Why I'm running a digital-products shop in public, and the rules I've set myself

This week I opened an Etsy shop called SortedDesk. It sells digital products: spreadsheets, planners, the odd printable. One listing is live, a Christmas budget planner, and more are queued. None of that is unusual. What I want to explain is why I am going to run it in public, and the rules I have written down before there are any numbers worth hiding.

The shop is a side project, built around a full-time job, and most of the production is done with AI tools. That is the honest description, and it is also the reason for doing this out loud. There are a great many people telling employed twenty- and thirty-somethings that a digital-products shop is an easy second income. Almost none of them show the middle of the process: the listings nobody clicked, the week where the only number that moved was the listing count. I would rather show that middle, week by week, and let you decide whether the work looks worth your evenings.

So, the rules.

One: process, not promises. Every week I will report two numbers, listings live and views. Not revenue. Partly because early sales are noise and any figure from a week-old shop would mislead more than it informs. Partly because the UK advertising code is clear that you should not imply what someone could earn without robust evidence, and I have none. Fees, prices and the arithmetic between them are fair game, because they are facts about the platform rather than claims about you. Income screenshots are not, and there will not be any.

Two: the AI disclosure goes in every listing. Etsy requires sellers to say when AI tools were used to make an item, and I would want to know as a buyer. So each description ends with the same plain sentence: designed and built by SortedDesk using AI tools for drafting and layout, then checked and finished by a human. The second half of that sentence is the part I have to keep true. Every spreadsheet is opened in Excel, Google Sheets and Numbers before it is listed. Every printable is checked at print size. If a product cannot pass that check, it does not go up.

Three: flops get published. When a listing gets no views for a fortnight, it gets a new title and tags. When it is still flat after four weeks, it is parked, and I will say so, with my best guess at why. When something sells, it gets a variant. These rules are fixed on a Friday review so that the decision is made by the rule and not by how I feel about the thing I spent a Sunday building. A record of what did not work is the most useful thing a shop like this can leave behind.

Four: real prices. Listings carry the price I would sell at without a sale, and sales are a percentage off that. The struck-through figure has to be one I genuinely charged. UK pricing rules say as much, and so does common sense: a shop that starts by fudging its own prices is not one I would trust with a budget planner.

Five: a plan with dates. The first thirty days are laid out: accounts opened, first listing live, a mailing list with a two-page checklist and a fee calculator as the reason to join, then new listings on a steady cadence with a review every seventh day. Weekdays are thirty to forty-five minutes. The building happens at weekends. If the plan is wrong, the reviews will show where, and the plan will change in public too.

There is one more thing that is less a rule than a design choice. The shop runs a catalogue and a flagship at the same time. The catalogue is many small, useful products across three clusters: money spreadsheets, ADHD-friendly planners and occasion kits. Its job is to find out what people actually search for. The flagship is one product that gets everything: ten images, a printable companion, a quick-start guide, two currencies. Its job is to show what the shop can do when it tries. If a cluster does nothing after a fair run, it goes, and I will tell you that too.

None of this guarantees the shop works. That is rather the point. If you are weighing up the same kind of project, the useful thing I can offer is not a result but a record: the decisions, the numbers as they arrive, and the mistakes with their causes attached. The shop is at sorteddesk.etsy.com. The checklist and calculator are free, and the weekly email is where the numbers will appear, including the ones I would rather not share.