The Tech Stack I’m Using to Automate my new product shop
We are officially moving from the “thinking” phase to the “doing” phase. Last article was all about the “why” and the market research; this week, it’s about setting the foundation for a business that actually functions.
I’ll be honest: I’m still not 100% in love with the brand name. But as a strategist, I know the biggest trap you can fall into is spending three weeks on a name and a logo instead of building the product. I gave myself a time limit and got to work.
If you want to see how these visuals came out here is the Youtube video
The Visual Identity: When Gemini Wins
I started where most people start—Canva. I threw together a basic logo, but looking at it actually made me like the name less. It felt flat. So, I decided to let AI take the wheel.
I’ve shifted almost entirely to Gemini for my workflow lately. It feels more logical than other models, it doesn’t hallucinate as much, and it connects directly to my Google Drive and ecosystem. I gave Gemini my basic Canva design and asked it to make it better.
The results were amazing. It created a primary logo that felt “cute” and professional, and a secondary logo that is now the profile picture across my new Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube channels. I even used it to identify the exact brand fonts and hex codes to create a cohesive brand board.
The Lesson: Don’t struggle with design if it’s not your strength. Use AI to generate the vision, then use Canva to polish it into a PNG.
The Platform Debate: Why I’m Returning to Etsy
The biggest hurdle this week was deciding where to host the shop. I looked at a few options:
FGFunnels: This is where I host my coaching business. It’s powerful, but it’s “heavy.” Setting it up for a brand-new project felt like overkill.
Amazon: I have a history here (shoutout to my college days doing “retail arbitrage”), but since I’m currently traveling, the logistics of shipping physical inventory to a warehouse was a non-starter.
I landed on Etsy. I’ve been an Etsy seller before—back in 2019, I sold Instagram highlight covers. It was my first taste of passive income; I created the digital files once, and they sold over 140 times thanks to a viral pin on Pinterest.
The plan is to start on Etsy because it’s a built-in marketplace. I’m connecting it to a dropshipping partner that will handle the printing and shipping of the physical card decks. My goal is for this to take about 5 hours a week. I work on it in the morning while I’m 12 hours ahead of my clients, keeping it separate from my main coaching work.
The Paid Learning Opportunity: AI Video
Something unexpected happened this week. While I was talking to my uncle about his new book, and later on a discovery call with a memoir author, I realized that these creators need a way to visualize their stories.
I decided to use this as a “paid learning” opportunity. I tested two platforms to see how they’d handle a storyboard for a memoir:
Gemini Video: The realism blew my mind. I gave it a script about a man running from his past, and it gave me cinematic, high-quality 8-second clips. The downside is the limit on daily outputs and the wide cinematic ratio, but the quality is undeniable.
Agent Opus: This is great for template-based videos with voiceovers. It’s faster, but feels less custom than Gemini.
Stitching those Gemini clips together gave me my “editing spark” back. I haven’t been this excited to sit in an editor in months.
What’s Next?
The shop is set up, the brand vibe is locked in, and the Etsy store is ready to go. Next week, we’re diving deep into the actual content creation. I have hours of raw family audio that needs to be turned into a visual story. We’ll be focusing on storyboarding and character consistency—making sure the AI characters look the same from one video to the next.
Are you a “researcher” or an “executor”? How much time do you let yourself spend before you actually launch? Let me know!