The TRUTH about scaling to $1M in Print on Demand

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]What is it really like to build a print on demand business from $0 to $1 million per year? And is it even worth it? I don't think I've actually ever heard anyone talk about this before, but I think it's really important that you know what you're getting yourself into.

[00:00:17]Whether it's worth it and whether you need to actually struggle to get to that $1 million or if a lot less will suffice. So, here is the good, the bad, and absolutely everything in between.

[00:00:32]Now, I've broken this video up into three parts. Part one is the beginning of the business. Part two is the middle of the business. And part three is the end of the business. And whilst there isn't necessarily an end, I needed that third word. Uh but part three is an ongoing uh period of time. But either way, let's get started with part one. What it's really like to get through part one of building this business. Okay, so I'm going to assume a few things based on my own business. So, I sell on Shopify. I use Printify to fulfill the orders because we're doing print on demand. And I use Facebook advertising, specifically Facebook, but then there are other channels like Google and TikTok. But for now, pretty much Facebook advertising or Meta um and I use Meta to run traffic to the Shopify store. And then when an order comes in, Printify will, you know, fulfill, pack, and ship out that order.

[00:01:32]That is how my business is run. So, for the rest of this video, that is what I'm going to be talking about in terms of going from zero to a million and what it really takes. So, part one is building the business. What are the struggles and what are the wins that you could see at the beginning stages? So, right at the very beginning, you're going to have to come up with a niche. That can be quite hard and you need to do a lot of research on that niche. Now, the beginning of the business are the most exciting.

[00:02:02]Even though you're not necessarily getting sales and it feels like it's not growing, it's exciting because everything is new, everything is fun, and there isn't pressure, right? You're not spending money at the beginning or you're not spending a lot of money at the beginning. So, it just kind of feels like, you know, you're starting a new project.

[00:02:21]So, you need to pick that niche. Once you've got that niche and you've done some serious serious research into it, and the reason why I say that is because the more you know your niche, the more you know your buyer, the easier it will be for you to create designs that people will want to buy. The last thing I want to see is you having picked a niche and all of these things, you're way down the line, you're creating design after design after design, not getting any sales, and the reason is because those designs don't resonate with the audience. You haven't learned who your audience is. So, very importantly, you've got to spend some time learning about your audience, what they'll spend, what their disposable income it is, what their jobs are, what they enjoy doing, what they would want to wear on their chest, their likes, their dislikes, all of it. So, niche audience. Then, you've got to actually create some designs. You know, you need some designs and you need a platform to put those designs on. In our case, Shopify. So, you're going to want to set up the whole Shopify business. Everything that goes along with setting up Shopify, building the theme, creating the product pages, the mock-ups, the website, the you know, FAQ pages. There's there's lots of what I like to call easy but slow tasks. So, the the the parts that go into this, they're very easy wins because setting up Shopify, where you just have to tick a bunch of boxes and that's an easy win.

[00:03:40]You've done it. You can move on. And once you've built out all these foundations, right? Cuz foundations are the most important part of any business, and like a house without the foundations, the house is just going to fall down.

[00:03:52]So, once you've got these foundations in place, you've got your Shopify, you've got your niche, your designs, your Facebook Ads Business Manager accounts, you got your mock-ups, right? You're then pretty much good to go for the middle stage. And the middle stage is where it can get a little bit scary because this is where you're spending a uh uh a larger portion of money. But the the middle stage is also where the stress can start to creep in and the thing that no one talks about can start becoming very real. And that is just the anxiety um and as I said, the stress and I guess most importantly, the unknown. The unknown of is this working? Is this not working? So, let's talk about part two.

[00:04:35]Part two is all about finding winning designs. So, in part one, we obviously built our designs out, we built our store out, we built our ads or we built our ads account. Part two of this business is we actually are creating ads. We are sharing our designs with our audience hoping that it will that they will resonate and people will buy.

[00:04:55]And the reason why this stage is I don't want to say the hardest stage, but close to being the hardest stage is because this is where most people give up. Because if you think about it, the first stage, easy wins. You tick all those boxes and you feel really good about yourself. You feel like you've done something amazing. You've built a store, you've got designs, you've got the mock-ups. You show people and you're like, I made that and you're like, wow, this is great.

[00:05:20]And then you just hit a brick wall when it's the second stage. And the reason for that is because the second stage revolves around advertising. It revolves around getting sales and confirming whether or not designs will work. And in the second stage, you're going to have to face a hell of a lot of rejection.

