricky, difficult to work with if for non coder because of
(08:03):
these Jason files. But if you pay 20 bucks a month
for Perplexity Pro, which uses Cloud four on the back end, and
you prompt it as you just showed, which we'll put in the
show notes, you can get around that confusion and anyone, even
the layman like myself, can use N8N successfully. 100%
absolutely. That's exactly it.
Why N 8 N is so powerful is because it has a ton of
(08:25):
community notes so and it can also just do web hooks really
easily. So even if there isn't a node
like for example, there's no Zapier or make.com integration,
but with a web hook you can callmost AP is.
And an API is just basically like an endpoint that you can
say, hey, I want this back from you, right?
And then you like. Just a way for softwares to talk
(08:45):
to each other. Exactly, exactly.
And then it sends that information back.
And so that is how you can basically like this is a really
small version of this where thisextends to and you can even get
further. It's like, OK, cool.
I identified all of the winning products on Etsy.
I extracted the photos from all those winning products.
You know, scraping using something like scraping Bee or
(09:07):
you know, any of these like scraping softwares.
Honestly, Appify would probably work for this as well.
And then once I have all those images in a Google Drive folder,
I can be like, OK, like do this flow, but I want to extend this
flow out even further. I want you to also upload this
to Printify automatically for me.
Add it to, you know, shirts to sweatshirts to mugs, you know,
(09:30):
all the different variations that you could sell of the same
graphic. And then within Printify, you
can just bulk select one, click publish and it goes live on
Etsy. And so that's like the whole
like, you know, process that youcan do with this so.
So it's your automation. Sorry.
Go ahead, you. Know I was just going to say you
have questions, happy to answer anything so.
So with what you're doing, you're using NAD N and other
(09:52):
similar tools to scale this thisEtsy strategy.
What is your goal? Like?
Are you just reselling stuff on Etsy?
Are you cross selling, you know,best sellers on Etsy, on other
platforms, on your own Shopify site?
What is your whole goal with this?
Yeah, I mean, you could take thesame graphics and go to like
Amazon merch, which is a second another category Etsy we found
(10:13):
is this like I've also sold, sold on Etsy for like the last
whatever it is like 10 plus years.
So I we just know the platform way better.
But the thing with this is basically it's just a volume
game, like you're trying to get 10,000 listings up and the
margin on these shirts. 50 of them will be good and the rest
of them won't make any money. Exactly.
You know what? It's the classic rule, like 8020
(10:34):
rule, right? Where it's like 20% of your
products are gonna make 80% of your revenue.
It's gonna be the same strategy.You don't know what's going to
win. But the arbitrage here is that
to create these graphics like I used to, like we used to do
this, we would hire like offshore talent.
They were like, you know, doing like illustrator files that they
could only do like one a day. So I got 10 of them working in
(10:54):
the Philippines doing 1A day. I mean, it was just like a
massive operation. Now you can do that same thing,
but like without any humans, maybe one person running this,
just a 1, you know, just you basically running this and get
to a scale where the listings are at a volume size that you're
just creating more this area andreally the to break down like
why this works? So Etsy is a platform that
(11:16):
already has a bunch of organic search traffic for a lot of
these keywords. Like if I go and search, you
know, horse sweatshirt on Google, like Etsy is going to
come up in those top listings, you're going to see them here.
That's that's Amazon. So what you're doing is
basically what they would call parasite SEO.
You're using the domain authority and the the current
(11:38):
rankings of these websites to get like sales.
So for example, as he's here, somebody clicks into horse
sweatshirt. If you rank in that top position
for horse sweatshirt, you're going to just get sales.
As long as the graphic is something that people want to
buy and you know what people want to buy because we already
did the research with Everbee toidentify those things, right?
(12:00):
And So what you're basically like this is solving as the cold
start problem of how do I get, you know, like how do I get
trust enough for people to buy this from me?
And when I lean on a platform, Ican solve that that cold start
problem. So.
Yeah. And for those listening,
parasite SEO is just like a parasite.
It's just SEO where you don't have any authority, you have no
(12:20):
reputation online. Google doesn't know you exist.
You just latch on to someone like Etsy and say hey, I'm
relevant now. Exactly, exactly.
