762: Buy Buttons, 10 Years Later

[upbeat music] Ten years ago, I wrote a book called Buy Buttons. The premise was this: the hardest part of any business isn't making the thing, it's finding somebody to buy the thing. So instead of building a store, a website, a product, a service, and hoping somebody finds it, the strategy was instead to go set up shop where the traffic already is, where the buyers are already buying. We talked about Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Fiverr, Udemy, the App Store. The book featured over 300 of these different apps and marketplaces, places where you could put your buy button in whatever niche you were in and connect with customers. Put it another way, the best fishermen fish where there's fish. The book was about where to find those metaphorical fish, but at a broader level, it was about shortcutting your path to profitability by going where the cash was already flowing. A decade later, does it still hold up? Are those platforms tapped out? What new ones showed up? And could the same basic marketing principle work when you take it offline? That's what we're covering today, and first up are the legacy platforms, the ones that if they weren't household names 10 years ago, they probably are today. When we covered Etsy in the book, it was in the context of selling handmade physical items, and that's still a part of Etsy's business, but I'm way more attracted to the idea of being able to create something once and sell it to unlimited customers, not just a one-off order. Which brings me to printables and digital products. Is it crowded? Yes. But you got to remember, the buyer pool has gotten a lot bigger too, and new product trends happen all the time. I sat down with Cody Berman, who's been selling printables since 2018, and he teaches a course on how to get started in that space, and he was getting some of that same feedback. "Sure, it's great for you, but it's too saturated to start now." So he says, "You know what? Challenge accepted." And he started a new Etsy store from scratch, and it took all of four months to reach his first [chuckles] $1,000 months because he understood the marketplace. He understood how to cater his products to the existing demand.

I actually tend to lean on the side of simpler printables just because I can pump out so many different variations. And for me, and we can get into this new shop, it was a numbers game. I was just, like, throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what would sell.

In eRank, and it looks like they have a, a free version, which is somewhat limited to five keyword lookups per day, but pretty affordable plans if you want up to 200 keyword lookups a day. So just to get an idea there of filling demand versus creating demand. Obviously, I want to go where there is some search volume versus, like, trying to create demand from scratch. Obviously, if nobody knows you exist and you create some random product that nobody's looking for, uh, it's a recipe for disappointment. Nobody's ever gonna find you on Etsy. So in these tools, are there certain metrics? I don't know if they... Do they spit out like a, um... Like, TubeBuddy will give you a, a metric. "Oh, this keyword variation on YouTube gave you, like, a 95." You're