I’ve made $1,949,003 selling things I make.

If you’re creating products people genuinely love but still can’t seem to get consistent sales, I want to share what I wish someone had told me when I was just getting started.

I think most creative business owners are carrying around six beliefs that quietly keep them from starting, growing, or making more sales even when they feel like they’ve already tried everything.

I’m walking you through all six.

The first one almost stopped me from starting my business altogether. And the last one? It’s the one I still struggle to admit, even now.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking. “This is a mindset blog.”

And yeah, it is.

But before you click away, let me tell you why I’m making it, because I used to be the last person who thought mindset mattered.

You can give two people the exact same strategy, and the one who believes their work is worth real money will execute it completely differently from the one who doesn’t.

For years, I thought the answer was finding the right strategy. Better photos, a better platform and better marketing.

I kept looking for the next tactic that would finally make everything click.

But looking back, what determined my prices, gave me the confidence to pitch myself to a magazine that eventually made me thousands of dollars, and decided whether I launched a product or sat on it for another six months… weren’t strategies at all.

They were beliefs I’d never stopped to question or even admit I had.

Your beliefs shape your business decisions long before your analytical brain has a chance to weigh in. 

That’s why this matters so much.

The tricky thing about beliefs is that they don’t feel like beliefs when you’re living them, they feel like facts.

At one point, people were completely convinced the world was flat because, from where they were standing, it looked flat.

But being certain about something doesn’t make it true. It doesn’t make it an absolute fact like 1 + 1 = 2.

So as we go through these six beliefs, don’t ask yourself whether you agree with them.

Ask yourself whether they’re quietly holding you back from building the business you actually want.

#1 Selling Will Ruin Creativity

The first belief is the fear that if you get serious about selling your art or craft, it’ll ruin the thing you love most: the creative part.

That your craft becomes a job, and the joy you get from making things gets replaced by orders, spreadsheets, and marketing.

But here’s what actually happened to me, because I’ve experienced this from both sides.

I started making jewelry when I was 15 in Malaysia. When I shared my work online, something happened that had never happened to me before.

People got me.

I grew up being told I wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t as smart as the other kids at school and I didn’t fit in. Then suddenly, there were strangers on the internet telling me they loved what I made.

I started making internet friends.

My first sale was $20 for a handbound notebook to a girl in the US.

Selling something I made with my bare hands didn’t take the magic out of creating.

Selling became part of the magic, part of the sparkle.

Having someone value your work enough to pay for it is one of the best feelings a creative person can experience. And the belief that selling will ruin your creativity robs you of that feeling before you ever get the chance to experience it.

In 20 years of doing this, the people I’ve watched actually lose the joy weren’t the ones making money.

They were the ones who couldn’t make enough money to justify the struggle, and eventually, they quit.

The people making BANK find ways to bring the joy and fun back into their work.

The people who lost their joy couldn’t find the balance between making money and staying creative.

The truth is, we’re allowed to have both.

And we can have both at the same time, both are essential for survivability and for fulfillment.

But it is a balance you have to foster, nurture, and protect.

Some seasons, I get out of balance too and that’s completely normal.

As long as you believe both can be true for you, that you can make good money and be creatively fulfilled at the same time, you can start working toward that balance and keep recalibrating it along the way.

#2 Sales Determine Your Worth

Here’s the second belief.  This one shows up when you have a slow sales week or you do your first craft show and barely make a sale.

It’s the belief that your sales numbers are saying something about you.

About whether you’re talented, whether your work is good enough, or whether you should even be doing this.

And I get why we, as makers, fall into this one so much more than other kinds of business owners.

When you make something with your own hands, a stranger not buying it doesn’t feel like a business decision. It feels like a personal rejection.

Like they looked at a piece of you and said, “No thanks.”

But I think about my first six years.

The work wasn’t perfect, but it was objectively good enough. I could sell to total strangers. People told me they loved my work.

BUT, if sales were really a measurement of talent or skill, I should have been doing much better than making $9,000 a year while working 40 to 60 hours a week.

My actual problem was traffic and strategy.

And no amount of talent, skill, or learning fixes a strategy problem.

The numbers were never saying, “You’re not good enough.” They were saying that not enough people are seeing your products, or your photos aren’t doing your work justice or your pricing is confusing people.

That’s what your shop’s data is actually telling you. It’s pointing you toward the things in your business that you can go fix.

And I’m not going to pretend I’ve fully mastered this one because, even now, a slow month can still get in my head.

Like, “Oh my God… no one likes my stuff anymore. After 20 years, I’m finally done!”

That feeling doesn’t completely go away, and that’s normal.

The difference is what you do next.

When you see a slow week as a reflection of yourself instead of your business, you spiral.

And that spiral keeps you from looking at what the numbers are actually trying to tell you.

When you can separate the two, even just enough to check your photos or your traffic numbers instead of questioning your whole existence, that’s when things start improving.

You’re allowed to feel disappointed by a slow week.

Let’s just ease up on letting it tell you who you are or what your worth is as a human being.

And here’s the thing that completely changed how slow weeks feel for me.

