Things I've built
I am ambitious about learning and trying new projects. Some of these worked. Some didn't. All of them taught me something I couldn't have learned in a classroom.
In January 2025 I opened an Etsy shop selling digital dog wall art. What started as "let me try something" turned into a real business with systems, data, and decisions behind every move.
I didn't just post art and wait. I ran product experiments — launched 70 dog breeds, tracked what sold, and narrowed focus to the top 10 performers. I introduced greyscale-with-color-pop seasonal variants for Christmas and Thanksgiving. I found that bathroom-themed prints with toilet paper in mouth were my best sellers, so I doubled down.
For Q4 2025 I expanded into physical print-on-demand calendars — higher AOV, hands-off fulfillment, and 2–3x the profit of a digital file per sale.
Etsy hides customer contact data inside raw transaction email metadata. There's no native CRM, no export, no easy way to know who bought what and when — unless you dig through your inbox manually.
I built an n8n automation workflow to solve this. Every time an order confirmation arrived, the workflow scraped the email metadata, extracted the customer, product, order value, and date — then logged it to a structured Excel sheet and deleted the source email to keep my inbox clean.
I then researched using this data for targeted re-engagement campaigns — sending a thank-you with a promo code tied to the exact product they ordered. I got as far as designing the outreach sequence before I caught it: direct email outreach to Etsy customers violates Etsy's seller policies and anti-spam legislation.
The real lesson: Catching a compliance issue before executing it is more valuable than never having thought of the idea. I documented my findings and moved on.
▶ Walkthrough Video — Coming Soon
Full n8n workflow demo with anonymized order data.Not everything worked. That's kind of the point.
Tried selling AI-built websites to small businesses via cold calling. Loved the product concept. Hated the cold outreach. Two weeks in, I had read four books on persuasion and sales — and still dreaded every call. Learned that medium and message both matter.
Full story on the blog →Joined a former coworker's window cleaning business to help scale it up — handling client outreach, scheduling, and day-to-day operations. My first real taste of entrepreneurship and what it actually takes to build something.
More in About →Started a YouTube channel to document building in public — the wins, the pivots, the failures. Not polished. Just honest footage of what it actually looks like to figure things out.
Watch on YouTube →