Etsy Printables Course Student Reviews

I have made thousands selling printables on Etsy.

And just this week I launched a course teaching others how to do the same.

You can sign up for the course at Gold City Ventures.

I sell bachelorette party printables and LOVE IT because every time a sale comes in, I do zero work.

I made the printables one time over a year ago and have made $7 per sale and $5,000 since.

Many readers have asked about the course and I want to share the experiences of current students with you.

The course is new but I have asked 3 people to test the course for me before launch.

• Two out of the three people had never started a side hustle before in their life!
• 1 person was in my mastermind last year where I taught printables and has made over $7,000 since!

Here are my interviews with them.

Keep in mind that these are transcripts of my interviews with them.

You can listen to the audio on my podcast.

Andrea – She created Weight Loss Tracking Printables

Julie
So I’m here with Andrea. Welcome, Andrea.

Andrea
Hi. I’m very excited.

Julie
So tell me about yourself.

Andrea
I’m from Boston, me and my husband have been married for two years. We just bought a house. And we’re looking to start a family.

Julie
So you are taking the Etsy printables course right now. Thank you for beta testing. Can you tell everyone, did you have any Etsy experience going into this?

Andrea
No, absolutely not. I was actually kind of scared, going and doing the course.

Julie
I know that you and I have had many conversations about Etsy. And then you’ve been super supportive of my shop, leaving me my first reviews and sales so that my shop looked more legitimate over the years. And we’ve even spitball than ideas together before. But you had never before this course, taking the steps to start your own Etsy shop. Why is that?

Andrea
Mainly because I was nervous. And I didn’t really know what to do or what ideas to put on paper. And I felt like there was a lot of different things went into it that I didn’t know how to navigate. So having the course available felt like a good way to put me on the right path to make sure it worked out well and helped me put my creative ideas kind of on paper and go from there.

Julie
Have you ever done a course before? Not something to do with Etsy or anything? That’s kind of entrepreneurial?

Andrea
No.

Julie
So just like school stuff,

Andrea
yeah, mainly just online school classes or anything like that.

Julie
How was this experience a little different than that?

Andrea
It was different. Because it was more exciting. I felt like I was kind of in control of my own business or in control of what I wanted to do. And it was definitely more creative. I was able to take my idea and my experience what I thought I could bring to the table for Etsy shoppers, and use the course to harness all the ideas, I had to make a product that people would want to buy,

Julie
and you crushed it. So I give you access to the course. And I think on day four, you had already created your first printable, it was pretty cool. You were ahead of the lesson plan for the week for sure. It was crazy. So I was really I was super pumped for you. Because I know that there’s something that you’ve been interested in doing for a while. And it just kind of like I think gave you the extra motivation to take action. So what specifically like tell people that first week or whatever, what was the learning curve for you? Like, how did you feel as you were going through?

Andrea
So as I was going through the majority of the course was really easy to follow. But I think the biggest learning curve is, once you did the course, once you did, you know parts of the course the first quarter of the course, you’re like, Okay, I’m ready, I think I can do my first printable, I’m going to start designing it and making it and you get into one of the programs that you talk about, and you start creating it and making it. And then what I did is once I made my printable, I sent it to you to look at and one of your first questions was, is that licensing okay to us. And I was like, oh, like, I have no idea. So that was one of the biggest curveballs because I feel like there’s a lot of licensing things, that is something I have never even experienced. So the course helped me with that. And then the Facebook group helped me and having the connection with other people who are beta testing the course, and helping with their experiences as well helped along with that, too. So, but I did have to go and revise some of my early printables to get the licensing that worked well.

Julie
Yeah. And you totally you were just like flying with that. But I think when people are starting out with something new, like they’re hit with a curveball of like, Oh, I didn’t even see this coming, or I’ve never thought about this before. And you were able to just completely, like overcome that obstacle and tackle it. That is a common thing that people have to know about. And I guess for anyone listening, when you are a business, and you’re using designs and making printables, you have to make sure that all the designs that you’re using are ok for commercial use. And commercial use means that you can use them to make money. That’s the opposite of personal use, which is you can just use them around the house or for whatever purposes you want, like you kids birthday party or whatever. But if you’re going to sell them, they have to be commercial use. So in the course we take you through exactly what that means. And it will be a little bit of a learning curve if you never thought about it, but it’s not something that you can’t overcome. Do you feel more confident? Now, Andrea? I mean, I know that was maybe like a week ago that you’re going through that. But do you feel like you understand it better now and you can move forward?