And you're, you're really just using like you could, we could
go and look at this actually like for all of the, let me
bring this up. So like, do you see this forward
slash market URL? So that means they have this
like subdirectory on the entire website.
(12:42):
Like that's where all of their product collection pages is what
they would be called are made. So Etsy has created 19,000,000
of those and we have the opportunity basically to go and
build products for all 19,000,000 that we can then show
up in front of, right? So they have all this traffic
that they're trying and like howdo they make money?
They make money when somebody comes in and makes a purchase.
(13:04):
So if your products somebody comes in and they make a
purchase, you rank higher withintheir internal search algorithm
and then they're doing all the work for you, though to show up
for, you know, 18K gold chain for grounding shoes for briar
rose ring for I mean it also, ifyou're trying to find product
categories that are like new andlike like quickly, like becoming
(13:26):
like a like like searched. That's he's actually a great
place to do research for this. So do that search.
What I did is cite Colon at etsy.com/market.
You select tools on Google and then I can say show me in the
past 24 hours. And so it's going to give me all
of the pages. Yeah, that's it.
That's made it for Cody. That's why people watch this.
(13:49):
Totally and so here's some of them that come up.
It's gag portraits, tweeter bird, phone case, gold filled
shoot or gold filled Canada. Some of them don't make any
sense, right? But at least this gives you an
understanding of the like Etsy is seeing that people are
starting to search these and so it is building out these pages
programmatically based off this data.
(14:10):
That is their real business is basically huge marketplace
looking at the data, building pages to like get this free
traffic and then, you know, categorizing all the products
appropriately to increase the sales as much as possible,
right? And so this is like a really
quick and easy way to like, you know, find a product category
that's growing quickly offense like offensive get well soon
(14:32):
cards. This is a great one like that
you could just literally only build a shop around that use AI
to generate the graphics and theimages like Canva, right and use
a print on demand company, some like Gelato, I think they have
these that will actually print these cards and send them to
people so. You know, what's crazy to me is
so many of these trends start with short form video.
(14:54):
Like all of a sudden someone posts on TikTok about Dubai
chocolate, which no one's ever heard of.
And this video goes mega viral, gets 100 million views.
And then it just starts disseminating out on TikTok and
you have hundreds and thousands of people posting out Dubai
chocolate. And then you go to this tool,
you go to Google with this trickand you search Dubai chocolate.
And then days, weeks, months later, you start to see it down
(15:16):
to kind of filter down the funnel.
Now people are making purchasingdecisions based on this, what
started as one viral video and then it becomes more and more
saturated. And you can look at the Google
Trends chart and it goes up and then it goes down.
But what you're showing us enables people to get ahead of
that, right? Because as soon as people go
from TikTok to I want to buy, it's going to show up right here
(15:36):
and you won't be too late. A. 100 percent, 100%.
And if you're the whole point ofthis too is you're not guessing
right, you're not guessing aboutany of this.
Like all of this is data-driven.The only AI part of this is the
human labor. There's nothing else that's
happening. The goal here is just like, I'm
just trying to make passive income, right?
Like this is a passive income type of business.
That's just an online business version.
(15:57):
And you know, I'm not saying you're not going to get like
crazy wealthy doing this except you.
I know you can do that. Right, but it's like in.
Reality, the average person likeyou, I mean, you can do it.
It's just, it's just, it's a lotof work.
But like realistically, like youcan, you can make another 100
grand a year doing this strategy.
It's not unreasonable. This was like one of the first
businesses that I ran was basically a version of this.
(16:19):
So anyway, yeah. So let me summarize the
opportunity. So you're going to Etsy, you're
using that tool ever be you're finding winning products, then
you're using an N8 N template, which you make in perplexity
pro. That template will go out and
connect your research with your Chat GPTAPI, find winning
products. And then once you find them,
(16:39):
you're using the same keywords, similar pictures to post them on
the same platform. And that's something that a lot
of people are like, all right, this is retail arbitrage.
I buy on Amazon, selling Walmart, buy on eBay, sell on
Facebook. Like no, like you just find the
winners and sell them on the same platform where the demand's
already proven. And then the magic of print on
demand is you're not buying any T-shirts.
You're not making possession of any of this stuff.
