This Online Side Hustle Pays for My Rentals (And Could Fund Your First Deal)

Ashley:Most real estate rookies say the same thing I’d invest if I had the money. Well, today’s Gus Cody Berman isn’t here to talk about real estate. He’s here to teach you how to make the money you need to invest with zero startup capital, zero audience, and zero experience.

Tony:That’s right. Cody is a digital income expert who used principles and digital products, and we’ll explain what those are in a minute. To build a business that now makes over $15,000 per month. And in this episode, he’s giving a true masterclass in starting and scaling your first digital product cycle.

Ashley:This is the Real Estate Rookie podcast. I’m Ashley Kehr.

Tony:And I’m Tony j Robinson. And with that, let’s give you a big warm welcome to Cody. Cody, we appreciate you brother. Thanks for coming on and joining us today.

Cody:Yeah, I am very excited to be here and to dive into all things digital products and real estate and all that good stuff.

Ashley:Cody, before we even get into your system, let’s start with the basics. What even is a digital product?

Cody:So a digital product is exactly how it sounds. It is a product that is digital, but to give people some tangible examples, think spreadsheets, trackers, planners, templates, guides, invitations, labels, wall art, the possibilities are truly endless. There are thousands of digital products out there. I’m going to try to keep some real estate specific examples today. I think there might be some digital products that people are sitting on in your audience that they might be using for themselves and they could easily then templatize that, put it out on a platform like Etsy and make some money with it.

Ashley:I actually have, I don’t have that Etsy store running anymore, but I did have an Etsy store for a little bit where I had a tenant handbook that you could download and every once in a while someone would buy it for a dollar 99. And I was like, oh, that was exciting.

Tony:So you’re an expert, Ashley, you also had the business, Ashley, where you were selling hand knitted something or rather, right? What was that?

Ashley:Oh yeah, but that was a lot more money I made off that than digital products, but that was me running a sweat shop out of my basement sewing baby clothes and selling them on Etsy. Very profitable, but a lot of sweat work there.

Tony:Yeah. So I guess on that note, Cody, let me ask, right, because when I think about Etsy, I usually do think about physical products. My wife, she’s big on throwing parties and a lot of times she’ll get physical things from Etsy. Do you think that, or I guess maybe even between the two, physical and digital, why do you feel the digital is a better option for a platform like Etsy than a physical product?

Cody:So digital has slowly been creeping up. Right now it’s about 15% of overall Etsy sales. So 85% still is physical, but for me as a former physical product seller, digital is so much easier. It is cheaper, there’s less headaches. You don’t have to be dealing with chipping inventory, packaging, all that fun stuff. Ashley, as a former physical product seller yourself, you could probably have the same feelings. I sold physical products. I had a disc golf manufacturing company, and it was just a nightmare compared to the digital stuff. And we’ll get into the nuts and bolts of creating a digital product, listing it and selling it, but it is just light years easier, Tony, than selling the physical stuff.

Tony:I totally understand the simplicity in getting started and the scalability from it as well. Cody, as we record this in the fall of 2025, artificial intelligence is getting smarter leaps and bounds day by day. Do you think that as those tools get better, is there maybe less of a need for the digital products on a place like Etsy?

Cody:It’s a good question. Etsy actually has quite the anti AI stance. So they do not want people coming onto their platforms. They’re like, they don’t want what happened to Google to happen to them where all these bots come in and they just have these algorithmic posts that they’re making and all of a sudden everyone’s not ranking. Etsy is very human first and they’re very handmade first. That’s kind of their whole thing. That’s the whole thing behind Etsy is like buy from handmade sellers. So I am concerned in the long term about the impacts that it might have on Etsy, but in the short term, my shop has still been going really, really well. AI hasn’t had too big of an impact. There are ways that I’m using ai, we can definitely talk about that today. But just in general, the average person doesn’t know how to go and create all these different types of things using ai.Maybe the 1% people who are listening might be like, well, why would I buy that thing on Etsy that’s so easy for me to make? But some random person who’s just getting interested in real estate doesn’t know how to create this. Let’s use an Airbnb income tracker that’s just so far out of their wheelhouse. They don’t even know to go to chat GPT to ask for help to build this Airbnb income tracking spreadsheet. So I think for the average person, the 99%, some of the stuff is just so far out of their realm of imagination that the people who do take advantage of AI and use AI to their advantage, those people are going to come out on top.

Ashley:I feel like too, even me as a user, there’s some things like a party invitation. We see those all over Etsy as to download a party invitation. I would 100% pay the 9 99 to download the template of that party invitation, then go into Canva or chat GPT and try to design one by using the correct AI prompts and getting it to what I want. I still as a user would rather pay that than try and figure it out myself to get it how I wanted it to.

Tony:So it really sounds like Cody comes down to convenience, right? Convenience and skillset, right? There’s still a large subset of folks who don’t have the skillset to Ashley’s point, to either jump into a place like Canva, design it themselves, or go to a chat GBT and build these tool themselves and you’re bridging that gap for all of those folks.

Cody:That is exactly right. Yeah, I mean, like I said, some people could go to Canva or chat GPT and make it work. But even myself, I’m with you, Ashley. I actually just bought an invitation the other day that I could have easily made, I’m literally a digital product seller and expert, and I’m paying these other people to create the design. I just don’t want to go through the rigmarole of going back and forth with some kind of an LMS or just fiddling on Canva and figuring it out. I’d much rather just pay a couple bucks to a seller who worked really hard on this design to have a really good looking design. So yeah, it’s convenience. Tony.