Andrea
Oh, absolutely. I, I actually took one of the images that was license, I’m sorry, not licensed, that was a free image and something that you could use in commercial use and ended up creating my own image from it very easily. And very simply, with the help of the course. Because the course showed different programs you can use, like Canada and Adobe Illustrator and and other programs that you can use to create that type of image. It was very helpful.

Julie
So we talked before about how you were nervous to do this, because you didn’t think you had any ideas. And I think that’s really common, like someone listening is probably saying to themselves, I’m interested in doing this, but I literally can’t think of anything to do. How did you get the idea to do your printable? And I know this is like a little bit of a personal connection for you to this one. But do you want to talk a little bit about the idea process?

Andrea
Sure. So my ideas for I printables came because I’ve had a struggle with weight loss and just healthy eating and weight my whole life. So I found something on Pinterest, that was two jars. And it was they had marbles in them. And there were two mason jars and one said pounds to go and once it pounds lost. And you would move the marbles, whenever you you know, you’d put say you want to lose 20 pounds, whenever you lost a pound, you would move on one of the marbles from the pounds to go to the pound glass jar. So I thought that was you know, a good visual for people to see. So I wanted to focus my printables on something that people had a visual for their weight loss, but also a goal. So my printables are something that if you want, say a bikini body, or you want to lose weight for your wedding gown, or if you’re a guy and you want to lose weight or gain muscle to look, you know, buffer at the gym, or something like that, I have made printables that have designs or images that kind of show these things, and you fill them in as you go. So with the more weight that you’d lose, you get to fill in sections. And then once the pictures fully filled in or fully colored in, then you get to see you’ve hit your goal, you made your progress, you know, you’re you’re done your ankle weight, and you’ve succeeded. And it’s just kind of a little reward for yourself, I’m actually doing one right now, because I’m trying to lose a little bit of weight before me and my husband try and start a family. So I made a printable for myself. And it’s a picture of a baby. And each part of the baby has, you know, a different section of poundage to lose. So no minus two pounds minus four, you know, and so on. So, I lost two pounds this morning, congratulations to me. I went and I got to fill in the little baby bottle that he’s holding or, or she and it was great, I got so excited. I was like, Oh, I get to fill in a part of my no printable. And it was great. And it just gave me a little bit more motivation to keep going because I’m like, you know, once I see that whole little baby filled in, it’s go time, you know. So I think it’s a good visual to see how far you’ve come and how far you have to go in a weight loss journey. So that’s kind of how I got my idea for my printables in my shop.

Julie
I love that I love that it has a personal story for you, and that you’re going to help people with this. And it’s going to sell like we know this is going to sell to which is awesome. So when when this does sell and it blows up big time, Andrea, what’s your plan to do with this money?

Andrea
Well, as I mentioned, me and my husband just bought a house and we’re doing renovation with that, and we want to start a family. So any money that I get or you know, if it does blow up and I make bank, then all of that money is going to go straight into my house and my family, you know, we have a lot of renovations to do. And babies cost a lot of money. So that’s exactly where it’s going to go.

Julie
Awesome. So now that your official beta testing responsibilities have ended, thank you for all your feedback. And the course is now better that you’ve come and gone through it. Thanks. Are you going to still be part of this? Like, are people listening, going to be able to see you in the Facebook group and you’re going to be hanging out? And you’re going to keep with it?

Andrea
Yeah, absolutely. I love this. And honestly, I mean, there’s a I may need questions from whoever’s in the group in the future. So there’s, you know, more minds, the better. So, if anyone has ideas or suggestions for me in the future, I’m down. So you know, I will definitely be a part of it.

