I'm building an Etsy store in public for six months and publishing every number

Starting tomorrow, August 1st, I'm opening a brand new Etsy store and running it for six months. Every dollar in, every dollar out, every hour I spend on it, published on a live dashboard that updates on its own whether the numbers are good or bad.

It runs until January 31st. Here's the dashboard, and it's live right now with nothing in it:

2026challenge.podzillaprints.com

I wrote the rules down first and published them before I listed a single product, because that's the step everybody skips. If you decide what to measure after you see your results, you can make almost any outcome look like a win. That's how a store that had one good week ends up getting described as a six figure business.

So the rules are locked. I don't get to change them later.

Why I'm doing this

Honestly? I want to know if what we pulled off with our first store was the method or just timing and luck.

We started selling on Etsy three years ago and it worked. But three years ago is not now, the platform has changed, the competition has changed, and I've been sitting here giving advice built on a result I got in a completely different market. That's been bugging me. The only way to find out if the advice holds up is to go do it again, from zero, in a category I've never sold in, and let people watch the whole thing.

There's a second reason. I build the mockup and listing software our sellers use every day, and I barely use it myself, because I'm not the one sitting down listing products. Six months of actually running my own workflow is going to show me things about my own tools that no amount of customer feedback ever has. Some of that is going to be uncomfortable. I'm publishing it anyway.

And a third one. Roughly 90% of the sellers who signed up with us in the last month are going into ornaments, because that's what the whole ecosystem has been pushing since July. Ornaments sell. But they go quiet in January and they don't pay your grocery bill in March. So I'm going the other way: mommy and me, infant and children's apparel. Matching sets, bodysuits, toddler and youth tees. Stuff that has demand in more than one quarter.

The rules, and the caveats

I need to be upfront about my position, because you should weigh everything here against it.

I own a print shop. I have a direct financial interest in you believing print on demand works. A disclaimer doesn't fix that, so here's what I'm doing about it structurally instead. The store buys from Podzilla at full published retail pricing, no internal cost, no employee rate, nothing comped, and I'll publish the invoices. Any profit this store makes goes to charity, with the receipt published. I'm not keeping the money.

No affiliate links. Anywhere. Not on the blog, not in a video, not in a listing. Every tool I pay for, I pay full price for out of the budget.

There is no course at the end of this. There will not be a course.

$500 is the ceiling for the whole six months. That covers research tools, mockups, design assets, listing fees, and any ads. It does not cover the cost of the products themselves, which comes out of revenue like it would in any real shop. But I'm starting at zero and staying there as long as I can, on free plans, and I only spend when I hit an actual wall that stopped me from doing something. When that happens I'll write down exactly what the wall was. I expect to finish well under $500, and honestly that result is worth more to you than the spending would be.

I'm not promoting this store to any of you. Not to the Podzilla list, not to this community, not to my email list. A store that sells because its owner has an audience teaches a new seller nothing. If sales do come through me somehow, I'll disclose it and count it.

I'm keeping a public list of every unfair advantage I have. Three years of Etsy experience. Knowing how fulfillment works from the inside. Knowing what breaks in print files. Being able to change my own software when it annoys me. That list is going to get long, it's linked from the dashboard, and it exists so nobody mistakes my starting line for theirs.

One more disclosure. The shop, Laurel & Lullaby, isn't a brand new registration. My wife and I set it up a while back and never used it. Zero listings, zero sales, zero reviews. I don't think account age matters much with no history behind it, but you should hear it from me rather than find it yourself.

How I'm reporting it

Two things, and deliberately only two.

The dashboard, updating on its own, pulling real numbers. Not a screenshot I chose to take on a good day. History is append only, so a bad week can't quietly disappear.

And a short written log once a week. What I did, how long it took, what broke, what I got wrong. Fifteen minutes, unpolished, posted even when the week was boring.

That's it. No video series, no podcast, no newsletter. I've spent a lot of words telling people to pick one thing and not chase every shiny object, so it would be pretty rich to open this by launching five channels at once.

What the numbers actually mean

The headline number is net, not revenue. Revenue without costs isn't a result, it's a screenshot.

The number I most want you to see is the effective hourly rate, which is net divided by every hour I worked. That's the number that basically never appears anywhere in this industry, and I think it's the one that actually tells you whether something is a business or a hobby that occasionally sends you money.

And I will never annualize a partial period. Not a good week, not a good month, not Q4. Taking your best stretch and multiplying it out to a year is the single most common way numbers get inflated in this space, and it's dishonest whether or not the person doing it realizes it.

What failure looks like

I'm defining this now, before I know the answer, because defining it afterward is worthless.

This store might not be profitable in six months. That's a completely realistic outcome and it's not a reason to stop publishing. If January 31st comes and the store has made nothing, that post goes up on January 31st with the numbers in it.

Specifically I'm committing to publishing the final net even if it's negative, the final hourly rate even if it's under a dollar, the total hours, and an honest answer to whether it was worth it and whether I'd tell someone else to do this.

I'd call my own advice wrong if a focused, one thing at a time approach with a $500 budget produces nothing over six months of consistent work and I can't point to a specific thing I did badly that explains it. If that happens, I'll say so plainly. I'm not going to blame your effort for my result.

Come watch

The dashboard is live. Nothing's on it yet, which is sort of the point. You get to see it fill in from zero, in public, in real time.

2026challenge.podzillaprints.com

I'll be honest, I'm nervous about this. I've got a comfortable position where I get to give advice and never have my own numbers checked. I'm giving that up on purpose. Let's find out.