Why I Started Selling Digital Products on Etsy Too

Everything I’ve built so far leans on a platform having some kind of built-in audience. The Obsidian plugins sell because Obsidian has a community that browses its plugin directory looking for exactly that kind of tool. The n8n templates sell — or at least get seen — because n8n.io has its own template library with people actively searching for workflows to solve a specific problem. Gumroad, on its own, doesn’t do that. It’s a checkout page. It converts once someone already knows what they want and where to find it, but it doesn’t put a product in front of someone who wasn’t already looking.

That’s fine for plugins and workflow templates, because those already have a place with search intent built in. It’s a much harder problem for anything that doesn’t have an obvious home — a spreadsheet template, a printable, a piece of digital design work that isn’t tied to any particular software’s plugin ecosystem. For that category of product, I didn’t have a platform with the right kind of built-in audience. So I started selling on Etsy.

What Etsy actually offers that Gumroad doesn’t

Etsy is a search engine with a checkout attached. People go there already looking to buy something specific — a tracker, a planner, a printable, a personalized gift — and the platform’s own search surfaces relevant listings to that intent. That’s the opposite of Gumroad, where the traffic has to come from somewhere else first (a blog post, a social share, a direct link) before the checkout page ever sees a visitor.

I’d already seen this pattern once, with the Obsidian plugins versus the SaaS boilerplates. The plugins had a community sending them traffic. The boilerplates didn’t, and their view counts showed it — a handful of views each, built in the same amount of time as the plugins, with none of the discovery. The lesson from that wasn’t “plugins are better than boilerplates.” It was “a product without a platform that already wants it is going to struggle no matter how good the build is.” Etsy is the same lesson applied to a different kind of product.

Why not just push everything harder on Gumroad

I could keep trying to drive more traffic to Gumroad listings through content and community posting, and I still do that for the products that make sense there — SchemaLens is a recent example, still relying entirely on that manual push. But it means every single sale depends on me personally generating the traffic — there’s no search layer doing any of the work. That’s a fragile setup for anything beyond a handful of products, and it means the type of product is constrained by what I’m willing and able to promote manually forever.

Opening a separate shop on a platform built around search intent isn’t a replacement for that. It’s a different lane for a different kind of product — one where the platform itself does some of the discovery work, the way Obsidian’s plugin directory does for the plugins.

Where this stands

The shop is new, new enough that I’m not going to dress up a handful of early views as a trend. What I can say is that the decision itself follows the same logic as everything else here: figure out where a product’s actual buyers already are, then go there, instead of assuming good content will eventually drag people to wherever I happen to be selling. Whether that logic holds for this shop the way it held for the plugins is something I’ll only know with time and can only report once I’ve actually got something to report.

You can see what I’ve built and where you can find it at ibrh96.gumroad.com.