Julie
Cool. That’s awesome. Thanks, Andrea. Thank you. Oh, wait, if someone wants to check out your shop, what is it

Andrea
color you confident,

Julie
love that

Nicole – First time Etsy Seller Created Bachelorette Printables

Julie
So I’m here with Nicole. Nicole, tell everyone about yourself.

Nicole
Hi, I’m Nicole. I’m 28 years old. I live in Seattle, Washington. I am very new to the finance space. I wouldn’t call myself a very financially savvy person. But when I heard about this course, in the potential to make a little bit of passive income, I thought this sounded like a great idea for me.

Julie
So let’s real talk. Since we’re sisters, you’ve known that I’ve had this Etsy shop for years, and you and I have spitball different ideas, because we’re both in similar ages. And we’ve gone to a lot of bachelorette parties and you know that I have the shop. And you’re always like, wow, I could totally do a better shot than you, Julie. And but you never really like took action to do it. Why did you never actually do this before?

Nicole
I think for me, the biggest barrier was the time commitment. I work in a job that’s pretty demanding. A lot of times I do have to bring, you know that work home. And I’m busy, I have a dog I’m busy, always busy and doing things and I was worried that I wouldn’t have enough time to devote to actually making something that was high quality. When I found out that you had kind of aggregated all of the resources that I would need to be successful in one place. That was a huge game changer. And as soon as I logged on and could see that, everything I needed all of the information from how to open your first Etsy shop, how to create your first printable how to market it. So it actually sells you know, everything was there for me. So I think it just saved me so much time and just simplify the process so much.

Julie
So I definitely appreciate you giving this a try. And we have a big win to share everyone that came through last night. tell everyone what you did yesterday,

Nicole
I posted my first Etsy listing, and called the principal fairy, you can go check me out, I am going to be selling Bachelorette printables, I’ll probably expand my line to include wedding and other events. I’m super excited, you have created a monster, I am going to blow yourself out of the water. And so thank you.

Julie
Challenge accepted. So as you were going through the course, what was really great about having a sibling do the testing is that if you got stuck at all, I knew I got a mad emoji text. And you would tell me exactly what was wrong. So I’ve taken a lot of online courses you haven’t. So as someone who’s literally never taken an online course before, let’s start it back at the beginning, like what was it like when you just got the email, you clicked it and you went into the course just tell people what it looks like. So they can get a sense of what’s in there.

Nicole
Yeah, so as soon as you you click in, there’s an assortment of both video instruction, and then also text that that kind of recaps what you’ve heard in the video along with any links that you might need, divided into chapters. So the way I approached it is I did one kind of chapter per week. And then there are also assignments to kind of keep you motivated and accountable. I also like to there is a Facebook group that you can join with other members who are taking the class at the same time as you. So you can share ideas, you can ask some questions. You know, for me, I had access to you to ask questions all the time. But I think for the average user that that Facebook group is going to be key to holding them accountable, but then also making sure they’re part of a community where they feel like their questions are being answered.

Julie
Yep. And part of the course is that in the Facebook group, Cody night will be in there once a week doing Facebook Lives to answer their questions. And then also, we’re paying at the experts to be in there with us to answer questions. Now, with people though, when you were texting me the questions, the answer I’d tell you is that you have to go back to the text and go to the next lecture and read it because I wanted to make sure that the experience that you had would be true to someone taking the course. And what was really cool about you going through this and I hope you’re not embarrassed. Let me tell you this is that I would say tech wise, you were a little bit in a different place. When it came to taking this course, we had an issue with scrolling where I asked you how the first module went? And what do you think of the videos and you said, Okay, I like the videos, they were good. And I asked what do you think of the summaries, and you were like what text I didn’t see anything, it turns out that you didn’t know to scroll underneath every video, which has all the the text. So we got to the scrolling. And now I have a nice prompt at the top of the video saying please scroll down to read the text. So I will tell for everyone it doesn’t consider themselves a techie type person, Nicole here has already tested for you and every usability thing that she’s pointed out, we’ve incorporated that feedback into the course. And now it’s much more I mean, it already was like a simple thing. But if you had never taken a course before, I can see why you wouldn’t know that there’s text into the video.

