---
title: 'How to Start a Print on Demand Business from Scratch (2025)'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=tcBJXXeAras'
video_id: 'tcBJXXeAras'
date: 2026-07-14
duration_sec: 1917
---

# How to Start a Print on Demand Business from Scratch (2025)

> Source: [How to Start a Print on Demand Business from Scratch (2025)](https://youtube.com/watch?v=tcBJXXeAras)

## Summary

This video presents a step-by-step strategy for starting a print-on-demand business from scratch, focusing on growing an Etsy shop to over $100 profit per day in just 2.5 weeks using mostly organic traffic. The creator shares proven methods for product selection, design creation, supplier choice, and marketing automation.

### Key Points

- **Introduction to Print on Demand** [00:00] — Print on demand allows selling white-label products (t-shirts, mugs, posters) with custom designs. Orders are fulfilled automatically after purchase, eliminating financial risk and enabling passive income.
- **Picking a Winning Product** [02:43] — Choose evergreen products (t-shirts, mugs) with at least 20-30% profit margin. Versatile products allow targeting multiple niches with different designs.
- **Finding a Targeted Niche** [07:04] — Use tools like Listing View to spy on competitor shops and validate niches. Look for high search volume (e.g., 1.7M views) with low competition (under 10,000 listings). Example: 'bartender pet portrait' had low competition and high sales.
- **AI-Generated Designs** [12:52] — Midjourney is used to generate designs quickly. Simple edits (background removal, vectorization, resizing) are done with free tools like Recraft and Canva. Aim to create many designs to increase chances of one succeeding.
- **Supplier and Automation** [17:22] — Printify is recommended for its low prices and quality. Preist automates bulk uploading of designs to Printify, saving time. Example: 20 mug designs can be uploaded and published in minutes.
- **Setting Up an Etsy Shop** [20:36] — Etsy is the best platform due to its built-in traffic (400M+ shoppers). Open a shop, add a logo and banner (using AI), and complete policies. Use a free guide for step-by-step setup.
- **Marketing Strategy** [23:51] — Use SEO (keywords from top listings) to rank. Improve conversion with high-quality mockups (buy from Etsy). Optionally run Etsy ads only on listings that already sell organically.
- **Investment and Mindset** [28:14] — Initial costs: Etsy shop ($15), Listing View ($150 one-time), Preist ($100 one-time), Midjourney ($10/month), Canva (free or $15/month). Invest upfront to fast-track success. Print on demand is not dead; online spending is $1.3T/year in the US alone.

### Conclusion

Print on demand remains a viable, low-risk business model. Success requires investing in tools, creating many targeted designs, and leveraging Etsy's organic traffic. With persistence, even a beginner can achieve $100/day profit.

## Transcript

all the different steps and strategies that are out there it can be hard to path to get started with print on demand even if you've never owned a business before this is the strategy that I've used time and time again to grow three
different shots to over six and seven figures so if I had to start over today from absolute zero well that's exactly what I did I grew this brand new Etsy shop from0 to over $100 a day in profit in Just 2 and 1/2 Weeks time now that's
pretty far from millionaire status but I think almost anyone would be happy with an extra $100 a day keep in mind this was done with almost entirely organic traffic even though I did run a few ads towards the end of week 2 but the paid
shop was bringing in a few hundred per day I did have to close it so that I could fulfill all the orders in time I'll explain the product and everything throughout this video but imagine what this shop could be making if I focused
shops just like this for over 5 years and they've made me millions of dollars your time to watch this whole video I've been sharing strategies just like this
over 140,000 sales and millions of dollars in profit so double check that you're subscribed and let's get it but first how does this whole thing even
work print on demand allows you to sell blank white label products which are products like posters mugs or t-shirts with your unique design on them these designs can be handmade or generated using AI once the artwork is uploaded to
the product you can post it for sale online the thing is you're not actually creating a real product just yet just an image of what the product will look like when the customer orders the key is that after someone buys your product the
order is fulfilled automatically and you only pay to get that product printed and shipped to the customer after someone has already bought it from you that's the on demand part and it takes almost all the Financial Risk out of the
you're not fulfilling these orders yourself and you can run the business entirely from your laptop making it mostly passive and allowing you to scale it when you have time and keep earning income while you sleep work your day job
or travel the world there are four pieces that you need to start this business a product a targeted design for that product a digital storefront to sell it on and good marketing so that customers actually buy it now before we
get into the weeds here there's a lot of important things that I'm going to say you can come back and rewatch portions that you need if you feel like you're missing anything there's also going to be time stamps throughout this video and
