All stories

An unfunded Kickstarter for an ice cream scoop turned around almost overnight after one newspaper article – then had to find a channel that didn't depend on press. Today it's Amazon, at 65% of sales.

This post is more musing than specifics. About what's working (a little), what isn't (almost everything), and what needs to change (that's the question). Plus: a ray of light.

A family workshop in a small Lithuanian town started out selling firewood and outdoor furniture sets locally – then found nearly all its international buyers through Etsy, growing from about 150 orders last year to 219 so far this year.

Roberta Perry turned a homemade sugar scrub into ScrubzBody, growing it for almost two decades into a business with 2,000 customers and a physical store – built on a weekly email newsletter and free publicity, not paid ads.

Yuliya Derbisheva makes every illustration and font entirely by hand, without AI – a deliberate stance in a market flooded with cheap AI-generated art – and has built her business by refusing to depend on any single platform to sell it.