Gold City Ventures Review: My Experience and Honest Opinion
I still remember the moment I sold my first printable product on Etsy.
It was in my summer holiday, I had taken the Gold City Ventures E-printables course and set up my shop — and at this point, I was just walking back from the beach when the Etsy app on my phone pinged.
Cha-ching! I’d made a sale!
It was a product priced at 3 dollars, and I had discounted it, so the total amount was $1.80 (minus fees).
But for me, it was a lot more than $1.80.
It was a beginning.
It was my very first passive income stream, and I was able to scale it from 0 to $1000+ per month in only two months. (I’ll be sharing some more exact numbers further down.)
But this article is not about me. After writing about it, a lot of people has asked me for a more in-depth opinion on the course I took in the beginning.
Therefore, I’ve written this Gold City Ventures review to explain my experience, review the different features and answer some of the questions I’ve gotten about the E-printables course.
What is printables on Etsy?
Before digging into the course features and the actual Gold City Ventures review, let me just pause you here for a second, and ask if you’ve heard about printables on Etsy as a side hustle idea before?
If not, you can swing by this article to get a better overview.
Printables are digital design products, usually sold as pdfs or Canva templates, made for the buyer to print at home. There are all sorts of printables — from wedding products to nursery art to party games, greeting cards, calendars and Christmas tags.
For me, the amazing part is how you make the design on your computer one-time and hundreds of people can buy it — without further action from you. Yes, that’s right — Etsy will serve your customers, while you are spending time with your kids or laying around at the beach!
Etsy is also getting more and more popular, with over 97 million customers shopping on the platform.
If you are interested in different ideas for printables, you can download my free e-book with 89 printable ideas here — of you could get the free Gold City Ventures e-book on seasonal secrets and how you can leverage the different seasons when you sell on Etsy — that one is also filled with ideas for different printables!
The prices of the printables on Etsy vary from just a couple of dollars to hundreds of dollars, but most printables are sold in the price range of $5-$30.
OK. Enough of the intro! Let’s dig into the actual Gold City Venture review!
Gold City Ventures Review
In the following I’ll go through what I think is most important to know about the course, in terms of contents of the course, who the Gold City Ventures course is for — an NOT for, the course costs and also if it is worth it.
I’ve also included links where you a coupon code of $50 will be automatically applied and you’ll also get a special free bonus if you’re getting the course.
What is the Gold City Ventures course?
The Gold City Ventures E-Printables course is a course that teaches anybody to sell such printables on Etsy. It is probably the most recognized course on the topic, and has already helped thousands of students.
The course includes all the different steps you need to take in order to succeed — from SEO research to find the right niche and product, classes in Canva to teach you how to make the actual products, how to set up the shop (including the branding) and how to scale once you’ve had some success.
Although the goal is to sell digital products, it’s not necessary to have any prior knowledge of graphic design. In fact, one of the founders (Cody Berman) had no prior knowledge when he set up his shop — and that was still an instant success, where he made more than $700 in a week not long after setting it up!
How long does it take to complete the course?
It’s full of bite-sized videos, ranging from just a couple of minutes to about an hour so you can really dive into each topic.
It is structured in a way that doesn’t feel overwhelming, though. If you set aside a full weekend, you can probably get through it by watching the videos and reading the lessons (not all the bonus material, though) — but I do recommend spending more time, so that you have time to set up the shop and work alongside the videos.
I spent about two weeks watching the course and setting everything up, and then a further 4–6 weeks on making more products and optimizing the shop. After the initial period of 8 weeks (where I made about 100 products), the shop has been a passive income source.
What’s included in the Gold City Ventures E-Printables course?
Here is the structure of the course, including some of my opinions on the different sections:
Getting Started (intros to the team)
What should you sell (lots of ideas, learnings about evergreen versus seasonal products)
Getting started making printables (important legal things to understand about use of graphics, fonts and templates — and where to find them)
How to make printables with Canva and Adobe Illustrator. (I actually haven’t seen the Adobe lessons, because I chose Canva straight from the start. You don’t have to learn both. Also, it is perfectly possible to succeed with a free version of Canva, but I have the Pro version at 13 dollars/month, and it saves me a lot of time)
How to make editable printables with Corjl (There are number of lessons on how to make editable printables with Corjl. I haven’t done these, as it wasn’t relevant in my niche.)
Packaging your printables: (Best practices to make your printables look as professional as possible)
Making listing images (The listing images are very important to get right and the lessons teach you how to make them and how to find the best listing bakgrounds. This was actually the only lesson I thought was a bit of a weak point in the course — for instance, it didn’t cover much how to make mockups with the “magic” mockups available in Canva).
List your product on Etsy (Perfect step-by-step-guide on how to list your product on Etsy — including how to price the product.)
Keyword research tools (The really good stuff! I loved these lessons, which were clear, actionable and easy to understand without prior knowledge. There are a lot more in the VIP vault which are also well worth watching!)
