Lex's Digital/Physical Product Group Accountability Thread

[Lex DeVille]

See this thread for more information on the what/how part of what we're creating in this thread.

Accountability
I decided to hold myself accountable for one year on my latest idea. I'm doing it in this thread in case you'd like to join in for group accountability.

Goals:
1. To create and focus on a digital and/or physical product for one year.
2. To automate as much of the systems and sales processes as possible to free up time.
3. To create a passive income system to support yourself or that you can sell as an operational business to someone else.

Tools
I purchased the perpetual calendar below to countdown days for fun.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B074SJHSYJ/?tag=tff-amazonparser-20

Why one year?
I think it's a reasonable timeframe to know if an idea/approach is a success, failure, or if a pivot is needed.

Current Progress
- Came up with a digital/physical product idea
- Bought a domain
- Made a simple logo in Canva (like 5 minutes total)
- Set up a basic wordpress site

To-Do
- Create an MVP
- Set up WooCommerce and remaining site pages
- Set up a Google Ads account & analytics/conversion tracking

Anybody want to join in? Doesn't matter when you start. Just get a calendar and start counting down from 365.

 

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[Andy Black]

See this thread for more information on the what/how part of what we're creating in this thread.

Accountability
I decided to hold myself accountable for one year on my latest idea. I'm doing it in this thread in case you'd like to join in for group accountability.

Goals:
1. To create and focus on a digital and/or physical product for one year.
2. To automate as much of the systems and sales processes as possible to free up time.
3. To create a passive income system to support yourself or that you can sell as an operational business to someone else.

Tools
I purchased the perpetual calendar below to countdown days for fun.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B074SJHSYJ/?tag=tff-amazonparser-20

Why one year?
I think it's a reasonable timeframe to know if an idea/approach is a success, failure, or if a pivot is needed.

Current Progress
- Came up with a digital/physical product idea
- Bought a domain
- Made a simple logo in Canva (like 5 minutes total)
- Set up a basic wordpress site

To-Do
- Create an MVP
- Set up WooCommerce and remaining site pages
- Set up a Google Ads account & analytics/conversion tracking

Anybody want to join in? Doesn't matter when you start. Just get a calendar and start counting down from 365.

Love it. Let's go folks. Grab hold of Lex's coat-tails and hang on.

 

[Trismigistus]

This is great, you got this man.

 

[Andy Black]

Useful thread:

GOLD! - HOT! - IDEA - Surprisingly simple stupid businesses- that somehow work

Like any good TFF member, I spend any possible downtime listening to talks with founders. I like hearing about people getting off the ground and getting started, and how quickly (or not) they were able to take off. A big, painful recurring theme is that there seem to be a lot of what I call...

www.thefastlaneforum.com

 

[Lex DeVille]

Days Remaining for Me: 362
The desktop calendar finally arrived and I started tracking days. My D-Day is set for how long I intend to work for the government while building up my next brand. Ideally, the brand will be profitable within a month or so. Currently, I'm short on time and struggling as an employee. I simply don't fit in, and it's rough pretending to be a mindless drone.

Product
I had a product in mind, but switched it last second after seeing what DALL-E can do. If you're not familiar, the paid version of ChatGPT grants access to DALL-E which generates images. So I asked it generate some images in a specific style, and to my surprise, they were pretty good. I refined my request by uploading examples in similar styles and providing more direction. The designs went from good to holy shit I'd buy ALL of these right now if they were for sale. It was like the AI was in my head and knew exactly what I wanted. So what product will I focus on?

T-shirts.

Why T-Shirts?
Because there are endless proven niches, and endless customers. T-shirts can be designed, printed, and shipped without inventory (until some later point). T-shirts can be branded. There are already a lot of proven slogans with poor designs that can be improved on. The process can be outsourced later.

Challenges
DALL-E can create shirt designs, but they're not ready-to-go out of the box. By that, I mean, DALL-E struggles with text and frequently misspells words. Also, the designs may need to be extracted by a freelancer and turned into an appropriately formatted graphic so its ready for upload to PoD websites. Either way, I'd say the designs are 90% ready within seconds.

Saturation
Some will worry about market saturation with t-shirts. I don't think it's saturated at all because you can get so specific when it comes to t-shirt designs. Besides, anything a customer asks for, you can turn into a design in seconds.

Sales Channels
I'll have someone create a new Etsy account and link it to a neutral bank account to sell on Etsy. I'll also set up to run Facebook and Google ads to a private website. This product should sell well through Google's shop feature, and maybe through Facebook Marketplace.

