Passive Income: How I Started Print On Demand with $0 (STEP BY STEP)

0:00When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast, terms and conditions apply. If you need a hiring hero, this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. This episode is brought to you by Palm Olive. Family time isn't just the big moments. It's weeknight dinners. Sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palm Olive Ultra. Palm Olive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9% of grease, leaving your dishes, sparkling clean, and the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier. But you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now at Palm Olive.com.

1:01This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast instead of doom scrolling, smart move. Another smart move? Getting help from one of State Farm's 19,000 local agents when you choose to bundle home and auto. Bundling. Just another way to save with the personal price plan. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Covered options are selected by the customer. The availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state. People are making thousands of dollars in passive income every month selling products that don't even exist until someone places an order. $34,000 per month. The realistic earnings have been able to make with printout demand. About over $1,000,000. $63,000. $1,000 per month. Multiple six figures in profit. $1,000 per month. $1,000 per month. $1,000 per month. But is this actually a realistic side hustle, impossible for anyone to do? Well, as an experienced millionaire businessman, I'm going to put this to the test myself by making and selling my own print on demand product.

2:02As this is a side hustle challenge, I'm setting myself the usual rules. Rule one, I must sell under a fake name. Rule two, I can't spend more than $0. And rule three, I must launch the business within 24 hours. Start the timer. The first thing on my plan is to find a supplier with easy to use software. For anyone who doesn't know how print on demand works, here's a very quick breakdown. You make a design and partner with a company and in return, they print and ship your product when someone buys it. This means if we execute everything correctly, then all we have to do is click the pay check. So I'm just going to make a free account with Jolato as they seem to have fulfillment centers all around the world. And from what I can see, have the most straightforward software for me to use. So now we need to decide what kind of product we want to sell. There are lots of different products perfect for print on demand such as T shirts, mugs and bags, but instead of just guessing, I'm going to do some market research to find out what's actually selling well.

3:03I like to use TikTok for this kind of thing as lots of people are using it to promote their print on demand stores because they have an integrated shop feature. You've probably seen the little banner that pops up at the bottom of some TikToks, but you've knew the option to buy what's in the video. Honestly, my son's girlfriend has bought so much on TikTok shop. I'm not just looking for one-off videos, I want to find out an account that consistently sells the same product. If someone is investing their time in creating multiple videos, it's safe to assume that the product is selling well. Right, I think I've found the perfect product. Wall art. Simply based on what I've seen on TikTok, there's a large market of aspiring entrepreneurs who love putting motivational artwork on their walls to keep themselves motivated and working hard. Secondly, wall art is very cheap to make, but it seems from my research that I can sell it for a high price as it's more than impulse purchase. This means that my profit margins will be very good as I'll make more money per sale.

4:04And thirdly, there are so many different ways I can scale this business. I just think if I grew it big enough, I could even branch out into premium artwork. Look, wealthy people can hang in their mansions. Imagine how much I could sell those for, but I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here. First, we need to make some designs. Right, I've got a confession to make and I'm not proud of it. As you know, I'm under a time limit here and I don't really have enough hours left to make my own designs and do everything else on my list. If I was a bit younger, then I could probably use an AI tool like mid-journey to create the wall art for me. But you guys know, I'm a boomer, so it would take me a little while to get the hang of it. And time isn't something I have lots of right now. That doesn't mean I'm about to die by the way. So long story short, I've ordered five different wall art designs from three different sellers on Fiverr. I sent them all this brief. I would like you to create an entrepreneurial poster that can be framed and used as wall art. Please come up with your own quote, idea and theme. I think something entrepreneurial or motivational would be best.

5:07I intend on using the poster size 30 by 40 centimeters. That's 12 inches by 16 inches for all our American viewers. I look forward to seeing the design. This is going to be pretty interesting as I really don't have time to make any changes and I'm kind of leaving my fate in their hands. While we're waiting for those designs to come back, let's use this opportunity to make an online store. I've decided I'm going to sell on Etsy as it's relatively simple and has a low barrier to entry. Platforms like this are great as they already have an established customer base for you to tap into. The downside is that it's often erased at the bottom as your product is nothing but a commodity and it's only compared on price. Although my designs are unique, there are still a lot of people selling similar products. If you want to build a business that stands the test of time, I suggest heading over to something I Shopify and creating your own store. So it's the next morning and I've been sent some designs to review. I haven't looked at them yet so let's look at them together.

6:10Actually, I quite like this one. The design looks pretty cool and the quote is very true. I'll tell you what, if I had a penny for every time someone said my success was due to luck and not hard work, then I'd be rich. Oh wait, I am. This next guy seems to have made five different designs. Let's take a look. Honestly, these designs do look pretty basic and the quotes are just stating the obvious. The only one I really like is the last one and even that looks like something I could have done in two minutes. Okay, so it's all riding on this last seller. This is actually my favourite design so far. This next one, I'm not so keen on but I can see it's at least tried to play with the text a little bit. Maybe this will appeal to the girls, is it's got that sort of swirly font. I think they like that sort of thing. Right, now we've got to upload these designs onto gelato. Since this is a print on demand product, I don't have to pay for anything until a sale is made. So, this is great if you're starting out with zero dollars.

