This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Friends, listeners, Side Hustle School community, welcome to another episode. My name is Chris Guillebeau. Thanks for tuning in wherever you are in the world. This is, of course, Side Hustle School. Because it's Thursday, it's also our Throwback Thursday/Where Are They Now segment.
In this segment, we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them. We've had all kinds of stories this year. Last week, in particular, we heard from a New York City opera singer, home contractor, and primary caregiver. This is not three people, that's just one person. She is an opera singer, home contractor, and primary caregiver.
Like so many Side Hustlers out there, she stays busy. Now, today, in our latest feature, we'll hear from Lisa Sansussi. We first featured Lisa way back at the top of season two. That was episode 371. Can you believe that?
We are now in episode 2,147. So way back in early 2018, we heard a bit from Lisa about how she used Merch by Amazon to sell t-shirts from designs she commissioned. So these are personalized t-shirts that she designed, or in some cases, she actually hired a contractor to do the designs, and then she sold them using this program Merch by Amazon, which now has a new name. She'll talk about that. And back then, I think her goal was to sell something like 500 so that she could get to the next tier and be able to sell more.
But as you're gonna hear on this update, she has exceeded that number by quite a lot. What's happened since? Let's hear directly from Lisa. She's also got some tips for anybody out there who would like to do something like this themselves. And I'll come back at the end with a quick wrap up.
[Music]
Hey everyone, it's Lisa Sansussi in Los Angeles, California. My Side Hustle is selling products on Merch by Amazon. I was featured on season two of Side Hustle School in episode 371 back in 2018. I first heard about Merch by Amazon on an earlier episode of Side Hustle School. Well, at the time it was called Merch by Amazon.
They've actually renamed it Amazon Merch on Demand, but the idea is still the same. It's a print on demand site. So the seller uploads an original design and description and Amazon handles the rest. Printing, shipping, returns, everything. In 2018, the only products available to sell were t-shirts.
So that's where I started. I had a few different jobs at the time in event production and marketing. So I actually hired a designer on Upwork to create the designs for me. And sometimes I had them create designs in bulk by swapping out a word or a number, you know, really simple example of being a shirt that says it's my 21st birthday. You can swap it out and say it's my 22nd birthday, 23rd birthday, you know, with the same design.
So you get it. When the episode was recorded, I was trying to get to my 500th sale with the system that they use that would have unlocked the 1000 design tier. So I would have been allowed to upload twice as many designs. As of today, I've sold just over 7000 products, which would put me in the 8000 design tier. To be honest, as time went on, my focus shifted to other projects and some major life events.
So I probably could be at a higher tier by now, but the great thing about this particular side hustle is that even when I take time away from it, the designs that I've already uploaded are still selling. I just checked today and the honeymoon vibes shirts are still going strong. I guess people love matching honeymoon tank tops. So I can go back to it whenever I choose to prioritize it, but it still creates some income even when I'm taking the time to work on something else. One of the interesting things that happened along the way is that my sales started to noticeably increase during one of those times where I wasn't really focusing on it.
And it turns out as a platform expanded and it was still pretty new when I joined. And as it expanded and new products and new markets were added, Amazon started to automatically upload some of my designs to those products and markets. So I suddenly went from selling t-shirts in the US to selling phone cases, throw pillows and hoodies, in places like France, Germany, Italy. So I have more sales with zero additional hours put in. And also each new design that I would upload now has the potential to make a lot more than it did at the start.
So that's definitely some motivation to get back in and spend some more time on it. There have been a few challenges that I found a little bit hard to navigate. One being the saturation of the market as the uploading and listing process became more streamlined. So it's a lot harder now to get new designs to sell unless they're really, really great designs, which makes sense. It's just not as easy as it used to be to sell a new design.
Another was the increasingly strict rules and the high sensitivity of, I guess, the copyright filters. So I would make a design really early on and when somebody would see that it was selling, they would create an almost identical design. And then when I went back to put my original design on a new product, it was rejected for copyright issues even though it was my design. So I understand for their own safety, they're more likely to reject a design if there's a chance it's not yours and ask for proof, but it's just not always a quick process to have it reviewed and approved, even if it is your original design. So you just have to be really careful with that and with what words and phrases you put into the description and things like that.
So, you know, sometimes really basic things get rejected and you're not sure why, but when you're using a platform that belongs to someone else, you always run that risk of your account being terminated or, you know, them making unexpected changes and there's not really much you can do about that. My advice to anyone considering getting into the print-on-demand world is to upload your designs to multiple print-on-demand platforms. Do some research on which ones other people are using currently and upload all of your designs to all of those sites. I regret not doing this earlier on because if you only upload them to one place and you get banned or the platform shuts down, all your hard work is gone. I mean, maybe it's not gone if you have the designs still, but you sort of have to start from scratch somewhere else.
So hopefully it at least would have your designs and descriptions organized somewhere. If not, that is also my advice. If you get into a routine of organizing and uploading all of your designs to multiple platforms at the same time, then it's less messy and you don't have to go back and do it all again later. As far as what's next for me and this side hustle, I'll absolutely continue to work on it, whether or not it ever becomes my main thing. These days, my focus is mostly on studying sound healing, which I got into in 2020 and I absolutely love it.
But while I'm taking classes, it's really great to have such a flexible side hustle and a source of pretty passive income as well. So good luck to everyone on your side hustles and thanks for the inspiration, Chris. [Music]
- Awesome, thanks so much to Lisa for sharing her updates with us. Follow her daily live streams on TikTok and her posts on Instagram @LisaSansusi. She's doing sound healing, she's doing, well, as I said, daily live streams.
So all kinds of fun stuff, go check it out. Lisa Sansusi, S-A-N-S-O-U-C-I. Listeners, let me know what you think and who you'd like to see featured from our archives of more than a thousand stories. If you've got a question or an update for us about your hustle, sidehustleschool.com/questions. Once again, thank you for tuning in.
Wherever you are out there, I'm cheering you on. I hope you do one thing today to get closer to a goal you believe in. I also hope you take care of yourself during this busy holiday season. All right, that's it for now. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the "Onward Project."
