A 31-year-old woman finds a side job where she earns $100,000 for 30 minutes a day: “It was a magical time”
The American woman uses a website to sell her own designs on demand.
The 2020 pandemic hit Cassiy Johnson, a 31-year-old American woman, hard when she lost her job at a daycare centre in Michigan. Faced with the urgent need to generate income, she began exploring different ways to work from home.
After experimenting with physical products such as cement candles and decorated mugs—which were expensive to ship and time-consuming to make—Johnson discovered a more efficient alternative: print-on-demand. This model allows creators to design digital products and sell them on platforms like Etsy without needing to hold any inventory.
In April 2020, she opened her Etsy shop and started selling t-shirts, mugs, and other items featuring her designs. Remarkably, she dedicated less than 30 minutes a day to her business, using only her mobile phone. In just two months, she generated around $30,000 in sales.
To supplement her income, Johnson took a traditional sales job, but she soon realised the potential of her online shop. By 2021, her annual earnings from Etsy had reached $90,000, allowing her to quit her day job and focus entirely on the business. Since then, her shop has accumulated over $766,000 in total sales.
How does the business work?
Print-on-demand combines creativity and technology. Designs are created digitally and uploaded to platforms like Etsy. When a customer makes a purchase, the order is automatically produced and shipped. Johnson uses tools such as Canva to create her designs and optimises her listings based on search trends, allowing her shop to run almost automatically.
In addition to her first store, Johnson opened a second one called StopMockAndRoll, where she sells mock-up images that other sellers can use for their products.
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She also started a YouTube channel, sharing tutorials on how to set up businesses like hers, which has attracted more than 200,000 subscribers. Johnson maintains that the key to her success has been consistency and discipline. “There’s no magic to it: you have to do the easy things every day for months until it works,” she says.
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