Ashley:Now Cody, when you started, you didn’t have graphic design experience, correct. And you also didn’t have a huge social media following. So why did you think this was going to work?

Cody:I had pretty much zero following and also zero graphic design experience. So I learned pretty much everything through the school of hard knocks. This is going way back to 2018, so seven years ago. But I didn’t think this is the side hustle that’s going to work for me. I was a side hustle guy back then. I was doing, at one point I had over 20 different income streams and I’ve since paired that down because I was just very distracted. But this was just one of many that I was trying, I was doing blogging, freelancing, I was managing affiliate sites, I was doing email marketing, I was running ads, I was doing all these random things and digital products was just one that stuck for a multitude of reasons. But one, it was so passive and I’ll kind of tell you my origin story and what I had one week that changed my life and got me really interested in digital products. But compared to the other things I was doing, it was just so much easier, so much of a lighter lift. I didn’t need to be spending a bunch of capital or a bunch of time after I kind of put in the initial effort and got the products up and listed in my shop.

Tony:You said there was one week that changed your life, Cody, I’m curious about that. What was that moment that made you feel like this was the right vehicle for you to really produce this income online?

Cody:We just met up at FinCon, me, Tony and Ashley, we were hanging out a little networking event. So back years and years ago, FinCon had this ski event called Ski Con and I was out in Lake Tahoe, and this is just at the beginning of my digital product journey, my online entrepreneur journey. I had created a bunch of products in getting ready for the Valentine’s Day season. So all of December, all of January, I created love coupons, I had these custom love notes. I had these drag and drop templates where you can put your spouse’s face in it, all this Valentine’s Day stuff. I knew Valentine’s Day was huge on Etsy. So I’m at this event Ski Con, I have my phone’s ringer on because I was expecting a call from someone and I keep hearing this Chaching sound and for those Etsy sellers out there, Ashley, maybe you were familiar with Chaching sound, you remember the sound.It keeps going off and I’m like, it’s Chaching buy lunchtime. I’d made over a hundred dollars from a handful of products. This is February 9th and I’m like, what the heck is going on? This is amazing. And by the end of that week, again, I’m skiing late Tahoe not working on my laptop at all with these other fincons and they’re like, what’s going on? They were asking me questions about digital products. I felt cool. It was great. This is the beginnings of my digital product expertise and journey. By the end of that week, I’d made over $718. I remember that exact figure. And I had not spent more than 10 minutes that week besides answering customer questions, working on my Etsy shop. So that was the turning point. I was like, screw this freelance writing, I’m done. I’m going to scale back the blogging, all this more active stuff. I’m really going to pair that back and I’m just going to go all in on this digital product thing. These were products that I created in December and January and now it’s the week of February, February 9th to the 16th or 15th, whatever that seven day span was when I made the 718 bucks. These were products I had spent a couple hours a month before making and now they’re making me hundreds of dollars in one week. So that was kind of the turning point. My big ski week in Lake Tahoe,

Ashley:I love these episodes. I can always see Tony getting shiny objects and drop we’re something cool. He’s already racking his brain as to like, okay, what digital products did I

Tony:Put together? So Cody, how much can someone realistically make by selling digital products? You mentioned that your first week, 718, we said at the top of the show, you’re up to 15 K per month now, but what can the average person expect to make because an expert in this, can I also expect to get to 15 k or is that just because Cody’s special? What’s a reasonable goal for someone to have getting started in this business?

Cody:So what I will say was not the first week I had ever sold stuff that I made that $700, that was a couple of months and I learned a lot of hard learned lessons about keyword research and SEO and what products to sell. My first 20 products, Tony, were so ugly, so terrible, not researched and they didn’t sell at all. But once I started to get the hang of, okay, what are people typing into the search bar? How can I create those products? How can I make sure that my product is standing out on the search and results page? That’s when I started making sales. So just want to make that caveat. But to answer your question,

Tony:Lemme pause you there Really quickly, I want to interject because you said you made a lot of flops along the way and I appreciate you sharing that because a lot of times, especially the age that we live in, everything is very sensationalized on social media where everything seems super easy and there are no failures and everything’s perfect. You said 20 some odd products you had done before they all flopped. Why didn’t you give up? Because I think for a lot of people after failure number six or seven or 15 or even maybe number 19, they’re kind of starting to question, okay, why am I doing this? What stops you from stopping at number 19 and persisting the number 20 that actually broke through?

Cody:That’s a great question. I am someone who sees someone else succeeding and if I can’t replicate that success, I get mad. I get competitive. So I had seen other people, I knew other people were crushing it on Etsy digital products. I had at this point started to listen to podcasts and read blogs and I was part of communities and I’m like, okay, this person’s making 10 KA month. How could I not make a dollar? Am I dumb? Am I just bad at designing? How can I not figure this out? So it was honestly kind of jealousy and motivation and competitiveness that fueled me. And so I was just not going to give up until I was like, I at least have to make a little bit of money. I can’t be this bad at this side hustle. And thank gosh I kept going. It turned out pretty well seven years later.

Tony:Cody, back to the original part of the question then. What is a reasonable amount that someone just getting started should expect to make if they were to get into the business of selling digital products on Etsy?