[00:05:38]And rejection in the form of designs that just don't work. And you're going to have to put your ego aside, you're going to have to find a way to relax and stay calm and and not get emotionally attached to your designs and what you and to your ads and just look at the data in a very realistic view. So, if you are running ads and designs are not performing move on from those designs, make new designs.

[00:06:07]And the whole thing about stage two, it's very much like a ongoing circle.

[00:06:10]You have designs and then you have ads and the designs feed the ads. The ads test those designs. If they work, they graduate. If they don't work, you got to go back, make designs. But you're always creating designs. So, it's like a flywheel. It's always always going around.

[00:06:25]So, it can feel like a never-ending loop. And the reason why the anxiety kicks in here and what you really need to be prepared for, especially if you are going about this on your own and you don't have any external help, which is okay. You don't need help. Um but obviously it can save you a lot of money, um which is why I have the community that I have. But if you are going to do this stage, you're going to get to this stage you have to be okay with losing some money.

[00:06:50]Because there is going to be a huge element of testing here. You are making designs. You are testing designs to try and find winners. The majority of those designs will not be winners. Don't think of them as wasted money or wasted time because every single design, every single thing you do, firstly it compounds, you get better and better, but secondly, it's a lesson for what you should or shouldn't be doing next.

[00:07:16]So, once you you know, go into this realizing there are going to be ups and downs, there's going to be times where you're just like gosh, okay, um that didn't work, that didn't work, this isn't working. All right, once you get over that and you just you don't let it dictate what you do you can kind of zoom out a little bit and start creating things that do work and then focusing on the things that do work. And when you start getting those designs that do work, that's where Ah, that's that's just where it feels amazing. Like I can't even put it into words. It's just I don't know. For for the longest time I had my um sales ping me on my watch. I don't have it anymore cuz it got very very annoying. Um but for the longest time I had and every single time a sale came through, it just I don't know. It just felt weird. It was like a sense of accomplishment basically.

[00:08:12]And it's a really really nice experience.

[00:08:16]But what I will say is the flip side of when sales don't come through and you're in this void of unknown, are they going to get Are we going to get sales? Am I not going to get sales? Oh, today I didn't make anything. Oh, the next day I made three sales. That trumps anything.

[00:08:31]That that anxiety is just huge, which is why it's really important to have other people that you can reach out to, you can talk to, um a shoulder to lean on kind of thing, to get the advice that you need and just to know and maybe even the motivation that you need to know that you're you're doing the right thing and this is all very normal. Now, in this stage, the hardest part and something you need to be aware of is the down days.

[00:08:59]So, what's very normal in this business is that you have profitable days and you have non-profitable days. Not every single day, no matter what scale you're at, is going to be a profitable day. So, let's just say you're making, for argument's sake, $100 a day in profit on average. That's fantastic. That's really really good, something to be very proud of.

[00:09:18]There might be a day where you lose $300. You know, especially if you're filling out your profit and loss and you're keeping track of everything and you see, oh, no, yesterday I lost $300.

[00:09:27]That is where you have to be extremely resilient. You have to just zoom out and realize, overall, we're doing okay. It's okay that there was a negative day, but overall, we're doing okay. You can't let that single day dictate your actions.

[00:09:44]You can learn what from what happened on that day. Maybe there was a website tweak, maybe there was something wrong with your store, or maybe it was just a bad day.

[00:09:52]But those are the days you have got to overcome because those are the days that can really make or break this business for you. Most people that quit, or most people that just think I got to just move on, are people who can't get over those negative days. And in stage two, those days can happen frequently. You know, you can have up days, you can have down days, and that's very, very normal. So, please don't think you're doing anything wrong if you have a day that isn't necessarily profitable. Especially if you are testing ads, you're testing new designs, and you're trying new things, it's normal, okay? It's normal.

[00:10:27]And then, that leads us on to uh part three, which is We did beginning, middle, and then end, but as I said, part three, I don't really want to call it end. I'm going to just call it scale because part three doesn't have to end. Now, part three, well, that comes with its own host of problems, but it also comes with a huge amount of wins. So, to get to part three, to get to stage three of this business, you've got a bunch of winners. You've got very comfortable catalog ads. You've got very comfortable static ads. You've got your emails doing well. You are in a very comfortable place. And if someone came to me and they told me, you know, I've made $100,000, but I'm not yet profitable, or I'm, you know, just teetering on being profitable, I would want to do a full audit of their website, of their store, of their ads, of their emails, and just figure out where the leak is. Because if you're making hundreds of thousands of dollars and you're not profitable, something has gone wrong. You need to be profitable at that amount, and there's so many people out there who are very happy to be making $100,000, $200,000, but not make any money. And I don't understand that.