Social Marketing
I'll probably focus on TikTok for this one. Instagram may prove useful. Facebook may prove useful. That said, short videos seem to work well for clothes. People like to see other people wearing the clothes.

 

[Andy Black]

Days Remaining for Me: 362
The desktop calendar finally arrived and I started tracking days. My D-Day is set for how long I intend to work for the government while building up my next brand. Ideally, the brand will be profitable within a month or so. Currently, I'm short on time and struggling as an employee. I simply don't fit in, and it's rough pretending to be a mindless drone.

Product
I had a product in mind, but switched it last second after seeing what DALL-E can do. If you're not familiar, the paid version of ChatGPT grants access to DALL-E which generates images. So I asked it generate some images in a specific style, and to my surprise, they were pretty good. I refined my request by uploading examples in similar styles and providing more direction. The designs went from good to holy shit I'd buy ALL of these right now if they were for sale. It was like the AI was in my head and knew exactly what I wanted. So what product will I focus on?

T-shirts.

Why T-Shirts?
Because there are endless proven niches, and endless customers. T-shirts can be designed, printed, and shipped without inventory (until some later point). T-shirts can be branded. There are already a lot of proven slogans with poor designs that can be improved on. The process can be outsourced later.

Challenges
DALL-E can create shirt designs, but they're not ready-to-go out of the box. By that, I mean, DALL-E struggles with text and frequently misspells words. Also, the designs may need to be extracted by a freelancer and turned into an appropriately formatted graphic so its ready for upload to PoD websites. Either way, I'd say the designs are 90% ready within seconds.

Saturation
Some will worry about market saturation with t-shirts. I don't think it's saturated at all because you can get so specific when it comes to t-shirt designs. Besides, anything a customer asks for, you can turn into a design in seconds.

Sales Channels
I'll have someone create a new Etsy account and link it to a neutral bank account to sell on Etsy. I'll also set up to run Facebook and Google ads to a private website. This product should sell well through Google's shop feature, and maybe through Facebook Marketplace.

Social Marketing
I'll probably focus on TikTok for this one. Instagram may prove useful. Facebook may prove useful. That said, short videos seem to work well for clothes. People like to see other people wearing the clothes.

I know a guy spending about $100k/mth on Facebook Ads selling POD t-shirts. He has printers in his warehouse. I presume that means it's not saturated.

 

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[Andy Black]

Wow, that's insane. Why do you think he's doing so well vs other people trying to sell POD t-shirts?

1) He doesn't listen to news it's oversaturated.

2) He runs ads to find out what people want to buy, then runs ads to sell it.

 

[Ludachris]

I know you've probably found them already Lex, but if not, there are sellers on Etsy that have made available all the different colors of popular shirt blanks to be used for mockup purposes with nice backdrops, of course, they might not work for all niches, but they'd probably work for most. The Bella Canvas 3001, Gildan, Next Level, etc. That right there was a genius idea, which must have taken a lot of work, but I'm sure the demand for that is really high for marketing the shirts. I can post a link if needed.

Will you be testing the different PoD services or do you already have one picked out? I've used a few different services over the years but haven't tested the more popular options currently.

I've dabbled in the t-shirt model over the years (CafePress, Spreadshirt, TeeSpring mainly) but kept getting stuck on one part of it - the PoD print quality is just not as good as screen printing, and prints on black garments tend to degrade quicker than screen printing. But in order to do screen printing you need to deal with inventory and fulfillment. There aren't any PoD screen printing companies out there because it requires setup labor/costs.

The thought process I went through was that to make it more Fastlane, the business would eventually need to turn into a popular brand that people know and seek out. Otherwise you'll always rely completely on marketing for sales. But if the print quality is not great, or it degrades too quickly, that becomes a challenge. Maybe you start out with PoD but transition to screen printing with inventory.

Have you figured out sales tax collection or is that something you plan to do after the first year or when it becomes clear the idea has legs? Digital downloads look to be tricky for that. Maybe using a PoD service or a marketplace, which handles tax collection is simpler than selling direct on a website, due to tax collection?

 

[Lex DeVille]

Will you be testing the different PoD services or do you already have one picked out? I've used a few different services over the years but haven't tested the more popular options currently.

I'll use Printify for now. Their quality is good enough, and they have design options I need. I won't use any other sites like Teepublic or Redbubble because I don't want my slogans or designs getting ripped off quickly. Eventually, I will move to in-house printing when it makes sense to do that.

