How to Win on Etsy | Meet My Student | Leaving Corporate America for Etsy

About this video

Student Keisha, whose professional background is accounting at two multi-million-dollar software companies, explains she chose Jahraus’s program because of its corporate, customer-centric approach. She married into a family running a brick-and-mortar shop and helped her mother-in-law bring a supplies business to Etsy after a Shopify store got no traction, choosing Etsy over Amazon for its market. She says her husband spent about three months creating 300 listings — each needing its own photo and description, drawn from thousands of possible items — and got fewer than 10 sales, which was discouraging despite listings costing 20 cents each. The course, she says, opened them to gift-giving: individual supply items sold for about $1.50 to $5, so they packaged items into an $88 gift box launched in November, which sold daily through the Christmas season. Keisha claims the shop went from roughly $500 to $1,000 a month to over $10,000 in December. She describes balancing this with a second child born in August — wearing the baby at the brick-and-mortar shop, researching during naps and slow periods, and training her team to take photos and write descriptions. She says she blasted through lessons at two-times speed, asked for some classes to open early, then added coaching and the community group because she needed a second set of eyes to get unstuck. Her prior hesitation came from a bad experience buying marketing before; her confidence came from the shared corporate, customer-first alignment. She advises against simply copying bestsellers, arguing the market for that need may already be won and businesses should solve a problem instead. She and her husband are now launching a second Etsy shop, Nova plus Ren, for his handmade jewelry — he has made jewelry for over 10 years, sells wholesale on Faire and is, she says, in 200 shops around the country — featuring 14-karat gold and gemstones, with him as maker and her handling marketing and accounting. Her three happiest takeaways are understanding SEO through doing 100 listings, using community and coaching to get out of her head, and an endurance mindset of pushing past the dip while competitors get tired.

Key takeaways

• Listing volume alone did not work for Keisha’s supplies shop: she reports 300 listings over three months produced fewer than 10 sales before strategy changes
• Repackaging low-priced $1.50 to $5 supply items into an $88 gift box for the gift-giving market was, in her account, the turning point
• Keisha attributes the revenue jump — from roughly $500-$1,000 a month to over $10,000 in December, per her claim — to the Christmas-season gift box launch
• She credits doing 100 listings in the program’s formula with making SEO finally click, and coaching/community with getting her unstuck
• Her advice is to solve a customer problem rather than copy a bestseller, and to treat Etsy as an endurance game that rewards pushing past the dip

Episode details: published April 11, 2023 · 13:22 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Dylan Jahraus’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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