I’ve had the same conversation with my friends about a dozen times.
The classic one.
"We should start a business."
Usually it dies as fast as it starts. This time I actually followed through and put a longer time frame on it and set some simple and reachable goals.
I’ve always been a gamer. I love Magic the Gathering, especially Commander. Hanging out with friends, building decks, losing to someone’s stupid infinite combo. All of it. It’s fun and honestly one of the few things that helps me unplug.
We talked about starting something together. Nothing serious. The idea was simple. If we could make a little money selling cool stuff, we could use it to help fund the hobby we were already pouring money into. That was literally the entire reason.
A few months later we have more than 70 orders and are on track to do over ten thousand dollars in revenue. We passed our first goal of getting a thousand followers on social. Now that we know it works, we’ve set bigger goals. Check out our shop here.
This is not a story about luck. It’s not complicated. What worked was that the brand was built for a very specific group of people. People like us. Magic the Gathering players. Even more specific, Commander players who enjoy memes, funny deck builds, and the social chaos that makes Commander what it is.
Starting out, I didn’t have some polished business plan. I just started posting on social. I shared cards, memes, screenshots from games, and stuff that made us laugh. A few posts went viral and we quickly crossed a thousand followers. That gave us momentum before we ever even had a product.
Once we had an audience, we figured we might as well build a shop. The tech stack I used was simple. Shopify to host the storefront. Printify to handle fulfillment. Canva to make every piece of creative. That’s it. You don’t need a hundred tools to get moving. These three are more than enough to get your first sales.
Let me break down each one.
Shopify was the foundation. I built and launched the store in a weekend. I’m not a web developer and didn’t want to spend weeks messing around with code. Shopify made it easy to get something clean and professional online fast. I could add products, set up payments, update branding, and manage everything from one place. It gave me a real storefront with almost no friction.
Printify was the engine that made this business possible. We didn’t want to hold inventory or ship anything ourselves. That wasn’t realistic. Printify solved all of that. They have a huge catalog of products you can apply designs to, and they handle printing and shipping. Desk mats and mousepads were the real winners because they double as playmats for Magic, Pokémon, and Yu-Gi-Oh. The quality is very solid. That part mattered. People in the TCG space care about the feel of a playmat. A bad product would have killed the brand from the beginning.
We listed desk mats and shirts and instantly looked like a real brand. When someone places an order, Printify prints the item and sends it directly to the customer. We collect the margin with no inventory risk. It is the perfect setup for building a brand without guessing on bulk orders or dealing with shipping.
Canva was the tool I used for everything creative. Playmat designs, shirts, logos, social graphics, product images, ads, even video edits. I’m not the greatest graphic designer and didn’t want to learn complex design software. Canva was simple. Drag and drop. Change colors. Export. Done. It let me create new ideas quickly and upload fresh designs to Printify whenever I had inspiration. The ability to work fast made a huge difference early on. You don’t need to be a pro designer to make something people want. You just need to be able to test quickly and see what sticks.
That tool trio is why we were able to start in the first place. I didn’t need a warehouse, a print shop, or a ton of gear. Shopify gave us a storefront, Printify gave us products and fulfillment, and Canva gave us the ability to create everything in-house.
The early traction all came from social media. I wasn’t running ads. Everything was organic rankings on google and traffic from social media. Posting consistently led to viral moments, and those moments drove traffic to the shop. The audience was already warmed up because they liked our posts before we ever tried to sell them anything. Some designs that flopped on social never made it to the store. Others that got big reactions became best sellers. Social media was basically free market research.
Our sales weren’t huge at first, but every order validated the idea. Every repeat customer told us we were doing something right. We still don’t take ourselves too seriously. The brand is supposed to be fun.
Looking back, the biggest advantage we had was building for a niche. Commander players have a specific culture, language, and sense of humor. Because we were already part of that world, we understood what people liked and what kind of designs they would buy. That connection is what made our marketing and products resonate.
A few things I learned.
Focus on the audience first. If people enjoy what you post for free, selling becomes easier.
Keep the tools simple. Shopify, Printify, Canva. That’s enough.
Move quickly. Don’t overthink designs or production. Just test.
Make products you would actually use.
Start with content. It’s the cheapest way to validate demand.
If I had waited until everything was perfect, this brand would not exist. We started small, made things we thought were cool, and let the market decide. That’s really all it takes.
If you want to launch an ecommerce brand in a niche you care about, you don’t need a big budget. You don’t need to quit your job. You don’t need to go all in on day one.
Start by making content for the community you understand. Then build a simple store. Then give them products that represent the culture they love.
That’s all we did.
Today the brand has proof behind it. Real orders. Real customers. Real revenue. The plan is to scale slowly, improve product options, run experiments, and keep having fun with it. The original goal was to fund the hobby. We’ve done that and now we’re dreaming a little bigger.
I still think anyone can do what we did. If you’re part of a community, you already have the most important advantage. You understand what makes people in that space tick. Lean into that. Make for them. Build with them.
If you’re interested in starting your own print on demand business, I recommend checking out the Printify product catalog and thinking about what niche you could build a brand around. That’s exactly how we got started. We found products that fit our community, tested designs quickly, and let the audience tell us what they liked.
Exploring their catalog is a great way to spark ideas. Look for items that naturally fit the hobbies you already understand and enjoy.
I offer consulting and document a lot of my journeys in business, marketing, and brand building at Buildapeak.com
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