Month 2: Goodbye Etsy
My relationship with Etsy was short-lived.
Welcome back to my “monthly” retros. Admittedly not off to a great start 😅 — I’m sorry for the delay! This post was written but sat in my drafts for a long while as I hesitated on whether it still made sense to publish these publicly. To make up for it — I’m posting two retros this month!
As a recap, last month I:
Decided to embark on a new journey as a part-time solopreneur and build in public
Started my Etsy store and got my first customer!
I tried Etsy Ads to make more sales
My first order of business for the month was focused on trying to improve my Etsy store and get more customers from the platform. I focused on asking my friends and family to share their reviews — and was also pleasantly surprised to receive a 5* review from my first customer last month 🥰
However, I wasn’t getting any more organic traffic since my shop first went live. My theory that Etsy gives new sellers a “push” seemed to be true.
So in order to get more sales, I decided to try Etsy Ads. I started with a very limited budget of $1 per day. However after a few weeks of running this, I realised Etsy wasn’t even able to push my ad to enough interested buyers to fulfill even that tiny budget. There were a few potential reasons I came up with:
There are a ton of similar listings in the space, but few interested buyers — Etsy prioritised their ad space for better listings.
My listing was performing poorly — Etsy wasn’t interest in pushing it out further, period.
Etsy’s algorithm simply didn’t want to push my content — I haven’t shown myself to be committed enough as a seller (by e.g. posting lots of listings or making sales myself).
To drive traffic, I decided to start… Tik Tok
If Etsy wasn’t going to drive organic or paid content to my listings, I realised I would have to create my own traffic. I decided to turn to the land of Tik Tok dances, day in my life vlogs and kids eating detergent pods.
I’ve been wanting to start Tik Tok for a while, but never built up the courage or motivation. I consume so much Tik Tok on a daily basis… here was a way to leverage it 🙃 (I’m Tik Tok-ing for research — I swear!)
I decided to give it a shot, and instantly fell in love with the process.
In just a month, I somehow feel as if I’ve learnt more than I have in a whole year working. It fills me with excitement thinking about how this platform is able to bring together so many skills — creativity, video-making and editing, marketing, business, and more.
If you’re interested in following my journey on Tik Tok — you can check it out here: @joyfully.
Being more authentically me
While my first video did well, reaching over 3K views, my following videos failed to repeat that success. My intuition says it’s because I’m trying too hard to copy others in a crowded market. Why would anyone want to follow my art, when there are plenty of better artists out there?
I ended this month deciding to experiment with a different route — being more authentically myself, and telling the whole story of wanting to launch a custom children’s book business.
Deciding on this felt uncomfortable. It was starting to become obvious that I was telling a comfortable lie to myself about starting with digital portraits and stickersets on Etsy — what I was really doing was procrastinating from the much scarier effort of writing and illustrating an entire children’s book.
If I had to do things over though, I would probably start the same way. Building in public is terrifying, and I wanted to start slowly to build momentum.
By publishing my story, I feel like I will truly have to be committed to the journey… and commitment is scary.
Does Etsy still make sense?
I originally started with Etsy since, as a marketplace, I thought it would help me solve for distribution of my future children’s books.
However, this month I learnt that I’d probably still need to grow an audience elsewhere and funnel it to the Etsy shop in order to get their algorithms to like me — defeating the purpose of using Etsy in the first place.
To top it off, Etsy is a terrible user experience for made-to-order products (i.e. products that are only created after the customer has made the purchase). I would have to manually adjust stock prices to reflect my capacity for building, e.g. setting listings to max ‘3’ just in case I got a sudden influx of orders I couldn’t fulfill in time (wishful thinking, I know).
It’s also buggy — occassionally, Etsy automatically ‘completed’ orders because it would update the setting to “Instant Download” instead of “Made to Order”, implying orders would be available straight away after purchase (in this case, a user would go to a “Download” page and see nothing available). This was incredibly fustrating — I still have no clue how to change it back reliably.
In addition, I really underestimated the work required to make a polished custom children’s book. Rather than rush with a smaller MVP book (like my original strategy) to test demand, I’ve decided to focus on the build-in-public journey as a way to get a feel for its demand. If I didn’t have a full-time job however, I’d likely still focus on my former path (focusing on smaller, revenue-generating products like stickers or digital portraits to start).
Reflections
I’m really glad to have started on this journey. The part-time solopreneur journey requires an extremely different mindset to my all-in startup journey, but I still feel generally more fulfilled, even if the pace feels much slower, and the problem feels less “world-changing...y”. However, a downside I’ve noticed is that when things are going well with this project, I start feeling slight resentment towards work (especially when work is rough). “Why can’t I do this full-time?” I’d ask myself — then remember that the grass is always greener on the other side.
But I also have worries about this project. Worries that are also the reason for procrastinating on sharing this public retro. I have immense feelings of imposter syndrome and how I’m actually going to execute the entire E2E.
But the whole point was just to try, and learn. I wasn’t supposed to have it all figured out, yet. At the end of the day, the only thing that’s certain is I’ll regret not trying. So I might as well give it a shot.
Until next time,
Joy