The NEW Claude Design Side-Hustle

A few days ago, Anthropic released Claude Design, and it’s pretty impressive to say the least. It unlocks a new way to start and scale up what could be a completely automated online business. This business can potentially make thousands of dollars a month if you know how to use the tools.

In this article, I’m going to break down what the business is. I’ll explain how to start it. I’ll also show how to use Claude to automate almost everything. And as always, we’ll look at how much people are making doing this. This helps you decide if it’s worth your time.

Simple Text T-Shirts Driving Real Sales

Take a look at these t-shirts that are selling on Tik Tok shop. They’re really nothing crazy. They’re just some kind of simple text design printed on the t-shirt. Usually, just some kind of sarcastic or witty saying. The principle here is really simple.

Create a bunch of t-shirt designs for various niches. Then upload them to marketplaces like TikTok Shop and Etsy. Customers are already coming to shop for products just like these.

This t-shirt, for example, is literally just one word, overstimulated. And if you add up the price and the shipping costs and multiply it by the almost 2,000 sales, it’s generated around $40,000 of revenue.

Not all profit, but consider that this is just one of the listings that this shop has posted for sale.

Shops Scaling with Multiple Listings

If you take a look at a shop like this one, they have dozens of these listings for sale. They follow the exact same format of simple text sayings in a nice-looking font. And they all have hundreds, if not thousands, of sales on each listing that they’ve posted.

The same type of products that sell well on TikTok shop sell well on platforms like Etsy. You can see this is almost the exact same design. Just says overstimulated. And this one’s made around $800 per month.

This might not sound crazy. But if we take a look at the last year, you can see that over the last 11 months, this listing has made approximately $5,000.

And again, on top of that, if you take a look at the shop that’s selling this specific listing, you can see that they’re selling a bunch of different types of t-shirts in their shop.

Massive Revenue from Consistent Effort

Now, admittedly, some of their designs are a little bit more complex. But what’s most impressive is if we take a look at their shop. You can see they’ve made approximately $250,000 in the last 12 months.

I could go on with examples for hours. But just for perspective, shops like this one have only been selling for around 17 months. Because they’ve posted so many listings for sale, they’ve been able to scale quickly. They’re making an estimated $33,000 per month in just over a year’s time.

Getting that many designs posted so quickly has always been a struggle until now. Now, you can make around a 34% profit margin doing this.

Profit Potential and Long-Term Success

And I’ll show you all of the math in a second. But all that means is that if you’re consistent with this long enough, you can turn it from a side hustle into a real business. Shops that make $30,000 per month at a 34% profit margin can take home around $11,000 of profit per month.

And that doesn’t take into account all of the shops that are making 40, 50, 60, even over $100,000 per month selling t-shirts. I’ve been selling t-shirts just like this for the last 6 years. And staying consistent with it over time has made me millions of dollars. And that’s why I share everything here on YouTube.

So now that you can see what the actual business is, we can talk about how to use Claude to do it.

Researching Winning Designs First

First, we have to do a little bit more research. We need to figure out what specific types of designs customers are already buying. This way, you’ll also be able to see that the results we’re going to get from Claude are good enough to sell.

Then, we’re going to use Claude design to create our own original designs. These will target the niches that we know customers are already coming to these platforms looking to buy. And then, I’ll also show you how we can use Claude and a few other AI tools. We can get finished product listings posted for sale in just a few minutes.

You can do research in a bunch of different ways. But I typically recommend starting on the platform that you’re looking to sell on.

Finding Best Sellers on Target Platforms

So, if you’re okay with posting a few videos about the products you’re making and you want to start on a TikTok shop, you can come and just look at which products have the most sales. Note down the designs that they’re using in those product listings.

And if you want to start selling on Etsy, you can do the exact same thing. You might need to install a plugin like the listing view plugin. This lets you actually see all of the sales data below each one of these listings. It’s super helpful for identifying specific listings that are doing better than others.

