Not a week goes by without significant new AI development. New capabilities are being released way faster than they can be adopted and used for real business purposes. Additionally, there’s no shortage of promotion online touting AI as useful for creating streams of passive income online by creating digital products. As an experiment, I set an ambitious goal to explore and leverage AI tools for myself:

Outcome:

• Use AI to produce artwork and set up multiple shops with optimized listings in less than a week.

Key Results:

• Create and list multiple products for male and female buyers
• 20+ active listings in multiple online marketplaces within one week
• Learn the strengths and weaknesses of at least two specific AI tools

The most important key result being the opportunity to learn. Though I wouldn’t mind becoming the first single-person unicorn that Sam Altman is predicting will happen in the next few years.

Getting things up and going would require me to choose my marketplaces, generate artwork for the products, build the products, and optimize listings.

Choosing a Marketplace

Some quick Google research revealed a few good options to sell products online. I settled on Redbubble, TeePublic, and a direct-to-print company Printful that integrated into an Etsy marketplace. Creating products on Printful would also enable me to expand into a Shopify site when my business inevitably needed to expand.

Image Generation

After trying several AI image generators, I settled on paying ten bucks for a month of MidJourney. The UI leveraging the Discord interface took some getting used to (but a brilliant product decision). Within a couple of hours, I was cranking out some decent-looking designs…