Cody:So I think this is one of the biggest misconceptions, and I guess people might just have two lofty expectations. This is not a get rich quick overnight scheme. Like this is something that you are going to spend time building up month over month, over month, over month. I recently started a new shop experiment and I wanted to talk a little bit about that today. And I’m someone who’s been doing this for six years. I started a new shop in a silo, didn’t mention it anywhere, didn’t promote it anywhere on social media, email list, nothing. And in that first month, and to give you a rough idea of how much time I was spending, I was spending five to 10 hours per week in that first month I made $185. Now some people might be hearing that. They’re like, okay, I’m doing the math. You have five to 10 hours a week, let’s call it 25 hours over a month and you made $185.That’s a terrible ROI. Why don’t you just go freelance? Why don’t you go do anything else? You could work at McDonald’s and make more money. That’s fair, but this is because it’s a slow and steady side hustle. The next month, that new shop made $400. The next month after that, that new shop made $900. The next month after that, that new shop made $4,000 and it continued to scale. So to answer your question, Tony, I think I don’t want to get people unrealistic expectations. Can you scale up to the 5,000, 10,000, $15,000 a month? Yes, but it is going to take time. I think just getting your first couple hundred dollars per month, that’s a great goal. If you can get to $500 per month, and I have some real examples here of how that could really kind of change your real estate journey and start investing and some real case studies as well.If you could just get an extra 500 bucks per month that you don’t have right now in addition to whatever other money you’re making that could be life changing. So I think that’s a great goal and then you can continue to grow and scale from there. I don’t want people to stop listening to this episode and think, okay, I’m $15,000 a month or bust, start small, continue to iterate. And I like to think of each one of my digital products as a little passive income machine. So as each one starts to get a foothold in the Etsy algorithm or wherever you’re selling, this one might be making $200 a month. This one’s making 50, this one’s making 300. And over time you have this little army of passive income monsters who are making you 5,000, 10,000, 15,000 plus dollars per month.

Tony:Cody, I love that you’re kind of setting realistic expectations both on the amount but also the time that it takes to get there. But even to your point, $500 per month over 12 months is an extra six grand a year. So imagine if in addition to whatever you’re saving for your first real estate deal, you could add on an additional six grand every year. How much acceleration does that give you to kind of build your portfolio? So it may seem like a small amount, but that’s life changing money when you add it up over time.

Cody:And I want to give people some homework. If you were driving, please don’t do this. And if you’re doing anything that involves you really paying attention, don’t do this. But check out these Etsy shops. So I pulled up two that are real estate specific. One is called the agent site shop. It is this group of, not this group, it’s this couple, they’re realtors, and they basically just decided to take all of the templates that they had that they were using within their own community. I think they were brokers and they had a team under them and put them on Etsy. These guys now have 63,000 sales average price point, I’m just ball parking like 20 bucks per sale. So these guys from assets that they already had have made an extra $1.3 million. Obviously this is a really great example of what could be possible, but imagine if you just took some of the things that you were already creating or already using.I’m sure we have realtors listening to this. I’m sure we have people who have real estate calculators listening to this. Imagine what that could do for you if you were to just turn that into a digital product for sale. Or there’s another one here just to give you guys some ideas. It’s called The Weekly Crew. This is another Etsy shop, and again, please don’t look this up if you’re driving, but this shop has 126,000 sales average price points, like 10 bucks per sale. These guys have made an extra 1.2 million selling spreadsheets for, they have an Airbnb income tracker, they have a rental income property tracker, they have a yearly budget, they have all these different spreadsheet type printables. So these are people who probably had these spreadsheets that they were using for personal use, and then they decided to then templatize them, sell ’em to other people, and they’ve made millions in the process.I just want to give people some real life inspiration, like what this could mean. I’m assuming most of the people listening are probably pretty interested in real estate. These are some real life real estate focused shops who have absolutely crushed it. I know we are mentioning numbers. Tony, you mentioned the extra 500. I like using a thousand dollars per month as a good benchmark, and it’s just easy math on a podcast who likes doing public math? But an extra thousand dollars per month is just $33 per day. I love breaking things down into micro goals. $33 per day breaks down to eight $4 products, four $8 products, seven $5 products, three $11 products. And once you start listening to these things and actually have products for sale, these numbers become so much more tangible. And what could an extra thousand dollars per month, $12,000 per year, $12,000 per year could be a 3.5% down payment on your first house hack, depending on what market you live in. That’s a significant amount of money from these silly little pieces of paper, these digital files that you could sell on a platform like Etsy. So even though these numbers might not sound as crazy as some flipper who comes on, they’re like, I made 150 K my first deal. Even an extra thousand dollars per month consistent can seriously change your financial future and give you a lot more money to start investing in deals,

Ashley:Especially the more passive it is. Basically. It’s almost like you’re getting royalties. You write a book, your book sells, you get your royalty check. Unfortunately, mine and Tony’s royalty checks are not this big as the digital products, but I just looked up someone I’d followed on Instagram for a long time, my wealth, a diary I had remembered years ago, she created a personal finance tracker for You’re Not Worth, and she would share how long it took her to build this tracker and the spreadsheet or whatever. And then she put it on Etsy and for a long time it was our only Etsy product, but she would share how much she made and I just looked up and she’s at 10,000 sales and only has nine products on there that range from $5 to $25 it looks like for her products. But over time you just put it on there and then kind of set it and forget it.

Cody:Yeah, yeah, it’s huge. It can really add up.

Ashley:So we have to take a quick break, but when we come back, Cody’s going to walk us step by step through launching your first product from Idea to Listing to sale. We’ll cover that right after Word from today’s show sponsors. Okay, we’re back with Cody and we just covered what a digital product is and how much you can make with them, but how much cash do you actually need to get started? So Cody, what kind of software do we need to buy? What are our fees for Etsy? What’s the startup capital we need?

