By the time I got around to Benski, he already had the listing pulled up. I'd asked all three guests about the first thing they ever sold to somebody who wasn't a friend or family, and he went and looked his up. It was a design he'd forgotten he made. He was aggravated that there was no good way to travel with a Dr. Squatch bar, so he designed a holder you can slide the bar out of and back into, and the slide doubles as a soap dish, with holes in the bottom. You take it out, put it in the shower, put it back in the gym bag and go.
A woman in a different state bought it. Then she came back and bought more.
He'd had four or five sales before that, all friends and family, after a Facebook post that said he'd opened his Etsy store. This was the first person who didn't know him at all. And sitting on The Padded Room, almost 2,000 Etsy sales later, reading that listing got to him. He said it out loud: he doesn't think he appreciates his customers as much as he should anymore. When a run of orders comes in now, he gets a little aggravated, because he's thinking about how he's going to fulfill them all.
This episode started because Blair reached out wanting to come on and answer some questions about turning a hobby into a business. Over a series of days it turned into a roundtable with three guests.
Blair, who you might know as Nerdy Chicken, runs Too Many Hobbies. She got there out of burnout. She had launched a pet company during Covid and was working 50 or 60 hour weeks, not getting to see her family. On a vacation she looked at her husband and told him the six 3D printers in his basement were hers now. He asked what they were going to make. Gaming terrain, she said, because she's a wargamer and that was her community.
Then she ran into the wall a lot of you know. Nobody knew who she was. She couldn't compete with Bob on Etsy. So she sold what sells to get to what she loves, starting with an axolotl. That was her first sale to a stranger, and it was the one she'd painted a little face on, after her husband told her the eyes weren't worth the time.
Bearded Printer, Eric, is coming at it from a different place. He still has a full-time job. He started designing because he'd see something and wonder if he could make his own, and people started downloading. One of his first models that took off was a flexi water dragon he didn't even like very much. He told us that knowing he won't have a safety net is what would change how he designs, and that he has to hate his full-time job enough to quit before that switch flips. He's also stopped selling prints of his own models, because he could easily sell them cheaper and still make a bigger profit, and that didn't feel fair to him.
We spent a long stretch on burnout, and all three of them were honest about it. Benski said a lot of his comes from being the main breadwinner, and the thing that helps is accepting it instead of fighting it, giving yourself the grace to know you're not a robot, and sometimes printing something just for yourself. Blair said she's in what she calls the messy middle right now. She walked up to another vendor at a show and told her she'd hit the point where she hated her business, and the woman said she'd been there. Volunteering with First Robotics is what brought Blair back to her mission. Bearded works in sprints: sprint, rest, sprint, rest.
Then we argued about the race to the bottom. Bearded says if you're selling something unique, there's nothing to race. Benski says it mostly exists for people who are only in it to make money. Blair says the phrase is mostly used to insult people. A cheeseburger is a cheeseburger, and her price is her price.
Her last advice was to name your support network, and then decide what you actually want out of the business, whether that's an extra $500 a month or a retirement plan.
So here's my question for you. Who was your first stranger, and do you still remember what they bought?
Benski: @basically_benski on YouTube · Bearded Printer: https://www.beardedprinter.com · Nerdy Chicken / Too Many Hobbies: https://toomanyhobbies.com
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