Profit from Amazon’s AI Custom Merch

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0:38With RSS.com, starting your own podcast is free and easy. Upload an episode and we distribute it to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and more. Track your listeners, see where they're from, and start earning from ads just like this. If you've been thinking about starting a podcast, this is your sign. Start your new podcast for free today at rss.com. Welcome back to the podcast. Today we're talking about Amazon. They are now letting shoppers design custom merch with AI prompts in Alexa. So this is going to change a lot of the print-on-demand stuff. Amazon, it's an AI design feature within their shopping app, which I think is kind of a cool concept.

1:19Today we're going to talk about all that. But before you get into it, Jaden, why don't you tell them about our school community? yes every single week we record a special episode that only gets posted on the school community so this week we did a whole episode about how i this week have two new apps that have been completely vibe coded and posted on the app store they got approved super stoked about it so i break down the metrics one of them is a redesign of a previous app i have so i break down how much money it actually is making every single month what the results were after we got the new version up One of the craziest things is we've got 4 ,000 downloads or 4 ,000 updates the next day of people updating to the new version.

1:57We saw some interesting traction on the revenue increasing after that. Anyways, so we break down a whole episode on that. If you're interested, and I also explain all of the tech and I'm not a coder in any way, shape or form. My wife who is pregnant actually rebuilt that entire app from scratch in two weeks while sitting on the couch. So I break down the whole tech stack, how we do it, how you can do it, and the metrics and stuff. So if you're interested, go join the school community. We have an entire video breaking down how to buy code and post apps on the Apple App Store. All right, let's talk about what's going on with Amazon.

2:31I think this is a really interesting story because we have actually done episodes in the past, and I've even tried the side hustle where I created t-shirts on Etsy, and you could buy custom merch from Etsy that I had designed as a side hustle. So I'll break down the results of my Etsy business. And I'm curious to get Jamie your take on this. Did you ever do merch for like your YouTube channel or anything? We did once. Yeah, this was I mean, way before AI. So we found someone on Fiverr to do like some some drawings for us. Then we took it over to Printify, I think, and then then marked it up a little bit to try to sell on the YouTube channel.

3:12I don't think we really sold more than like two or three. So it wasn't really worth all the time. We probably net lost money on it, but you know, the whole print on demand side hustle has been popular for many, many years, especially on sites like Etsy. If people want to get a customized shirt or customized coffee mug for someone's birthday, you know, they would go find someone on Etsy to do the design for them. You know, And then since the rollout of AI, a lot of that's become just like the person on Etsy is the middleman, just having AI do everything and then selling it for a markup. Well, now with something like this built into Amazon, that's going to really, I think, potentially take away a lot of business from some of these Etsy people who are just using AI to redesign or to customize things because now you can do it right in Amazon.

4:09uh the example they gave is like if you're doing if you have a family reunion and you all want like the same t-shirt with like the year on it you know and instead of having to go buy it through etsy and pay you know 30 a t-shirt or whatever it is you can now do it just through amazon probably prints on like an amazon basics t-shirt you can probably get them for you know half the price you know so yeah it's going to be make things cheaper for people to do but then also kind of cut out those some of those print on demand people. Yeah, I think it's interesting. I will say so I actually did a whole Etsy business experiment where I made like a t-shirt company.

4:48I only made four different types of t-shirts. I called it the Holy Thread Club. And it was like t-shirts with like Bible verses on it and stuff. Anyways, I will say from that I promoted on like a Christian podcast I host. So I talked about it a little bit there. I was like, probably naive even thinking that if you just put some, if you put stuff on Etsy, like people would just find it by searching for, you know, keywords like, you know, Jesus t-shirt or something like that. I made zero sales on this. And I think the last three months, I only ever made four t-shirts. And so maybe people that are like real pros at Etsy are like, you ought to make a ton of t-shirts.

