How to Avoid the Race to the Bottom
What happens when everyone follows the exact same business advice.
🐥 A quick note: Yes, the silly Painter Duck illustrations in this post were created with AI. They’re here to make you smile. I use AI as one of many creative tools, alongside my paintbrushes, colored pencils, and increasingly questionable business decisions. This post isn’t anti-AI. It’s about questioning business advice in a marketplace that AI has fundamentally changed.
For the past year, I've been trying to figure out how creative people actually make money online.
You know the advice.
Sell digital downloads.
Open an Etsy shop.
Create printable planners.
Make stickers.
Join affiliate programs.
Start a YouTube channel.
Write a book and sell it on Amazon.
Start a blog.
Build an email list.
Create a course.
Sell print-on-demand products.
Buy in bulk from Alibaba.
Become an influencer.
Grow your social media.
Sell more digital downloads.
…and if that doesn't work, obviously you just need to sell MORE digital downloads.
Everyone says the same things. Do the same things.
Each time I look at one of these markets, I don't see opportunity. I see thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of people all trying to sell nearly the same thing. AI has only accelerated it. Today someone can generate hundreds of products before lunch and have them listed for sale before dinner.
That's not competition anymore. That's a race to the bottom.
The lowest price wins. The biggest marketplace wins. The loudest algorithm wins.
Etsy is where I first really saw it.
Out of curiosity, I searched Etsy for digital downloads. Within a few minutes I found listings advertising 100 million digital products for 90 cents, 220,000 SVG files for $1.49, and tens of thousands of stickers, planners, cookbooks, templates, coloring pages, and whatever else someone could cram into a ZIP file selling for less than the price of a cup of hot water.
If you're wondering whether I exaggerated any of this, I didn't. I didn't even bother linking the listings. You can find them in about five seconds.
And it hasn't slowed down. I was already seeing it on Amazon with books and coloring books, and now Facebook is slamming me with even more of it. Wooden puzzles you paint. Calendars you paint. Paint-by-number kits. Diamond painting kits. Coloring subscriptions. Markers. Craft kits. There's just so much stuff, and so much of it is another version of something that's already being sold by a hundred other companies.
That's what keeps getting me. Something starts selling and suddenly everybody has one. Then everybody has ten. Then somebody makes it cheaper, somebody else makes a bigger bundle, and before long you're looking at thousands of versions of basically the same thing.
AI has made it even easier to churn this stuff out, and I'm not anti-AI. I use it myself. But there's a difference between using AI as a tool and mass-producing things so quickly that nobody even seems to be checking what they're selling.
And somehow the answer we're constantly being given is still the same: make more, sell more, list more, and make it cheaper.
Which brings me right back to the question I started with: How exactly am I supposed to compete with that? And more importantly, why would I want to?
Today I spent hours filling out affiliate applications. Bank information. Tax forms. Identity verification. Copyright rules. Product photos. Disclosure statements. All so someone might click a link instead of going straight to the company’s website themselves.
Maybe they will.
Maybe they won't.
Despite all that, one realization hit me.
I haven’t painted in almost a year.
It hit harder than any rejection email ever could.
I'm not against affiliate links. I'm not against digital products. I'm not against selling things.
I'm against building a business where the only way to survive is to become one more interchangeable creator chasing pennies in a market that's already overflowing.
Before I build anything now, I'm asking myself one question:
Am I creating something valuable… or am I entering another race to the bottom?
Those aren't the same thing.
I'm still looking for the answer.
Maybe it's software.
Maybe it's AI.
Maybe it's something none of us have thought of yet.
But I know this isn't it.
I’d rather spend my time building something genuinely useful than becoming the 500,001st person selling the same thing everyone else is selling.
Because if the only way to win is to be cheaper than everyone else…
Maybe I'm playing the wrong game.
I know spending my days filling out applications, photographing products, writing disclosures, and chasing the next monetization strategy isn’t why I started Disorderly Studio in the first place.
Somewhere along the way, I realized I'd spent more time chasing pennies than creating.
That's not why I became an artist.
So for now…
I'm done chasing pennies.
I’m pulling my paintbrushes back out and getting back to building things that solve real problems, and making the kind of work that made me excited to create in the first place.
Maybe that's the wrong business decision.
Maybe it's the right one.
Either way, I'd rather spend my time creating something that matters to me than trying to win a race to the bottom.
If Disorderly Studio succeeds, I want it to be because I built something people genuinely found useful, not because I learned how to chase the biggest algorithm or the smallest commission.
Because if I build a business that pays the bills but steals the joy that made me start creating in the first place...
...what exactly did I win?
Probably three cents! 🤣
The Race to the Bottom
I chased the clicks.
I chased the trends.
I chased the pennies
that never seemed to end.
I watched the prices tumble,
the bundles multiply,
while every “next big opportunity”
was yesterday’s reply.
So today I unpacked my pencils,
put the noise back on the shelf.
Maybe winning isn’t winning…
If you lose a piece of yourself.
– From the desk of Disorderly Studio, where chasing creativity finally beat chasing pennies.
📰💥 Breaking News: Local artist resigns from the International Society of Penny Chasers. Colored pencils immediately welcomed her back with suspicious enthusiasm.