Marketing and advertising (Everything you need on small but important things like how to generate coupons, sales and use Etsy Ads)
Optimizing your shop (Again, these lessons were really useful and actionable on topics like using Etsy stats to improve, common traps for new sellers, how to optimize with data, how to learn from competitors, and how to monitor Etsy trends. Some of these were very valuable for me!)
Etsy seller app (quick and easy intro to using the app — which I now use every week, so I can answer any customer questions on my phone while on the go)
My favorite topics in the course
I can’t write a Gold City Ventures review without mentioning that I thought the SEO trainings were just amazing!
For me, SEO was really the essence of the course — and learning and getting better at SEO was really one of my main reasons for getting it in the first place.
(I figured it would be much more fun to learn SEO once I had a real product to market and sell, but setting up a full-blown blog seemed like too much of a hassle at the time — printables are so much easier and more fun to make.)
Perhaps the SEO lessons were extra-important for me because of my motivation. But the training is really, really thorough and I learned a lot that has helped me a lot also outside of Etsy. It has really given me a foundation for SEO that I use every day when writing on Medium, selling digital products and doing affiliate marketing.
In addition, I think the focus on SEO and on actually selling (not just making the products) is what make the E-printables course really stand out from the crowd — a lot of other courses in this niche are more focused on just making the products, and you need a lot more if you want to build a profitable shop.
The “What should you sell”-module was also a favorite for me — I especially liked the little video called “Bundles is the key to $$$”, which is about using bundles to increase revenue. This was super-useful for me and really had a high impact on my earnings.
In the beginning, I sold cheaper products, so even though I sold quite a few the total revenue wasn’t that high. But after I bundled five of my games (each priced at $7.50) into a bundle of 5 games sold for $15, I really started to see a big difference in revenue.
Today, that one bundle has been a bestseller for months. It accounts for more than half of my total revenue! You can read more about that exact story of that product here, along with some tips.
Another part I really liked, was the free templates and all the Canva tutorials on how to use them. In the beginning, I was trying out myself — and boy, did I save a lot of time when I started using templates for everything.
In the beginning, it is necessary to play around in Canva a lot, though — and the videos are made so that you can watch them while following along in Canva yourself.
Bonuses in the Gold City Ventures course
Don’t you just love bonuses? The course includes a lot of valuable bonuses, and a Gold City Ventures review wouldn’t be complete without offering an opinion on those as well.
Let’s first look at what the bonuses are:
30 day complimentary VIP Facebook group membership
30 Day access to the VIP Vault, which is filled with valuable video trainings
A large bonus section on how you can make money on printables on other platforms than Etsy
A bonus section with videos on making printables through other programs like Templett and PDF Escape (to make fillable printables)
Lots and lots of free templates that you can customize and sell in your brand new Etsy shop straight away! These include a Wellness Planner, Greeting Cards/ Envelopes, Calendars, Home Seller Checklist, an Adult Birthday Party Game Bundle, a Valentine’s Day Bundle, a Certificate Bundle (10-pack), an Ebook Template, a Party Planner, Habit Tracker, Spring Cleaning Checklists, Weekly Checklist — and lots more templates, including templates for Etsy listing images.
Out of the bonuses, I thought the VIP Facebook group, the VIP Vault and the templates were the most valuable for me. For me, these really added to the course.
Inside the Facebook group, there are paid experts who answer any question quickly and always with useful information. The Vault is filled with lots more videos — I do recommend seeing them before the free period runs out, especially the ones on SEO. And of course, the templates are really, really valuable and make it possible to start selling very quickly.
And hey, if you use my link from this Gold City Ventures review, you will even get an extra bonus — a starter pack with even more templates and listing photos, valued at $97. Just use this link, and you’ll get it automatically!
Shortcomings in the E-printables course
The only section I thought could have been improved on, was the one on “How to Make Listing Photos”. It has a video on how to use GIMP and I tried to fiddle around with that for a while, but honestly — there are lots of mockups available in Canva now where you can just drag and drop, so I started doing that instead. (I took the course summer of 2022, though — it could be that it has already been improved.)
(And if not — if you choose to buy the course, you will get free templates for listing photos if you get it through my link.)
Who owns Gold City Ventures?
Gold City Ventures is made by the duo Cody Berman and Julie Beringer.
Cody got hooked on Etsy printables when he opened his shop and soon after went on a skiing holiday with his girlfriend — only to make over $700 in passive income during the getaway. He was a normal 9–5’er with no prior experience with digital design at all before he started, so naturally, he was pretty blown away that this was possible!
Julie Beringer opened her first Etsy shop and started selling temporary tattoos back in 2017. She later pivoted from tattoos (which had to be made and shipped, so it required A LOT of customer service) to printables — which can be made once and sold over and over again.
