“The more we reduce ourselves to machines in the lower things, the more force we shall set free to use in the higher.”
Anna Brackett
Operating a POD business is not as easy as it looks. It requires dedication, consistency, and keeping up to date with market trends.
The steps are straightforward enough. But when they’re broken down, they add up to a mountain of work.
If you don’t want to suffer burnout or go out of business after a few months, then you need to put a system in place.
Of course, this is where you ask: “How can I do that?”
It all begins with asking yourself the right questions. Like I said in the side hustle chapter, you can learn whether you need to automate your business by answering these questions:
- Will my business consume much of my time?- Can I do it by myself?- Can I hire people to do the work for me?- Can I use technology to reduce the workload via automation?
Now, let’s say you can achieve your short-term goal(s) by doing things manually. You’ll make some money to pay bills or buy food.
But if you want to create a sustainable side hustle that earns more passive income, then you have to scale up.
You need to be concerned about time and scalability. You can’t scale up if you don’t have a system to manage your production flow.
This is why you might need to hire people or start leveraging technology in your POD business. Let me give you a breakdown of what you need to do in full.
Breakdown of the Process
As you know, running a POD business begins with selecting your niche market. Once you have your niche market, you can begin to work on the quotes you want to put on your products. Then you use the quotes to create designs.
If you have great product designs, you can move on to the uploading process, in which you place your products in print-on-demand marketplaces where prospective buyers can place orders.
The fulfillment process begins as soon as an order arrives.
Chronologically, the full process looks like this:
- Niche Market Selection- Quote Research- Design- Uploading- Fulfillment
Each of these processes is essential to creating a stable production flow for your POD business. From market research to niche selection, it all requires attention and a good eye for detail.
In other words, your head needs to be in the game!
If you want a profitable business, you need to list products with different kinds of quotes. Now, this might seem easy – until you have to list thousands of products every week.
This is why you need to have a system in place, one that allows you to run your business without much stress and physical effort.
If you have a hundred different quotes, you need a hundred different designs. And often, you’ll end up with more than a few hundred. You can have as many as a thousand quotes.
Even if you’re a pro designer, making tons of designs for your products might become overwhelming. The design of your product is very important, as it will influence the purchasing decision of your customers.
Now that your quotes have gone through the hands of a designer or your hands, it’s time to upload them to a marketplace.
You can upload your products yourself by filling in all the details one after the other, from product to product.
God help you if you have thousands of products to upload. You’ll get exhausted in no time. The same thing goes for the fulfillment process. When orders start coming in tens and hundreds, they will be a total hassle to manage. But remember:
Consistency is key if you want to build a sustainable and profitable print-on-demand business.
That’s why, when your business starts to grow, you’ll have an urgent need for a system that allows the work in each of the POD process steps to flow smoothly.
You need to develop a suitable workflow system that will allow you to get more done without having to wear yourself out trying to satisfy multiple work demands.
The proven way to simplify the entire POD work process is AUTOMATION.