When you’re doing research, you’re trying to find existing best sellers. That shows you that customers are interested in that specific niche and that specific design style.

Using Proven Designs as Inspiration

Once you know that a specific niche and a specific design style are already proven to sell super well. For example, this is sort of the sarcasm niche, and it’s in a typewriter-style font. Now, I know there’s at least demand for this type of product.

So, if I posted something for sale, I know that there are at least some customers who might be interested in it. Your goal is to find listings like these that make consistent sales over time. You can use them as inspiration when you go to create your own.

One of the things I always look for is whether a specific design can be turned into a template. For example, life happens, cats help, could be life happens, dogs help, or basically any other idea that you can slot in there.

Scaling Through Templates

So, although this one specific design is only selling 40 times a year, if we were able to make a hundred versions of that product, that one design idea could make us a lot of money.

And since we know that the more listings we have, the more money we make, it’s clear that even if not every single design we make and post for sale is an absolute winner, it’s worth building up a larger catalog over time. And this is exactly where Claude comes into play.

Building a Simple Text Design Tool

The first way we can use Claude is to build out a simple text design automation tool. This tool creates tons of simple text designs just like the ones that you see selling super well right here in just a couple of minutes.

To do this, I’m going to be using Claude Design. So, when you come to claude.ai, you can click on this design button over here on the side. It will take you to the design website.

This is essentially a completely new design tool from Claude. You have all of the projects and designs you’ve worked on on the right, with some examples from Claude as well. These are actually pretty cool examples to scroll through if you have the time.

Setting Up Your Design Generator

And then we have this control panel over here on the left. So, we can start by building out a new project. I’m going to call this our design generator. I’m going to change our design system to none. And we can leave high fidelity checked and just hit create.

This is where we can start to build out tools that will help us make text designs. Now, you can play around in Claw Design and try to build out your own tools to help you generate designs. And I actually recommend you do.

But since you’re reading this, just to save you a little bit of extra time, I’ve already gone ahead and put together this entire prompt. You can grab it for free in a Google Doc right below the subscribe button. And it will basically get Claude Design to build you a fully robust tool. It does the exact type of design that we’re trying to make right here.

Creating the Bulk Design Tool

So, I’m just going to copy the entire prompt. Come back and paste it into Claude Design. You can see I’ve pasted those 57 lines. And instead of checking this hi-fi design, I’m going to uncheck it and hit send.

Unchecking it is just going to save some of those credits towards your weekly limit. This lets you run through more design generations. Do this unless you want this app to look super aesthetic right out of the box.

Now you can see it created a to-do list with all of the elements that we want to build out. It’s going to start writing the script to actually create our design creation tool.

Refining Prompts for Better Results

Now, while we wait for Claude to build out our app, I wanted to talk about how you actually get to the point where you have a more detailed prompt like this. You do this without having to manually write out the entire thing yourself. And the key is working back and forth with Claude in chat mode.

So, this is the exact prompt I use. I say, “Create a prompt that I can use to build out the bulk design generator with PNG download. Users should be able to change the font and create some sort of templates to reuse.” And I showed the template for my cardio is the example.

And when you send this off, assuming you’ve seen my previous Claude video where I talk about the entire setup that you should be following to get the absolute best results out of Claude, it’s going to work back and forth with you. It asks multiple questions about how it should build out that tool. And you can answer those questions.

And when it finally returns you the full prompt, it’s going to be much more detailed. It has a lot more context about what exactly you’re trying to build. So that when you run that prompt, you get something that’s actually usable.

Using the Bulk T-Shirt Generator

And now, if we come back into claw design, you can see I haven’t run any other prompts. It was just that one prompt that I ran. And this is what we get. And it might look a little confusing at first. But this is essentially an entire bulk t-shirt generator right inside of Claude Design.

So over here on the left, you can see we have our template builder. So this allows us to choose from a list of presets, or we can create our own. There are a few different options that are preloaded. For example, my hobby is cardio. We could change this to hobby is my therapy, for example.