you started component number one is picking a winning product this can be the easiest step but at the same time you don't want to get it wrong because it could ruin your business before you even get started so how do you know what
first I always make sure that the product I'm selling is Evergreen this future look I don't want to put a bunch of work into and make a bunch of designs
product we have to look at what's already been working and the reason that we start with the product is because the designs that we put on the product are what Target specific niches that we want to sell to nobody's going to buy any of
these blank products so we're mainly selling the design that go on these products and I only ever sell long-term best-selling products which are basically any products in this list like t-shirts mugs posters because they've
been proven to work for years and these types of products will continue to sell pretty much no matter what my shops that have done six and seven figures have all sold the most competitive products like t-shirts and mugs and some people see a
bunch of competition but I see a huge opportunity with tons of demand remember put on the mug and that's how we stand out with an evergreen product second the product has to make a good profit what's the point of even owning a business if
it doesn't make money my goal is always at least a 20% profit margin but ideally a little closer to 30% let's say that I'm selling a sweatshirt from print to 5 okay this is going to cost me roughly $12 just for the item itself and then
another $7 for the shipping so my total cost is about $20 this bestselling sweatshirt sells for $30 base and then another $10 since it ships from Canada and here's another bestselling sweatshirt again this one sells for $37
to $48 so I think it's reasonable to assume we could make around what $30 to $35 at least with a sweatshirt if we plug these numbers in even after fees you can see we'd be left with around a 27% profit margin or about $9 per sale
which is perfect this gives us a really nice profit per order since we're using mostly organic traffic but it also has enough margin that we could run PID ads if we want to it's just a rule of thumb but again if you sold something more
shop that I grewed at over $100 profit per day you can make a lot more profit per order but it's not really passive at all so you need Less sales to make good
money but it's way less scalable over time so you kind of have to pick your poon shops that are easy to grow in the short term usually don't make as much money over the course of its life third the product has to be versatile an
evergreen product with a high profit margin only needs one thing to sell and that's targeted designs the design is what the customer is buying and it's the actual Niche that our product is in a versatile product simply means it could
have designs from all kinds of niches on it like doctors teachers UFOs martial arts coding and really anything you can make designs for can become the niche so these could be Custom Designs where you have to modify the design for each sale
you usually make a little bit more profit per order this way or you can sell pre-made designs which are just sold as is which obviously sell more passively once they're created they could also be Evergreen designs these
will sell occasionally and continue to sell long to the future or trending important thing here is that your product shouldn't box you in to making one type of design when you're trying to decide what to sell think long term all
the top seven and eight figure Etsy shops have hundreds if not thousands of listings posted for sale in their shops to get to that level of success if you have to post a few hundred or few thousand product listings for sale then
which type of product would you want to make designs for picking a product that consistent the goal is to pick a product that can be Evergreen that makes a good profit that can Target as many niches as possible with different designs so that
we can post lots of listings in our shop but even with the best product you're not going to get very far without great designs the thing is making designs is
easy but most sellers fail because they don't understand what a good design looks like luckily for you good designs only have two elements a targeted Niche where we'll start our research a targeted Niche should be hot and working
right now so that when we post our products for sale they rank quickly and we want to sell on niches that have high search volume but low competition now you can do all of this research for free on Etsy but you're just not going to get
the same level of detail unless you use a research tool like listing view which lets me spy on competitor shops view all of their top listings and then validate keyword Niche ideas before I go spend time making the design for example this
was the top listing in my challenge shop a bartender themed pet portrait and this single listing made over 80% of the total sales and total profit and let me show you how I figured out that this would sell you first have to find a shop
selling sweatshirts that we could use to model our own shop after so I can use listing view to analyze this shop and see how well it's performing over time
