List a poster mockup on TikTok Shop, post one AI video, and print only after sales

Zuhair Lakhani… for his brand. And the videos started doing really well, and I realized, you know, "If I'm making somebody else money doing this, I can probably just do this on my own." At the time, I was also designing for this company, and I realized, you know, if I take some of these graphics that I'm doing and apply them to my own products, and I have this like TikTok marketing experience now, I can probably blow it up. So, that's exactly what I did.

Zuhair LakhaniI took this poster design that I had made for another client that they didn't use, just put on a poster mockup because I was like, you know, a poster would be the easiest thing for me to source right away, right? Cuz like delivery matters here, too. TikTok Shop has a two-day delivery period. So, I took this design, put on a poster mockup, this exact mockup, by the way, and put on TikTok Shop and made one video off of it using AI. It was ElevenLabs plus Midjourney. It was this TikTok that started everything. But I think at the first day, it was probably at like 5k views, and it got just three sales.

Zuhair LakhaniBut that just validated that this could work. And as soon as it got three sales, I went to the print shop, and I gave them a deposit. I was like, you know, "Here's like a 100 bucks, just like as soon as I call, just like print my posters." Cuz at first, they didn't even trust me, right? Like I had to go, and they were like, "Okay, you have to pay before we make them," whatever. I was like, "Okay, instead of just doing that, here's a 100 bucks. Every time I I have a poster order, just make it for me, and then like, you know, bill my card afterwards." After this happened,

Zuhair LakhaniI tried to automate the content. That's my first time trying to do slideshows, like in an automated way. And here is an example of me doing that. These are all using images from Cosmos, actually, which is pretty ironic. Every single one of these were made. This is like Figma components, whatever. But this gets really, really hard to do at scale. Like this was just a VA doing it.