TGIF. Welcome back to the Creator Economy NYC newsletter, your weekly hit of insights and strategies to help you build, monetize, and scale as a creator.

We've been going deep on money recently from the creator tax playbook to the financial mistakes creators keep making. But there's one money conversation we haven't had yet.

As a creator, you’ll hear often to diversify your revenue. Whether that’s launching a product or building a merch line, or starting a course, it can be good advice.

But launching a product is so much harder than it looks. Most creators who jump in without understanding the difference end up with dead inventory, an abandoned Shopify store, and more stress than they started with.

This week: what we've learned from NYC creators who've actually built product businesses, the expensive mistakes, frameworks to follow, and the questions you need to answer before you launch anything.

Let's get into it.

Caitlyn Kumi is the founder of Miss Empowher and launched her Shopify store back in 2020 selling waist beads. 

Five years later, Shopify is still her backbone. 

Why?

Domain management, PayPal integration, solid templates, and consistent product updates that actually keep up with how creators work. 

Her take for any creator thinking about where to sell? If you have a product, Shopify makes the operational side feel less like a headache and more like a system.

That is the kind of infrastructure the Creator Economy NYC community builds on.

P.S. she even got to link up with the Shopify NY space to host one of her own events. The platform showed up for her IRL too.

You've probably seen the pitch a hundred times by now. Some thread or reel telling you that the path to "real" creator revenue is products. Courses, merch, templates, physical goods - just build something and sell it.

And look — we literally built a framework around this. Commerce Mountain maps the progression from affiliate deals to brand partnerships to building your own thing.

But building your own product ≠ launch something, anything, and the money will follow.

You might know Bryan Reisberg as the human creator behind Maxine the Fluffy Corgi. He’s now built Little Chonk, a custom-designed dog carrier backpack, after years of carrying his dog Maxine around New York in bags that kept ripping (and he sells dog supplements now too.)

He designed it from the ground up, raised money, found manufacturers, patented the design, sold out in FOUR minutes on launch day. It made more than $1M in the first year. 

Here's what he says about it now:

And: "The launch is overrated. What are you going to do when you stock out and you can't get more supply? What happens when people stop buying your product?"

That gap between launch and sustainable business is where most creator commerce falls apart. Here's how to make sure yours doesn't.

Selling a product once is a project. Keeping people buying is a company - with operations, supply chain, customer service, legal, and accounting that have nothing to do with content.

Bryan cautions other creators: "I will give you every reason not to do it. And if you still want to do it, godspeed, go for it. Because it really takes some kind of psychosis."

He took a $30,000 loss on his first launch because the team didn't understand international shipping duties… yikes. Got sued the day the product went live. 

Jacob McCourt, who leads creator partnerships at Shopify and works with 50 to 100 creators a year on product launches, backed this up:

That's the Shopify guy telling you to slow down. Listen to the Shopify guy.

There's a huge spectrum between putting a graphic or branding on a Printful tee and designing a product from scratch - and knowing where you belong on that spectrum right now is half the battle.

Here's how David Roa, co-founder of Superlost Coffee in Bushwick, breaks it down. His company white-labels coffee for creators, and he sees the full range:

"There is a whole hierarchy with white labeling. At the bottom is stuff like Printful — you're, say, putting a logo on [standard apparel], someone's doing all of it. It can get up to where we'll actually help them cup the coffees, source them, design the packaging. We just say: open up a Shopify store, sell it, we'll do the rest."

"The amount of effort you put into it is what you're going to get out of it,” he adds. 

You can start simple and build up. David sees creators begin with a simple branded product, then gradually get more involved in sourcing and quality control as revenue justifies it.

Bryan didn't hold back: "I can't tell you how many content creators I've met. They launch a product and then they're not putting out any content showcasing that product in any way and they're like, 'I just don't want to be a salesman.' Well, then don't try and sell a product."

Commerce isn't passive income. It's not "build it and they will come." It's a second full-time job layered on top of the one you already have.

And if the idea of constantly talking about your product in your content makes you want to quit, that's actually useful information. It means this might not be your revenue path right now.

And it's fine — not every revenue path requires a physical product. Commerce is one path, not the only path.

Bryan built a product because his audiences literally told him to. Bryan spent years in DMs having real conversations with pet parents which ended up being his market research.

And he emphasized going beyond the platforms: "Get off of those platforms. Go find out where they're talking to other people because there are really small pockets. Facebook groups were huge for us."

The common thread: Bryan didn’t invent a product in a vacuum. He responded to demand that already existed. 

P.S. This newsletter is a recap from our panel with Shopify. You can watch the full recap here. 

Our next event is being planned for May - and we're opening up 3 sponsor slots for brands who want in.

Join the likes of Adobe Express and others in getting your brand in front of the most influential community in the creator economy.

Inquire here.

The F*ck It, Create It Workbook is the thing that finally gets you off the sideline.

It’s a guided system — with companion videos — that walks you through the exact mental blocks keeping you stuck and forces you to ship your first piece of content, product, event… whatever you’ve been sitting on.

One time purchase of $57 for the workbook and companion videos.

The Creator Goal Setting Guide (FREE): A simple but powerful document to help you declare who you want to BECOME in 2026. Get it here.

The Creator Accountability System (FREE): Your visual companion for consistent creation in 2026. Get it here.

Thanks for reading! If this saves even one person from a $30,000 lesson in international shipping duties, I'll sleep well this weekend. See you next week.

P.S. would you mind taking 3 minutes to fill out our creator business survey? It’ll help shape the future of resources and access we have in this industry. Take it here.

F*ck It, Create It,

Brett