5:25But I have very little traffic on this entire Etsy store altogether. So I think there's a way to make a lot of money with some of this print on demand stuff. But I think you probably, it's not low effort. It's definitely like a high effort business. You probably have to make like 200 different designs. You probably have to try promoting them, try paid ads, try influencers, or if you have your own kind of following on something, promoting it there. So it's, it was less of what I was hoping, which is like, you just kind of make the content and people find it. And more of like, I think you'd have to do an active job in promoting it.

6:02Like you mentioned, even yours, I mean, you have a big following and only selling a few from it. You really have to have the right audience to actually make this. And so I think for a lot of people, it might not be worth it. And this Amazon thing might be kind of stealing the thunder again with some of the more customized stuff. So I definitely think this is an interesting point in this whole business. And Amazon's probably gonna make a lot of money from that feature. I even think like we recently had a family reunion last year, my family. And yeah, my mom, I think she used Chai Chupiti, but she had like all these custom designed t shirts with the year on them for all of us that she gave all of us once we got there.

6:42So Amazon being able to do that, and she had to go to like a local print shop in her town to like go and get it all made. And so I think Amazon being able to do that would have saved her a ton of time. And I think in the future, that's the way people are going to do it. Yeah. And I will say like people still buy from where they buy from. So just because Amazon rolls this feature out doesn't mean people aren't going to use Etsy anymore. You know, it's just, it's, it's, it's going to just change. And I do think they'll grab some of the market share. Um, so I'm not saying that every print on demand person's going out of business, but it definitely in a lot of cases will, will change the way it's done and take some of the market share.

7:25But, um, and that is also assuming that Amazon's version is good and that they can actually be customized. You know, I would like to see, you know, kind of like your, your t-shirts had a really cool style to them. If you could actually make them, um, styled a certain way, or if you can screenshot and have it emulate, uh, fonts and things like that, that would be really cool. But if it's just kind of a basic, like, uh, put your text on, you know your black t-shirt you know it might it won't be as good and it won't take off as much so i'll have to see what that what actually rolls out but uh a pretty pretty cool idea on amazon's part yeah and apparently there's a bunch of other um companies that are competing with them red bubble bonfire spring fourth wall they're all going to be doing this this is only in the united states that it's going to be rolling out maybe more countries in the future if it gets more popular but for now it's just um in the united states but they have 12 different categories so it's not just t-shirts they're gonna do um hoodies polos jerseys tumblers water bottles the jerseys is kind of cool because you can think of like all of the little league teams right like you could get your own like your little league team to have all their custom made jerseys basically um which i think and and it's it's smart of them to go after like you mentioned something like family reunions or even like jerseys where it's like you could have a whole bunch of things rather than just like one t-shirt like why don't you get 20 jerseys made for the whole team or like you know 15 shirts made for the family reunion or or whatever um so i think that there's yeah i think they're they're doing a good move trying to focus on high maybe some higher volume things um you could even say something like water bottles like gyms could get water bottles made for all of their clients so there are areas where you could you could print things for more than just one person that I think would be good.

9:16And the cool thing is it's completely free. You're not paying anything for this. It's completely free. You only go pay if you decide to use it. So it's kind of based off of how good can Amazon make those designs, which is the question I'm genuinely curious about as far as how well it's actually going to work out. Yeah, I think that'll make all the difference for sure. But yeah, I'd like to try it. And I'm sure it's with all their, like I said, Amazon Basics stuff already. So they already have the product. and now you can just customize it. It will affect their bottom line, I think in a big way.

9:48So yeah, it'll be good to see what happens with it. But hey, if you got any value out of this episode, we'd really appreciate a rating or review wherever you're listening. We really appreciate those and they help us reach more people. We recently crossed 100 reviews and so we're trying to get to 150. So if you could help us, that would be awesome. Thanks for doing that. And then check out the AI Hustle School community again if you want to learn how to actually make money online and grow your business with AI. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time. Moto Casino, American Social Casino.

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10:56With RSS.com, starting your own podcast is free and easy. Upload an episode and we distribute it to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and more. Track your listeners, see where they're from, and start earning from ads just like this. If you've been thinking about starting a podcast, this is your sign. Start your new podcast for free today at rss.com.