so this shop opened up 11 months ago and it's already made over 13,000 sales or around 1,000 sales a month remember even after all of our costs and fees we can make about $9 of profit per order so with 1,000 sales per month that could be
about $99,000 of profit 11 months from now it could be you making $9,000 a month passively from your shop if you took this serious once we know that a shop is successful we can come down here and filter out all of their listings to
find the bestselling ones typically the very very top ones are the more General to choose one that's a little bit down the list so this one it says dog outline
so if we click on it we'll just come and see what this is and it kind of breaks down all of the listing stats now this single listing has made an estimated $3,000 so I say that this could be a good idea now this particular listing is
a custom product but the research process is the same no matter what listing you would probably just try to make your own version and post it for sale and hope for the best but since I'm using listing view I can validate the
niche even further by checking the competition and its score so I want to take the main keyword from the listing so that I can analyze it using the keyword finder so I'm just going to put in a dog portrait outline and you can
see a breakdown of how well this keyword should perform so this is a kind detailed breakdown of this keyword if I made listings with this keyword in it I would be competing with only about 4,100 other listings and that's actually
extremely low considering that this keyword's getting around 1.7 million views if a niche has less than 10,000 competing listings your chances of getting sales are pretty good this is cool because it will also show us top
keywords for similar top listings that are ranking in search so for example pet line drawing custom line drawing dog ear outline and dog line drawing are also top niches that have a high search volume with low competition we want to
Target this kind of Niche that has Max views with low competition if I tried to search for something like a dog portrait you can see the score is basically zero meaning there's way too much competition don't even try it that's why I found out
when I searched for a bartender pet portrait that even though there aren't a ton of views you can see there's hardly any competition ranking for that specific keyword this type of super specific Niche is where all the money is
made I could take the idea for a bartender themed pet portrait and switch out bartender for any other profession and come up with hundreds of listing ideas or for my sweatshirt I could take the dog portrait outline and I could
make it a corgi portrait outline or any other specific dog breed and have hundreds of targeted designs this is how we're going to get our products to rank identified a winning Niche you need to analyze the art style each Niche has its
sell sweatshirts to grandmothers but you're using some kind of crazy font see what products look like in this Niche so there's all kinds of these
simple line art style there's also a little bit of variety here as well some of these listings look a little more realistic or a little bit sketched but you kind of get the general Vibe now I like to save these listings as
inspiration so I'll click through and I'll try and find some top performing listings so that I'm not wasting my time making designs that don't look bad and I just want to copy the link to these listings then I can just come over and
create one of these these whiteboards over here on canva and I can just paste the link it and it creates this nice little preview icon so that I can always reference this listing or come into this whiteboard for ideas when I'm ready to
Niche ideas that you can make designs for and now after you've identified the art style in a winning Niche and you have some inspiration to go off of it's finally time to start making designs and with that list there's four methods we
can use to create different art styles to turn each of those IDE is into lots of sellable designs I have an updated 2025 ultimate design tutorial coming soon so we'll cover this a little bit quicker today and if you really want to
master designing then watch that video after this one we're not trying to reinvent the wheel simple designs work best and our goal is always to make a lot of designs so that we have the best chance at just one of them popping off
method to making designs that's definitely the fastest and currently the most profitable is AI generated designs especially now that marketplaces like
Etsy have publicly endorsed the use of AI it's a no-brainer if you're just getting started I personally use mid journey to generate images and the generator takes care of the rest you can go to alpha. Mid journey.com to use mid
journey in the browser and here I'll just start by browsing for images that making the type of design that I'm trying to get this also allows me to
jump in and see the prompts that these other people have used to make that design and then I just have to craft my own prompt the best that I can to make the type of design that I'm trying to get there's no magic prompt mid journey
is very capable but you also have to learn how to use it well so don't get upset if your first 10 images don't look perfect again it's doing all the work able to get a few decent results here after running a few different prompts
