How I turned a hospital stay into $961.39 (and counting) with a simple Etsy printable

My “aha moment” about passive income

Mom working on laptop next to sleeping child; Image created by the author using Dall-E

Last year, my two-year-old son needed to stay in the hospital for a few days. Nothing super serious, but it meant that I needed to significantly adjust my work schedule for my private tutoring business so that I could stay with him and keep him entertained.

We did lots of coloring, went through several sticker books, and redid the same puzzle about a billion times.

Meanwhile, as a self-employed solopreneur, it was stressful to know that at the same time that we were racking up hospital bills, I was simultaneously losing out opportunities to bring in money from my tutoring business.

My Simple Product

During one of his naptimes, however, I decided to pull out my laptop and create a printable to sell on the Etsy shop I had just started a couple months prior. (Here’s a free workshop from the program I used to get started.)

So far, I hadn’t done much with my Etsy shop, so I had only made a whopping $12, but I had an idea of a printable that wouldn’t be too complex to create so I decided to go for it.

I created it over the next two naptimes.