The thought process I went through was that to make it more Fastlane, the business would eventually need to turn into a popular brand that people know and seek out. Otherwise you'll always rely completely on marketing for sales. But if the print quality is not great, or it degrades too quickly, that becomes a challenge. Maybe you start out with PoD but transition to screen printing with inventory.

I always start with branding because it is always my intent to build a cult-like following around my products and services. Otherwise, I see no point in creating them.

Have you figured out sales tax collection or is that something you plan to do after the first year or when it becomes clear the idea has legs? Digital downloads look to be tricky for that. Maybe using a PoD service or a marketplace, which handles tax collection is simpler than selling direct on a website, due to tax collection?

Taxes are easy. I let my bookkeeper and accountant deal with all taxes. I'm selling through Wordpress with WooCommerce which does have tax options, but I probably won't use them.

 

[Lex DeVille]

Logo
Usually, I create my own, but I decided to let DALL-E have a go. It churned out several brilliant designs. I had to touch them up slightly in Canva, but overall, excellent turnout. I'll use DALL-E from now on instead of creating my own. Plus, it's faster.

Web Graphics
To keep the branding together, I also let DALL-E create background images for my website in the same style as my shirts and logo. Again, amazing turnout. You can even input size requirements. So I told DALL-E to create background images that were larger than 1920 x 1080 and it did it no problem.

Social Graphics
Again, same thing. DALL-E for all general social media imagery.

Printify
I got halfway set up on printify. I need to finish my first design. I'll finish it this evening. Then I need to get the other basic settings set up.

WooCommerce
I decided not to use Shopify. If someone were coming in brand new with no Wordpress experience, then Shopify would probably be the way to go. As it stands, I want more customization without a new learning curve, so I'll stick with Wordpress/WooCommerce for now.

Customization
Ultimately, I'm not building a t-shirt brand. I build cult followings. T-shirts are just the center piece, but the experience will run much deeper (in time). For now, I have to focus on the core items and getting them launched. Then can tinker with story, automation, and brand marketing and loyalty.

 

[Andy Black]

There's a reason Lex moves so fast.

good enough

I have to focus on the core items and getting them launched

 

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[NervesOfSteel]

I always start with branding because it is always my intent to build a cult-like following around my products and services. Otherwise, I see no point in creating them.

This is exactly what makes a business survive when top platforms act bully and decide to kick/ban your shop on their platform!

Logo
Usually, I create my own, but I decided to let DALL-E have a go. It churned out several brilliant designs. I had to touch them up slightly in Canva, but overall, excellent turnout. I'll use DALL-E from now on instead of creating my own. Plus, it's faster.

Web Graphics
To keep the branding together, I also let DALL-E create background images for my website in the same style as my shirts and logo. Again, amazing turnout. You can even input size requirements. So I told DALL-E to create background images that were larger than 1920 x 1080 and it did it no problem.

Social Graphics
Again, same thing. DALL-E for all general social media imagery.

WooCommerce
I decided not to use Shopify. If someone were coming in brand new with no Wordpress experience, then Shopify would probably be the way to go. As it stands, I want more customization without a new learning curve, so I'll stick with Wordpress/WooCommerce for now.

Probably that's why I am starting with Shopify. I am yet to comprehend the power of WordPress...

 

[Lex DeVille]

@NervesOfSteel and anyone else reading this, you are welcome to post your progress in this thread if you want to for accountability purposes. Otherwise, I'll post my progress as it comes.

 

[Primeperiwinkle]

Was this business idea and subsequent thread prompted by Andy Black's question on the doctorate thread?

Would the cult following be college students by any chance?

 

[Lex DeVille]

Was this business idea and subsequent thread prompted by Andy Black's question on the doctorate thread?

Would the cult following be college students by any chance?

No and no.

There's no telling if I'll stick with it, but I do have a countdown calendar with 361 days remaining. That's more than enough time to find out if this is the right idea or not. Even if I only have an hour or so to work on it per day.

 

[Timmy C]

I might join in on this at some stage

I'm about to put a bullet in my current endeavour.

It isn't going well, and I think I've given it enough time.

 

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[StrikingViper69]

What’s going to make your t shirts better than all the other people using AI drop shipped t shirts?

 

[Lex DeVille]

What’s going to make your t shirts better than all the other people using AI drop shipped t shirts?

