Man, I gotta push back on this one. Two extra hours per book is a ton of time for a spine that only held up for a week, which honestly proves nothing in book terms. Your kid flipping through it for seven days is not the same as a book sitting on a shelf for 20 years, and glue setups can open flat too if you grain the paper right and don't skimp on the spine lining. For small runs, cords are extra work that most folks will never notice or pay for, and if your sections get thin at the end you're fighting uneven spacing on top of it. Sounds less like a fix and more like a hobby you picked up a taste for.

$4,100 in a whole month selling planners is not the flex people think it is. After taxes and the Etsy fees and the Canva subscription and buying her own health insurance since there's no job, that's maybe $2,800 take home, which is under $34k a year. Meanwhile the loud 5am cold plunge crowd is making money off the course they sell to people who want to be them, and that's the actual business model, not the hustle. The quiet planner kid is working way harder for way less and everyone wants to point at her like she cracked the code. Rent in Columbus is up like 40% since 2019, so tell me again how templates are the thing that broke everything. The economy got wrecked by people with real power, not by a 23 year old with a Shopify page.