Cody:So the awesome thing about this side hustle is you need almost zero capital to get started. So the big price tag to open your own Etsy store, and again, the reason why they do this, they’re very anti AI and they don’t want just bots flood in the platform. You got to pay a whopping 15 bucks and upload a picture of your license, your identification to prove that you’re a real human being. After that, you can pretty much ride on free tools. If you want to go the frugal route, you can use the free version of Canva, which is $0 per month. You can use the free version of various keyword research tools. One I like in particular is Eran. There’s also ever be Insight factory. There’s a couple of good ones out there that are Etsy specific. There are paid versions if you want to go crazy, and this is the cool thing about the Etsy niche.It’s not like blogging or some of these other niches where the monthly fees on these platforms are egregious. I know there’s some keyword research tools in the blogosphere I’ve used before that are like $200 a month. Eran, the pro version is $10 per month. As we’re recording this, the pro version of Canva is $12 per month. Those are what I use. So if you want to get the official Cody toolkit, you’re looking at a whopping $22 per month in tech, Canva pro, Eran Pro. It’s really that simple. You don’t need many more tools than that, and you can get away going this crappy and free version, although you’ll just have a little less access because the tools are a little worse with the free versions as you’d expect.

Tony:Cody, I just want to make sure I’m tracking. So you’re saying with a roughly $40 investment between Etsy, Eran and Canva, you could potentially create a side hustle that’s producing four figures a month in net profit to you as the owner?

Cody:Yes, that sounds sensationalized. You will have to invest your time. That is going to be the biggest investment here. You can’t just get the tools. Then all of a sudden the rain starts pouring down with the cash. But yes, that is in terms of capital, it’s very capital intensive. It is a little bit time intensive. You’ll spend time creating designs and we can talk about using my template method and ways to shave that time down, but it is really not very capital intensive at all.

Tony:I love that. Right? Again, the challenge of real estate investing is that oftentimes it is capital intensive. So I’m glad we’re going through this. So Cody, let’s start at square one. They’re listening. You’ve sold them on the idea of digital products as a side hustle to help them get their first deal. What is the very first thing that we should be doing?

Cody:So the first thing I like to do is just generate a massive list of ideas. Now, these could just be ideas from your head. You could use a thought partner like chat, GPTI like using chat GPT to kind of think of product ideas. Just look around the room that you’re in or things that you use. Go through your files and your computer. Look around. I have wall art behind me. I have a tracker on my desk, I have a planner on the desk over there. There’s so many opportunities. If you just literally look around the room that you’re sitting in, or again, look at the files of your computer, what spreadsheets you using? Do you have a media kit? Do you have this? Do you have that? Just look close to home. And then once you start to exhaust that list, start to think of other things like maybe you’re really into meal planning and you’re really into working out and maybe you can go down that niche or maybe you’re really into real estate. You can see what types of real estate principles or digital products you want to create. Maybe you’re really into faith-based principles. There’s so many different avenues you can explore. Then after that, you take that massive list of ideas and I’m basically just, I’m running you through the exact playbook, Tony, that I did for this brand new shop that I started as an experiment, the thousand dollars per month experiment. I just had a massive list of ideas. I then take those ideas.

Tony:No, I love the brainstorming as the first step. Cody, you also mentioned using chat, GPT. Do you have a good prompt that you found to work well to help with this ideation? Or is it really just like, Hey, here’s what I’m interested in. Help me come up with some ideas. How should we approach using some of those AI tools?

Cody:I guess it depends how much you know about what you want to create. You could say, Hey, I’m really into fitness and meal planning. Help me think of some fitness and meal planning digital products that I could create. Or you’re like, I really want to create a meal planner. Give me 15 different niche down variations of a meal planner. And it might be like, here’s a keto one, here’s a paleo one, here’s one for women, here’s one for men. Here’s one if you want to gain weight. Here’s one if you want to lose weight, and it can just spit out all these different variations. Now, a lot of these ideas are going to be garbage. So you need to plug these ideas into a keyword research tool like an Eran or ever be or insight factory. Basically take all the ideas that you’ve thought of.I use this literally a Google sheet. Take all the ideas that you thought of or your thought partner chat, GPT or whatever you’re using, and start plugging them in. Literally type in, you’re like, okay, keto meal tracker, how many searches does this have per month? What does the competition look like? And a lot of these keyword research tools will make it easy. They’ll be like, okay, if it’s green, that means there’s a lot of search volume that’s for a search volume. If it’s red, that means there’s not a lot of search volume. If it’s green, that means there’s not lot of competition. If it’s red, that means there’s a lot of competition. They’ll give you numbers, but it’s color coded super easy. So I’ll kind of go through all of these ideas that chat, GPT spits out and be like, okay, what are the ones that have some decent search volume and not a lot of competition?And usually if I have a list of a hundred product ideas that gets whittled down to 20 or 25 that I’m actually going to create. And then from there I’ll bucket them into similar types. So I dunno why I’ve been big into meal tracking and fitness tracking. I’ve been really into my FitnessPal and trying to bulk up and stuff. So that’s top of mind. So let’s just use that as an example. Let’s say you’re like, okay, I want to go down this meal planning route. So from there, I’d bucket the different types of printables. I’m like, okay, I want to create a meal planner and I want to create 15 different variations of this meal planner. I know I gave some examples before. So then what I would do is I would go into Canva, I’d create my base template for my meal planner, and what that would be is just like, okay, meals tracked, here’s the calories, here’s the macros, all that fun stuff.Maybe the days of the week I would, before I even go in actually and create this, I would go on Etsy. I would type in the product that I’m going to create. Let’s use keto meal tracker and just see what comes up. And don’t copy the best sellers, but just use the best sellers in your knowledge base. Don’t be making something that’s so far outside of what, obviously it’s a bestseller, people are buying it. That’s for good reason. So use that as kind of your North star. Like, okay, I want to have similar qualities to this. How can I make mine a little bit better or stand out a little bit better? Or maybe the design is a little bit better. Then I’ll go into Canva. I’ll actually create the product. I’ll create the base template. And then once I have a base template that I’m really happy with, the base template is actually the part that takes me the longest.I’ll spend a couple of hours creating a really solid base template for something. Once I have that, that’s when I go crazy creating different variations. So this is what I like to call the template method. So once I have a perfect meal tracker based template, then I can just go and make the keto version, the paleo version, the carnivore version. I can just spit out dozens of variations of this product in a very short amount of time. It might just be changing a couple words and the colors, and let’s use another example that’s outside of meal tracking. Let’s say we wanted to create an invitation to some type of party. You could very easily have some Christmas invitation and turn that into a Halloween and turn that into a Thanksgiving and turn that into a birthday and turn that into a graduation and turn that into Mother’s Day, father’s day. You can just basically throw every holiday, every niche, every trend that you can possibly think of as long as the search volume supports it on top of this base template that you’ve created. So that’s kind of the process for the creation part.

