Here’s your article. Written as plain text so it pastes clean into Medium — no symbols, no markdown, just format headings as bold once it’s in the editor if you want them to pop.
I Made My First $100 Selling Digital Stickers Before I Even Owned an iPad
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about digital stickers. You don’t need fancy drawing skills. You don’t need an Apple Pencil. You don’t even need to be good at art.
I found this out by accident.
A friend of mine, let’s call her Amna, was obsessed with planning her week in GoodNotes. Every Sunday she’d spend twenty minutes decorating her digital planner with cute little stickers, the kind that look like washi tape and tiny cartoon plants. One day she asked me where she could buy more sticker packs that matched her aesthetic. I looked it up. Etsy. Sellers were charging three to eight dollars for a single sheet of digital stickers, and some shops had sold over ten thousand copies of the same file.
Ten thousand copies of a file that costs nothing to reproduce.
That’s when it clicked. This isn’t really about art. It’s about packaging something useful in a format people can’t easily make themselves.
So I tried it. And it worked well enough that I want to walk you through the exact process, mistakes included, so you don’t waste the two weeks I did figuring out file formats.
What digital stickers actually are
If you’ve never used GoodNotes, Notability, or a similar app, here’s the short version. People use these apps as digital notebooks. They write with a stylus, and they decorate their notes and planners the same way someone might decorate a paper journal with actual sticker sheets.
A digital sticker pack is usually a PNG file, or a set of PNG files, with transparent backgrounds. The buyer imports the file into their note-taking app, and then they can drag, resize, and place each sticker wherever they want. Nothing is physically shipped. Nothing gets used up. One file, sold infinite times.
This same idea works whether your buyer is in New York, London, Toronto, or Karachi. A student using GoodNotes to decorate lecture notes in Lahore has the exact same use case as a student doing it in Los Angeles. The product doesn’t change. Only the price sensitivity does, and I’ll get into that.
Why this is a genuinely good beginner business
I want to be honest with you here, because Medium is full of “I made $10,000 in a month” posts that leave out the part where the person already had fifty thousand Instagram followers.
Digital stickers are good for beginners for three real reasons.
First, the barrier to entry is low. You can make a decent first pack in an afternoon using free tools.
Second, there’s no inventory and no shipping. If you’re in a country where PayPal isn’t fully supported, like Pakistan, this matters a lot, because you’re not dealing with international shipping logistics on top of payment headaches.
Third, the market is proven. This isn’t a “maybe this will sell” idea. Etsy already has thousands of shops doing six figures a year in GoodNotes stickers, planner stickers, and digital journal kits. You’re not creating demand. You’re stepping into demand that already exists.
That said, it’s also a crowded market, and I’ll show you how to not get lost in it.
What you actually need to get started
You do not need Procreate. You do not need an iPad. I made my first pack entirely on a laptop.
Here’s the real toolkit:
Canva, free version, for designing the stickers themselves. The paid version helps later but isn’t required to start.
A transparent background PNG exporter, which Canva handles natively now.
An Etsy seller account, which costs nothing to open. You only pay when you list something, and that’s twenty cents per listing.
A way to receive international payments if you’re outside the US. This is the part that trips up a lot of Pakistani and South Asian sellers, so let’s address it directly.
In the US, UK, and most of Europe, Etsy pays sellers directly through Etsy Payments into a local bank account. It’s seamless.
In Pakistan and several other countries, Etsy Payments isn’t directly supported the same way, so sellers typically use Payoneer to receive funds, then transfer to a local bank. It’s an extra step, not a dealbreaker. Thousands of Pakistani sellers run active Etsy shops using exactly this setup.
If you’re in the US, UK, Canada, or Australia, you can likely skip this part and connect your bank directly.
The mistake almost everyone makes on their first pack
When I made my first sticker sheet, I designed twelve different little icons. A coffee cup, a calendar, a checkmark, a small plant, and so on. I was proud of it. I uploaded it. Nobody bought it for two weeks.
Here’s what I didn’t understand yet. Buyers on Etsy aren’t browsing randomly. They’re searching. Someone types “cute planner stickers pastel” or “GoodNotes stickers aesthetic minimal” into the search bar, and Etsy shows them results based on those exact words.
My listing was titled “Sticker Pack Vol 1.” Nobody was searching for that. Nobody ever will.
The fix was almost embarrassingly simple. I renamed it to “Digital Planner Stickers, GoodNotes Stickers PNG, Cute Pastel Sticker Pack for iPad Notability.” Sales started within four days.
This is the single biggest lesson in this whole article. Your product doesn’t need to be better than the competition. Your listing needs to be findable.
How to actually research what to make
Before you design a single sticker, open Etsy and type a broad term like “GoodNotes stickers” into the search bar. Look at what comes up. Sort by best seller. Look at the shops with thousands of sales.
Get Anullah’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
You’ll start noticing patterns fast. Pastel color palettes. Cute rounded shapes. Seasonal themes, like autumn stickers in September and Christmas stickers in November. Minimalist line-art versions for people who want something less cartoonish.