and again it's okay to get a lot of bad results because you only need that one listing to pop off and grow your entire business there's still skill required here you have to know what type of designs look best and you have to
actually put in effort to make good products here even if the AI is doing the design ready there's three types of edits you might have to make to the the Des design there's a lot of free tools but recraft does a good job at
this you just have to upload your design and click this button it is literally little blurry so you might want to vectorize the art so you can make this
small image as large as you need to so again right inside of recraft you can just click this vectorize button and once it's done no matter how much you zoom in the lines are still crispy and it's still high quality so then we can
just click download and download it in the SVG format for free you can only really vectorize simple Graphics not these complex painting style images so high quality enough to use for some products like mugs we're able to make
perfectly sized artwork right inside of mid journey in printify if you click on start designing for a product like a mug you'll see this print area size over here on the left so what we want to do is use this as a ratio in the
image size for Mid journey and now if we generate a new design you'll see it's sized perfectly for that product for products like our sweatshirt this is also how we can size our design so the print area for a sweatshirt is 3852 by
4398 so we just have to go over to canva and we can make a new custom siiz document and just put in the dimensions 3852 by 4398 and this will make our design file the correct size then I can just drag in
it'll look good on the sweatshirt and here I could just sell this graphic as is or I could come in and I could add some text so maybe I'll grab a nice
looking font and I'll just put in the pets name and this could be our custom sweatshirt design just like that we have two designs but I can take this a step duplicate the page and then here maybe I want to use chat gbt to get a funny
saying that I could use for my relevant graphic so maybe this will work so I'll just copy this and paste it into my design and then maybe I want to change the font to something else just to kind of mix it up and get some variety here
and now I have a brand new design with basically no extra work then I can click to upload it to my product now there's a lot of other types of designs like the
good oldfashioned handcrafted text design pre-made designs and hybrid designs and all these strategies make designing a lot easier which is the step that most beginners get hung up on but for the sake of time in this video I'll
before the goal is to make as many designs as possible you want to have so should be your top priority and at this point you should know how to make a lot
of designs so next we have to figure out what supplier is going to be best for our product now look we're not going to waste time trying to sell on Redbubble or Teespring or Society 6 since we're actually trying to make money this means
that we have three options for a supplier to use printify printful and several reasons why printify is the best in the game I've used printify for years
at this point and they've genuinely been the best to work with and they've enabled me to keep hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra profit since I sell tens of thousands of products and they have the absolute best prices in the
game while still delivering high quality prints to customers but that's not the only reason to go with them because we still have an issue see if you've been we need to get uploaded to our product on printify if you're actually using AI
you could be making dozens of designs per hour so if you have 20 designs it why we want to automate the process of uploading using prelit preist has a
printify product uploader built in and to show you how quick and easy it is to use we first have to create a sort of template in printify so all this means is I have to select the product that we're selling in prini and hit this
start designing button then I select all of the colors that I want to sell in this product listing so we'll just select a few and then I just have to add some kind of design it doesn't matter what it is we just have to add it so
that we can save it and then we'll call this our sweatshirt template then I just copy the link to this product template in printify and here I just add the template in so that I can use it for bulk uploading now if I have 20 design
files I can drag all of them in at the same time but that's not even the versions of the exact same designs but I want to put those white versions on a
few colors and have them in the same listing I can just add a Vari ation and here I can select the colors that I want the white design to show up on and then I can just upload all of those white design files you can see that it links
all of them together without me having to do it and then I can just click upload and give it a little bit of time when it's done uploading the products will show up in your printify account you can see all of the black and white
publish this saves so much time so let's say I I have 20 mug designs that are ready to go because I made them in mid Journey so they're perfectly sized and
everything I just select a mug template I made drag all of those designs in and click upload it uploads all of them and it even names them based on my settings in preist so literally all I have to do is hit publish doing this manually even