[00:11:34]At the end of the day, we need to make the money. We need the money to survive.

[00:11:38]We need the money for whatever we need the money for. So, I don't really care if you're making a million dollars in revenue if you're you know, in a net loss of a hundred grand. You know, it's all about what your profit is going to be at the end of the day. That's the important number.

[00:11:53]So, at this scale stage, it's very, very important that you are doing everything you can to uh stay profitable, to be as profitable as possible, and to expand your margin.

[00:12:04]So, if your margin's 8% your profit margin, you know, at this stage you want to try and get it to 12%, to 15%, to 20%. You want it to get bigger and bigger. Now, unfortunately, in print on demand, our biggest expense are the COGS, the cost of goods, right? The t-shirts. And that's not something we have so much control of because if you want to be doing print on demand, we need to rely on a print on a print on demand provider like Printful or you know, Awkward Styles or Gelato or any of them. But, they all have the same fundamental problem, and that is that they overcharge for the product. So, we can't really do anything about that. So, if that's the case, we're going to have to figure out how we can cut costs in other places. So, don't go overboard with the tools that you use. Don't start hiring left, right, and center. Uh make sure you're charging good amounts, and make sure your ads are profitable. You need to understand what your break-even ROAS is. You need to understand what you can afford to spend on a click. You need to understand what your website's conversion rate has to be, what your average order value has to be. All of these different metrics are very, very important when you get to this stage.

[00:13:06]Now, that's not to say they're not important leading up to this stage, but they are very important at this stage.

[00:13:11]Now, at this stage, you've also got another another thing that I want you to consider. And this is also something people don't really tell you. So, at the very early stages, you don't really have many um many things holding you back. It's just you're following a long list of things, ticking it off, you know, make the design, make the store, make the ad, right? You're just ticking things off.

[00:13:34]The middle stage is, like I said, where it gets a little bit scary cuz you're starting to spend money. And then the the third stage is where it can start feeling extremely overwhelming. Now, I'm going to talk to you as if I have no one working on my team and as if I'm doing everything myself because then it becomes a lot Well, it becomes a lot more realistic. It becomes a lot more understandable.

[00:13:56]So, at stage three, if you're, you know, doing 50,000 a month, 100,000 a month, 150,000 a month, that's where things really ramp up and the anxiety ramps up ramps up with it.

[00:14:08]So, you're going to have a humongous amount of customer service inquiries, people with the wrong size, people with, you know, if they just want to return it, unhappy customers just asking where their order is because with print on demand, things don't come straight away.

[00:14:22]You'll have people, you know, complaining that maybe there was a hole in the shirt, maybe the the design is a little bit blurry, maybe the design is is a little bit skewed, maybe the shirt is a little bit dirty.

[00:14:31]These are just some of the customer service emails we get, but you're going to get a lot of customer service emails.

[00:14:37]And it's easy to say, "Oh, it's fine.

[00:14:39]I'm going to outsource that. I'm going to hire someone to do that." Yes, you can and that that's what we've done.

[00:14:45]But, you have to understand if you do that, that is another expense and that would shrink your profit margin even more. And I don't know about you, but I'm not interested in putting all of that effort in, having to handle all of that customer service or employees to handle it, and all of that mental stress to make $100,000 in revenue if it's only making me $2,000 in profit.

[00:15:09]I'm not interested in that. That is a massive waste of time, um in my opinion.

[00:15:14]I just don't I just don't see the point in that. So, there are far better and easier ways to make more money.

[00:15:20]If you're going to make $100,000 in revenue, I would like to hope that at minimum you have a 10% margin. And that's a minimum, so that's $10,000 in profit. It would be much better if it was a 15% margin or a 20% margin. But, this is where it gets difficult because the margins are so tight.

[00:15:38]You can't just be like, "I'm going to go and hire this person to do customer service. I'm going to hire this person to do my emails. This person to do my ads. This person to do my designs."