There are 8 billion people on the planet and most of them need clothes. Clothes wear out regularly, so the demand for clothes is endless.

Even though AI makes cool designs, you need a creative entrepreneur to drive those designs and put in the time and effort to build this into something more.

People buy clothes that highlight who they see themselves as and what they want others to appreciate about them, but depending on the style, it may be underserved or even doesn't exist.

Nobody knows the shirts are PoD, and mine won't be PoD forever because I'll want more quality control (QC). Through my website, there is nothing that says, "These are PoD shirts."

Past experience selling Printify shirts tells me people are generally happy with the quality of their shirts. It starts by choosing the right shirt material (I like Gildan shirts). Then you create your design, order a sample for QC, and if it's good enough, list it up for sale.

The other main factors are branding, social media, and advertising. For instance, TikTok brings millions of targeted views to new brands every day.

Lastly, (and probably most important of all) I'll sell shirts, but this isn't a "shirt" business. It's a digital brand where shirts are a way to shout who you are while demonstrating brand loyalty.

What's most important to me right now is that I can work on this a little each day and build it up into something over the course of a year. I no longer have huge pressure to get something off the ground.

 

[Andy Black]

Thought this list might be interesting:

How to create and edit digital content with Genmo AI | Sabahudin Murtic posted on the topic | LinkedIn

: Dive into the future of motion and video with AI! From… | 33 comments on LinkedIn

www.linkedin.com

 

[kolim]

might be interesting it is

 

[NewManRising]

I'll join. I followed your 15 days to Copywriting course here and had some success. So, I will do the same here. I need to get my head out of my a$$ and create some income I can control. Looking for a change of pace.

It might take me a little longer to keep up since there will be a larger learning curve for me like, learning ads and getting a website up. And of course, creating a good digital product.

 

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[Lex DeVille]

I'll join. I followed your 15 days to Copywriting course here and had some success. So, I will do the same here. I need to get my head out of my a$$ and create some income I can control. Looking for a change of pace.

It might take me a little longer to keep up since there will be a larger learning curve for me like, learning ads and getting a website up. And of course, creating a good digital product.

No rush anyway. I don't plan to do this as fast as last time. Don't have the time available to execute as quickly. This thread is intended to be a 365 day countdown to work on an idea. Everyone can start their own 365 countdown on whatever day they want.

 

[NervesOfSteel]

"If you build it, they will come!
If they don't, you'll need to run Google and FB ads!"


Goal:

1. A. To create a digital product that fits into a certain niche in such a way that it is compatible with a larger chunk of the audience of the particular niche.

1. B. To sell my product via partially aggressive digital marketing and along with that collect all the data of the results of this enterprise. The data will be very useful in the future for the next product.

Start date: 21 Dec 2023

Time: 6 months.


Progress as of 21st Dec 2023:

1. Market research is in progress. Various products are under scrutiny. The First Niche is finalized though.
2. I decided to go with Shopify's $5/mo plan, to begin with. This will be my landing page. I intend to test this out on as little budget as possible.

Hurdles:

1. Etsy and eBay are unwilling to register any shop from my country. Etsy has some issues with my country's payment gateway, I suppose. With these two websites down, I will have to rely only on digital marketing - targeting the customers directly to my landing page.
2. None of the major e-commerce platforms are accepting shops/ listings from my country to sell globally due to their internal issues with my country's digital payment partner. So no platform to sell globally at the moment.

Challenges:

1. Only theoretical know-how of digital marketing. No real-time experience.
2. Time. With my main business consuming most of the time, I can only devote 1 hour a day, 2 tops!
3. It's the 22nd of December, and Xmas this year is a missed opportunity, and so is New Year's Eve. Launching this project in November would have given me a boost during this festive season.

Motivation:

1. A new skill to learn which I was procrastinating for quite a long time.
2. To develop a business model that can and probably will help me a ton in future endeavors.
3. A passive income sounds pretty good to me!
4. Gut Instinct.

Update as of 25th Dec 2023:

1. Took a test drive of both Shopify and WordPress. The latter seems more impressive, easy, and economical as compared to the first.
2. The product is finalized. Brainstorming for redesign starts today.
3. Started learning digital marketing.

