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A
I have Ryan Hogue in the studio today. He is a seven figure print on demand seller. He's been selling apparel for the last 10 years on both Amazon and Etsy and he has a lot to share with us today with specifically what he's been experimenting with with AI. And I haven't had this level of technical conversation with someone yet and I think it might be a little bit over the heads if you're just getting started with AI. So don't be intimidated. But for those of you that want to hear how a more advanced seller is thinking about using AI to scale their time and, and specifically someone that's selling both print on demand as well as on the Amazon side, then definitely check out this episode. We're going to get right into it. Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of Crickets to Cha Chings. I'm here with Ryan and he has a trend to share with us today. Welcome Ryan.
B
Hey Julie, thanks for the invite. Fun to be here again with you and looking forward to sharing some insights, hopefully sharing some value and making this worth everybody's time. So the trend that I noticed, I'm a big apparel guy since day one. I started by selling T shirts and this is Day almost 10 years later, I'm still selling a lot of T shirts. I noticed this year one of the top trends had to be old school presidents, US Presidents, ripping the electric guitar back before, you know, a lot of the presidents back before they even had electric guitars. So that was the niche that I saw selling really well. I saw a shirt on Etsy earlier today selling over 300 times in the last month.
A
And what's so funny to me is that I keep hearing that July 4th this year is going to be huge. I think it might be the 250th anniversary. Is that, is that correct? And I feel like it's going to be maybe a huge opportunity for print on demand sellers more than any other year. I don't know if you've heard similar things.
B
I let the data do the talking and yeah, it's, it's all over the place already. It's those are rising and kind of dominating the high end of Amazon print on demand sales. When I do my research on Amazon merch and like I said, I was even looking at Etsy earlier, filtering by, you know, the best sellers basically and, and seeing quite a few of those presidents. I think the whole play of it is it's kind of funny when you have the. Well actually funny story. My dad actually wanted that shirt for his birthday too in Completely unrelated. He's like, he loves history, he loves politics, he loves guitar. And I was like, man, why didn't I think of this? Why didn't I already have one of these shirts, like ordered for you? So I can see why it's popular.
A
Yeah. And I actually see it in my household. So my nanny, for whatever reason, I guess young people are into President Carter and she's been wearing a lot of different Carter shirts. And I don't, I don't quite dive in enough to ask, like, why, why are you interested in President Carter? But they, they seem to be interested in that. So I think not only just some of the old presidents, but recycling some of the more recent ones and trend combining them with other things. Like you mentioned guitar might be a big winner as we enter the summer.
B
Yeah, you got a cliffhanger. Now for the next episode, you gotta go figure out why and let everybody know.
A
I will find out. I will absolutely find out. So I know you mentioned that you have a unique strategy of how you would create a design like this. Can you share a little more of what you've been experimenting with?
B
Yes. I will preface it by saying, like, I'm a tech guy. You know, I, I have been addicted to computers since I was 13. So that's why like, for me, starting an online business was a no brainer. Studying it when I was in college was a no brainer. And adopting any software tools that can shorten, you know, my time spent from A to B is something I'm always looking to adopt. So for me, what I was working on earlier today actually was taking the, you know, high end niche of Abraham Lincoln playing the electric guitar. And basically what I did is I went to ChatGPT and I did two things. First I said, can you write me a list of like the top 20 most popular presidents in U.S. you know, presidential history? And I said, just their names. So just a little text list. And then I popped that into an Excel file. One row is just one name. And then I said, you know, copy paste the design. And I said, can you just describe the design style? So I'm not ripping off any design elements, anything like that. I just want some text description of that design style. And what I did then is I took if this is like kind of a nerdy thing to know how to do, but print on demand led me to this. But you can actually in Excel build out a string of text where you insert variables. So essentially it's like equals, you know, quotation marks. And then if you double quote it and you hit ampersand, you can select the cell that you want to inject as a variable. So essentially what I did is I built out like a AI prompt for image generation for all 20 rows, but I only had to write it once. And then I, it just references, you know, a cell, a 2 cell, a C, a 3, a 4, a 5, and built out, you know, all, every prompt that I needed. Then I popped on over to some software I use called my designs that allows for what they call parallel prompts and basically allows me to just copy paste all 20 rows into my designs. And you can configure like what resolution you need, the graphics, how many graphics to output, you know, because maybe the first one won't be good if you only have one, you're stuck. You can have it generate multiple images per prompt. And so within like, let's say two minutes, I basically had 40 designs based on 20 of the most popular presidents. And you know, to me, that's, that's what's worked for me. I don't like to bank on having outlier success selling print on demand. In this case, I like to just throw as much as I can on the wall, see what sticks. And you know, on Etsy, maybe I just don't enable auto renew. Maybe I do manual renew and by default, and then I'll just go in there and after something sells, enable auto renew and let it kind of live up there for a little bit longer.