Nicole
Yeah, I stand by that it wasn’t clear.

Julie
So now if there’s a sign, you scroll down, you get all the good stuff. So let’s talk a little bit about the actual process of creating the printables. I know that that was something that overwhelmed you a little bit at the beginning, the idea that you had to create these printables yourself. And I don’t know how you feel now. But what you had built it up to be in your head and what it actually is, is that the same?

Nicole
Yeah. So my original assumption was that I would need to have more design experience, which surprisingly is not true. I use Canva as my main software. And at first, I felt it was a little bit difficult to figure out. But once you kind of got the hang of it, it was pretty easy. So you know, as soon as I learned that, then kind of I was off to the races. And I was creating different versions of my printables, I was using Acrobat to make them editable for customers. So actually, the learning curve was not quite as steep as I anticipated.

Julie
So that’s great to hear. You just mentioned some two buzzwords, Canva and Adobe, which I know those were things that you had no idea what they were before. So for anyone who is listening that doesn’t know what these things are, tell us first, are they free tools, because that’s a concern of someone starting they’re wondering, buying this course I have to buy any extra stuff like tell them have you had to buy anything, since you put up your first Etsy product.

Nicole
So Canva is a free tool, I did not need to purchase that edition, the Acrobat for editing printables, there is a monthly cost. What I have done is all of these tools, Adobe Acrobat, pick monkey for text, there are a number of tools out there that will offer a free trial period. So if you feel like you have a week where you can really create and spend the time to do so I would suggest doing the free trial. And if it’s something that you don’t think is going to give you a good return, then you can cancel it after the trial period. But that would be my suggestion.

Julie
Great and you don’t have to use any of the paid ones. I mean, Canva which is like an online Photoshop tool. You don’t even need to download anything. You just go to Canva and sign up for a personal account and it’s free. You can use that to create them. So Nicole, you got your first listing up yesterday, you feeling jazzed about it, officially the beta testing is over. So you are released from your duties. Tell everyone Are you going to be hanging out in the course with them in the Facebook group and continuing this thing?

Nicole
Yes, I am and you will see me engaging in the Facebook group. Again. My store is called The Printable Fairy.

Julie
Awesome. Well, Nicole, I’m super proud of you. It’s really excited to share this experience with you. And now last night we just nerd it out on Etsy together and I’ve been waiting like years for this to happen. So I’m super excited and I can’t wait I hope that you do blow my shop out of the water and I’m really excited to watch you crush it and watch the shop grow. Oh one thing I want to ask you though, what do you want use this money for?

Nicole
So I would like to create a shop that is providing me with passive income which is why I thought the printables would be a great product. At this point. I would like to save this money for future use. You know I am saving towards potential down payment for a house or a property of my own. So I think having a side hustle would be a great side income channel.

Julie
Thanks Nicole.

Kevin – Made $7,000 in Sales Since Starting Last Year

Julie
I’m here with Kevin. Hi, Kevin. Hi, how are you? Very good. So we first met a year ago when you join the Etsy mastermind for fire drill podcast. And I’m so pumped to talk to you in this episode, because you are an example of someone who started an Etsy shop and crushed it. And this year has been crazy successful for you. Can you tell everyone a little bit about your Etsy journey?

Kevin
Yeah, so I basically started FC, really not knowing what to expect, other than I had an idea for a particular printable, in my case, it was a debt thermometer, or something I was giving away for free on my website. And I figured, why not try to sell it as well for a few dollars on this alternate kind of online marketplace. And I just put that item up there. And then I continue with the idea of finance related printables and built more and more and over three months, I basically put myself in a position where I had about 20 to 25 items up on Etsy. And I that culminated with was taking about 10 of the items and putting them together in a bundle. And the moment after that three months after I put that bundle together, I started noticing that instead of making $100 a month, and I was making four or $500 a month, and the particular space that I’m in is really more focused on self improvement. And so the typical sales I have throughout each month is about four or $500. But then around December, January, I made 1500 dollars in January, and then $800 in December. So it was really, it was a lot of fun to be able to kind of see that because, as I mentioned earlier, the work that I put in was between March and June of the prior year. So from June onwards, I was basically just seeing the most profits that I had seen yet. And I was doing very minimal work to keep things going.

