After watching a few YouTube videos about digital products on Etsy, we decided this will be our first side hustle attempt (07/02/23).

There are so many different types of digital products from cleaning guides, themed party games, to multiple fitness plans. We knew that Valentines Day was coming up so we wanted something love related. After a little searching, we chose Couple Question cards!
As with most Etsy digital products it is fine to do something that has been done before, especially a product that has proven to be popular. 

We saw (what we thought was) a slight gap in content in that there were not many unusual couple cards. Most of the existing questions were love related, so we thought we could brand ours as a different, funny set of questions that allow couples to get to know new, silly, unknown things about their partner. 

We listed 99 questions from 10 different categories (funny, surprising, stories, motivational, career, love, people, future, past and hobbies). It took about 3 hours to complete all the questions, but it was actually really fun finding and thinking of so many different questions and didn’t feel like work at all!

Next, it was more time consuming creating the cards (7 hours). We wanted something colourful that would catch the viewer’s eye when scrolling past all the cards on offer, so we added small pictures to each card for some extra fun! Neither of us are particularly artistic and can’t draw or design so we were happy with how the cards came out, though we struggled with ensuring the introductory page looked professional. 

On 08/02/23 we published the digital cards on Etsy. On the first day we received 18 visits to the shop and 37 the next day. However no orders, even on Valentines day!

From then on we received 1-2 visits to the shop each day and received 1 order! So we assume that Etsy must push and “test out” the shop on the first couple of days to see if the product actually sells, and from then on choose whether to rank your product higher to searching customers. 

Total loss -£1.37
Sales: £3
Marketing: £2.32
Listing fees: £2.05

Overall the loss in £ is quite small and we do not mind the loss in time it took to create the cards as they were actually enjoyable to make. It would have been great to receive lots of orders and for couples to enjoy the cards, but we learnt a valuable lesson that just making a product alone is not enough.

Next time we would focus on ensuring the product looks really professional. In hindsight the eye-catching colours may have stood out for the wrong reasons, and the top-performing couple cards had much simpler colour schemes. Especially with it being a printable digital product, being colour heavy would mean a lot of printer ink is needed, which may have put some customers off. 

Currently we have deactivated the listing, but the cards are made and we are optimistic that with a few tweaks to the design and some advertising, we could get our first few sales. 

Of course we will keep you updated!

Side Hustle Sisters x