[00:15:45]Because before you know it, you've got no margin left. You know, your margin is completely gone on all these people all these people you've hired. So, with this business, you have to kind of know what you're doing in every aspect of the business. And then as you really really scale, so you know, you're doing $150,000 a month in revenue, and you've got a 15 to 20% margin, so you're making really good money. That's where, you know, you can start hiring out designers, email people, um media buyers, like advertising people.

[00:16:16]Uh well, I'm not going to say customer service cuz customer service should come a lot earlier cuz otherwise it's just very overwhelming. But, that's when you start hiring people. So, my my question for you, and I think the biggest point of this whole video is I need you to ask yourself, what do you actually want to make?

[00:16:34]And what what amount of time can you afford to give to this business? Because if you actually sit down, you crunch the numbers, and you find out what you want to make a month, you might not care about making $150,000 in revenue and $15,000 per month extra. You might only need 2,000. You might only need 5,000.

[00:16:56]You might you might need a thousand dollars. It depends on where you live, it depends on your circumstances, it depends on your life.

[00:17:03]It's really important you know what that number is, that number to to to aim for.

[00:17:08]Because if you know what that number is, you can prepare yourself for the workload. You you prepare yourself for what's to come.

[00:17:17]You you can, you know, prepare yourself for the the panic attacks, you know, the the anxiety, the the things that come with running a business.

[00:17:27]And you can ask yourself, do I want all that extra stress for that extra money?

[00:17:32]Or am I happy with less money and significantly less stress?

[00:17:38]This is it, right? So, there will be people out there like your Alex Hormozis and, you know, big business people that are just striving to make hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars.

[00:17:47]There is no ceiling. They want to make more, more, more, more.

[00:17:52]I ask, to what end? Okay, cuz I used to be like that. I very much used to be like, I want to make as much money as humanly possible.

[00:17:59]But in the last two, maybe three years, um, you know, I just don't really care.

[00:18:05]Yes, I want to make lots of money, but what do I want to give up to make that lots of money? Do I want to give up spending time with my daughter?

[00:18:15]No, right? That's much more important. I would give up all the money in the world to be able to have a relationship with my child, right? Do I want to, um, do I want to give up my just my life? Do I want to give up being able to go on holiday with my family? Do I want to give up, you know, being able to wake up in the morning and just be like, "I'm going to take a breather today and I'm going to go and do this. I'm going to go do that." Or do I want to wake up and just grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, grind all the time in order to make hundreds of millions of dollars?

[00:18:46]Again, to what end? Like, what will make you happy? So, this is what you've got to ask yourself. Like, what do you value? Do you value your life? Do you value your money? Do you value, um, generational wealth? Cuz once you have the answers to all these things, you can really decide, is putting on the mind the right thing for me? And if it is, at what point will I be content? When will I be happy? Or will I just keep trying for more and more and more? And let me just quickly clarify, there's nothing wrong with trying for more and more. There's nothing wrong with that grind. There's nothing wrong with being like, I don't want a ceiling, I want to make 100 grand, 200 grand, a million a month. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. And I would love to grow our business to, you know, a multiple seven figures per month, sell it, you know, and you know, whatever whatever comes next.

[00:19:31]By all means.

[00:19:33]But, you just have to you have to be okay with what that takes and what you'd be giving up. So, when the business grows, as I said, the customer service grows, the potential problems grow. For example, last week, all of the items on Printify for us were out of stock. And that was really stressful because you were getting hundreds of orders every single day. And with us on Printify, we don't automatically submit orders, we manually submit them. We have someone that manually submits our orders for us because we reroute them across different countries and we also do giveaways.

[00:20:06]Whatever, it doesn't matter. But, it was a good thing in this case because orders were out of stock, so we were able to reroute them to to um suppliers that were in stock.

[00:20:17]But, that took a really long time and that was really stressful because in my head I'm like, we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of orders and no stock. What do we do here? We are fully reliant on Printify. We are fully reliant on this printing provider and they have no stock. And that was really stressful. And then likewise with ads, looking at your ads every day, spending two, three, four, five grand a day on ads.

[00:20:40]Yes, it's a lot of money and it's stressful. Even if you're making that money back and you're making four times that money back, it still feels like a lot of money. You know, it's still a large sum of money and you just have to be okay with that. But, if you tell me, "No, Shirazi, I'm actually happy just making three grand a month."

[00:20:58]Brilliant. Well, at a 10% margin, you're looking to make $30,000 in revenue a month, which is really, really doable.

[00:21:05]And not just doable, but really manageable. Like the customer service that comes with that will be minimal.