A
That's a good point. I've, I've heard both sides of keeping things around for longer, but also if you're just mass listing, then you don't want to have to pay for the long tail of designs that never seem their day on Etsy. So I'm just curious. So you were all you were doing. I like the idea of asking it to describe the design style because I think when people see a bestseller, all they have in their head is that design. So that's a way that you can say, okay, I like this aesthetic, but I don't exactly want to copy and I want it to generate something that's a derivative of that, but not exactly that. So that's, that's super creative. So were you just having it, you were just literally putting in each cell names of 20 presidents? It wasn't like, like you were having an ad. Anything else?
B
Yeah, I just asked for the name because my, my plan was to let also chatgpt kind of write the prompt for me with everything except the president's name, which I'll then inject So I probably started with a design optimized for print featuring US President and then grabbed the variable insert playing the electric guitar, and then I just copy paste the rest of it related to the design style. And I would just say, anybody watching too, I know there's still people probably like lagging in their AI expertise, if you will. I don't know if you ever feel like you're the expert, like, I always feel like I want to learn more. But a great place to start for POD is just copy a design copy paste into ChatGPT. It could be a free account. Just say, describe this design to me and what you literally see is reverse engineering of a prompt that would help you build out that design in AI. And so you start to see it, how it sees it, how it would describe it, et cetera, and then you become better at prompting.
A
I love that tip. So one trouble that I've had when trying to generate designs with ChatGPT is that sometimes the output is not ready to list on Etsy, whether it's maybe the wrong DPI or it's not the right dimensions, or it started with the right dimensions, but then somehow it drifted and now I kept going and Now I have 20 copies of the wrong dimension. I have to go back to the drawing board. How have you put rails on that? And are you finding that you're getting good output or is that why you're going into the second tool to generate, so that you can set more controls over the output?
B
Yeah, you guessed it. The second thing you said there, like in the tool, my designs, it's like a whole ecosystem that has everything I need and it lets me do everything in bulk too, which I love, up up to 120 at a time. So it's like if I want to publish 120 Etsy listings at once, I can literally do it all in there. So instead of using the top 20 presidents, theoretically, if I wanted to somehow come up with 120 historical figures playing the guitar, I could do it all in bulk, including using AI to do the, you know, title tags, description, the mockups, the video can all be done there as well. To answer your question, I can take the designs that it outputs and basically in bulk. Like I use 20 as an example, but it could have been 120. I can have it remove the background, then vectorize it, then basically re optimize it however I need to for whatever product I intend to sell on. But I'm saying when I say that is, you know, the, the dimensions that I need for a coffee mug are different than the dimensions I need for a T shirt. So I would go and basically tell it like, hey, I intend to sell this on T shirt. And it'll say okay, so you want it to be this size? And I'll say yes. Now apply that to all, you know, 20 in this case. Then once I have that file optimized for a shirt, can generate all the mockups. I can then take the mockups, make a video from them and push it to, to Etsy. So it's pretty cool. What's possible?
A
I know Printify will give you the dimensions for all the different products, but I'm just curious for like resolution, have you had any issues with that? Because I can imagine a newer seller might be nervous. Oh, when, when it prints out and ships to someone's house, it's not going look right or it's going to be blurry. Have you ever had issues with that or how are you ensuring that the quality is good?