for just a few products takes forever preist automates the uploading now with our products ready to go on printify we still need a shop online a storefront to sell them in and there's several options here but as a beginner we want to sell
where the customers are already shopping with over $12 billion of transactions per year and over 400 million active monthly Shoppers Etsy is a Shoppers search engine that's more than capable of getting your business to six or seven
figures not to mention opening an Etsy Shop allows you to leverage their brand and trust that they've built up for over a decade Etsy is the best place for $110,000 a month you can think about scaling onto another platform like
Shopify Etsy drives so much organic traffic to my businesses that I wouldn't printify is an Etsy approved integration means that all of those products that we
bulk uploaded with preist can simply be published to our shop ready to sell to open up your Etsy shop I suggest downloading my free guide which will open and started from coming up with a business name to creating a free branded
email and getting your shop open and ready to sell this guide walks you only helps me out but it also gets you the maximum discounts and coupon codes
which totals up to around $66 of free sh you can download it for free below this video now even though there's no website design here you still have to make the shop look alive take a look at how drastic the change is the before and
after of the shop that I recently scaled to $100 profit per day even with just one listing the shop that doesn't have any details added looks completely dead look alive I used AI to come up with a logo that fit the business name and a
banner image to go with it as well and then I added some text to the announcement and the policy section and all of it really brings the shop to life I was to spend money on this shop I would trust the finished version a lot
more than the Bare Bones brand new shop even though the listings look exactly the same realistically it should only take you about 15 minutes to open your shop and then from complete start to complete finish and having your shop
opened and designed with a logo a banner image a name email and everything all together maybe an hour an hour and a half done is better than perfect don't over complicate it get your shop open and ready to sell because it only has to
be done once and remember no customer is going to care what your logo or your banner image are only that you have one but if you don't have one you're going to look like a complete new remember every image that you use in your shop
whether it's AI or handcrafted should always convey that your shop is premium modern custom and an overall trustworthy brand buyers come to Etsy looking for products to buy and your job is simply to have something ready for anyone
that's why specific products work so well if a customer comes to Etsy and they search for a bartender themed pet portrait and you have one of the only listings showing up that actually looks decent you have a really high chance of
getting the sale the whole business is just about getting as many of these specifically targeted products posted for sale on Etsy as possible and once you understand that you're ready to learn
marketing assuming that you've done your Niche research and you've made targeted designs then the marketing should be easy my marketing strategy is broken into three different parts getting your listings to rank on Etsy getting them to
convert and optionally paying for ads getting your listings to rank on Etsy is the very first step and it's done by using great SEO or search engine optimization which is just a fancy way of saying keywords free way to find
keywords is to look on Etsy and see which listings have performed well we would have to go through and find listings based on our main Niche which performed well this listing for example has over 200 reviews so it could
potentially be a winner we would want to look through the title and see if we can find portions of it that we can use as keywords to make our own title for our can find this section which is all of the tags that they're using to get this
listing to rank now that's the freeway but if you have the budget listing view can save you a ton of time and headache in the keyword finder we just have to put in the keyword of our main Niche so in this case a oneline pet portrait and
this will show us a list of similar keywords that we can use to build out a title for our own listings now I like to filter these out by recommendation and least amount of competing listings we can use our main keyword plus all of
these other trending keywords in our product titles to get them to rank and next we can do the tags if we come over to the listings tab here still in the keyword finder we can filter out the top listings matching our keyword and look
for the ones that seem to match our product best so I think I'll choose this one and here this just gives us a breakdown again of the listing but more importantly allows us to just copy all of the tags that they're using to get
this listing to rank now this strategy will get our products to show up in search results but to show up in more search results and earn a rank at the to click on our products favorite them and even buy them the way that we do