(17:02):
Like, you're just sending all ofthese orders through an API,
through an automation to a big warehouse in, you know, Kansas
City, MO. And they're shipping out the
hats and sweatshirts all over the world, right, While you
make, you know, cents to dollarson every little transaction.
100% I mean, the cost for this are so cheap too, right?
I think Etsy listing now, I don't know if it's 20 or 30
(17:23):
cents, I can't remember. But again, you you pay that
premium because they have all the traffic.
So you don't have to solve the traffic problem.
You just have to make the product that's most likely to
sell. So their cost is basically like
the subscription for something like an ever be the cost to
generate the image and then basically the listing fee on
Etsy. A last thing too, on the image
generation side, an actual like technical thing, you'll go and
(17:45):
remove the background from thoseimages that they provide back.
One of them is like BG back. Of services.
Yeah, hundreds of those, but basically get into that that
version where it's like a PNG where it has a clear background.
That's what you're what you're actually doing in a printer 5,
but just making sure you know, trying to get so.
You remove the background. You remove the background before
you sent it. Send it to ChatGPT through the
(18:07):
API. Remove the background before you
send it to printfy. So you would scrape it from
Etsy, send it to ChatGPT, get the image back, send it to a
background remover, get the image back, send that to
Printfy, send that to Etsy. OK, at what point, if any, is
your manual involvement needed throughout this process?
That whole thing could be automated like they would just
(18:29):
be the the research on the frontend.
In reality, you could probably automate that in some capacity.
There's just like, not a great tool out there for it, but you.
But The thing is, like a lot of this stuff is so fun.
Like why automate the research? It's so fun.
Totally, totally. And then the posting, the final
process of like posting them live within Printfine or within,
you know, Printfull, those are the two pieces, that whole
middle section, which is all thelabor like that can basically be
(18:52):
removed, right? So yeah.
OK, first of all, like this isn't like very tangible, but
for those listening, this stuff that he's describing, like
setting up an automation, your first automation for the first
time and just seeing it work, it's just the best feeling in
the world. It's just so fun.
Like it's, you know, skydiving level fun.
So this isn't like, you know, yeah, you can make money
(19:13):
scrubbing toilets. I talk about that stuff.
That's not fun. Scrubbing toilets objectively is
not fun. This is fun.
And you know, worst case you make no money, but you learn
when you make money on the next thing because of what you
learned, best case you make a lot of money.
So what do you have to lose? No 100%.
Have you ever found a situation since you've been on Etsy for so
long, where there is an advantage to take a winning
(19:36):
product that's just winning organically, copy it, and just
put paid ads behind it because you know that your cost per
acquisition will be low enough? Yeah, great question.
Google ads in particular are like shopping ads, absolutely
right. If you're saying like this horse
shirt is absolutely crushing it on Etsy, we know that like you
know, Etsy ranks for horse sweatshirt on Page 1 and like a
(19:56):
majority of the traffic has to be coming from that.
You throw up a Shopify store andyou know, run like Google
shopping ads directly to that and Google shopping ads, just so
like people understand what those are, are the ads.
Let me screen share and I can show you what they look like in
the actual like search results. But it's the ads that look like
like again with you horse sweatshirt.
(20:18):
It's these here where it's like these like.
You know, the images, these are all Google Shopping ads.
So how you do these is you basically set up like a Shopify
store. You then connect it to Google
Shopping so it pulls in all of your SKU data.
And then within Google Ads you can say, hey, I want you to bid
on this keyword horse sweatshirtand show this specific product
for that keyword. So you could double down on
(20:39):
this. And then what this turns into is
it's just like a arbitrage game and you're like, it's a Roaz
game, right? So it's like I put a dollar in
and maybe $2.00 comes out. So like maybe my margin isn't
crazy good, right? And what I mean by that is like
for every dollar I spend in ads,I get like, you know, $2.00 back
in revenue and that so and say your margin on that second
(21:01):
dollar is only, you know, 20%, which is like probably what
you'll end up seeing. So it's like I'm only making
like $0.20 off of every dollar Ispend.
But if I go and spend, you know,100 grand and it's like that 20
cent starting to look suddenly looks big.
The arbitrage here as well. And I'll just again, just more
sauce for everybody is that ad spend.