B
You know, even before I was using AI, I always, like I mentioned, I was selling the truth. I started with T shirts so I basically design at T shirt dimensions. Now if I want to sell a duvet cover, I'm in trouble. Right? Gotta find something to scale that up. Or I have to take the T shirt optimized design and do a pattern or something. Which by the way, Printify makes very easy to do if, if it is viable to create a pattern. They literally have pattern option. One click and then you, you can say, you know, do the, I don't know what they call it exactly. For some reason I'm blanking, but it's like instead of it just being a square pattern, you can have it like a little bit off center and it looks pretty good. But yeah, maybe it's not like a beginner thing to say, but once you kind of remove a background, you can vectorize. There's a, you know, I'm sure there's plenty of free tools and when something's vectorized it's resolution independent. So you can scale it up as big as necessary. You can obviously scale it down and then you don't have that issue anymore. So I would just look for a free, I don't know if there's any free vectorizers off the top of my head that I would be able to recommend since I'm used to using the bulk tool called my designs.
A
But yeah, okay, well thank you for the tip. And I know for some people they're going to nerd out and they're going to try to copy you and get in the weeds with my design. So thanks for the tip on that. And others are like, you know what, I'm going to hold on AI. And I think either of those paths are fine right now. You can still make lots of good designs without AI. But if you do want to make more for your time now we have this incredible opportunity in 2026 with AI. So it's been blowing my mind. Although I find that I use AI so much, my phone and my computer can't keep up sometimes. Like my phone just turned 100 degrees because I was troubleshooting something with AI for our rental property. And I don't know if you've ever had that issue. I think I need to upgrade my laptop as well.
B
You know it's funny is I'm not phone guy, so. No, I have not. I'm like a desktop guy and I'm always at my desktop. So.
A
Okay. Yep. Yeah, that's. I definitely do both, I think with the kids because I'm always like on the go. I have, I use my ph. So in terms of what type of products you're selling for Print on Demand, I know you've been historically apparel. Have you dabbled with any other types of products? Or do you have any other secret trends or tips that you've seen break out recently? Or are you, do you still think that like apparel is the way to go?
B
Speaking to my own personal experience, I had a lot of success with simple text based designs which I know might, might seem counterintuitive because on the high end you're typically not like, you know, I just shared a niche of there's no text in the design. So like Abraham Lincoln playing guitar, there's no text. So it's basically the exact opposite of that. I realized, well, I kind of took the approach from day one that I need to make it work for me. And like I used to work full time and I was a web developer that also taught web development and did web development on the side that was trying to do Amazon, FBA and Print on Demand, but wasn't really sure what, where that was going to take me. Right. So I wanted to push those businesses further ahead but also make it work in the sense that like can't just be eight hours a day doing that, trusting that it'll work out. So what I realized is like, it's better to be doing something than nothing. You know, I want my, my number of listings available on Etsy and on Amazon. When I started Etsy, Print on Demand wasn't even A thing. You know, I think it was 2018 when that started. They kind of said, okay, you can do that now. Or I guess they, they greenlit it. I'm sure people were already doing it. So yeah, text based designs. So not only on apparel, but I realized embroidery, like text lends itself to embroidery really well because you can't really embroider complex graphics in the first place. So you're almost limited in scope to a basic design. And I mean, honestly, you could just literally use Printful Printify's text tool. Just pick a nice big bold font and you could just start by listing an embroidered hat with the name Ryan on it and then the next one, the name Julie. And it may seem silly, but like, no joke, you can actually make sales that way. And once you see it work, it's like, oh, okay, I just need to do more of this. And I've manually posted easily over a hundred thousand listings to Amazon where most of them just text and, but it was because I just gotten the cadence of doing it every day throughout the day. Amazon, they, they kind of make you wait about 30 minutes between posting. So it was just like a part of my internal clock, like to just do that workflow and just keep pushing, keep expanding my catalog. And as a result my income from Amazon print on demand just kept growing and growing, growing. And I, I don't say that to like anybody. Like you don't necessarily have to do that. If you push to Etsy, for instance, you could do it all in one, one sitting because they don't have the same kind of requirement there. But it's really just to show you that it works and that you don't need to be achieving outlier success to generate real money. I'm fortunate that I've been able to make like six figure profits, I think every year since 2019. But it didn't start overnight. Like I actually published income reports since day one on my blog and I did it for the first five years. And they're exceptionally unexceptional. It's the opposite of what everybody expects. It was very slow, but I just literally I was like, oh, I'm listing on Amazon now I'm listing on Amazon Etsy. Now I'm listing on a platform called Redbubble. Oh, I can integrate with ebay. Then I start listing there as well and I just kind of spread all my listings and I call it online real estate. Like, you've got your Airbnb, I've got my, my online real estate here on Amazon, Etsy, Ebay Walmart, et cetera. And just kind of watching that, you know, gradually climb.
