The BIG Problem with Print-On-Demand No One Talks About

Print-on-demand sounds like the perfect side hustle—you don’t need inventory, you don’t handle shipping, and all you have to do is upload designs. But is it really the best way to make six figures online?

In this reaction, Matt breaks down the real challenges of print-on-demand that often get overlooked.

Nothing in this video is technically wrong, but success in print-on-demand is much harder than influencers make it seem. If you don’t have a niche, a brand, or a real marketing strategy, it’s going to be an uphill battle.

There are tons of people out on social media giving business advice. Some of it is good advice, but most of it isn’t good. In this series watch CapForge’s owner react to different advice videos. He’s an expert in all things business and has 20+ years of experience under his belt. Some of the things he reacts to might even surprise you!

Video Transcript: 

Business Advice Video:

I make six figures purely online as a teenager. I’ve tried about every side hustle that possibly exists. So I’m going to tell you guys the most successful one that I found and the one that’s made me the most amount of passive income. It’s called Print on Demand and I use Printify as my print on demand site. And let me just tell you why this is the best option you’ll find. You don’t need to keep any inventory, don’t need to ship things to customers, don’t need to actually make products physically in your home. All you have to do is design products and upload them to a website. And that’s it. 

Matt’s Review”

Yeah, not that teenagers can’t be successful, but I’m a little skeptical on a few things. One, that she’s tried every single side hustle that there is, and I feel like if you’re a teenager, you probably haven’t had time to do that. Also think if you live at home, you’re still supported by mom and dad, then your requirements are different than somebody who’s replacing a nine-to-five with this. The biggest problem though with this side hustle is not that anything she said isn’t true, you can create designs, you don’t have to have the product. You don’t have to do anything other than create the design and list it. And if somebody buys it, it’ll get sent to a print-on-design place. They’ll put the design on a shirt or mug or whatever it is and ship it to the customer. All that is true. The problem is, and what she didn’t go into, is that literally anyone can do this. And using AI, you could come up with a thousand designs in the next half hour and then list them and anyone of those designs could attract a customer, but someone else could also come up with 1000 designs, and someone else and someone else and someone and pretty soon there’s 14,000,000 designs. By a few thousand print-on-demand wannabe entrepreneurs on the site. So yes, the process is easy. It doesn’t cost anything except for maintaining the Etsy store, which I think is not that much per month for the subscription, and the time it takes to do the design or have AI do the design and upload them all. But the problem is there’s not an infinite number of people willing to spend 30 or 40 bucks on a t-shirt on a design when there’s millions of choices, right? You’re going to have a very hard time finding enough customers for your print-on-design designs unless you’re unique and you’re in a specialized niche and you have a way of finding those niche customers and then a way of copyrighting and defending your copyrights because Copyrights, while you can have them, it gives you the legal right to your design are easy to knock off.  And by the time you’ve caught up to and stopped the person knocking off your designs, you may have lost thousands of dollars in sales if you had something somebody wanted in the 1st place. But the fact that anyone can do it and it’s so easy and so low cost is not a good thing. There’s no barrier to entry. And there’s not an infinite number of customers for this infinite number of designs that can be created. So that’s the problem. Nothing she said is not true, but the problem is in order to have any level of success, and if you’re using a print-on-demand and you’re putting up designs, you’re paying Etsy, you’re paying the print-on-demand people and whatever else, you’re only at the end of the day making a few bucks per shirt or per design. You have to sell thousands of them to replace a nine-to-five. And there just aren’t that many customers for those kinds of things out there. That’s the problem with this, not the idea but the fact that anyone can do it. You want to get into a business that not anyone can do, that there are some barriers to entry, and it does require some specialized ability, skill, knowledge, investment, what have you, so you’re not competing with a million other people in a totally undifferentiated way for a not big enough market of customers. So, unless you have truly unique ideas and designs and an audience for them, this is a much, much tougher business than what she’s making it seem like.