Ryan's Method: The First Shirt He Sold Netted $2.58. Nine Years Later He Reports $49,000 a Month, and 60-Hour Weeks

The first shirt he sold went for $14.99 and left him $2.58. Nine years later, Ryan Hogue writes in a piece for CNBC Make It that he brings in $49,000 a month. Stories like this get told as money that arrives while you sleep, and the phrase passive income sits in the headline of all four articles used here. Yet a May 2024 report by CNBC reporter Megan Sauer says that once a business is automated Hogue gets bored and starts hunting for the next challenge, often working 60 hours a week. The “one hour a day” line comes from his own piece, published 18 months earlier.

Nine years of numbers

The arithmetic that turns $19.99 into $5.23

Amazon Merch on Demand works simply. Upload a design as a PNG, a product listing appears, and every order is manufactured, shipped and supported by Amazon while the seller collects a royalty. The rate runs from 13% to 37% depending on product and price. Hogue’s best seller is a standard T-shirt at $19.99 with a 26% royalty, which is $5.23 per unit. Amazon keeps the rest. On larger items such as sweatshirts he takes $10, and he writes that he prices everything to leave at least $5 per sale.

That gives a sense of how much each unit carries. About half of the $14,600 in November 2022 came from Amazon Merch, so roughly $7,300, and dividing that by $5.23 puts him near 1,400 units a month. The product mix moves the average, so treat it as an order of magnitude rather than a count. Producing $7,300 a month at $5.23 a unit means owning a shelf of listings that sells in the thousands, month after month. An Etsy listing costs $0.20 and an eBay listing costs $0. His design subscriptions run $59 a year plus $4 a month plus $22 a month. That is close to the whole fixed cost, and he never holds inventory.

“One hour a day” and “60 hours a week”

The two figures do not contradict each other. They describe different periods of the same business run by the same person.

The beginning reads like a joke. His first design was a badly drawn Loch Ness monster, and he gave up on Adobe Photoshop because he could not navigate it without training. Early profit ran about $4 a day. His friends laughed at him, he says: “Dude, cool. $8?” What Hogue did with that was turn it into a game where each day had to beat the day before by a dollar. Four dollars to eight, eight to sixteen. The reporting credits that increment with keeping him from quitting before the business turned profitable.

The same habit runs today. When automation is finished he gets bored and looks for the next thing, sometimes at 60 hours a week. He tracks net worth in an Excel sheet and regularly calculates how many Big Macs he earns per day, which at $4.67 in his home state of Virginia works out to roughly 343 a day. The hardest part of this case to copy is not the automation. It is that a person who finds himself with free time right after automating keeps filling that time with the next income stream. Put bluntly, the word passive explains almost nothing about how this business is actually run.

What grew was the number of streams, not the shirts

The $14,600 of November 2022 was almost entirely print-on-demand. Amazon Merch made up half, and the rest came through Printful onto eBay and Etsy. Make designs, list products, learn tools that automate the work. That was the job.

By his April 2024 piece there are 10 streams: Amazon Merch, Etsy through Printful since 2018, cross-listing to Walmart, eBay and Redbubble, the Amazon Influencer Program he joined in September 2023, where video reviews of products he owns pay a 1% to 3% commission on purchases, and a YouTube channel producing $4,900 a month. By February 2025 he describes four streams: print-on-demand, YouTube, online courses and one-on-one coaching.

The one that sits apart appears in the reporting. For $10,000 to $15,000 he spends six months building a print-on-demand business for a client, largely through AI and automation, and 11 clients had paid for it at the time of the interview. Compare $5.23 of profit on a shirt with a single order above $10,000. At $14,600 he was selling shirts, and at $49,000 he was selling the method for selling shirts. Moving to the teaching side is what changed the order of magnitude, and on that basis this is no longer a print-on-demand business.

Ten months without movement, and what stays unpublished

The figure of $49,000 a month appears unchanged in the April 2024 piece and again in February 2025. On the published numbers at least, monthly revenue did not move across those 10 months. The growth happened between 2022 and 2024, and what follows looks like a plateau.

Exactly one figure has been checked by an outside party. The May 2024 report states that CNBC Make It reviewed documents covering 2023, showing over $1,600 a day and roughly $11,400 a week. Spreading $11,400 across 52 weeks puts the monthly figure near $49,400, which lines up closely with the $49,000 he states. Every other monthly number is self-reported.

Plenty stays unpublished: the split across the 10 streams, ad spend, the price and enrollment of the courses and coaching, the number of listings in the stores, return rates. Even the starting year wobbles between sources, with the 2022 piece and the May 2024 report saying 2016 while the April 2024 piece says 2017. This is speculation on our part, but the gap probably sits between starting dropshipping in October 2016 and selling the first shirt on Amazon Merch some time after. Either way, this business began nine years ago, and the order of magnitude changed only in the last few years.

$49,000 a month, standing on Amazon, Etsy and YouTube

Hogue was a web developer and an adjunct professor, and nine years ago he was in a position to walk away from $117,300 a year. The “one hour” comes after the design sources and the tooling were settled enough for him to name each one in print. Most of the income also sits on surfaces owned by Amazon, Etsy and YouTube, where royalty rates and review commissions are set by the other side. When a new surface opens, as the Influencer Program did in September 2023, he can ride it, and no equivalent exit exists for the day one closes.

Related cases

Sorted by monthly revenue, the same print-on-demand and Etsy shape runs like this. Stoic Muse, selling 100 to 150 Stoic philosophy shirts a month with ads running at a loss and 200 reviews doing the work, sits at about ¥450,000 a month. Pretty Arrow, two sisters who sold 29,000 budgeting spreadsheets, sits at about ¥1.56 million. This case sits at about ¥7.35 million. The higher the order of magnitude, the less of what is being sold is a physical object.

Further along that line is Justin Welsh, who has accumulated $12.5M with one person and outsourced VAs. Holding no physical product and running above 90% margins on courses and publishing alone, he occupies the extension of the direction Hogue took after 2024.