A
I'm just curious, for this year, what are you seeing for, let's say, percentage of your business that's on Etsy versus Amazon? Because I've noticed you've posted a lot more Amazon stuff than I've seen on other channels, for example. So I'm just curious like what the percentages kind of net out as I
B
would say sell on Amaz First, I'm not anti Etsy, but you know, it's. It's the number one e commerce website in the world.
A
So do you also see like the embroidery happening on Amazon too, or is that just through Etsy?
B
Yeah, embroidery through Amazon as well. Anything that I research and design, I'm going to post to both places. One quick tip, if anybody's trying to follow my footsteps, like, I guess you could do it in Printify too, but I like how the user interface, the UI in Printful, you can use what they call product templates, where you create the product one time. So if I want to sell an embroidered hat that says Ryan, I can create it there, title it, and then I can basically just click it and say publish to Amazon and then click it again and say publish to Etsy, and then click it again and say publish to ebay. I'm one of these people that kind of obsesses over these little efficiencies. You know, back in the day when I was first starting, I would literally have a clock timing how long it took me to do things and I would try them different ways and literally figure out the most efficient way to do them. Should I be uploading in literally like 10 different browser tabs at once? Or is it faster doing five based on how my fingers could hit Control one, Control two, Control three and switch between tabs? So I don't know, I would just say I really like how Printful does it. Printify's equivalent is you create it once and then you can basically do. It's basically similar. You just clone it to your other stores that are in Printify and you can publish from there.
A
Got it. Yeah. For some reason I thought Printify and Printful merged. We were Printify people over here, but I heard they merged. They still have separate UIs.
B
They have separate UIs still, yeah. I mean, but you know, as. As is the case with many companies these days, it seems antitrust laws just aren't enforced. That's not me complaining about Printful and Printify, but it's just kind of the theme of the last like two decades in my opinion. It's just like big companies get bigger, you know.
A
Yeah. I mean, yeah. Think about Amazon. I used to work there though, so I enjoyed the elevator ride of Amazon. So okay, so that is a helpful way to think about it. And I love how your brain works on efficiency. So I mentioned how my computer and my phone are kind of frying trying to do the AI. I'm just curious with my designs if I were trying to generate 20 presidents at once, how long is this taking? Like anytime I try to do it on ChatGPT it's taking like four minutes. And if I'm generating 20 designs I'm getting annoyed. Just kind of like watching it spin and spin and spin. Is that your experience with my designs? Like how long would you say that takes? And you do you just like keep it running in the background while you're doing other things?
