The Playbook

Reverse-Engineering Demand on Etsy and Amazon Before You Make Anything

The best time to find out nobody wants your product is before you've bought the inventory.

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There's a particular kind of pain I want to help you avoid: the garage full of stuff nobody's buying. And the fix is almost embarrassingly simple. Sell where the buyers already are, watch what actually moves, and let them tell you what to make.

Start with Etsy, because Etsy is a demand machine with the buyers pre-installed. Two sisters set flowers in resin and sold the jewelry on Etsy — and in year one, per the source, they did 5,000+ online sales and $65,000+ in revenue. They didn't build a store and pray traffic would come. They plugged into a marketplace that already had people hunting for exactly that. Bailey's Blossoms — now a multi-million-dollar children's clothing business — started at Erin Hooley's kitchen table with no sewing training, selling hair accessories on Etsy to support her family. The marketplace was the launchpad, not the destination.

This is the whole insight: an existing marketplace hands you built-in buyer traffic so you can validate before you invest. You find out what sells while making early money, instead of guessing in a vacuum.

Now, "reverse-engineering demand" means something specific. It's not just listing your thing and hoping. It's reading the marketplace like a research report. What's ranking? What are people already searching and buying? What are they begging competitors for?

That last one is a play I stole from Zapier, and it's pure gold. Founder Wade Foster went onto product support forums and found users asking competitors for integrations that didn't exist yet. He'd reply, offer to build it now, and drop a landing-page link. Those pages got maybe 10–15 visitors — but around half of them signed up. Fifty percent. Because he wasn't guessing at demand; he found people who had literally already voiced the exact need out loud. On Amazon and Etsy the equivalent is sitting in the reviews and Q&A of existing products, reading every one-star and three-star review, and noting what's missing. The complaints are your product spec.

Which brings me to Nadeef Bidet, one of my favorite validation stories. Ahmad Iqbal didn't start by making a bidet. He asked his target market why they didn't already own a handheld bidet. He got two objections back: "hard to install" and "not sold here." So he built the product and the entire pitch around dissolving those two specific complaints. That business reportedly runs around $120K a year with zero employees. He didn't invent demand. He found the objection standing between people and a purchase, and removed it.

Here's how I'd actually run this before making anything:

First, go to Etsy or Amazon and search the terms a buyer would use — not your clever brand name, the plain-English thing people type. See what comes up, how many reviews the top listings have, how recent those reviews are. Volume of reviews is a proxy for volume of sales. That's your demand signal, free.

Second, read the reviews like a detective. The three-star reviews especially — those are buyers who wanted it to work and were let down by something specific. Every recurring complaint is either a product you should make or a listing angle nobody's claimed.

Third, if you can, list a minimum version and watch real behavior. The tea-subscription founder in the research partnered with a tea farmer's market booth to create blends before scaling into a subscription box reportedly on track toward seven figures. Pipcorn debuted at Smorgasburg, a Brooklyn open-air market, hand-stamping bags of heirloom popcorn kernels — testing the actual product on actual buyers before Whole Foods and Oprah and Shark Tank. Southern Elegance Candle Company started at a local farmers market pulling around $200 a weekend, gathering face-to-face feedback, before growing toward roughly $20K a month.

The physical-market founders and the Etsy founders are running the same play as the Zapier founder, just in different venues: put the thing in front of real buyers cheaply, watch what happens, listen to the objections, adjust. The marketplace is your focus group that pays you.

One more thing. Don't fall in love with the idea before the market votes. Better Booch spent the first few months at farmers markets perfecting recipes on live feedback — the markets were literally their income and their R&D. That's the posture I want you in. Curious, cheap, listening.

Make the thing the market already told you it wants. It's a lot less romantic than the version where you invent a masterpiece in secret. It also works.

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