And then down here in the bottom, we can provide the hobbies or the nouns depending on what the template structure requires. It’s already preloaded with a bunch of different niches that we could target. This is super cool.

In the middle, we have the design controls. We can select between a bunch of different fonts that are pre-loaded into our design generator. We can control the design color if we want to. We can change the alignment if we want the designs stacked or just a couple of lines.

We can transform the text depending on the case style that we want. And there’s a bunch of other modifications that we can make all within our design editor.

In a matter of maybe 5 minutes, it was able to build out this tool. It can essentially give us endless designs depending on the templates that we preload. All from a click of a button.

Generating Multiple Designs Fast

So now what I can do is come back into Claude and enter incognito. I say, “Give me a list of 20 hobby ideas formatted like this.” Then I’m going to paste in all of those hobbies and hit enter. And now we have 20 new ideas that we can use to make designs.

So I’m going to copy these. I’m going to come in and paste them in. We’ll change the font to something a little bit more universal. Maybe that uh, possibly more people can like. I think the twoline design looks good. We’ll uh also scale these up a little bit so that they look good on the t-shirts. And we’ll hit generate.

And now you can see we have 28 designs finished. And as we scroll through here, you can see all of those designs preloaded on transparent backgrounds, ready to go. We could download these and upload them to the t-shirts that we’re selling. And we literally did all of this in less than five minutes.

And because this is your custom tool, you can modify it depending on what you need. So we can say something like, I need to be able to align the designs to the top of the print area. I can give the prompt for my revision. Hit send. And after a couple of seconds, you can see that we now have the vertical alignment enabled. Our designs can always be centered and positioned exactly how we’d want.

So, this essentially gives us 28 product designs that we could export and upload to our t-shirts. And that doesn’t even include all of the other templates. If we wanted to switch out all of these design settings, we could just pick a different template. Hit generate, and get a bunch of other designs ready to go.

Turning Designs into Products

I think we’re going to go with a hobby as my cardio. We’re going to do the designs in white. And from here, we can just download all of those as a zip file to use on our t-shirts.

And if I open these designs up, you can’t see it super well since it’s a white design on a white background. But the text is there, and the designs are ready to go.

The fact that you can do this so easily is completely insane. Like the fact that entire businesses are built on selling simple text-based t-shirts just like these with funny sayings. Individual listings make thousands of dollars per year. This is absolutely crazy.

You could make hundreds of designs targeting any niche imaginable. You can change out the fonts, basically targeting any type of niche that you want, in just a few minutes. It’s honestly absolutely insane that you can do all of this. And this is just one of three design automations that I’ll show you how to make in this article.

Choosing a Print Provider

But before we get into those, let me show you how you can take these designs and turn them into finished products in less than 10 minutes. The first decision is who’s going to print and fulfill your t-shirts for you.

Now, there are a lot of options out there. But you’ll probably end up going with a company like Printify. Most of the best-selling t-shirts on Etsy and on TikTok Shop are selling this Comfort Colors 1717 brand shirt with the designs printed on them.

And on TikTok Shop, for example, they typically sell for around $19 with $4 of shipping. So, between $23 to $25 of revenue. And if you want to sell that exact same t-shirt, the comfort colors 1717 through Printify, they’re going to charge you $10.70 for the product and $4 for shipping.

So that leaves you with about $8 of profit per sale on a listing like this one. This is just around 34% profit margin.

Maximizing Profit Margins

And those few dollars through Printify go a long way. If you choose to sell through Printful or Gelato, which are other popular options, the exact same product costs a few dollars more. It’s going to cost you a little over $20 per product that you sell. This might only leave you with a $4 to $5 profit per sale.

So, in Printify, you can select the product that you want to sell and hit start designing. You can choose the specific color options that you want to list for sale. Upload one of your designs. Make sure that the size and position look good, and just hit save.