Julie
So I had the same experience where I didn’t touch my Etsy shop from June of last year when we’re all doing masterminds together till maybe just recently for the course. And it’s called how it’s a very passive business, and you’re not going to become a millionaire, for sure. But I think the ROI and your time with a side hustle is really good.

Kevin
Yeah, I think the critical thing is just finding something that’s resonating with buyers out there. And there’s always different directions that you can take it you can either add more printables are you can make more variations, maybe add more paper sizes, kind of to them. But once you just find a few products that are resonating with people, you can really just leave it alone for the most part.

Julie
So how much has your shop made you to date?

Kevin
So I’ve sold about a little over $7,000 in products, and I would estimate that after fees, it’s at least 5000, somewhere between 5050 500 once you take out the fees and marketing

Julie
and tell people a little more about yourself like what about you and your family? And why did you want to start the side hustle even to begin with?

Kevin
Yeah, so it’s kind of part of a longer journey for us. We previously so my wife and I, we just celebrated our eighth anniversary. And so eight years ago, we found ourselves in $107,000 of debt. We paid that off in three years. And part of that was because we wanted to have a family and my wife wanted to stay home with the kids. So we had our first son almost four years ago. And about a year later, my wife stayed home with the kids. So we went from two incomes down to one income. And so that kind of that decrease in income, we started to realize how important it was that if we were going to raise our income that we’d have to do it through some sort of side hustle. And when I had the death of monitor on my blog, and then putting that on to Etsy, it just seemed like kind of the perfect opportunity to be able to find something that might work. And I had no clue if it was going to work. But I had seen some kind of positive response to the death monitor. And I felt like you know, there’d be some interest in there.

Julie
So what do you guys do with that money each month? Do you save it? Do you use it for household expenses? What do you do with it.

Kevin
So for the last few months, we’ve actually just been saving it up and kind of building up a business account to be able to either invest, we’re into the blog, or if we wanted to be able to hire some people to do future work for Etsy printables. So we kind of have that at a certain point where we feel comfortable with it, you know, our tickets for fin con this year will be covered. So that’s nice. We don’t have to worry about when that’s going to come from but actually going forward. We’ve talked about a series of savings goals, maybe for a new car, or not new car, but a new used car, or vacation or, you know, college funds for the kids that we really want to start taking the side hustler income and putting it up into there.

Julie
So when you first heard that last year I was doing the mastermind is part of the podcast, you probably were on the fence about making the decision whether to do this or not. And you also didn’t really know sort of what it was going to be. How did you make the decision to like, yes, I’m going to do the side hustle. Now I’m just going to go for it and try something new.

Kevin
That’s actually a tough question. So I guess the other way to answer this would be when I was listening to the podcast episode, the I with Laura, heart printables, I believe that’s the correct shop. Basically, I was thinking man, I already have something like this, and I could totally be utilizing this one resource that I have and putting it elsewhere. The hesitation that I had was that it was Etsy, it was an online platform that I did a shop that I didn’t know anything about. And so I just figured, okay, that’s going to be the learning curve is kind of understanding that world and then hoping that I’d be able to be marketable on there, just being a guy, it tends to be more of a lot more females that are shopping on there. And so it’s just hoping that I would still be able to resonate with my particular product.

Julie
So there are two approaches. If someone wants to do something like this, they can DIY it, or they can do like a group like we did the mastermind, or do a course which I know that you have access to and you’ve looked into recently can speak to what are the benefits of someone who chose to go the group route last year? What are the benefits of doing that a course or something more formal,

Kevin
I guess what I like about the course is that you can take it at your own speed. What I really appreciated with the mastermind, when we had a group is that there was more accountability, and each week, so but the downside to that mastermind was that if you were interested in taking the mastermind, and it didn’t work with your schedule, then you basically have to wait until it was open again. So that’s the one benefit that I see to the course is that you can take it along with other people, but it can be during the time of week that actually works for you on a schedule that works for you. But there’s a structure that I think we learned in the mastermind in terms of weekly goals, being able to ask each other questions that I think seems to be built in well to the particular format of the course that you have it.