B
They're really good about integrating the latest, greatest image generation models. So they, and one of the things about as these like image gen models get, get better, they get faster. So it probably took 60 seconds to get 40 images done. So it's just, it's getting really cool. Like really the improvements are impressive. I would say Google has something called Flows. If you guys have never heard of it, you can use it for free. Just I don't know if saying Google Google Flows is the right way to put it, but I think it is going to take you to the right place and basically you just hit new project and tell it what you want it to do and it will output you know, up to four images for you and it's going to use, you know, the latest and greatest I think is like ChatGPT Image Gen 2. But if it's Google it's going to use Nanobanana too and it's probably the fastest I've seen. So you can go in there and just test it at all like with anything. And what's really cool too is there they make it real easy. Anybody listening please? If you take one thing away is I would say just spend like you know, five minutes messing around with AI Image gen and Google Flow is a great free place. You just log in with your Google account and you don't have to put a credit card on file. It makes it easy to iterate. So you could say just as an example, hey make a picture of Abraham Lincoln and then it will do that whether it outputs one or four. You control those settings. By the way, it does video too. But then you can say of these four, I like this one. So then you can click it and say add to prompt. And then you could say make him playing an electric guitar. And then it'll do four more. And you take the one you like and say make a monochrome version of this design optimized for print. And what I just told you, like I've never even done myself. But like that's a nice, easy, real easy exercise to get comfortable with how this all works. And when I say iterate, you can literally take the one you like the most out of the four that output, feed it back in and say make these changes. And you can keep saying make these changes, make these changes, make these changes as many times as you need until you've got what you're, what you're looking for.
A
Wow, okay. And in terms of the overall kind of cost of this, because one one hesitancy I've had of recommending AI generally is that all of us that have YouTube channels for us experimenting with this AI is part of what we do. It's like a business expense. Right. But when someone's just only selling on Etsy or only selling on Amazon, it can get expensive with all the credits to generate all the images that you need with some of these paid programs for how much you might make on the one listing if it took you like 20 gen 20 spins to generate that image. So I'm just curious how you've seen on like the cost benefit analysis of any of these tools. And if you have anything to share
B
on that, I would just say it's moving very quickly. So it's, I could say something today and it could change tomorrow. Right? I, I do think it's smart to be cost conscious like I always was myself. So I get that. I would just say like just if you're willing to look, you'll probably be able to find a way to do most of what you want to do for free. If they make Google flows cost money tomorrow you might be able to find something else that lets you do it for free. And then, and then that might change that week and you have to go find something else the next week. But it's definitely worth at least getting a little bit comfortable doing because you know, the cat's been let out of the bag, it's not gonna go away. And it's not like I don't wanna say that you have to be doing it. Cause I said, hey, text based designs still work really well. You don't need AI to make text based designs, but you can definitely do that as well in bulk. And save a lot of time as well. Going back to that moniker of time is money, you know, it's always gonna be true. I think if you have other things on your to do list, even if it's just working on business, it allowed me to do YouTube, you know, is just kind of being more efficient with how I ran my pod business. Yet it freed up time to do more YouTube.
A
Totally agree. And I've actually been experimenting with Nano Banano a little bit in my personal life because I thought, well, if I can justify using this tool personally too and have some fun with the family. I think we were generating like a kid's book together, my daughter and I. Then I'm like, oh, there's other utility to this. And learning how to do this can help your everyday life. And it's like incredible kind of keeping up with it. Although it can be a lot to keep up with for sure. So, Ryan, do you have any last tips to kind of share with anyone before we sign off in terms of like, what either what you've been experimenting with or AI or kind of trends you're seeing?
