Underfoot & Co, Day 90: Still No First Sale. Here’s the Next Thing.
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On day one, July 14, we said a thing out loud so you could hold us to it: first sale within 30 days. It’s day 91. There has been no first sale.
This is the update we promised to write whether it went well or not, and honestly it’s the more useful version. Anyone can write the post where the plan worked. Here’s what actually happened over three months, what we got wrong, what stopped, and what we’re doing next — because “just do the next thing” turns out to be the whole method, and we had to relearn it the hard way.
the numbers, such as they are
- Listings live: 11 (the 10-listing target, hit August 24 when the mug went up, plus our first ornament in late September)
- Sales: 0
- Total spent to date: about $30 — the ~$27 from day one plus $0.20 per listing. No ad spend. Not a dollar.
- Days since launch: 91
- Days the founder was actually working on the store: maybe 50 of those
That last line is the honest one. We’ll get to it.
what went right in the first six weeks
The build itself worked the way we said it would. Three designs became ten listings — tees and a two-sided mug, built around lines like “personal space? never heard of it,” which is less a joke than a documentary about living with a vizsla. Everything was made with the under-$30 tool stack and fulfilled through Printful, which has cost us nothing because nothing has sold. We enrolled in Etsy’s Share & Save the week it made sense to, so any traffic we bring ourselves earns 4% back. We wrote the first-sale playbook from inside this exact situation.
And we caught a mistake that would have quietly killed the mug. For three weeks the mug draft sat “ready to publish” with the design placed dead center on Printful’s wrap template — which, on an 11 oz mug, is the spot directly opposite the handle, the one angle nobody ever looks at. The main Etsy photo was a white mug with a sliver of orange peeking around the edge. We’d been about to launch a listing whose hero image was, functionally, a blank mug. The fix was free (duplicate the layer, one copy on each side guide, no new artwork, same $5.95 base cost) and the lesson is now permanent: never place a mug design on the center guide. Put it on the two side guides. Every mug tutorial should say this and almost none do.
what went wrong, in order of how much it mattered
1. The 30-day goal was a guess dressed up as a plan. We picked “first sale in 30 days” because it sounded accountable, not because anything in our own research supported it. When we actually looked, real sellers report first sales anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, and that’s for shops that are listing and marketing the whole time. We had three listings on day one. A new shop with three listings is not a shop; it’s a rounding error in Etsy search. We didn’t get to ten until day 41. The clock we should have started was the one that begins at ten listings, and by that clock we’re at day 50 — squarely inside “normal,” not late.
2. Our traffic plan got blocked before it started. The plan was Pinterest: one pin per product, pointed at the store and the blog. In late July, Pinterest blocked our whole domain as suspected spam — not a pin, the domain — and after multiple appeals it’s still blocked. We eventually found the cause (an ad plugin was redirecting a file on our site to a third-party ad server, which is exactly what Pinterest’s spam filter looks for), removed it, and routed the free-guide pin through a page hosted elsewhere so at least that one link works. But the store pins never went up. New shops sit at the bottom of Etsy search until they prove themselves, and we’d bet the whole “bring your own traffic” strategy on one channel that went dark. Lesson: two channels from day one, always.
3. Then life happened. In early September there was a death in our family. Everything stopped — the store, this site, the newsletter, all of it — for the better part of three weeks, and it should have. We’re not going to say more than that, except that anyone who has been through it knows the store was not on the list of things that mattered, and it wasn’t going to be.
Here’s why it belongs in a business post anyway. Every side-hustle story you read is written as if the person had an uninterrupted ninety days. Nobody does. Somebody gets sick, a job gets busy, a kid needs something, a parent dies. The plan you make on day one assumes a version of your life that doesn’t exist, and when reality shows up, the temptation is to conclude the whole thing failed — the goal was missed, the momentum’s gone, might as well let it go. That’s the actual point where most side projects die. Not from a bad niche or a bad design. From a pause that quietly became a stop.
the only rule that survived: do the next thing
When we came back to it, the whole plan felt heavy. The missed goal, the Pinterest mess, a backlog of half-done things. What worked was refusing to look at the plan at all and asking a smaller question: what is the single next thing? The next thing was scheduling one email that had been sitting in drafts. Then it was writing one blog post. Then it was opening the Etsy dashboard for the first time in weeks, which is the step we’d been avoiding, because looking at a zero is unpleasant. It was still zero. It was also fine. The listings were still there, still indexed, still getting the occasional view, doing their quiet work the whole time we were gone.
That’s the thing about print on demand that makes it survivable as a side hustle: the store doesn’t need you every day. It needs you to keep adding to it. A listing you made in August is still a ticket in the lottery in December. A pause costs you the growth you didn’t do — it doesn’t cost you what you built.
So the plan for the next 60 days isn’t a plan. It’s a list of next things, in order, and we do them one at a time:
- Fill in the empty Etsy attributes on the mug (capacity, dishwasher safe, microwave safe) — they feed search filters and it’s two minutes of clicking we somehow didn’t do.
- Ornaments. Q4 is the best first-sale window of the year and personalized ornaments are the most concentrated demand in it — we wrote the whole guide last week. Our first personalized vizsla ornament is already live at $24.00, with one or two more designs to follow; a 3-pack waits until the singles prove themselves. This is the first time Underfoot has had a product that’s a gift rather than a self-purchase, which is where Etsy’s Q4 traffic actually goes.
- Finish or kill the bandana. There’s an “Off Duty Dog Bandana” draft from July that nobody’s touched. Decide, don’t drift.
- Second traffic channel. Short-form video of the products (and the cofounder, who is very good on camera and has no idea), because it’s the lane that isn’t blocked. Twenty visits a day from a small account beats zero from page nine of search.
- Etsy Ads, maybe, in November — only after the ornaments are up and only at a couple of dollars a day on the two best listings. We’re writing up the real math on that next month before we spend anything.
the honest forecast
We think the first sale comes in Q4, and we think it’ll be an ornament, because that’s where a new shop’s odds are best: a gift product, a buyer with a deadline, a search term that spikes 100× in December. If it doesn’t, the day-150 update will say so, and it’ll say what we’re changing. Either way we’re still spending under $30, which is the part of this experiment that keeps being true: the cost of finding out is nearly nothing. The cost of stopping is everything you would have learned.
If you’ve got a store that’s been sitting untouched for a few weeks because something in your life took priority — that’s not a failed store. That’s a paused one. Open the dashboard, look at the zero, and do the next thing. The first-sale playbook is the list; start wherever you left off. And if you haven’t started yet, the free starter guide is still the map. Start it alongside us. We’re clearly not ahead of you by much.
design it ● print it ● profit ●
All numbers are Underfoot & Co’s actual figures as of the publish date. The store is at etsy.com/shop/UnderfootCo; the build-in-public series starts here.