Julie
So I actually gave you access to the course to get your feedback, and you get a chance to look through it as someone who has an Etsy shop. And let’s say that there’s someone listening who’s not brand new to Etsy, and they’re wondering, should I still take this course? What would you say are the valuable things in there for someone that already has started,

Kevin
I think what’s the most useful is that there’s an approach to here’s how you can start it out, you know, using completely free resources, as well as additional resources for you know, that might cost. And so I think the course would work well for someone who has an Etsy shop, but maybe their cells haven’t really taken off. And I think just being able to kind of comprehensively see from beginning to end, how to build a successful shop, would allow you to see where you maybe need to fill in the holes, or how you can improve the products that you have. I think that would just kind of go a long ways. Because there really are kind of a series of things that you can kind of check the boxes on to make sure that you have in addition to having the products that sell

Julie
what did you think about the bonus lessons?

Kevin
Yeah, so I thought that was really interesting. They seemed like some great tips from a number of other Etsy shop owners, I was definitely curious to see what they had to say and learned a lot from them. It’s kind of a nice insight into somebody else’s shop and you know, appreciate where they excel at something.

Julie
I don’t know if you’re curious about this, the section that we’ve included on selling off of Etsy, I thought that was kind of cool, because I never really thought to sell the printables anywhere else. But on Etsy. And we have someone that sells on Shopify, someone who sells on her own blog, if someone that sells through another website, Teachers Pay Teachers, it kind of opened my mind up that like it doesn’t have to be the end all. Are you planning on expanding there?

Kevin
Yeah, that’s actually been one of my goals kind of more long term is to I just saw it as an opportunity. It was an online marketplace be able to tap into a customer base. But there’s no reason why you can’t take those those printables that you’ve created, essentially, those are your assets. And you can apply those elsewhere. So that’s absolutely something that I’m very interested in, either with other marketplaces or really just being able to offer them as products on my particular blog as well.

Julie
Kevin, is there anything else that you think people should know, when they’re either getting started with an Etsy shop and deciding whether to take this course,

Kevin
I think it would be helpful to do have some sort of interest in either like an idea of maybe what you want to sell or if it’s Etsy as a platform, just have something, something that’s kind of motivating and driving and a reason for you to do want to choose Etsy in particular, you know, there might be other side hustle such as the other two courses that they’re offering or others in general, I definitely encourage anyone to be able to start a side hustle, there’s so many benefits to it. But in particular, you know, find that why for what it is that you’re doing. You know, for us it was additional income as well as wanting to take a chance and actually create something and prove that I could sell it and the benefit from that has just been tremendous in terms of confidence as well as the financial aspect but find something that’s motivating for you and something that you can really try and push forward.

Julie
Well thanks so much for coming on. If people want to connect with you where can they find you?

Kevin
The best place would be my blog debt free happens email debt free happens at gmail. com. And then my Etsy shop is Modern Printable Shop.

What is in the Etsy Printables course?

My business partner, Cody, recorded a YouTube video of what exactly is in the course.

The short of it is that there are video lessons, text summaries, and a Facebook group where we offer 30-days of free coaching.

You can watch the video on YouTube here to get a sneak peek of the course.

How do I sign up for the Etsy Printables course? Here.

Come join Andrea, Nicole, Kevin and myself in the Etsy printables course!

We’d love to help you create Etsy success too.

You can sign up now at goldcityventures.com

PS – If we’re not launching right now, enter your email to join the course waitlist.

Related post: Etsy SEO Tips for 2019 (including free tools)

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Millennial Boss

Julie paid off nearly $100k of debt and is on her way to financial independence. She is the creator of the Make Money with Printables side hustle course where she teaches people how to sell printables on Etsy and blog as a side hustle.

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