[00:21:11]And the the the other headaches, the the the supplier headaches, and the email headaches, and just general business stuff that comes with that will be far more manageable. So, you just need to ask yourself, what do you want out of this business, and what are you willing to give to get what you want out of this business? I really wanted to make this video just to make everyone aware of what it's really like, what you can expect, and whether or not you're prepared to do it.

[00:21:40]If you are prepared to do it, whether it's to make 10K or 30K or 100K a month, whatever it is you want to do, I would love to help you.

[00:21:50]I would really love to help you. And not just help you in the sense of this is what you need to do to get there, but also help you in being okay once you get there, helping you through the potential panic attacks, helping you through the anxiety, helping you through, most importantly, the unknown, the looking at ads account in the morning, and just being thoroughly confused of what to do next. I really want to help you through all of these stages, and kind of just just be like there, in the background, you can call on whenever you want, basically. And that's what my community is all about.

[00:22:27]My community is all about helping you build a brand, whether you want to hit 10K a month in profit, or whether or not you want to hit 2K a month in profit. It doesn't matter, right? Each one will come with various challenges. Some will come with significantly more challenges.

[00:22:43]But make sure that whatever you do end up doing, you have someone, whether it's me or someone else, it doesn't really matter.

[00:22:51]I mean, you've got my community, there are other amazing communities as well.

[00:22:54]Um I'm not the only one. Um but just try and have someone, like a mentor or something, that can really help you out, can help you understand the numbers, can help you make those decisions of what to do next because it will be a massive weight off of your shoulders. Doing this on your own, whilst very possible, it's extremely draining and there are so many times where you just want to, you know, bash your head against the wall and just just call it quits, right? And I want to try and avoid that happening for you.

[00:23:32]So, feel free, you know, click the link in the description below, feel free to check out the community, you know, watch the video on the on the about page. If if it's something that interests you, try it out. You can cancel whenever you want. There's no like uh commitment there.

[00:23:46]And hopefully I can help you. And if by some chance I've fully scared you off doing this business, well, I want to just give you a little bit of insight and a bit of a personal story. So, I started well, I started making money online when I was 12, but I started proper business when I left school at 18.

[00:24:05]Print on demand is one of many businesses that I've done. I've had an Amazon FBA business, I've had various other Shopify businesses, I've had offline businesses like a photography business, various different things.

[00:24:16]And what I will tell you is everything I've just mentioned in this video, all of the anxiety, all of the unknown, all of the just the worry that comes with this business applies to all other businesses and all other things as well.

[00:24:32]So, if you are thinking, you know what, print on demand, I I just don't want that stress in my life, I'm going to go and do this business instead, like I know whatever that business is, that business will come with the same stress, right? So, it doesn't really matter what you do, everything that you do will come with stress. Even having a 9-to-5 job, right?

[00:24:52]You're going to have that constant fear of potentially being let go or the constant fear of what if my expenses go up but I don't get a raise or you know, what whatever it could be. So, there's going to be fears in every aspect of life and every aspect of business and working.

[00:25:09]Um, but I think at the end of the day it all comes back to do you have people in your circle that can help you? Do you have people in your circle that you can talk to that can understand what you're going through and give you advice on how to get through it? Because if you don't, it can be a very very lonely a very very lonely um, journey.

[00:25:33]And often times when you are doing it on your own it's much easier to give up. Similar to like working out. You know, if you are working out on your own, you are much more likely to give up than if you are working out with a personal trainer who's motivating you and getting you to do the things that you wouldn't have done on your own.

[00:25:51]So, just just think about it like that.

[00:25:54]And um, let me know in the comments down below cuz this is very curious about this. Let me know what person are you? Are you looking to make 2K a month in profit or you looking to make tens of thousands of dollars a month in profit? You don't want a ceiling. You want to just make as much money as humanly possible. Which camp are you in? Because as I said two very very different camps and require two very different levels of work and commitment. And it's interesting to see what everyone wants to do. So, yeah. Want to say thanks for watching this video. I hope I haven't scared you. I hope this was just some real talk so that you could know what to expect and be okay when it actually happens. And of course part of this video was me, you know, offering my help if I can help um, because I would genuinely love to. I'd love to help you do exactly what I've done. And if you want that, the link down below will take you to my community where you could join many other people also getting help from me through live calls, through recorded training, and just through, you know, back and forth chats on the in the community wall. But anyway, thank you so much for watching, and hopefully I'll see you in the next video.