Ashley:Is that what you would call the stacking method though, is to taking one product and then using it to create other products based off that as a template?

Cody:That’s exactly what I mean. Yeah. So always, I’m never just creating one product, spending a couple hours creating one product, and I’m like, yep, that’s it. I’m not creating any other variations of that product. I’m always creating the most basic, I like to call it a base template version of the product and then seeing how many niches that I can get that product into, because the riches are in the niches. On Etsy, if you’re just creating a generic meal tracker or a generic birthday invite, you’re competing with everyone and their mother who has an Etsy shop. But the more you niche down, the less competition there’s going to be and the more in line with the buyer’s search, your product is going to be, which leads to a higher conversion rate. So yeah, there’s a lot of reasons to niche down, but that’s exactly what I mean. Ashley is taking one base template and just stacking it into as many different niches as humanly possible.

Ashley:Let me give an example real quick. Okay. So one of the products I had was a tenant handbook, which was basically you put together a guide which tells you where the water shutoff is, how they pay their rent with the addresses, what the local schools are. They can enroll in things like that. And then it’s like eight pages long with different stuff. So as an example, how would you niche that down? So would it be like a duplex tenant handbook, a single family home tenant handbook where maybe you could change the duplex one as to here’s our rules, here’s how we respect the common areas or things like that. What are some examples of real estate as to how you could niche down on digital products?

Cody:This question is exactly why keyword research and SEO is so important. I don’t know off the top of my head, that’s the honest answer, I don’t know. But if you type that into the Etsy search bar or you type that into one of these keyword research tools, you might see that a ton of people are typing in like the house hack version or the duplex version or the Airbnb version. You just don’t know until you go and do the research. And I think honestly, that’s one of the biggest mistakes that new sellers make is they just create stuff willy-nilly without looking, and they do get the master list, but they just go through and create everything. I create the master list, plug it into a keyword research tool, figure out 80% of them are junk, and then I go and actually create the ones with search demand. So off the top of my head, actually, I have no idea, but if we were to actually go and do this and type in, type that into the SE search bar or into a keyword research tool, we’d very quickly see what people are searching for and then we could create the products accordingly.

Ashley:That’s an even better answer because anyone looking to do any kind of digital product just got the answer.

Tony:Exactly. Cody, how often are you buying the quote competitor’s product to better understand what the actual deliverable is? Is that part of your process or is it just based on their Etsy sellers page that you’re kind of gathering this information?

Cody:I used to do a little bit of competitive research where I’d buy other people’s products, but at this point I kind of know exactly how it’s getting packaged and what they’re doing. The only time I’ve done the research to see how people are delivering things is for a massive shop. Sometimes people will deliver A-P-D-F-A really nice branded PDF, and I’ll have a link to their shop and it might have a freebie that they’re giving away to get people on their email list. And this is kind of next level Etsy. So we can get into this if you want, but it’s definitely not necessary for a beginner, but you don’t need to go and buy the competitor stuff. You can kind of see what the product looks like. You know that if it’s a tracker, it’s probably getting delivered as a PDF. But if it is a link, if you’re curious, for example, if you were to buy a spreadsheet from me, Tony, you buy it on Etsy. Etsy doesn’t just email you the spreadsheet link, I would A PDF would get delivered to you. It would probably have a big button on it, like download spreadsheet or whatever, and you create a copy, it would go into your Google sheets. But a lot of times those PDFs are nice and branded. So I’ve done some competitive research with that. But for a regular old downloadable PDF type of thing, I’m not going and downloading. I kind of know what the customers are getting.

Tony:So it sounds like step one is the idea generation either using your own brainstorming or some of the AI tools, then doing the keyword research, which you mentioned, and what was the name of the service? You mentioned it was Eran as a way to do some of the competitive research. Then it’s actually creating the product. Canva is your tool of choice. So once the product is actually ready and you’re like, okay, I feel good. I’ve done my research, it looks great. What are the following steps?

