Hard Part Done Studio
The hard parts of Etsy, done with you.
I’ve spent the last five years selling and working around Etsy while watching the platform change through different waves. During that time, I’ve used plenty of seller tools like eRank, Everbee, EtsyHunt, Alura, SalesSamurai, Marmalead etc. They’re useful. I still use some of them. But I kept coming back to one problem.
The numbers don’t make the decision for you. A lot of Etsy research tools work with some combination of direct data, purchased data, inferred data and learned data. That can give you useful signals. It can also give you a very confident-looking number that still needs a human to make sense of it.
When I’m researching manually, I don’t look at one number and decide whether a product is good. I opened Etsy & search. I look at what buyers are seeing, what is selling, how old those listings are, how products are presented, what sellers are doing, what patterns keep appearing, where the gaps are and whether the opportunity makes sense when all those signals sit next to each other. A lot of that decision comes from comparison, visual signals and experience.
For years, that part needed a human. AI changed what I think is possible (to some extent)
What if AI could research more like an experienced seller?
AI gives us an opportunity to automate work that couldn’t realistically be automated a few years ago & I’m interested in a very specific part of that opportunity.
The 20% of research and analysis that gives us 80% of the useful information. Instead of throwing more dashboards and numbers at an Etsy seller, I’m building an agent around the way I would actually approach the problem myself.
- Look at the market.
- Compare the signals.
- Understand the product.
- Understand who buys it.
- Find the patterns.
- Then make sense of what you're looking at.
So that AI tool is HPD Studio in general..
What is Hard Part Done Studio?
Think of it less like another tool sitting in your browser and more like an extra member of your Etsy team. The long-term idea behind the community and a tool is to help with the heavy lifting from the moment you ask what should I sell? all the way to:
Good, I am selling it, how to scale it now? We’re starting much smaller. And very specifically with Etsy digital products.
Start With the Opportunity
One of the first things Studio will give community members is a researched daily product opportunity.
Not just: “Sell this.”
You’ll get the context needed to understand the opportunity and make your own decision. The product. The buyer persona. The use case. The timing. The market signals. The opportunity.
What you should understand before creating it.
And the information I would personally want in front of me before deciding whether something deserves my time.
You still make the decision.
The studio does a lot of the digging.
Then Comes SEO
This is one of the parts I care about the most. You can make an incredible product and still struggle if Etsy doesn’t understand where it belongs or which searches it should appear for. Studio is being built to help with Etsy’s on-site SEO using the product itself, buyer intent, market context and relevant search behavior.
From there, it can help prepare the parts sellers usually spend far too much time figuring out: Titles. Tags. Keywords. Descriptions. Categories. Listing structure. Selling Price And eventually, the uploading workflow itself. I want the process from finished product to properly structured Etsy listing to become much less painful and one thing i need to highlight here, it will not be another generative AI writer that’s writing a generic meta data as an LLM wrapper, but it will be slow but cognitive, trained to mimic human, exposed to keywords data and with a decision making capability. So i will be an AI writer but a smarter one.
Later, Studio Goes Further
Research and SEO are only the beginning. Future versions can help with the design side, faster listing preparation, categorization, post-sale analysis and understanding what your existing store is telling you to do next.
I don’t want to build 47 features because a SaaS pricing page looks better with 47 checkmarks. Every feature needs to remove a real piece of work.
The direction is simple:
What to sell → When to sell → How to sell → How to list → What happened → What to do next.
And Then You Do the Part I Don't Want AI to Replace - Creativity.
Your taste. Your experience.
Your understanding of the customer.
The little decision that makes your product genuinely more useful than the ten products sitting beside it.
If Studio can handle more of the research, repetitive analysis, SEO and technical work, you get to spend more of your time on the part where you can actually make a difference.
Make a better product.
That’s the point of Hard Part Done. I don’t currently want thousands of random users.
I’m building it as an extension of the Hard Part Done community and the methods I teach inside it.
The people learning the system should also have access to the tools that help them execute it.
That also means I can build differently.
I don’t have to chase features because competitors have them.
I can build around what our members are actually struggling with.
Founding Members Get the Beta Access First
Hard Part Done Studio is currently in development. The first beta will be released to Hard Part Done founding members. You’ll get to use what I’m building while it’s still early, tell me where it helps, tell me where it gets things wrong, and help shape what comes next.
I’m actually looking forward to that messy stage. Some ideas will work exactly as expected. Others probably won’t. I’d rather discover that with a small group of people who are actually building Etsy businesses than pretend I’ve already figured out every button before anyone touches it. Until Studio is ready, you can join the Hard Part Done community and learn the methods behind it, including what I’ve learned from five years of working through different stages of Etsy’s evolution. When the beta is ready, founding members will be the first inside.