For the first chunk of my business, if sales were slow, all I could do was post more and hope the algorithm worked in my favor.

Which usually did nothing for me.

What changed everything was having my own email list.

A list of people who had already bought from me, or who had explicitly said they loved my work and wanted to hear more. 

I could reach them directly anytime, with no algorithm getting in the way of my work being seen by the people most excited to buy from me.

I’ve always told my students that sending an email to your list is like making money on demand.

Got extra bills to pay this week? Send an email to your list.

Which is exactly what Brevo helps you do.

Brevo helps you with email marketing and automations for your online store, so you can set up something like a welcome sequence once, and every new person who joins your list will automatically receive it while you’re at your desk making more products.

It also offers SMS marketing, which can convert into sales even better than email.

Brevo has built-in features that help you draft and set up campaigns much faster, so you don’t have to worry about not knowing what to say in your emails or what to write about.

Every store needs an email list. I’ve always said that your business revenue is directly correlated with the size of your email list.

So don’t sleep on this.

Brevo has a free plan for those of you just getting started, and if you have a larger list, their paid plans are super affordable.

If you want to try it, use my code CREATIVEHIVE50 to get 50% off their Starter and Standard plans for your first three months. That’s for new customers.

Head to this link: https://get.brevo.com/creativehive

#3 If I Love My Work, It Shouldn’t Feel Like Work

The third belief almost sounds too good to be wrong.

I actually get SUPER triggered by this. This one sounds harmless, and it’s everywhere. 

“Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.”

I’ve probably said that a few times myself. But it’s missing SO much context and I actually think this belief sets people up for failure more than almost anything else.

Because when you believe this whole journey is supposed to feel like love and fun, the first time you run into something that’s hard or annoying, you start to dramatize it.

Like you’re doing something wrong or this isn’t meant for you But there are a LOT of parts of monetizing your creativity that just aren’t fun.

Photographing the same necklace over and over because the lighting keeps coming out wrong.

Writing product descriptions, figuring out shipping or answering customer emails.

None of that is super fun. But you know what?

It sure beats driving an hour to and from an office job you hate.

None of that is why you got into making things.

But if you believe it’s all supposed to be fun, you’ll keep doing the fun parts, which is making more stuff and avoid the boring or difficult parts, which are often the very things that get your work seen and sold.

Then the sales don’t come, and you point to the results and say,

“See? It doesn’t work.”

And I say this as someone who’s genuinely lazy, undisciplined and has mood swings.

I’m neurodivergent, I have anxiety and I’m a Reflector in Human Design, and that’s not me trying to be cute.

I didn’t “fix” or change any of that about myself. I built my business around it.

So here’s what I did.

Out of all the business-y things, media outreach, email marketing, paid ads, social media, I figured out which one brought me the most sales.

Then I focused on that.

And I dropped the business-y things I didn’t enjoy doing, like social media. You don’t have to grind through everything.

Learn how to minimize the boring or unfun parts, make them more enjoyable, or replace them with something that’s a better fit for you while still getting the results you want.

But how do you know which business-y things are actually worth focusing on for your shop?

That’s exactly what my free workshop walks you through.

I know how overwhelming it can feel when everyone is telling you to be on every platform and do all the things but you don’t have to.

I’ll walk you through the same step-by-step process I’ve used in my own handmade business for the last 20 years, so you can focus on what actually gets you sales.

Head to this link to watch it for free: https://tinyurl.com/4ptsmp5c 

#4 The Artist’s Ego

The fourth belief is a little uncomfortable to admit but I think a lot of us creatives have it.

It’s the artist’s ego.

And I don’t mean ego as in arrogance. I mean the version where your standards for yourself get so high that they keep you invisible.

You don’t post your work because it’s not quite there yet.

You don’t promote yourself because it feels cringey, desperate, or like something a sellout would do.

You’re waiting until your work is good enough to speak for itself.

I know this one personally. I used to be painfully shy. Like, couldn’t-get-through-a-job-interview shy.

I’d sweat bullets just making a phone call. And here’s the thing.

I had to be really honest with myself, all that waiting and not talking about my work felt like it was about having high standards.

It wasn’t.

I was protecting myself from being judged because if I never put my work out there, nobody could reject it. But the price of that protection was that nobody could find it.

And I was broke. My first pieces were awful.

I shared them anyway on LiveJournal and DeviantArt because I didn’t know enough to be embarrassed yet.

That’s the version of you that gets found.

Not the version waiting to be good enough.

The other half of this belief is the idea that selling your work, promoting it, or being commercial somehow devalues your creativity.

And I want to challenge that.

There are so many incredible artists and creators making good money from their work.

Calling them “sellouts” is just a social construct that’s meant to keep us small and scared.

The whole “starving artist” idea was popularized by the 1840s French poet Henri Murger, who later influenced La Bohème and Rent on Broadway. Since then, generations of artists have repeated the narrative that you have to suffer for your art.

It’s also part of our history and maybe even our DNA that standing out feels scary because, for thousands of years, being rejected by your community could mean not surviving.