Write down five to ten sticker pack ideas that fit a theme you can actually commit to. Don’t try to cover everything in your first pack. A tight, well-themed pack of thirty stickers beats a scattered pack of a hundred random icons.
I eventually built a small routine around this. Every Sunday, I’d spend fifteen minutes browsing new Etsy listings in my niche, just to notice what themes were gaining traction before they got saturated.
Designing the stickers step by step
Open Canva and create a custom size design. A common approach is one large canvas, roughly 8 by 10 inches, where you arrange all your individual stickers like a sheet, similar to how a real sticker sheet looks in a stationery shop.
Design each sticker as its own small element on that sheet. Keep a consistent style across all of them, same line thickness, same color family, same general vibe. This consistency is what makes a pack look professional instead of like a random collection.
When you’re done, export each individual sticker separately as a PNG with a transparent background, not just the whole sheet as one image. Buyers need to be able to drag individual stickers into their notebook, not one giant flat picture.
This part takes patience. My first pack took about three hours because I was cutting and exporting each sticker one at a time. By my fifth pack, the same process took forty minutes because I’d built a reusable template.
Packaging the file the way buyers expect
Once your stickers are exported, buyers need a way to actually use them in GoodNotes or Notability. Most sellers provide two things.
One, the individual PNG files, zipped into a folder, for buyers who prefer to import them one at a time.
Two, a pre-made GoodNotes sticker file, which is essentially the stickers pre-loaded onto a page inside the app’s own file format, so buyers can just import one file and immediately see all the stickers ready to use.
The second option takes a little extra setup but noticeably increases how professional your listing feels, and buyers often mention it in reviews.
Pricing, and what actually sells
Most digital sticker packs on Etsy sell between two and six dollars. Bigger themed bundles, like a full seasonal collection with fifty or more stickers, can go up to ten or twelve dollars.
Price too low and buyers assume low quality. Price too high without an established shop reputation and you won’t get the first few sales that build your review base.
I started my first pack at three dollars. Once I had eight solid reviews, I moved similar packs up to four fifty. Nobody complained. The reviews were doing the convincing, not the price tag.
For sellers in Pakistan or other South Asian countries, a common instinct is to price lower than everyone else to compete. I’d actually push back on that. Etsy is a global marketplace. A buyer in the US isn’t comparing your three dollar price to Pakistani rupee value, they’re comparing it to every other three to six dollar sticker pack on the platform. Undercutting mainly just leaves money on the table without actually winning more customers.
Listing it so people can actually find it
Your Etsy title should read like a sentence stuffed with the exact phrases people search. Something like:
Cute Digital Stickers for GoodNotes, Pastel Planner Sticker Pack PNG, iPad Notability Stickers, Digital Journal Kit
That looks clunky as a sentence, but it works because Etsy’s search algorithm is matching keywords, not judging your prose.
Your first listing photo matters more than people expect. Show the stickers laid out on a mock digital planner page, not just floating on a white background. Buyers want to picture how it’ll actually look once it’s in their notebook.
Fill out every tag Etsy gives you, all thirteen slots, using different phrasings of what your product is. Some buyers search “GoodNotes stickers,” others search “digital sticker pack,” others search “iPad planner decoration.” Cover the variations.
A realistic timeline
Nobody makes ten thousand dollars in week one. Here’s what a realistic path looks like, based on what I saw with my own shop and a few Pakistani sellers I know who run similar shops.
Weeks one and two, you’re setting up, learning Canva, and publishing your first three to five listings. Sales are slow, maybe zero to two.
Month two, if your listings are well tagged, you start getting occasional organic sales, maybe five to fifteen a month. This is where most beginners quit, right before things start compounding.
Month three onward, if you keep adding new themed packs consistently, maybe one a week, your shop starts showing up more often in search because Etsy rewards active shops with more listings and consistent sales history. This is when it starts to feel like an actual small income stream instead of an experiment.
The sellers who make real money at this aren’t the ones with the fanciest art. They’re the ones who kept publishing new packs for six months straight without giving up in month two.
A few things I wish someone had told me
Don’t obsess over having original, never-seen-before designs. A well-executed pastel planner sticker pack in a saturated niche will still sell if your tags are strong. Differentiation matters less than findability, especially at the start.
Batch your work. Design five packs in one sitting rather than one pack at a time. It’s mentally easier to stay in a creative flow than to restart it constantly.
Read your competitors’ reviews, not just their listings. Reviews tell you exactly what buyers loved or wished was different, which is free product research nobody else is paying attention to.
If you’re outside the US or UK, don’t let payment logistics scare you off. Payoneer plus Etsy is a well-worn path at this point, used by sellers across Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and beyond. It’s an extra setup step, not a barrier.
Where to go from here
If you make one sticker pack this week, just one, themed around something you’d actually enjoy designing, you’ll already be ahead of most people who read an article like this and never open Canva.
Start small. One pack. Five listings within a month. Watch what search terms bring in views. Adjust. Repeat.
That’s genuinely the whole game.
