#85 - From Stuck to Sold-Out: Real HBSA Student Success Stories You Need to Hear

Ever wondered if the Handmade Business Success Academy actually works?

In this episode, you’ll hear straight from HBSA students who’ve gone from stuck, overwhelmed, and doubting themselves - to confident, consistent handmade business owners.

They share how the Academy helped them:

💡 Find focus and stop “throwing spaghetti at the wall”

📈 Boost conversion rates and sales (some hit 2,000+ Etsy orders!)

💬 Build real confidence in marketing and SEO

🤝 Join a supportive community that keeps them going when business feels tough

If you’ve ever thought, “Could that really be me?” - this episode will give you the proof (and goosebumps) that it absolutely can.

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🎙 Welcome to the Handmade Bosses Podcast with Steph 👋

If you’re dreaming of starting your handmade business or knee-deep in Etsy listings and feeling stuck - you’re in the right place.

I’m Steph - handmade business coach, Etsy seller since 2016, and founder of Handmade Bosses. I help makers go from overwhelmed to consistent sales (yes, even if you’re just starting).

🛍 Learn how to:

• Start and grow on Etsy

• Turn browsers into buyers

• Master SEO, branding, pricing

• Find your niche and ideal customer

• Scale beyond Etsy to your own website

💸 I’ve helped thousands of makers build profitable 4 and 5-figure shops — and in this podcast, I’ll show you how too.

✨ Free starter resources: handmadebosses.com/freeresources

🎓 Deeper help? Explore the HBSA, the SMS & more: handmadebosses.com/paidresources

📅 Join our Facebook group for free workshops: facebook.com/groups/handmadebosses/events

📸 Follow us on Instagram for tips and inspo: instagram.com/handmadebosses

Hit follow, grab a brew, and let’s grow your handmade biz.

Love, ...

Transcript

The world of handmade business can be tough When trying to monetize what you love We've got truth bombs and motivation too To help you find your way through Passion to profit, let's start today Cause the world needs what you create Tune in right now, it's your shot To learn how to be a Handmade Boss Hello everyone and welcome back to the How To Be A Handmade Boss podcast. So today it's going to be a little bit of a different format because today we're going to be chatting with students who are in the HBSA about the HBSA and we're really going to be digging into whether or not they feel that the course has worked for them. I'm here with Jen.

Hi. What impact has the Academy made on your business? It's been huge, Steph. Like, it's honestly been massive.

I think, I don't know if I would have gotten to the hard points and then continued, like, pushed past it without the HBSA because it was always such a nice place, like I said, to come back to when I was finding things hard or I didn't know how to do certain things like SEO. I mean, I still don't think I've quite got there with that yet, but I'm getting there. So yeah, it's always just been a place to come back to.

And I think Without it and without the help and without the community, it would have been really hard on my own to try and figure this stuff out because you don't know what you don't know, basically. And it's such a hard thing, especially if you come in and you start your business maybe as a hobby and then you think, okay, I want to turn this into something real. If you don't come from a business background or you're not that way-minded, it's hard to know all the things, whereas the course just sets it out in such an easy, simple way for you to follow it through and just be like, oh, so that's what that means or that's how I do that.

It's just been such a great place and a great resource to help build my business. And I think that's the reason that I've managed to do it for seven years and hopefully for a lifetime more. I'm here with Fran. Hi Fran.

Hi. So what impact has, I would say, like the HBSA and your current business, what impact has that had on your life? So it's just brought me a lot of happiness to be honest. It's really nice just to have that joint something with someone and to have the idea that actually now I've got something that's going to build in my future and I'm going to have a business that's going to just run while I sleep.

And I can just go off and do what I want, when I want, and actually it'll still be there, it'll still be running. And so yeah, it's just brought like a really positive glow to my life, actually. And yeah, it's just, yeah, I mean, not like, you know, it's brand new business, so I'm not a millionaire yet. But yeah, it's the, yeah.

The thought is there and it's just a really positive thing. What is your favourite part of the course? What's the thing that you get to, because you've probably gone through it a couple of times now, what's your part where you get to and you're like, yes, I enjoy it. probably like the kind of like the setting up of the shop and making it look all lovely and like how to design the banners and all that kind of like pretty stuff.

I think yeah mainly that Etsy is like a long-term project like I think it's sort of you hear a lot about Etsy like oh yeah just open shop you'll make loads of money and that'll be brilliant and I think yeah actually the fact that you've got to persevere you've got to get it set up right and there's sort of there aren't really any quick wins with it. You've got to keep going. So, yeah, I think that's the one thing I would keep in my brain from there.

There's a lot of layers to it, isn't there? We are going to hear from Karen. There's something about you that clicked. There's a lot of me in you, you know, I see a lot of similarity and I'm like, I like listening to her.

She seems down to earth. It's helped me a lot with the marketing, you know, on pinning down, you know, like I had an idea who my target market was. But doing that research, and I mean, I spent time on it. I spent two weeks on Target Market and dug in like five hours a day, really digging into it and doing the research and grinding through.

