🚨 B2B PIVOT 👉 10X REVENUE🚨

We built this business to be B2C.

We wanted to create ultra personalized gifts for our customers.

However, we think the right move might be to pivot to B2B.

Current State

We had an amazing November and December.

November: $500+ December: $1200+

However.. things have been quiet since then...

We've gotten 1 Shopify order, and 2 Etsy orders in all of January.. for a total of 👉 $60

What this tells me: foodies aren't ordering our books, gift-givers are. We've had this suspicion that gift-givers would be our ICP, and I think the data has proven it.

This means our product is going to be very seasonal, and I expect we will get a rush of orders before Valentines, Graduation season, and Christmas every year. And maybe a slow consistent trickle throughout the year for birthdays.

Action item for us:

1. Re-optimize all of our SEO for gift givers
2. Update listing descriptions to target holidays & gift givers

We are going to work on this, but what this means is that our B2C business is going to be very streaky and not a reliable source of revenue.

However, Etsy and Shopify are not our biggest source of revenue these past two months... it's been Faire (Etsy for wholesale)

Faire

While we made only $60 on Etsy/Shopify this month, we've already made $375 on Faire.

Since the start of December we have made $1075 on Faire, which is about $200 MORE than what we've made on Etsy since August. Some notes on why this is amazing:

1. The $865 we've made on Etsy since August has been via 43 sales to 40 customers with around 35 unique books.
2. The $1075 we've made on Faire has been has been 6 sales to 3 customers with 3 unique books.

I spend about 20 minutes per book I curate. The math:

• Etsy = 43 books * 20 minutes = 11.66 hours of curation to make $865 = $75/hr
• Faire = 3 books * 20 minutes = 1 hour of curation to make $1075 = $1075/hr

And to top it off: Faire gives us the opportunity for recurring revenue. If the book sells well, the stores will re-order. $600 from Faire is from a single customer who has already re-ordered 3 times because they keep selling out. At this rate, they may be spending $1000+ with us per quarter.

So, now comes the hard part.. How do we scale up on the B2B front? The only thing we need is more customers, we already have all of the systems in place to fulfill orders. I have some ideas I'll be trying over the next month or so. I would love any ideas yall have

We've done $1,500 in sales with 10 listings and zero paid acquisition. What happens with 500?

📊 The signal

Our Shopify store gets 3-5 sales per month purely from Google SEO. No ads, no marketing — just people searching for "Nashville gift idea" and finding us.

With 10 listings.

Meanwhile, Etsy has been our main channel — 90% of sales. But the holiday bump is over. We did 19 orders in the first 17 days of December, then zero since then. The algorithm giveth, the algorithm taketh away.

Shopify SEO is slower, but it's ours.

The question that won't leave my head: what happens when we have 500 listings? 1,000? 5,000?

😩 The problem with scaling manually

Each listing used to take 30+ minutes of work:

• Generate a cover for the city
• Manually create 3d mockup images
• Generate a listing title and description
• Manually click a bunch of buttons and copy/paste to create listings on Shopify and Etsy
• Repeat

I got bored after two listings. Not "this is hard" bored but "this is repetitive and my brain is rejecting it" bored.

So I started automating.

🛠️ What we built

1. 3D product renders

We commissioned 3D models of our book in multiple poses. Then I wrote a script that composites our cover files and interior page files onto these models and renders final images.

Every listing now gets professional product photos. Huge shoutout to <@115123178946297856> for helping us figure this out (go subscribe to <#1369682208264163479> !!)

2. Cover generation pipeline

Re-use our existing cover generation code, just made it more scalable.

3. Listing content generation

Title, description, tags — all generated. We also identify a "hero restaurant" for each city to feature in the 3d mockups where the book is open to a restaurant page.

4. Census data targeting

Here's where it gets fun. We pulled census data for every town in America and filtered by population thresholds.

5. Platform automation

We are building apps for Shopify and Etsy that take all of the above and create listings automatically.

🤫 The part that feels like cheating

We're not curating the restaurants for each book upfront.

The curation workflow (pulling Google Places data, running it through AI extraction, manually reviewing) still takes 5-10 minutes per book.

So we're skipping it... for now.

The listings go live. When someone orders a book for a city we haven't curated yet, then we do the work.

We're betting on demand before doing the labor.

💸 The investment

This isn't a free experiment.

• My time: Multiple full days building these systems. Thank god for coding agents — this would have taken months otherwise.
• AI costs: Cover generation at this scale isn't free anymore. We're burning real money on API calls.
• 3D assets: Several hundred dollars for the models and hiring someone to design lifestyle environments around them.

⚠️ The risks

SEO might not scale linearly. 50x listings doesn't guarantee 50x traffic. Google might not index them all. The long-tail might not be as long as we hope.

Etsy might deplatform us. Flooding the platform with 500 listings in a week could trigger spam detection. We're being careful, but it's a real risk.

The demand might not be there. Maybe the 3-5 sales/month is a ceiling, not a floor.

🔮 What happens next

This time next week, we'll have 500+ listings live on Shopify (and hopefully Etsy if they approve our app soon and we don't get flagged).

We'll report back with real data:

• Did traffic scale?
• Did sales follow?
• Did we get deplatformed?

If this works, we're not stopping at 500. Every town in America with the right population threshold. Then every town in every country our printing partner ships to.

This is our first real go-to-market push. We've done $1,500+ in sales on Etsy's algorithm and minimal Shopify SEO alone.

Let's see what happens when we actually try.

📖 Introducing RestaurantPassport

Hey everyone! Excited to share what I've been building: Restaurant Passport - customizable restaurant discovery journals that help people explore their local dining scene and make amazing personalized gifts.

🎯 What We Do

1. A customer places an order for their restaurant passport - giving us the town to curate for, their name, and a gift message
2. We curate 50 restaurants in the area (more details on this in a future update)
3. We create a PDF for the cover + book
4. We order the book directly to the customer from a print on demand provider

Available through our Etsy shop and website at restaurantpassport.net

🚀 Current Milestones

Pretty stoked with where we are just 3 months in:

• 25+ sales across custom and pre-made passports
• $400+ revenue this month
• 1 retail placement

🎬 What's Next

We're scaling up with some exciting experiments:

• Launching our first ad campaign
• Partnering with a foodie influencer
• Exploring partnerships with short-term rental companies to offer as welcome gifts for guests

Still early days, but we're picking up steam and I'd like to share my insights with everyone here.