From here, Printify builds out an entire product listing for you. It’s ready to publish for sale on Etsy, TikTok Shop, or wherever you want to sell it.

There are also bulk uploading options, like a pre-list. You can select a template from your Printify shop. You can upload all of your designs at once. Hit upload, create, and it’s going to publish all of those designs into your Printify account at once. This is because uploading them one at a time can take a while.

All of them are imported directly into Printify without me having to go through and create each one by hand.

Creating High-Quality Mockups

And once our designs are in Printify and we publish them to our sales channel, the next step is to get high-quality mock-ups. One of the reasons these listings sell hundreds of thousands of times is because it looks like an actual, realistic product. The customer can envision buying and owning it.

This is simply done by putting their design on what’s called a product mockup. Luckily, you can buy the exact mockups that these top-performing shops are using on marketplaces like Etsy for just a couple of dollars.

I recommend buying these. Typically, the default mockups that Printify uses aren’t going to generate the same level of sales. And we can actually use a different AI tool to help automate the mockup creation process as well. This tool is called the listing view. It has sort of two features.

First is the market research side, which you’ve already seen at work. It provides sales estimates for listings on Etsy’s marketplace. The second are the management tools.

Automating Mockups and Optimization

Now, if we come over into the asset library, this is where we can create our product mock-ups. We’ll come into the mockup templates tab. We’ll create a new collection called shirt mockups. I bought these mockups online. So, we’re going to upload them.

Make sure that they’re defined as mockup templates. We’ll add them to that shirt mock-up collection. Here, we can just click into one of these templates. Hit the define mockup region. I’m going to use the t-shirt print area preset. Scale this down until it looks like the appropriate print area for the mockup I’m creating. I think this looks good, so we’ll hit save.

And now we can upload the t-shirt design that we want to use. So, we can drag that in. And then all we have to do is select it. Hit generate mockups. We can select the entire mockup collection to apply this mockup to all three templates that we have.

I like lowering the opacity just a little bit to preserve some of the realism from the design. And we’ll hit generate three mockups. And just like that, after a few seconds, we have three mockups ready to go. These look a lot better than Printify’s generic one.

You can use the listing optimizer tool to open up the listings that you published for sale in your shop. And we can upload those mockups that we just generated directly into our listing.

And once our images are in place, we can also use listing views AI with Plot Opus. This generates the title, tags, and description for this listing. We get the most optimized SEO when we actually publish this for sale.

Now, we have a fully optimized listing on Etsy that’s ready to start making sales. That’s almost the entire process. You’re able to automate almost everything using two or three tools.

Power of Multiple Design Methods

And that’s all, just based on the first of the three design methods. You could do the math. But if we added in over a hundred different hobby niche ideas and had around five good templates that customers were actively buying, that’s over 500 designs.

And that doesn’t even account for if we wanted to make different versions using different fonts, styling, sizing, or any other types of variations for these designs. So, although this was a simple example, hopefully you can see how powerful it is.

Bulk Text with Graphic Designs

With that, let’s move on to arguably an even cooler design method. This is the bulk text with a graphic placeholder. Once again, you can grab this entire prompt from down below. We’re going to bring it over into Claw Design.

This time, I’ll leave my default design system on. You can see how it looks different visually. And we’re just going to drop that prompt in and hit submit. This is where it starts to get really powerful.

This layout might look a little bit more complicated. But that’s because there are a lot more features packed in here. We’re essentially able to generate these templates of stylized text. They are based around a graphic or theme and export them in bulk.

You’ve probably seen designs like these. It’s a funny saying and a simple graphic combination. This one specifically that says off to cause a kerfuffle is making thousands of dollars per month on several listings here on Etsy. And of course, the same type of design style sells super well on TikTok as well.

Generating Bulk Graphic Designs

So, we could come to Claude and ask for several variations of these sayings. Hit generate. Then, we just need to upload an image directly into our design. I’m going to scale it up a little bit. We can position it and scale it depending on how we want it to appear in our designs.

