Let me start off by letting you know this...I'm a moron. Not like a real moron - just compared to the contributors on this forum. You guys are great!
I've been using KM for about 8 months now, and I use it like my brain, at about 5% of its capacity! However, I have been able to utilize it to great effect in helping to build a business that you might not imagine is something that would be easily automated - creating and selling t-shirt designs online.
You see, many t-shirt ideas are scalable, think of the "Keep Calm and (xxx)" shirts you've seen people wearing, or the parody "Straight Outta Compton" shirts that replace Compton with 1000 different cities. I use KM to go between huge lists on Excel, for instance the 1000 city names in my example, into a design that I pre-created in my design software, replacing the city name in the design and saving the design in the file format i need to upload as my design file. This is something I used to do manually, and i got pretty quick to the point that i could do 3-5 per minute. While the script i created doesn't seem to speed that process up, it does allow me to walk away from my computer an do other things while the process unfolds.
The second half of this process is uploading the file to the site of my print-on-demand partners, i.e. Amazon, Etsy, Redbubble, etc...This is where there is opportunity! So far, I've created a script that allows me to list my products using an Excel sheet to differentiate the listings and provide all of the listing details to named clipboards, then transferring the contents of the clipboards to the appropriate field on the listing page. It works great, although I'm 100% certain that my script is all types of inefficient because...again, I'm a moron! However, it does make the process painless, and buys me back the 3-4 hours of time i used to spend shackled to my desk uploading image files and entering listing information to list 100 products per day. With the script I can do 3-4x that amount while I'm sleeping!
Here is the thing, there are products available, programs that folks have written to do what my script does. These products are being sold as monthly subscription services for prices in the neighborhood of $99/mo per user. Believe it or not, there are tens of thousands of designers in the Amazon print-on-demand program alone and they are willing to dump money into anything that makes the process easier. Using myself as an example, I have paid $20/mo for design software intended to make the process faster. I've spent $29/mo on research software (a very popular program with thousands of users). I've also used countless third-party Chrome extensions to help make the process easier. Print-on-Demand content creators are willing to spend money to make their life easier.
I think there is a e-course potential in teaching these people how to create their own scripts with KM to help them specifically with print on demand. In the end, buying KM and learning to create these scripts would be a huge time and money saving prospect for these people. So why am I here? I'm here because I've got an extensive knowledge of the print-on-demand game, but my KM skills are rudimentary (at best) - what I'd like to do is to partner with a KM wizard. I truly believe, if we can provide the right content, we can help a lot of people and make a bunch of money in the process. Many of the "guru" types in this business have huge YouTube and social media following that came from providing scraps of generally useless information over the course of the past several years. Many of these same "guru" types have since moved on to providing fee-based coaching or monetized private Facebook groups that provide little to the user but provide the guru with more income than their POD business ever did.
So, who is up for it? I'm a wide-open book - I'll tell you anything you want to know. I see a big opportunity here but I need help to open the door! Who wants to take a chance?
Mike