Cody:So once you have your product created, then you list it to your Etsy shop, which includes a title for your product. So making sure, going back to the keyword research that you have, the most optimal keywords in the title, making sure that it’s exactly what people are searching for. You upload your listing images. So this is your images to showcase what the product’s all about. So this is Airbnb income tracking spreadsheet. You might want to show some of the features and be like, okay, this is this tab, this is this tab. You can use up to 20 listing images to kind of describe your product. Then you have a description where you kind of write down all the things like this is how the product is delivered. If you have multiple sizes, this is delivered in letter a four, a five size. You can also add just basically anything you want in the description that’ll help the buyer understand what they’re getting.And then the last important thing is the tags. And the tags are basically just ways to identify your product. So if you were selling an Airbnb income tracking spreadsheet, you might be like real estate Airbnb spreadsheet like income tracking, and you have 13 unique tags that you can use to identify your product. Once you have all that filled in for your product, you hit publish, it sits in your Etsy shop, and when someone purchases that product, it gets automatically delivered to them. You don’t need to click send, you don’t have to send them an email, you don’t get a notification. It’s like now you have to email this file out. No, it gets automatically uploaded to the person’s Etsy account once they purchase on Etsy. That’s the beauty of this whole side hustle. I know you mentioned at the beginning why digital products versus other things.It’s because I could have a thousand people buy my products and I basically have no work. I like to say it’s 95% passive because I’ve done the stat analysis on this. I get about one in 20 customers messaging me who are like, Hey, I don’t know how to download this, or they have some clarifying question. And for most of those I have just, they’re called auto replies or saved replies, just like a canned response. I click one button, ship it off, and all of a sudden they have no trouble downloading the file. So it is a pretty passive side hustle once you get the products up and listed in your shop.

Tony:Cody, what about actually marketing? Are you doing any additional marketing to drive traffic back to those products? Are you going into the comments and forms and trying to redirect people back that way? Or are you running paid ads on Etsy, or is it just truly organic traffic from the platform? All the SEO and the research you’ve done that’s driving eyeballs back to the actual listing.

Cody:So I’ll answer this question in two ways. If are a more advanced person, once you get to the level that I’m at, you can use other strategies. You can start promoting on social media, like Pinterest is a great tool. You can create an email list where you’re having people download some kind of freebie on the PDF deliverable. There’s a lot of fancy stuff that you can do. But for someone just getting started, and this is exactly what I did with that news shop that I scaled from zero to a thousand dollars in 116 days, a thousand dollars per month I should say, in 116 days, you do not need an email list. You don’t need an audience, you don’t need anything like that. All you need to understand is keyword research and SEO, and I know I’ve been throwing those terms around. Lemme just define them real quick.They can sound like jargon. That doesn’t mean anything. It sounds like nerd speak. Basically what keyword research is is understanding what people are typing into the search bar of Etsy, of Google, of whatever, whatever platform, YouTube and delivering the thing that they’re looking for. So if someone is typing in keto meal tracker onto the Etsy search bar, your job as a keyword researcher is to create the exact thing that they’re looking for. That is keyword research. In a nutshell. It is literally researching the keys that people are typing into their keyboard on the search bar. I know it can sound fancy and jargony, but that’s pretty much it. So hopefully that answered your question a little bit, Tony. But yeah, that’s kind of all you need to understand to start making sales with this. That’s the cool thing too, is you don’t need 10,000 followers on Instagram.You don’t need a big YouTube channel. You don’t need any of this stuff because Etsy, Etsy inherently doesn’t sell stuff. They’re just a platform. So they make money when you make money. They take 6.5% of digital product sales, which they raised from four to 6.5 a couple of years ago when everyone was up in arms. But I think it’s a great thing. I don’t know if you guys watched the Super Bowl last year. There’s a big Etsy ad, there’s a big Etsy ad two years ago in the Super Bowl. They’re spending so much money. I see Etsy ads on the gym, TV screens when I’m at the gym. They’re spending so much money getting people onto the platform, and that’s exactly what they’re using those dollars for. So I’m more than happy to pay Etsy 65 cents to deliver my $10 product to someone that never would’ve known about me.They don’t have to follow me on social media, they don’t have to know anything about me. They just have to be typing something into the search bar that I was clever enough to create and then list and have it look good enough for them to be interested in buying it. So that is kind of the reason I like Etsy over other platforms like a Shopify or selling on your own website. Those are great if you have an audience, if you guys were to start a real estate specific shop, you could have an Etsy shop and you could have a separate Shopify store, but Shopify isn’t going to drive traffic to your shop. Etsy is. So that’s why I’m such a huge fan of Etsy. They have a hundred million buyers just waiting on the platform to buy your stuff.

Ashley:I think this is so comparable to Airbnb. I have two Airbnbs listed on there. I don’t have to do any kind of marketing, any kind of advertising. They take care of that for me. I pay them a percentage now, a way higher percentage than I was, a little higher than Etsy. But the same concept, I think very comparable. And it seems to be working for both the end user, the provider, and also the platforms themselves.

Tony:So Cody, you’ve mentioned this challenge that you did to relaunch a new Etsy shop first. What was the genesis of that and did you learn anything new as you were going through this process in 2025 that maybe wasn’t a lesson you learned when you started back in 2018?

