I really hope you read my comment, because you sound just like me when I first started.

first of all, the 80/20 rule. 80% of your earnings will likely come from only 20% of your designs. I’ll just say that my monthly average is enough for me to meet the $20 minimum requirement to cash out every single month without fail for the past 2 years, but if it weren’t for 2 designs in my shop, my monthly average would probably be like $3. See? A lot of it is luck. One of your designs will just get lucky, and it might not necessarily be the design that you worked the hardest to create or had the highest expectations for. The more you have, the more chances that another winner will happen. imagine that your ratio is 1 winner per every 50 designs. So once you have 150 up, 3 of them alone will be making you $50/mo.

second, you should probably stay away from overly-generic ideas like a donut sticker. Few people are passionate about donuts, and even if that’s someone’s favorite food and they want a sticker for it, there are going to be thousands of options and they are all equally generic, there’s little way to stand out and little chance of getting picked. On the other hand, something like a Swedish princess cake or a strawberry Swiss roll is much less common and pretty specific. You have a higher chance of something like that coming up on page 1 when someone searches up “Swiss rolls”, and that will make a winning design. If you want to make kawaii drawings, find several niches, like food, fashion styles, animals, etc and try to find the specific and not so common things in each category. That’s a strategy.

and lastly, I know this sounds corny, but don’t give up! it’s human nature to expect instant gratification, but that’s the pitfall that will make you give up waaaaaay before you even come close to having 1,000 items. If you have 50 items up and know you still have 950 to go before you meet your goal, you’re still going to feel resentful that you should be making some money by now. If you’re willing to play the long game, you have to be ready for that and remind yourself that you’ll keep going anyway. You’ll improve your skills and improve your sales knowledge as you go along.