7:11So, I'm just going to go to the menu on the left hand side and select product catalog. As you can see, there are a lot of different options here but I'm of course going to select wall art. This pulls up a selection of different types of posters. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast, terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is the job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. This episode is brought to you by Palm Olive. Family time isn't just the big moments. It's weeknight dinners, sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palm Olive Ultra. Palm Olive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9% of grease, leaving your dishes,

8:16sparkling clean, and the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now at Palm Olive.com. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast instead of doom-scrolling? Smart move. Another smart move? Getting help from one of State Farm's 19,000 local agents when you choose to bundle home and auto. Bundling. Just another way to save with the personal price plan. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Covered options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state. I'm going to pick wooden framed posters. I'm then going to go with the premium matte paper option as I can see that this is the best seller. And to be honest, I don't think people are really able to tell the difference between this and the museum quality one, but my profits certainly will. So I'm going to select 30 by 40 centimeters. Because I think this is the best sized poster for most houses.

9:19And it seems to be the size most people select. Then I'm going to pick vertical and a black frame color as that's pretty sort of gender neutral and ready to hang because not assembled. Hey, nobody get time for this! I'm just going to repeat the steps with all my designs, including the ones I didn't like. After all, I've got nothing to lose and who knows, I might even sell some. Now I've got all the designs uploaded. I'm going to go over to the menu and select stores. This is where you can link your gelato account with your Etsy store. If you don't want to sell on Etsy, as you can see, there are lots of different options. Right, I could just upload the designs from Fiverr right onto my Etsy listing, but to be honest, they don't look very premium. So I'm going to use the built-in mock-up studio by clicking here. This tour will help me bring the posters to life. First, we just have to set the dimensions for our file size. Oh, they have actually on here an Etsy preset, so I'm going to just select that.

10:20But you can also set custom sizes if you'd like to create mock-ups for things like Instagram Stories. Now we need to select a scene for our mock-up. Oh, now that one looks good, so let's go with that. You can zoom in and move around a scene by just double-clicking on it. So I'm going to adjust it to make the scene a little bit bigger so there's more focus on my poster design. Next, let's select our poster size. I'm going to set it to 30 by 40, as I said before, most poster designs are this size. These are looking pretty good. Now the last step before we can sell our wall art, setting a price. I've just taken a quick look at the price navigator tool, and in here it lays out exactly what the product costs. How much shipping will set us back, and even the total profit per sell. Looking at all of this, I think a good price would be $49.99. This is a bit high compared to most competitors on Etsy, which will definitely impact sales. But I'm willing to take a bit of a risk, because I always think a nice profit margin is around

11:2450%. Right, so I'm over in Miami on business, but I've been keeping an eye on our side hustle challenge, and I'll tell you what, I've got some results. But before I share them with you, check this out. I actually ordered a couple of our products, and got them shipped to me over here in the USA, and I think they're pretty good. And the quality as well is absolutely fantastic. I think I'm going to keep these. Actually, I'm really impressed with the shipping time, as well. It took three days to get these tools, which is far better than to try these drop-shippers, and that should give us an advantage. I'd actually always recommend ordering your product before you start selling it, because reputation is everything. And you don't want customers speaking negatively about your product. So I've left it just a few more days, because things were going nicely. Now for the moment you've all been waiting for, did we make any sales? Well, yes and no. Some of the posters generated a few sales, and some didn't even catch a bite. Overall, we generated 11 sales, which led to £549.89.

12:27But of course, this isn't all profit. First, we had to pay for designs on Fiverr, which was £60.77. Then it's, he'd take a small cut of 6.5% on each sell, which came to £35.74. And let's not forget the product and shipping costs, which came to £371.69. By the way, as I used Jolato a lot in this video, I reached out to them and asked them if they could give you guys some kind of discount on these fees. They agreed. So with the link in the description, you can get 50% off your first order. With all those expenses deducted, it leaves us with a grand total of £81.69. Considering that I accomplished all the setup within 24 hours and now have the designs, I consider this a success. This means I can continue selling these products over the next few weeks with minimal additional expenses. If you guys would be interested in seeing a part 2 where I allow myself more time to revamp the business and see how far I can take it, let me know in the comment. If you want to know how to sell blank books on Amazon, then I'm going to leave that video

13:29right up there, but don't click on it, Josh, make sure to subscribe if you want to grow your wealth. OK, I'll see you over there. Fall is the perfect time to refresh and reorganize your space. At the Home Depot, find power tools and tool sets starting at $50 to help tackle DIY projects, home updates and more, whether you're drilling brackets to support new shelving or sharpening your head trimmer blade with an angle grinder. Home Depot has the tools you need to check projects off your list, shop Labor Day savings at the Home Depot and gear up for fall projects with the right tools to keep your projects moving. Have you heard that McDonald's spicy chicken McNuggets made with spicy tempura and a blend of aged cayenne are back? Remember to grab a few extra napkins. Bottom up, bubboy. For a limited time at participating McDonald's. Be a business done with the new American Express Graphite Business Cash Unlimited Card with unlimited 2% cashback on all eligible purchases.

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