(21:22):
If you have an Amex or a Chase Sapphire card, they're the Amex
card. I can't remember the name of it,
but they get Amex gives you 4X points on every dollar you spend
on paid ads and Sapphire gives you 3X points on every dollar
you spend on paid ads. And So what that translates into
is like, yeah, maybe you're making the Super small margin
and like, Oh yeah, we're getting25, yeah, whatever, like 20
(21:44):
grand a month off of this shirt or, or yeah, 2 grand a month off
this shirt. But you can use this as a way to
like go and stack points. So it's like, oh, you want to
take a, you know, a trip to southern France and want to fly
business class, you know, all the way there and then also stay
in a hotel for free. You're basically spending money
to make small fractions of money.
(22:05):
And then the byproduct of that is like layering on.
So I I have friends that do this.
I've done this in the past as well so.
I love print on demand, especially when compared to drop
shipping. You know, 10 years ago drop
shipping was everything. But when you really break down
the business model, it's pretty crappy.
Like all the stuff is coming from China.
Some woman in in middle America,you know, buys this $30 thing.
It takes a month to get to her. She's likely chart filed dispute
(22:28):
against her credit card by then.By the time it gets there, it's
probably crappy quality. It comes to this weird
packaging. The branding is not the same as
the person she thought she bought it from.
And then the seller is hardly making any money because you
really have to use paid ads to make drop shipping work.
And then like, you might be selling these handheld blenders
that were all the rage on TikTokat the time.
And then by the time it arrives,it's not cool anymore.
(22:49):
No one wants it. But with print on demand, as
long as we're wearing T-shirts, sweatshirts, hats, there's going
to be a business there. And they're not coming from
China, they're coming from any number of factories in these big
companies like Printfy have a half dozen factories all over
the country, so you can still get the shirt in a few days.
If the design or the pattern goes out of style, you lose
nothing. Totally.
You have no inventory you're sitting on, you have no sunk
(23:11):
cost. I think it's also just a Better
Business. Like the biology of the business
is better, right? Like I always just crazy to me
all the like everybody that goesinto drop shipping because it's
like you can never sell a drop shipping company, right?
Like full stop, period. But I could sell a print on
demand company like I could sellyou all the IPI own all the
graphics I own and also the likecash flow that I own and like
(23:34):
flip that like on a marketplace or sell it to.
Well, NAN templates have value now a. 100%.
Three months ago they didn't exist.
Today, they're actually valuable.
People sell them. Totally.
Yeah. It's a great first business.
It's low, it's low cost. It's very approachable, it's
very clear, like it's like it's not complicated.
The math is easy. So anyway.
(23:54):
You acquire 1/2 a dozen skills that you can use with so many
other things. 1000% dude, 1000%.I say this all the time on my
podcast. Like generally speaking, this
first business, whatever it is that you do, it's not going to
work. Like statistically speaking,
everything we're talking about right now won't work because
that's numbers law of large numbers.
I mean, most businesses don't work, but the idea is to get you
(24:15):
started, get your foot in the door, get get in the game so you
can acquire these skills and pivot towards something that
does eventually work. A. 100% it's not just hoodies
and sweatshirts. Like there's so many things that
you can create. Stickers.
Notebooks. Stickers, custom notebooks,
Printables, right hoozies. Have you done anything with
(24:36):
printables? Like yeah, totally, absolutely.
Yeah. Like, you know, cut kids
coloring books. There's also like this, I
wouldn't call it print on demand, but it's like digital
assets. So like Excel templates and like
Procreate color palettes, like there's, there's thousands of
these different like categories that you can go into.
(24:57):
And the, the idea here is that it's like it's a non asset type
business, But like I can go downthe like anything that's digital
and anything that you could sellon the print on demand side.
There's like a ton of opportunity there.
But I think the thing to remember is like, don't get
pigeonholed into like, oh, it's got to be sweatshirts and
T-shirts alone. Like you can make really good
margins on stickers, you can make really good margins on like
(25:20):
even mugs, right? Or like whatever.
There's so many of these companies now that are competing
against each other. So they're always adding new SKU
types like, you know, baby jumpers and like a huge, a big
piece of this too that like a lot of people make a lot of
money is doing custom ones like print on demand custom.
And what I mean by that is. With laser engraving or.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something like that or even
(25:41):
like, you know, brides like, youknow, are going out like they
want to get custom jackets made that are embroidered.
