Start a Print on Demand Business
POD Launch Checklist
Companion to "Your first thirty days."
Realistic budget: about $50 (one-time Etsy set-up fee, a handful of listing fees at $0.20 each, one month of a design-asset subscription). No ads, no premium tools, no course purchases.
Week 1: foundations
- Open the Etsy shop with policies set honestly, processing times matching your production partner's real numbers
- Register your production partner (name + location disclosure set up once per partner)
- File the Merch on Demand application now (acceptance takes time; spend it elsewhere)
- Set up the USPTO search bookmark (tmsearch.uspto.gov), your design tool, and your tracking spreadsheet
- Validate ten niches and put them on the list with evidence
Week 2: production
- Ten to fifteen designs from validated phrases, each through the trademark check before any pixels move
- Build light and dark variants
- Target the standard 4500 by 5400 template so every file works everywhere
- Set up your production partner's mockups so listing photos take minutes, not evenings
Week 3: listings live
- Publish every design as a full listing: front-loaded title, all thirteen tags, attributes, size chart image, partner disclosed
- Push the same designs to the passive marketplaces as time allows
- Start the daily rhythm at whatever scale your week allows, two hours minimum
Week 4: measure and decide
- Update the tracker with views, favorites, and sales
- File any problem reports; answer every message
- Take the month-two decision seriously (decision rules below)
End-of-month-30 checkpoints
- Ten or more validated niches logged with evidence
- Twenty-plus trademark-checked designs produced
- Every listing live with full titles, tags, and disclosure
- Merch application submitted and waiting
- Passive marketplaces catching overflow uploads
- Tracker shows views and favorites per listing
Month-two decision rules
Views + favorites, few sales. The machine works. Keep producing; conversion often arrives as the catalog crosses fifty listings and search learns what your shop is about.
Views near zero across the board. Problem is niche or listing craft. Rerun validation on everything, compare your tags against the top sellers in each niche, rebuild rather than pile on.
One niche outselling the rest. Double it immediately: variants, subniches, adjacent phrases. Early winners are instructions.
Season checkpoint
- Calendar mark on the next gift occasion (September for Q4, March for the spring cluster)
- Catalog seasonal-ready four to six weeks before that date
Kill criteria, stated plainly: give the shop six months of real craft and a catalog in the hundreds before judging it. If after six months of well-researched, trademark-clean, properly listed designs the shop earns less than your monthly tool costs, keep the catalog earning passively, stop feeding it hours, and redirect your energy.