Julie’s shop is called The Swag Elephant and she sells a lot of different printables, but has a special focus on printables for bachelorette parties. She has done more than 5 500 sales in the shop — and made over $10,000 in her Etsy shop while she took a 6-month hiatus and across the country!
In the course, Julie and Cody combine their expertise — including their experiences outside of Etsy in setting up side hustles — to teach everyone how to make a passive income stream with E-printables.
How much is the Gold City Ventures Course?
The Gold City Ventures course cost is normally $247.
However, if you use my link to buy the Gold City Ventures course, you’ll get a $50 discount automatically applied — so your price will be $197.
And as a thank you for using my link, I will also send you a free bonus pack of templates that you can use to stock your shop as well as some extra branding templates you can use for your listing photos and for displaying the benefits for the customer and not just the product features — which in my experience, is super-efficient in closing sales. The value of this extra pack is $97.
The Gold City Ventures E-printables course cost is not cheap, but on the other hand, it is more of an investment — making it possible to make a lot more!
Is $197 expensive?
I guess it depends on how you see it. I think of it more like an investment. When I did the course, I made the money back in two months and have been making $1000 in sales per month ever since. You can see my stats here:
Who is the Gold City Ventures course for?
I would say anybody who thinks this sounds like a fun side hustle. The videos are made for anybody, so you don’t need to know any SEO, graphic design or anything else before you start.
It is especially well suited if you are a busy person who wants a passive income stream (and do have time to build that stream over the first weeks or months).
Julie is a busy mom herself and she has had great success — I also noticed inside the Facebook group that there were a lot of people who seemed super-busy and who were eager to get passive income.
My own experience is that it has been very passive after I set it up, and for me, that was an important reason why I wanted to start with this.
Who is the Gold City Ventures course NOT for?
I think the main reason for not trying, would be if you know that you don’t have the time to complete and actually build the shop.
The E-printables course is not a magic button to create passive income. It does teach you how to, but you do need to do the work yourself.
If you don’t have the time to do that work, you will not benefit from doing the course.
Also, I think you should think it sounds like fun to make printables. For me, the creative process has been super-fun. It doesn’t mean that you need any experience from before, but I think it will be easier for you if you think it sounds like fun.
Is Gold City Ventures legit?
Some people ask this, as it can sound just too good to be true. To be honest, I was a bit hesitant myself, as it seemed like a big investment at the time. And this is also one of the reasons I am writing this Gold City Ventures review now.
However, as you can see in the stats above, I made back the investment within two months — and was able to scale it to about $1000+ per month after that.
However, as mentioned, there is not a secret button to push. As with everything, you need to show up and do the work yourself. You need to do the SEO research to find a profitable niche, you need to learn Canva so you can make products quickly and you need to produce a lot of products in order to gain traction.
Today, my shop is largely passive except for some customer questions (I spend perhaps 30 minutes per week on that). But in the first 2–3 months, I invested A LOT of time in setting it up.
In other words, the course is completely legit. It provides a very large amount of valuable information, and I would never have been able to set up my shop and experience the success if I hadn’t first done the course. But there is no guaranteed success, and you will need to invest time to research, make the shop, optimize and experiment in order to profit from the course.
Is the course worth it?
It was certainly worth it for me.
Only you can decide if it is worth it for you. With courses like this, there can never be a guarantee — but if you do the course and the trainings, do proper SEO research (don’t forget that part — without the SEO research, the rest won’t work) and set up the shop according to the trainings, you should be able to make money as well.
If you want to look at more Gold City Ventures reviews, you can check out what former students say here.
Free Workshop
I hope you enjoyed this Gold City Ventures review! If you are a bit on the shelf, a completely free way to start is by watching their free workshop.
In this 60-min workshop, they cover a lot of ground.
You’ll learn:
How to pick the best printables to sell for maximum income
How to 10x your sales to hit five figures in revenue
Their seasonal product secret strategy for selling printables
& how to manifest your online business goals this year
Cody & Julie also share case studies of new printable sellers who hit 5-figures in revenue, they explain the massive opportunities in the printables space right now, and show how to get started with little money spent.
Want to learn more?
I’ve written this Gold City Ventures review because the course is a bit special for me.
Selling printables on Etsy was my very first passive income stream, and the success I had after taking this course gave my the courage and the tools I needed to go all in — also with other passive income streams.
Today, I sell digital courses, have an ever-growing email list and do some affiliate marketing. You’re most welcome to join my email list where I write about different passive income streams —and if you do it through this link, I’ll send you a free mini e-book with 14 Etsy Mistakes to Avoid.
And full disclosure: The link to the Gold City Ventures E-printables course is an affiliate link, so I will receive a small commission if you buy through it. You, on the other side, will receive a $50 discount (the coupon code is automatically applied) and as mentioned, I will also be happy to send you a large pack of templates to help you get started!