Cody:So this is a funny story. The reason I started this whole thing, I had a hater leave a comment on one of my videos and they were like, must’ve been easy for you starting back in 2018. Etsy is so saturated now. You could never repeat this. I’m like, okay, bet. Let’s put this to the test. So I was kind of mad about it, honestly. I was fuming for a couple of days and I was like, this guy, I can still do it. I got the chops. So I started a brand new Etsy shop in a silo. Again, I didn’t promote it anywhere, and the goal was to see how fast I could get to a thousand dollars per month. I think that’s a pretty meaningful number. We talked about it’s $12,000 per year. That’s literally a down payment on a house hack. It’s a pretty meaningful number.So I was like, okay, let’s see how fast I can get to a thousand dollars per month. And I didn’t want to basically dedicate my life to the shop. I wanted to be realistic. So I was spending five to 10 hours per week. As I mentioned before, it wasn’t like I was just spending 80 hours a week on this brand new shop, and again, it went kind of slowly. It was like 185 bucks in month one. It was like 400 a month, two, 900 month three, and then month four took off and made over $4,000. It was between month three and four, day one 16 where I hit that a thousand dollars per month milestone. But yeah, man, the genesis was honestly a hater, and I was like, I’m going to prove this guy wrong. And I mean, it was great for me just to kind of go back through the things that I already knew, kind of not reteach myself, but just reinforce force that, okay, I know what I’m doing, the things that I’m teaching, we have a whole community and course and stuff.Is the stuff that we’re teaching, does it actually still work? I hadn’t built a new shop from scratch since 2018, and the answer was that it does. To answer the second part of your question, there was honestly not really any gotchas or things that I didn’t know. It is funny, there’s all this AI stuff and all these new tools coming out, but it’s seriously, just going back to the basics. It is just going back to the keyword research and SEO stuff, and that is exactly what I focused on. It was just relentlessly or ruthlessly getting rid of crappy product ideas, creating the ones that worked. And I wouldn’t want to say every single product worked because I had, using the template method, I had listed 350 products in four months, which might sound like a lot or a little depending, but it was because I was able to pump out six variations of one product in an hour or 10 variations of a product in an hour. So it was very quick. So I was just basically throwing as many product ideas as I possibly could as long as they passed all the checks, like, okay, people are searching for this. There’s not a crazy amount of competition. And yeah, it was a slog. But after day one 16, I crossed that a thousand dollars per month mark and the shop has continued to chug along since.

Tony:Let me ask one follow-up question. I’m sure this is what everyone’s going to ask in the comments anyway. If you were to do that again, what niche and product would you start with and why?

Cody:If I were to start right now, Tony, we’re recording this the end of October, 2025, I would go crazy in the Christmas niche. The holidays are insane on Etsy. Like some Etsy sellers make 40% of their income for the year, especially in the handmade space on Etsy. So I don’t have a specific product in mind. I’d have to go and do the keyboard research, but it would definitely, I just go crazy with Christmas digital products. Honestly, I would just create as many as humanly possible in the next month throughout the entire month of November. And then I probably have a pretty big December and I bet I could get to the a thousand dollars per month milestone even faster.

Tony:Alright, coming up next, we’re going to talk about how to scale. We talked about how to get started, but how do you scale beyond that 1000 bucks per month? We’ll be right back with Cody after this. Alright, we’re back here with Cody and he’s walked us through what digital products are, how much we can make the step-by-step process we’re getting set up. And I want to get into the nitty gritty of how do we actually scale this thing once we’ve got a good foundation laid? So Cody, we talked about 100 bucks per month, $1,000 per month. What are the levers that someone can pull to really scale this up exponentially beyond that first kind of four figure threshold?

Cody:This is where we start getting into the more advanced stuff. So at this point, if you want to get to $5,000, $10,000 per month, you probably want to start opening up some other traffic sources. Like I mentioned before, you can totally get to a thousand dollars per month, just strictly keyword research and SEO, no social media presence, no Pinterest, no ads, nothing like that. But once you want to scale, you might want to again, open up some, open the floodgates as you will. So you probably want to start building an email list of some sort. So you could pick whatever email platform you’d like. Start building an email list. An easy way to do this is when you deliver a PDF to someone, you could have some kind of freebie or some kind of download. Maybe someone’s downloading your Airbnb income tracker and you’re like, Hey, you like my Airbnb income tracker?I also have this personal finance tracker. You might give that away for free to someone who buys your product. It’s Goodwill. And you can then get them on your email list. They trade their email, they get your personal income tracker or whatever, your personal finance spreadsheet, and then you have them on your email list. Now you know that this person is the exact type of person who is primed to buy your stuff. They already bought your Airbnb income tracker. So when you buy the ultimate Airbnb listing guide, and then you can pump it out to your email list. And chances are that the people on your email list are going to be pretty interested in that thing because they, again, they’re the exact avatar that’s buying the stuff. Anyway. So that’s probably one lever that I would definitely take full advantage of is build that email list.And my main business, gold City Ventures email is our number one traffic source, and it’s something that we focus a lot on. So email list second would probably be Pinterest. Pinterest and at sea we like to say, goes together like peanut butter and jelly. The types of people who are on Pinterest typing in these things, they might type in income tracker or they might type in Airbnb income tracker, or they might type in meal tracker using a lot of the examples we’ve talked about today. And they might type that in the Pinterest looking for one, and then they click through from Pinterest, brings ’em to Etsy, and boom, they’re in your shop. So Pinterest is another great one. And just like the crossover between Pinterest users and Etsy users is huge. I don’t have exact data on that. They haven’t released it, but it’s a pretty good swath that use both.Next would probably be probably ads. I don’t want people to start or to think that they have to start using ads right away because I don’t want people to think that they have to spend money to make money. But once you reach a certain threshold and you have products that are actually performing, you can then start to turn up the ad dials a little bit. So you could run ads on Etsy platform itself. You could run ads on Pinterest to get traffic to your Etsy store, but please, please, please only run ads on once you start having some traction. The biggest mistake I see is people will be like, well, I could get to a thousand dollars per month. I could just run a ton of ads. It’s like, well, ads only buy eyeballs. Ads don’t buy sales. So if you have a hundred people who saw your product and didn’t buy it, and then you buy a thousand eyeballs to look at that same product, chances are you’re not going to make any more sales.But if you have a product where a hundred people saw it and four people bought it, you have a 4% conversion rate, then you buy a thousand eyeballs. Now you might make 40 sales from it. So just please understand the numbers and don’t think that you’re going to magically going to start making sales by running ads. But once you have some proof in the pudding, you can kind of use ads to juice the traffic to your shop. Next would probably be social media of other types. You could create a Facebook page about people who are passionate about tracking their Airbnb and come with real estate, or you could create an Instagram page or you could create a TikTok or pick your poison, whatever social media you like. This is what I’ll say too. Don’t think you have to do all these things. You don’t have to do all the things, just do the things that you have the least resistance towards, because then friction, if there’s too much friction, then you’re not going to do it.I’m a big believer in taking small steps every day rather than, okay, I am finally going to put on my shoes and go for that run. It’s the consistent, small, daily actions that produce results. It’s not just one big heroic effort. So the less friction that you can have in this side hustle in general, the better. So if you’re like, well, I don’t want to post on social media, then if you don’t want to create a Pinterest account, then you don’t have to do these things to be successful. But I’m just answering your question, Tony, about how do you maximize the juice? How do you get the most squeeze out of this juice?