Nobody wanted to become the outcast, for some people, that still feels worse than death.

But today, the reality is different.

You’re still safe, people can disagree with you and still love you.

The fear is valid but it isn’t reality.

And can I just say, marketing and business can be an incredibly creative act.

I learned that myself, and it’s actually the reason I started Creative Hive.

I got so nerdy about marketing because I fell in love with it and with the psychology behind it that I needed an outlet to talk about it.

So I started blogging back in 2012. Getting your work in front of people takes the same imagination as making the work itself.

Honestly, some of the most creative things I’ve ever done in my business had nothing to do with making jewelry.

They came from figuring out how to pitch a tiny waffle necklace to a magazine editor.

#5 Making Art Isn’t a Real Career

The fifth belief is one almost every creative runs into at some point.

It’s the voice that says this isn’t realistic.

Making money from your art or craft? That’s not a real career, that’s not a real business. Be practical! 

Sometimes that voice comes from people who love you.

My family sent me to college in Wisconsin to study actuarial science, which is about as far from polymer clay jewelry as you can get.

I failed the professional exams twice.

I couldn’t land a single job, even after graduating with almost a 3.7 GPA.

And the whole time, the thing that was actually working, Tiny Hands was sitting right there in my dorm room, being treated like a distraction from my “real” future in corporate.

Which, by the way, I never had.

Understand that their lack of belief usually comes from the fact that they’ve never seen anyone do what you’re trying to do.

And sometimes, that voice isn’t coming from your family at all. It’s coming from you.

That first year, I made $9,000 while working full-time hours. My husband asked me, very nicely, “What are you doing?”

I broke down crying because I had no freakin’ idea. So here’s what I want to say about this one.

The people doubting you are usually working with old information, they know the version of this story where the artist starves.

Where craft fairs are the ceiling, where handmade is just a cute hobby.

They’ve never seen someone with no business experience build a handmade business from the ground up and make it successful.

You don’t have to convince them, my parents doubted this for years.

Until they had 20 years of evidence from my business that it was possible, and that they didn’t need to worry about me anymore.

Just because you’ve never seen something before doesn’t mean it’s impossible and there’s never been a better time to challenge this belief.

Today, there are SO many people building successful, self-employed creative careers.

If they can do it and if I can do it, you can do it too.

Sometimes, all it takes is seeing someone else pave the path first, so you know it’s possible to follow it.

#6 Wanting More Money Makes You Greedy

The last belief is the one I told you at the beginning that I still struggle to admit myself, even after 20 years and almost $2 million in sales with Tiny Hands.

On the surface, it looks like a pricing problem. You price your work by adding up your materials and your hours.

Then you round down and maybe knock off a little more so nobody thinks you’re greedy.

I hear versions of this from makers all the time.

One of my A Sale A Day students said, “I can’t even afford my own work. How could I ask someone else to pay that?”

But underneath the math, there’s something else going on.

Somewhere along the way, a lot of us picked up the idea that wanting real money for creative work is asking for too much.

That the acceptable thing to do is just be grateful anyone buys from you at all.

So we don’t raise our prices, we don’t pitch ourselves for bigger opportunities, we don’t follow up on unpaid invoices because it feels greedy.

I still catch myself doing this.

I’ll send an invoice and when it doesn’t get paid right away, I start wondering if I did a bad job.

I grew up being told I wasn’t good enough and that mindset doesn’t just disappear because your revenue went up.

So I’m not going to sit here and tell you I completely fixed this belief.

I haven’t but I’ve learned to manage it.

The difference now is that I can recognize when it’s the belief talking instead of the reality of what’s actually happening.

And over time, that belief can become something much healthier. Like thinking I’m worth it and my work has value.

Because every time I raised my prices, people kept buying. In fact, they bought more.

Your customer isn’t standing there calculating your material costs and hourly rate, they’re looking at something they love, made by a real person, and deciding whether the finished piece is worth it to them.

You’re allowed to let them make that decision and you’re allowed to ask for a price that doesn’t require you to apologize for it.

And you know what made believing I deserved that money even harder? The picture I had in my head of what someone with a six-figure business was supposed to look like.

Because that’s what we see all the time on social media. Designer bags, a new car, looking expensive all the time.

I’m just not a flashy person and some part of me thought that’s what asking for real money eventually leads to.

But here’s my reality, I drive a used car that’s fully paid off, I don’t pay for manicures or eyelash extensions.

I made a blog about what being wealthy actually looks like, I think it’s going to change the way you think about wealth.

Read it here: https://tinyurl.com/4tdbdy8z 

If there’s one thing I hope you take away from all of this, it’s that building a successful creative business isn’t just about learning better strategies.

It’s about noticing the stories you’ve been believing without even realizing it.

The good news is that beliefs aren’t permanent. They’re learned, which means they can be unlearned.

Every time you choose to show your work, raise your prices, put yourself out there, or keep going despite the fear, you’re rewriting those beliefs.

And over time, those small decisions compound into a completely different business and a completely different life. 

I hope this gives you permission to believe that making a good living from your creativity isn’t just possible for someone else. It can be possible for you too.