that is with the listing presentation and specifically the mock-ups the mockup shows off the design you made to the customer it's like the product image but without the actual product ever being created this is so important because the
customer has to imagine actually owning the product even though it isn't printify they don't have the same premium handcrafted highquality vibe
that Etsy is known for so we have to fix that look at the other top performing listings selling the same product as you these mockups are the mockups that you need to be using if you want to get the same results most of the time you can
find the exact same mockup or very similar mockups if you just search for it right on Etsy there's almost always a lot of high quality results that you can the bestselling listing is a best seller for arza those mockups are proven to
convert and since mockup shops sell all the same mockups to everyone you can buy the same mockup and use it for yourself and the best ones are usually only a few dollars I've also got an entire video breaking down exactly how to automate
the process of making mockups and since this video is already getting long I'll often is should I pay for Etsy ads there's no one siiz fits-all answer here
but here's a good rule of thumb there's no substitute for posting lots of listings for sale there's no way around it if you want to be successful you have to make and post a lot of product listings with great keywords that being
said if you have a high enough profit margin to spare and you know that your product listings should be converting then paying for some ads just adds fuel to the fire if you do want to try ads I would recommend only turning on the ads
for listings that have already gotten sales organically and that way you're not going to be wasting any money running ads for listings that won't ever sell to begin with keep in mind a lot of the biggest shops get enough free
traffic from the Etsy search engine that they don't even have to pay ads my shops automation tools buying good mockups and posting a lot of listings I see this
and that's that they don't fully invest when getting into the business this is one of the most affordable and risk-free businesses that you can start period that said I see so many beginners afraid of of investing even a couple hundred
into the business that they expect to eventually make them hundreds of dollars a day if you seriously want to see results be prepared to invest time and money into the business that's the only way to actually get to the point where
much all of this costs and although pricing can always change right now here's a good estimate of how much you should plan to invest at the beginning
of 2025 an Etsy Shop is $15 to open one time that cost is unavoidable and each SC listing you post is 20 if you want to save time do better research and automate everything there's only really two tools you need listing view has
several plans but its onetime payment is by far the best value at just 150 bucks and prist also has a one-time payment of $100 which is an absolute steal in my opinion pry is free with my coupon code and it only makes sense to fully upgrade
after you're making around five sales per day other the subscription doesn't save you anything mid journey is $10 a month and canva is free or $15 a month compare paying a little bit more and getting the yearly or one-time payments
upfront is definitely the best value and the smartest decision long term but if at all if you're only getting the monthly plans and the absolute Necessities you definitely don't have to but if you spend a couple hundred up
front you'd be able to not really worry about the other costs besides the Etsy listing fees and you'd only be down maybe a couple hundred again think about it as an asset that could eventually pay you a couple hundred a day you don't
really need any of these tools you can get started almost completely free for techsavvy these tools and things just FasTrack your success but the thing that
I've seen is the people who invest are the people who see results sooner and life-changing money I also hear that print on demand is dead saturated and that it doesn't work anymore but tell me how much time do you think the world
spends online each day chances are you watching this have personally bought something online recently your friends and family make purchases all the time anything else if you don't think they're spending money while they're online
you're sadly mistaken online spending just in America is over $1.3 trillion per year growing at 10% a year for you to make even a million dollar a year is absolutely minuscule nobody would even notice it's not even a drop in the
bucket Etsy alone processes over 13 billion in transactions each year and it's growing every year so no online business is just getting started if you've ever had a job before no matter what it is you probably understand that
it takes a couple of weeks of training before you even know the basics and then it can take a couple of years of hard work before you get a promotion to because it's too competitive or oversaturated even though there are
business is not for you but if you're the type of person who understands that it's realistic to have a learning curve and to spend time working towards a goal really can't fail if you continue to improve and don't give up leave your
questions and comments down below I hope you found this video helpful and subscribe