Tony:And Cody, that was like a phenomenal breakdown, man. I mean, you gave a lot of super tactical things. I think one additional question that comes to mind for me is, is it common for sellers on Etsy of either digital or physical products to offer additional services or coaching on the backend? The example you gave of a keto planner, if I’m someone who is maybe a trainer in my day job and I sell this digital product of a keto meal planner, could I then reach out to those people for maybe be like virtual fitness coaching? Is that something that you see on that platform of reaching back out to those buyers for actual services that you can offer to them?

Cody:I’m talking to a businessman here. Okay, yes, people do do that. And so that is a really good point. And another great point about Etsy. Since Etsy, a marketplace where you don’t need an audience, you don’t need an email list, any of that stuff, it is a free lead generator. You pay to get people into your orbit with Facebook ads. You pay to get people into your orbit with Google ads, with YouTube ads, with any other ads there are out there on Etsy, you could sell people a little $5 printable. And then if you have a coaching business on the backend you got them on their email list, you warm them up, you start to maybe bring them into your webinar, whatever your business model might look like. These are free leads who are already interested in the things that you have to sell. So going back to the Airbnb income calculator example, if you have someone who downloaded that for, they paid 10 bucks to get access to your spreadsheet, you think they’re going to be interested in a real estate course or community?Heck yeah. A lot more than the average Joe or Jane off the street. So that’s a great question, Tony, and that’s kind of next level Etsy business is if you do build a business on the backend, Etsy is a fantastic lead generator. Now, I wouldn’t be like, okay, you bought this $5 thing and then there’s a direct upsell on Etsy to my thousand dollars coaching program. But if you can get them into your orbit, onto your email list, following you on social, all those good things, then later on you can convert them on higher price point products and services.

Ashley:Maybe Tony and I should do our own challenge. The first one to get to a thousand dollars benchmark where we each do trade our own shop and put real estate stuff up, and as

Tony:Just you’re going down, don’t bring out the competitors here.

Ashley:So Cody, to wrap up here, if someone listening wants to start today, like Tony and I for our challenge, what’s the one action that they should take immediately after this episode ends?

Cody:You could literally have an Etsy shop up and running within the next hour. If you were to stop listening. Again, if you’re driving, don’t do this. But if you’re at home, if you have an hour, half an hour, you might again be sitting on a product that you could then easily templatize, just white label it. Obviously, if you have an income tracker or a net income tracker, delete your numbers out of there and then templatize it. But you might be sitting on a product that you could list literally within the next hour, and that’s all it takes. I’m a huge fan, again, of momentum, of the snowball effect. Once you get that first product listed, then the second one becomes easier, the third one, the fourth, so on and so forth. So it’s kind of the Nike thing. It’s just do it. Get over that first hurdle.There’s so many people I see who just sit on the sidelines forever, whether it’s real estate or a side hustle. They have a 20 page business plan. They have a list in their notes of a hundred different business ideas, and it’s been there for four years and they’ve never taken action. Just take that first piece of action, go into Canva, create something for fun. If you don’t have anything that you already are sitting on, like I mentioned, the barrier to entry is so low with this side hustle and this side hustle is just a segue into so many other things. You never know what the keyword research knowledge that you might gain from doing the side hustle could teach you, or the design skills. The design skills could translate into so many different things. You could use the skills that you learn from a digital products business to freelance to earn some quick now money if you need some extra cash. It’s just kind of a masterclass in business. It’s a little mini MBA, if you will, creating a digital product business. So yeah, please just take that first step of action. I see so many people who just have these endless business plans and notes of all the things they’re going to do, but that first step is so elusive, but the first step is everything, and that’s what leads the second and the third and the hundredth step. So yeah, take that first one.

Ashley:Well, Cody, thank you so much for joining us today. Can you let everyone know where they can reach out and find more information about what you’re doing?

Cody:Yeah, so Gold City ventures.com is the website where everything, digital products. And if you want to follow me on social media and actually check out for the thousand dollars per month challenge, I recorded a video every day. It was a lot. It was grueling. I was pretty happy when I hit day one 16 and actually reached the goal, but at Cody d Berman everywhere, and you’ll see that series and you can DM me, reach out. I love talking to people and talk and shop. Thanks for having me, guys.

Ashley:Yeah, thank you so much. This was a wealth of knowledge and me and Tony definitely have to do this challenge. So everybody makes you come to my Etsy shop to download a product and not Tony’s. Well, Cody, thank you so much again. I’m Ashley. He’s Tony. And we’ll see you guys on the next episode of Real Estate Rookie.