B
Yeah, for POD again, for me it's been a lot of just anytime I do research and then design and then do the SEO, I like to publish it at a minimum to Etsy and Amazon. Now, I know your audience is a lot of digital product sellers, so Amazon might not be relevant and I get that. But if you're doing anything POD related or really just in life in general, I'll take it all the way back to when I was a web developer. Like, I learned how to be a web developer. I built websites, monetized them with ads, made a web development LLC where I had clients, worked as a senior web developer, taught web development at a university. You see what I'm saying? Take that approach to everything in life. If you want more money, which I think most people do, you know, you just got to have the desire to just squeeze a little bit extra out. And like, when I say it, it sounds so logical and so obvious, but most people aren't doing it. So I would say there's gotta be a digital product equivalent of that, a print on demand equivalent of that. Right? For me it's like, oh, yeah, I don't just publish to Amazon, I publish to Amazon, etsy, eBay, Walmart, Redbubble, like Spreadshirt, TeePublic, like all these places. Oh, by the way, you can pretty much automate uploading to most of those places with a few clicks as well. So don't be Afraid to take shortcuts, try new things like subscription fees. I know might be like a blocker to a lot of people, but put one month on, or a lot of times there's a free trial and just buy something and literally think about how much your time is worth at a minimum. I used to, I would say quick tip. Like, I thought of my income in terms of dollars per day, so I knew how much my dollars per day were from working, like creating my time for money day job. And then I also tracked my dollars per day every single day in a spreadsheet at the beginning. I don't do it anymore from side hustles, you know, and. And I literally could see, like, okay, my Amazon FBA business is making me this much and it's jumping, you know, maybe not day over day, but like week over week, month over month, certainly. And then I introduce print on demand, and then it goes up more. And then I introduce YouTube and then it goes up more. And then, you know, now I'm at the point where it's like, hey, like this side hustle experiment, whatever, worked really well. And, you know, we're in. We moved into a nice house like that we're very happy with. It's kind of the dream for most people and we can start a family and we want more, you know, And I'm working on investing, you know what I mean, like doing technical analysis on stocks. Because for me personally, in my journey and where we want to be, that's the logical next step for me. But anybody watching this, I wouldn't say go from where you are to, you know, a hundred million dollars. I would say be realistic, like, incremental steps. POD is a great way to add extra income to allow you to take more risk with your finances. If you do want to one day be worth $10 million, 50, 100, whatever. And also, the higher you set your sights, the easier it is to. To get, you know, closer there. You know, I mean, if you try to make 10 million and you fall short, you only make 5, you'll still be pretty happy, right? But I would say the same factors in for, you know, POD or side hustles. Like, if you do a side hustle, like when you do your niche research on Etsy and you see, oh, this is on the high end, selling a hundred times a month. The number one bestseller sells a hundred times a month. You know, that's three sales a day. Is that going to get you where you want to be or should you be in another niche where on the high end it sells 5,000 times a month. You know, that type of thing.
A
Yep. I love that thought. And, Ryan, I know the episode's ending, but I think something's funny. We went through the whole episode without you mentioning Claude or agents, and I'm wondering how we did that with your background. So I'm just curious, have you been dabbling in Claude and is there a reason that you are trying these other tools versus that?
B
Yeah, I'm a former web developer, so I didn't want to hijack the conversation and make it about that, but it's like, unfathomable where we are. And by the way, I'm not hyping AI. Like, I'm a realist. Like, I know how to program. I don't think AI is sentient or anything like that. That being said, it doesn't matter what you know. I mean, it's still incredible that you can that. I'm a web developer by trade, and if I'm writing code, I'm doing something wrong right now. Like, it's absolutely insane. Yeah. Like, you know what I mean? It's not. It's not special anymore to be able to build web apps that would've taken a team of people a year to build anymore, because you can have one person build it in a week with AI agents. Right. So it's just we're in a whole nother timeline. Things changed extremely rapidly. They're only gonna get crazier. I think doing what we're doing makes a lot of sense. Being a human in front of a camera, telling a story that people can relate to. We're not AI, whatever avatars. We can help, like, guide people based on our real experience and expertise. It's something that's, like, worth learning because you don't need to know how to code, but if you have some sort of an app idea that you can then build without having to spend millions of dollars, because you can just get a cloud subscription for $20 a month. And if you're willing to get in front of a camera and a microphone, you can hopefully attract an audience that your web app that you just built is relevant to and get the user base. And as long as you're providing them value, I'm sure they'll provide value in exchange. And to me, that's, you know, how you make dreams come true, how you shape the world.
A
Basically, so are you. I heard there's a Claude Chrome extension. I haven't tried it yet, but once I heard that, I was like, oh, wow, this is going to be a Game changer. Have you experimented with that yet?