 

[mcpretelin]

I’ve been following the thread as well, and the one prior about building a 2k/mo business in 30days. Decided to give it a try as well, so today I started. Decided on a niche and first product to simply get started and prototype the idea, get a feel for website creation as it’s my first time w word press. Following in your steps has been unbelievably helpful for getting thru steps i had no clue what i was doing! Thanks @Lex DeVille for the inspiration, let’s get it!
Ps, got my gf inspired and thinking new ideas for her existing, but brand new etsy business and already established social media following. Look forward to keeping up with everyone’s progress and sharing!

 

[Strm]

I've thought about starting a very similar PoD project for some time now. I am a part of a growing pet community here in Estonia and it's nowhere near saturated (not cats and dogs, a bit more exotic). I see it in our local FB group and in Instagram that it could very well have a cult-like following and pet owners usually buy things easily if they connect with the brand and see something cool. We have literally zero businesses for these pet owners here but the local community is small too. PoD and AI combined could work well with short tiktok and Meta ads. I have put it on hold for long enough, mainly for the simplicity of it and considering my own passion about the pets, but maybe it would be a cool side-hustle to look into it a bit.

Anyways, good luck @Lex DeVille , great thread! Inspiring.

 

[Timmy C]

I'm thinking of a potential art angle in a niche I know to be very culty.

The issue I have found with dalle as well as midjourney is it has trouble with text.

If you plan to do this for a digital download you would need 300 dpi from what I understand otherwise the image won't scale to certain sizes well.

It's not as simple as just prompting the AI generator then selling it.

Surely there is a tool you can use to fix this though.

( just seen you touched on this in your first post sorry)

I was thinking candles, but that can be tricky.

 

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[Lex DeVille]

I'm thinking of a potential art angle in a niche I know to be very culty.

The issue I have found with dalle as well as midjourney is it has trouble with text.

If you plan to do this for a digital download you would need 300 dpi from what I understand otherwise the image won't scale to certain sizes well.

It's not as simple as just prompting the AI generator then selling it.

Surely there is a tool you can use to fix this though.

( just seen you touched on this in your first post sorry)

I was thinking candles, but that can be tricky.

I ran into this issue with my shirts. Even though I liked the designs, DALL-E wouldn't remove the background, and ignored my requests to fix text. Further, when I went to Canva to remove the background, their background removal tool couldn't do it either. I think DALL-E used shading that made it difficult to determine the actual background color.

As a workaround, I ended up re-creating the design in Canva as best as I could. It turned out well, but I'll need to adjust my process a bit going forward. It took several hours to get 1 shirt live on my site.

 

[Timmy C]

I ran into this issue with my shirts. Even though I liked the designs, DALL-E wouldn't remove the background, and ignored my requests to fix text. Further, when I went to Canva to remove the background, their background removal tool couldn't do it either. I think DALL-E used shading that made it difficult to determine the actual background color.

As a workaround, I ended up re-creating the design in Canva as best as I could. It turned out well, but I'll need to adjust my process a bit going forward. It took several hours to get 1 shirt live on my site.

Yeh the background removal tool on canva, Adobe express and several others aren't perfect at the best of times.

I downloaded gimp but I am yet to play around with it much, see how that goes at removing backgrounds.

I suppose photoshop would work but you have to pay for that one.

Although these 2 are more of a manual process compared to canva.

Yeh I fiddled with this stuff months ago as I was gonna sell digital art then, but I was already in the middle of another project at the time so I kind of forgot about it.

 

[Matt S.]

Yeh the background removal tool on canva, Adobe express and several others aren't perfect at the best of times.

I downloaded gimp but I am yet to play around with it much, see how that goes at removing backgrounds.

I suppose photoshop would work but you have to pay for that one.

Although these 2 are more of a manual process compared to canva.

Yeh I fiddled with this stuff months ago as I was gonna sell digital art then, but I was already in the middle of another project at the time so I kind of forgot about it.

I've used photopea quite a bit for background removal. The automatic bg removal tool isn't the best but it gives you the tools you need to get the job done manually for free. Plus it works in browser so you don't have to mess with clunky 'ol gimp.

 

[Timmy C]

I've used photopea quite a bit for background removal. The automatic bg removal tool isn't the best but it gives you the tools you need to get the job done manually for free. Plus it works in browser so you don't have to mess with clunky 'ol gimp.

Granted gimp is slower, but it has more capabilities than all of these things. Same as photoshop.

You also don't lose resolution on the original image like you would editing in canva.

Maybe photopea is different? I briefly remember fiddling with it.

I think once you get past the initial learning curve, it's fairly simple, albeit will take a bit of time.

But as far as i can tell, not many other tools that I have found, can do what I need.