So it's like a like you go and you find a like a embroidery on
demand company and you like custom embroidery their names to
denim jackets so that when they go to Nashville, like they all
are matching right or whatever. Like there's that.
That's a huge category of this too, is that custom component.
(26:03):
And so I don't think you just have to do like, you know, that
graphic thing that I was describing.
There's all of these different layers to this that you can kind
of, I kind of unravel. Yeah, it's really just finding
and what's it's easier than everto find these print on demand
companies, right? Like when I started out, there
was like two companies. Now it's like I go to perplexity
and I'm like list 100 print on demand companies and the unique
(26:24):
things that they sell and it's like boom, like here's a list.
Let's do a little a little ideation freestyle, no prep.
I'm in the middle of launching astore like for myself called TKO
store.com where you can buy shirts and stuff because it's a
no brainer. I'm using a company called 4th
Wall to do it and it's basicallyprint on demand for creators.
(26:45):
What opportunity did you see? If I were to say gun to your
head, Cody, I need you to come up with a business idea that
merges print on demand with creators because most creators
out there aren't selling merch, right?
A lot of them are. A lot of times it's like the
first thing they go to, like howdo I monetize?
Let's sell AT shirt. But Even so, like just
statistically, most creators aren't selling anything.
Maybe they do brand and stuff for other companies or
(27:07):
something. They're collecting emails.
But how would you do that? What type of an automation would
you set up to go out to all the creators?
Say on Instagram, they have over100,000 followers.
Maybe pick a niche, not pick a niche.
DM them and say hey I will make like a I'm answering the
question for myself. I will make a fully a fully
functional store for you and allI charge is 5% of revenue.
(27:29):
Pay me nothing upfront and then you just use something like 4th
wall on the back end. What do you?
Yeah, I think it's brilliant. I'll walk you through how I
would do it exactly, like play by play.
So the first thing I would do isI would go and I would look for
like phrases or like keyword phrases that they say often in
their content. So like one that's one of mine
I. Was going to say that.
Dang it. Yeah, so one.
(27:51):
One of mine on my. Channel is I say 1000 percent,
1000% and I always like in the comments, people will just like,
you know, basically like flame me about it and like even my
family. It's like you say, it's just,
it's one of those things. So you go and identify, you take
the transcripts of all the things that they published.
You identify those phrases that are recurring and you basically
(28:12):
analyze that. Cool, here's these ones that
they're saying. Often that's what the merch
turns into, right? Like, I'm just imagining a dad
hat that says 1000% comma, 1000%or something ridiculous, right?
So then you take that and you now have these merch ideas.
I would go to the creator and I would be like, I would pitch
them literal, like examples of the ideas, like, hey, you're
(28:33):
yeah, you say this a lot. You have to make it real for
them exactly. They're not going to be able to
imagine what you have in mind. Show them and dad had that has
some, you know, something on it,right?
That is like a part of their community.
Is there something you say often, Chris?
Oh yeah. Yeah, I start every single short
form video with, look at this freaking guy right here over
1000 times. And I was just going to say
like, I have this now. If you're listening and you want
(28:54):
to start this with me, I'm sorry, it's too late.
You drop the ball. OK?
But if someone would have slid into my DMS and said, Chris, I
just bought TKO store.com, the domain, it's all yours.
I set up a site for you. Look at this shirt.
The shirt says, look at this freaking guy right here.
It's all yours. I just want 5% of revenue.
I'll add new designs. I'll do everything.
I'll manage it. I'll manage everything.
(29:14):
Logistics. I don't know how simple it is on
the back end. At least you know the average
creator doesn't. He's just using another company
to do this. I would have said yes, I want a
T-shirt store, event store. Eventually.
You just saved me all the hassle.
I have three and a half million followers like that.
Could have been a big customer for him, but I had to do it
myself. Totally, totally.
And I think that is the going tobe the differentiator is coming
(29:35):
to them with examples. It's not like pitching like this
esoteric like to your point likeyou bought the domain, the
Shopify store already exists, but you know we shut that down
too like ever. All this could be done in like a
weekend, right? It's a $10 domain.
Shopify's free trial for 30 days.
Like you don't need to spend hardly any money to do this.