I mean, there's 10 businesses you're looking at. You can't just give them a half an hour. You really need to dig and find out what you're seeing and what they're doing. And a lot of them aren't marketing at all.

I'm like, okay, well, maybe they don't want to be a full-time business either. You don't know. That's one thing you don't know. But it has helped a lot on the marketing aspects of my business.

It's where, you know, you get the, oh, okay, that helps. Yeah. I believe, you know, like going through the Academy has given me that work-life balance that I've always, you know, I always try to work towards. So now let's hear from HBSA student Pash.

I thought, oh wow, this woman actually knows what she's talking about. And I got the book and I've started reading it. I'm not very far through because loads of other things have happened, but I started reading that. And then the poster song came on and I thought, brilliant, I'm going to do that.

And I'd been thinking about joining the HBSA, but at the time I was thinking, oh, problems, you know, I don't, I wasn't, I guess I wasn't willing to invest in myself. And after doing the post-a-thon, I just thought, you know what, I can do this. And I just made the leap and I thought, right, I'm going to join HBSA. Hand on heart, it's the best thing I've done this year.

Next up is Eric. I think the biggest thing for us was it just helped us get set up properly right off the bat. Obviously you can go in and change stuff afterwards, but I think if you can do it do it right from the beginning. It makes it a lot smoother.

So that was a big thing. I had never had an Etsy shop before. I'd never had my own website before. I'd gone to business school.

I'd learned about marketing and that sort of thing, but I hadn't really applied it in that way. So the HBSA was just a really nice kind of foundation to learn how to use Etsy, like what to do tag wise, how to, a lot of the technical side of things. And then the group has been probably one of the most fun parts because being in business by yourself can definitely be hard at times. Um, there's a lot of ups and downs and it's nice to have that community where, you know, we, I just put a post last week, we just hit 2000 sales on our Etsy shop and you get so many comments and, everybody's supportive, or if you have a question

where you have something that you just can't quite figure out, you have, you know, a couple thousand people to go and ask, does anybody have an idea on this? And you get a lot of good feedback. And then you also get to help other people who maybe you've learned from some mistakes that you've made and you can give some advice on, oh, well, this is what we did and it didn't work. Maybe think about a different strategy.

So it's just a really nice community that makes it a little bit easier to not just be stuck in business by yourself and going through that roller coaster. I think the course is really, really valuable, especially if you, if you didn't go to business school, or if you haven't had your own business before, there's so much good stuff in there that you would never even think of. So I would always suggest doing that at the start, but then once you've done the course, then it's, you know, then the community side of things is what really becomes the value after that. Okay, so next is Vicky.

It's given me focus, really. That's what it's really done. It's given me focus and direction because I was throwing spaghetti at the wall to steal a phrase and it was just, yeah, not knowing what to do in what order and sort of sitting down and doing the HBSA and working through that first module, it just kind of was like, oh, yes, I can do this.

It's not going to be crazy. It's not going to be trying to do a million things at once. I'm only part way through the second module, second part of it. But the difference to my shop is amazing.

It's, Like I say, gone from virtually no conversion rate at all to like a 5% conversion rate. Next up is Tara. Okay so a year ago I was posting something on Etsy finding it wasn't selling in a week and taking the listing down and having some sort of panic attack. Now I'm selling in a few local shops, commission-based so it doesn't cost either of us any money until I make a sale which I've started doing now.

My Etsy shop, I'm putting it up there and just, you know, regularly posting on Instagram and knowing that the views will get there once it kind of sorts itself out in the algorithm. I've got the weekends and evenings free to spend with my girls because I'm not panicking about the next craft fair and that I need to have 20 products made just in case they all sell out. I've kind of like got a more family life balance back, I think. It's made me feel like I'm part of a family.

So Charli is up next. I think it's had quite a huge one actually, I'd say. It's been so helpful. The biggest thing for me is that it's given me structure because I can be quite scatterbrained.

So it's really given me a vision and got a structure now that I didn't have before. So, I mean, it's amazing because I'm like, I'm now full time, which is really cool. Like, I would say when I first went full time, I was quite scared because I changed a lot of stuff and rebranded and I was like, oh, and I think when you, I didn't realize, but when you rebrand, there is, there can be like a little bit of a dip, a bit of a business dip because so much is changing, but it's got so much better now.

You know, it's doing so much better than it's ever done. Laura is up next. I think seeing when you did the kind of 30 minutes a day, kind of, I found out that that was a thing. I was like, you know what, that is manageable.

I can do that. Because up until that point, I was literally going, I'm going to do this, I need to do my photos, I need to do my social media, I need to do this. And it was just literally trying to do everything. I was running around like a headless chicken trying to do everything all at once.

And not really achieving anything because I was trying to do too many things all at the same time. But just having it broken down into these little tiny chunks, I'm just like, OK, so my photos aren't being done at the moment, but I'm doing all the other things and I know that the photos will get done, I think, in the next module. And be done properly rather than being done in a rush. So just having it all laid out like that, it's just, it's calm and I'm not running around like a headless chicken anymore.

I feel like it's creating a really like solid base for having a successful business. So guys, I really, really hope that you've loved hearing from all of the HBSA students in today's episode.