Hey guys,
I'm currently 25, so have been self-employed/a business owner for a few years now
In this time I've lived all around the world, including a year in Thailand, time in India, Vietnam, and I'm now currently travelling around the West Coast of America in an RV! I thought I would try and put together some thoughts that could hopefully help some of you guys out trying the entrepreneur route, as I can't imagine life still working a 9-5
For context, I was originally self employed from selling posters on Etsy through Print on Demand. I now co-run PrintShrimp, a Print on Demand company for posters – as I figured the next logical step above selling posters was printing them for others! Check us out if you'd like, I'm very proud of what we've achieved in basically a year
Anyway, some hopefully useful points I've learnt.
-Don't wait to launch! People seem to try and wait to launch until they have a great product service. Do NOT do this – that is a waste of time! We launched PrintShrimp with no product and the worlds worst website. We managed to convince some customers to try us and we then processed orders via email, without any marketing, any order portal, or anything like that. It meant I was chained to my laptop to send orders all the time but it allowed us to grow our customer base, test our MVP, whilst actually creating our service in the background
-Build a personal brand!! Please don't be afraid of putting yourself in front of a camera. I started a personal TikTok two years ago, before PrintShrimp. I didn't even know why but I figured a personal brand would come in handy. I didn't post about anything business related, I was just posting my travels. But when the idea of PrintShrimp was born, I was able to pivot and begin talking about PrintShrimp. This is where our first customers came from – and they already trusted PS despite not knowing anything about it, as they trusted me. A personal brand will take you so far.
-There is no such thing as too much competition. You just need to do something no one else is doing, or figure out a smart way to create customers for yourself. There are dozens of other huge POD companies in existence. We were able to carve out our part of the market by specialising in only posters, and more importantly by creating on organic customer creation. We taught people how to sell posters based on my Etsy experience completely free of charge. This creates our customers, a lot of whom are now very big Etsy sellers. And we still teach people how to sell posters for free, as we make our money from printing the posters when they sell one, rather than having to charge for knowledge.
-Organic is always best. I see a lot of people posting about how they started a store and pumped hundreds of dollars straight away into marketing. That is insane. If you can't test the concept first and get some organic sales, it is probably not a good concept.
-From your end, an issue can seem like a HUGE problem. For example, if something goes wrong with your business. You are seeing everyones issues getting reported at the same time, so it seems like a huge issue. But bear in mind that individual customers are affected on a much smaller scale. Look at a problem from a customers point of view and it is never as big as it may seem from your POV
-Success will take TIME! I started PrintShimp with a friend about a year and a couple months ago. We made so many mistakes, we lost money due to stupid mistakes. There were times growth wasn't looking great. But – above all else – we were completely deluded that it would one day work haha. It is actually only in the past 3/4 months we have started making proper money, but we always had faith it could work. Luckily we were both able to support ourselves from selling posters on Etsy whilst building income, so something like that can really help
I hope some of this is useful knowledge! That is my Sunday morning word vomit complete, sometimes it is good to reflect and put thoughts to paper. I'm off to Bryce Canyon now, god bless everyone 🫡
I've Been Self-Employed since I was 22 – Here is What I've Learnt
byu/tommo278 inEntrepreneur
Posted by tommo278
6 Comments
God bless you!! Sounds like a great story and journey, your post radiates happiness 🙂
Lol sounds like chatgpt garbage, how old are you now? 23?
Impressive!
POD to running your own POD company is a solid progression most people skip. They stay stuck in the seller mindset instead of shifting to infrastructure.
The location independence thing works until you hit scale problems. Running operations across timezones sounds romantic until you’re debugging production issues at 3am Thailand time because your US customers are experiencing downtime during their peak hours. Found that out the hard way scaling past 100k monthly revenue remote.
What most self-employed people miss in the 22 to 25 range is the transition from doing everything yourself to building systems that run without you. You can print on demand from anywhere, but can your customer support handle 500 tickets a week without you manually responding? That’s the real test.
The other trap is lifestyle creep. Year one you’re hustling in a Bangkok co-working space living on 800 bucks a month feeling like a king. Year three you want the RV and West Coast travel and suddenly your profitable 5k monthly business doesn’t fund the life you designed it for.
Curious how you structured PrintShrimp to avoid the manual fulfillment bottlenecks most POD companies hit at scale.
Thank you very much for sharing your insights. I wish you the best of luck & health!
Just looked up your company 😉
Can’t wait to see what’s ahead for you!!