Totally. OK, so you, you built this, you
got this set up. Now how do you actually reach
(29:57):
out to them? DMS is one of them.
If they're YouTube creators, youcan go and you can get the
e-mail addresses from their profiles you can use.
Appify for that. Yep, totally.
So let me look you up. Oh.
Man, you're so butcher in my name.
That's my it's spelling is not my gift.
(30:17):
You're not even subscribed to me.
What are you doing? I know dude, this is not my
personal, it's not my main, but anyways, I can do this.
I hit this, I get their e-mail. Awesome right there.
Cool. I reach out cold e-mail is I
built you a merch store all lowercase.
That's the subject line. Yeah.
I'm opening that e-mail 100%. I'm opening that.
Yeah, Yep. And then explain what you did,
(30:38):
link to the actual actual merch,give them a proposal, ask them
for an interview. So how do you do this at scale?
You can go and you can use something like Appify.
They have a YouTube channel, e-mail scraper.
There's an end point. I don't know which one it is.
You'll have to look through these, but basically you can go
and just imagine. I go and I scrape every one of
(31:01):
these channels, every creator, and then I cold e-mail reach out
to them. And what you could probably do
is be like, hey, if you want to see it like your store, just
like e-mail me back, yes, and I'll send you the URL.
And then you make it and. Then you build and then you
build, right? How do you actually do this cold
e-mail right at scale? Like say you're trying to e-mail
(31:21):
1000 people a month. So to do that, you go find that
e-mail and then you would go andyou'd validate that e-mail with
something called Million Verifier, which is e-mail
validation software, basically checks whether it's like, you
know, like a valid e-mail or DNS.
Score. Exactly, exactly.
So or you know, if it's a catch all or do not send right.
(31:41):
And this the reason you have to do this is if you send a bunch
of cold emails to like like bad emails, it'll basically just
like ruin the IP of that e-mail address that you're sending
from. And so to just ruin the
reputation from a deliverabilitystandpoint, since I validated
that e-mail, I then go into something like instantly AI and
I set up a cold e-mail campaign and I just literally that it,
(32:02):
I'm sending the exact same thingto all the creators.
And I'm just saying like, I built you a merge store, right?
Like that is the subject line and be like, you know, if they
like answer yes, like just, you know, respond yes and I'll send
you the link to the to the storeand then like they respond yes,
you quickly build you. Got the store on.
The line, Yep, you quickly buildthe store and then immediately
(32:24):
that turns into a lead and then you basically have a business
right out of this, that side. So it is a great idea.
Actually, this is like a really,really, really good idea, yeah.
Cody's proud of me. Cody's proud of me.
I'm a nobody, man. I just, I just see a lot of
stuff, right? Just like you.
So it's like when you see good stuff, you're like that is that.
Is I know. That's good content.
(32:46):
And what's going to happen is like, this is what I do.
Like let's say someone with a million followers response says
yes, and then I send it to him. And then they like it, say sign
me up. I send him a contract.
He signs up and now I'm crunching my numbers.
I'm just like, all right, I justneed 1%, one $15 profit per
shirt. I get 5% of that.
Yeah, I'm going to make $100,000a month.
And then you launch and you makelike $2000 a month.
(33:07):
And then you're like, and then you're like, I'm making $2000 a
month like from a cold e-mail just for my time, just like I
just, I just typed in the right words on my keyboard and I
created $2000 a month. I just need to do that 10 more
times and I've got a quarter million a year.
Like that's what happens. Like either in my experience,
(33:27):
either you don't get anywhere close to your projections, but
you still have an awesome business and you learn a ton, or
you, you 10X your projections and you're like, holy crap, so
many more people want this merchthan I ever imagined.
I thought I'd make 100 grand. I'm making 500 grand, you know.
One thing to add is like, I would focus on creators that are
long form too. I think that short form creators
don't have as much like per social relationship.
(33:51):
And so like I would go to, you know, all of these creators that
have long form content where it's like somebody's sitting
down and spending an hour listening to you talk, right?
Like, and they're doing that weekly.
Like you're basically brainwashing them over a 90 day
period. Like if they show up for 90 days
or they go and binge your old back catalog.
All right, you're in luck because Cody is coming back on
in a week. So be sure to subscribe, share
(34:12):
with a friend, and we're going to chat all things AI business
ideas.
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