My Shop Sucked... and I still made $1.5M | How to Get Started on Etsy in 2023

About this video

The creator, who claims $1.5 million in Etsy revenue and over a million dollars in profit over about seven years, argues that waiting for perfect listings, an LLC filing, a better time, or confidence about fulfilling orders are excuses that cost sellers money. She says 99% of people who delay are stuck mentally rather than technically, that there is never a perfect time to start or scale, and that the only real way to fail on Etsy is to set up a shop and then stop taking action. Her prescription is relentless action and incremental improvement: publish the first version of listings and designs, do the first social posts, accept the first custom order you do not yet know how to make, and say yes and figure it out later. As evidence she shows her first YouTube video from July 2022, describing herself as awkward with no editing experience, and says committing to one video a day for a month (she managed about three weeks before illness) compressed a year of experience into weeks and grew the channel past 20,000 subscribers in about six and a half months. She says she used the same volume approach on Etsy, starting with one listing, no SEO and one picture, then working far harder than competitors for 18 months.

Key takeaways

• Treat perfectionism, paperwork and timing worries as excuses; delay lets competitors build market share while you leave money on the table
• Expect to be bad at a new skill the first time — that has no bearing on future potential, so get the bad first attempts over with quickly
• The only way she identifies to fail on Etsy is to set up the shop and then stop taking action
• Use high-volume sprints, such as daily output for a month, to compress the experience that would normally take a year
• Say yes to unfamiliar custom work and figure it out later, focusing on incremental improvements rather than judging month one harshly

Episode details: published April 9, 2023 · 9:49 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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