Let’s start by celebrating that I got my first check from Etsy today! It was double digits, which is peanuts compared to my corporate job. Sadly also peanuts compared to my living expenses, even though I’m living in frugal mode these days. Still, it’s a start. Onwards and upwards!

Now back to the research

When I was a corporate designer, I was always a big proponent of research. It’s so exciting to get data about your customers!

Yesterday I signed up for the Etsy research tool Marmalead and I’m feeling that familiar sense of excitement as I’m using the tools. This is why I knew that one of the freemium tools, that limit your number of searches, wouldn’t work for me. I would burn through that limit in less than an hour as I hypothesize, test, confirm or reject and take notes.

When you do research, you always want to start out by casting a wide net. Test every crazy idea you have and confirm or reject them just as quickly. Take notes of both outcomes, so you don’t have to keep revisiting the ideas that tank in the early stage. Then once you have a couple of ideas that seem to have legs, narrow your focus and dig deeper into the nuances. That’s the stage I’m at right now.

I basically have two growing edges:

• improve the listings I already have so that they reach their potential

• refine the ideas that I came up with yesterday that survived the first round

Marmalead has a letter grade system for listings. My listings are all in the B to C range. So there’s definite room for improvement from an SEO standpoint. I think I’m going to spend a day or two this week focusing on the SEO of my existing listings. That will hopefully be time well spent. I also have some new ideas that I got from yesterday’s research that I want to develop.

Apart from all this research, I’m also doing some marketing, both in RL and online. Busy days! I’m loving it.