Then, I’m just going to grab a few of these things from Claude. Paste them into our slogan generator and hit generate designs. So, now you can see what these are starting to look like. But we can take it a step further.

If we click on the design files, what we can do is upload custom fonts that we want to use directly into our design project. So now I just have to tell Claude, make sure that I can use my custom fonts that I’ve uploaded into the project as options in the drop-down.

And now we can select our own custom fonts from the drop-down. So I’ve just added the American typewriter. We might need to adjust the size here. But you can see that our custom font is showing up in the designs.

We can obviously play around with some of the sizing. We can adjust things like the curve of the text. We get all of these designs dialed in in bulk without having to do all of them manually. This even gave us a few different pre-built layout options. We can choose from them depending on the style that we’re trying to go for. This is just absolutely insane when you look at it.

This basically means you can create as many designs as you want in the time that it would take you to normally create one. Once again, I can download all of these as a zip file. Then upload them to my t-shirts whenever I’m ready.

Pattern Overlay Design Method

Now, if those other ones didn’t blow your mind, hopefully this last one will. This type of design, where it’s just some kind of text or shape with a pattern overlay behind it, sells like crazy.

There are all sorts of different design styles like this one. It’s just a floral pattern shown through the text. It’s making $2,000 a month. Again, here’s another floral design style. It has 48 sales a month.

These come in a bunch of different styles, from leopard prints to floral prints. And they all tend to sell super well. And now we can do the same right inside of Claude Design.

So what this did is it built out a pattern press tool. Once again, the prompt is in the description. First, I’m going to upload a couple of fonts into my project file. This lets me get custom designs that I want to use.

And we also need some kind of pattern background to use for these designs. The easiest way I found to do this is to use an image generator like MidJourney. So, if you write out any kind of prompt describing the type of pattern you want to get and you add d-tile to the end of that prompt, it’ll create a repeating pattern. You can download it and insert it into our tool to show behind the text.

For example, if we want a checkerboard, this one looks really nice if we want to put it behind some kind of text. So, I can download these patterns to my computer. I can upload them directly into our tool. You can see it update all of our designs in real time.

Why These Tools Remove Barriers

I think that even if you have absolutely zero design skill, something like this can help you start making decent-looking designs in just a few minutes. It should really remove a lot of those barriers if creating and selling t-shirt designs sounds like something you want to do.

And so now we can actually start to design out some real designs here. So I’ve uploaded my custom fonts. We could do either nectarine, which has sort of this more playful style about it. I think maybe we could scale up the pattern size quite a bit. That’s looking pretty good.

Of course, we also have our list of slogans. So, however many slogans we add, that’s how many designs it’s going to create for us. You can preview it on a bunch of different backgrounds. We can also control the border thickness and whether it’s distressed or not.

I think that the thinner borders tend to look better with this style of design. We can also add an arch or a bend to these designs if we want to. So, I think something like that is going to look really good. And from here, we have a bunch of designs that are arguably ready to go.

The cool thing about this is that no matter how many single-word designs you want to make, you can always just swap out the pattern for something else. Or you can change the font and get a completely new design with a completely different style, all in just a few seconds.

And because we know this design works so well, and it’s so easy to automate at this point, this makes it, in my opinion, one of the coolest ways to automate generating designs if you run a t-shirt business.

Final Thoughts

If you’re curious to learn more about selling t-shirts, it’s actually something that I’ve done for the last six years. And I’ve got a completely free full tutorial up here on YouTube. If you made it through this article, you should go check that one out now.

But yeah, I hope you enjoyed. I hope you found Claude Design as cool as I did. And hopefully it’s useful to you in some way. Let me know in the comments if this is something you’ll use. Or if you’ll use Claude Design in a completely different way than I haven’t thought of.

And yeah, that’s about it. So, as always.