B
I'm not using the CLAUDE Chrome extension. I do have, like, you know, CLAUDE installed. I've got Claude integrated into, like, an ide, so I can basically look at the code it generates. But like I said, I'm not trying to write code, but it's. It's insane. Like, I'm honestly working on a web app that this is outside the scope of this video. But, like, I'm working on a web app for an investing community that I run right now, basically to give automated buy and sell alerts, because I developed my own proprietary methodology for buying and sell signals on the stock market. And it's a crazy thing to say because most people who say this, you should not be trusting at all. But, you know, you can retroactively test this methodology that's completely my own. It works incredibly well, but it's also not something that, you know, is streamlinable. I couldn't just send you the code and say, copy, paste it and then enable it, and then it works. I have to sit there and literally be curled up into my computer monitor like this, giving myself neck problems, trying to align everything perfectly for. Yeah, it's crazy, but that's what I want to build. I honestly think that if I build that, the number that came into my mind was I could be making like half a million dollars a month, realistically, because I'm gonna be providing more value than that. The stock market is the second, I think, the second most liquid market, so there's definitely demand. If you know how to beat the market, like you can, you know, half a million dollars might be a joke. A hedge fund might buy the software for $10 million. Right. Or the. The methodology, you know, I don't know. I'm just excited about it.
A
Well, I'm excited, Ryan. And. And having multiple passions is always okay here. So don't worry about being outside the scope. I think sometimes here we get very focused on Etsy and Canva, and I think that there's still tons of opportunity there. And I don't actually think people need to experiment in AI and actually, sometimes for beginners, and it can be kind of take them down the wrong path where they're still learning, like, how to list something on the Internet, how to get demand. All of those things optimize for a listing or Etsy. But it's fun to see, like, more of an advanced user, what they're dabbling with and kind of like what's on the cutting edge. So I like that you're you're playing in the print on demand Etsy arena, but then also you're trying to use it for investing in personal finance. I think there's people that are using it across many different disciplines in our community. So it's always fun. And if anyone listening, you want to comment, if you want to tell us like how are you using these AI tools even if it's outside of your print on demand or scope of Etsy, I'd be really curious to hear like give, give us all ideas of what you're doing. Cool.
B
Yeah, I agree with that by the way. I agree with your take.
A
Yeah. So Ryan, if, if people want to learn more about you, check out your channel. Channels. How can they find you?
B
Yeah, just type like ryan Hogan to YouTube and you'll find the print on demand content. You'll might see some of my investing content as well. It's very focused on like bitcoin and bitcoin adjacent opportunities. But I think that's the most like currently in the next like 12 months, like asymmetric risk reward, high end kind of returns. So I'm really focused on, you know, nailing that.
A
Cool. Well thanks Ryan for coming on today. We always appreciate having you.
B
Thank you Julie.
A
Cool.
Title: Make 100 Listings With AI + July 4th Ideas
Podcast Host: Gold City Ventures
Guest: Ryan Hogue
Date: June 9, 2026
This episode features a dynamic conversation between host Julie and seven-figure print-on-demand (POD) seller Ryan Hogue, known for his expertise on both Etsy and Amazon. The discussion dives into advanced strategies for rapidly creating listings using AI, capitalizing on trending July 4th (especially the 250th anniversary) apparel ideas, bulk listing efficiency, and the evolving tech landscape in print-on-demand.
Julie encourages both beginners and seasoned sellers to take away practical tips, emphasizing that even if some topics sound technical, there’s value for all experience levels.
Old School Presidents with a Twist
250th Anniversary of July 4th
Niche Layering:
Data-Led Niche Identification
Rapid AI Design Generation — Step-by-Step:
Listing Strategy on Etsy:
Creative Prompt Use:
Quality Control and Output Specs
Text-Only Design Success
Efficiency Habits
Emerging Tools
Cost Considerations
AI as a Skill for Life and Business
Multiple Streams and Incremental Growth
Adoption Pace—Entry Points for Beginners
Coding & AI Agents
Personal Projects and Passion
Whether you’re a beginner dabbling in your first Etsy listings or an advanced seller looking to rapidly scale and diversify, this episode is packed with actionable insights on leveraging AI for print-on-demand, the value of bulk creation tools, finding and riding trends, and keeping an eye on the next big thing.
“Spend five minutes messing around with AI image generation…” — If you do nothing else, heed this takeaway, and start exploring.