We recently connected with Daniela Diaz and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Daniela thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What was it like going from idea to execution? Can you share some of the backstory and some of the major steps or milestones?

It all started with my husband saying “you are so creative, you can make money.” I was always the creative one in my family who had an idea for something or always wanted to decorate a family’s birthday party or wanted to make a dessert for the holidays. You are probably saying “well why didn’t you get into party planning.” Party planning wasn’t something I was fully passionate about. It was more like a hobby. I wanted to find something to do that I loved doing and wasn’t just a hobby. I was more of a number girl. I was into numbers; budgeting, dividing the cash with sticky notes to pay bills, keeping track of all of our finances. I loved organizing our money.

Then, one summer evening I decided to Google “ways to make money”, “DIY projects to make money” and I couldn’t find anything interesting. I looked into making candles and started making them, selling them to family but realized it wasn’t my thing. I was having fun doing it but didn’t love it.

Finally, one night, I hopped on YouTube and came across a couple of you-tubers putting money inside envelopes, diving their bills into different envelopes and these envelopes were broken into categories. That’s when I learned about the cash envelope system. THIS was it! I knew right away this is was my thing. I said to myself “this is BRILLIANT”, I love budgeting, separating and organizing the money and what better way then to use the envelopes method for them. I learned right away I wanted to make my own cute but SIMPLE envelopes. But then asked myself “how do I make them? how do I start? What do I need to make them?. I went on YouTube and searched “how to make envelopes?” (did not find one that I understood). All I learned was that I needed a laminator and laminating sheets to make them. But had no measuring or how to even go about making them. So I taught myself how to make them, struggled for a couple of days, but I was determined to find the way to make them, until I finally got it and when I did, I cried… happy tears. This is where SimpleShopz came into existence. I had tons of ideas running through my mind all at once. Ideas I couldn’t let go, Ideas I wanted to develop. Ideas I knew I had to write down, and find the way to make them happen. I was eager to make all my ideas come to reality. I spent hours everyday working on those ideas and ofcourse I failed so many times but I knew this is what I was passionate about this I had to chase, this I had to conquer, this is where my head was. I remember my husband saying to me “you need to list it on Etsy”. My heart dropped to my knees. I was so afraid to take that next step, the BIG step. To sell it, knowing my items were not perfect, not knowing if I had the right measurements or if people would even like them in person. Knowing I had tons of competition out there and that 1 negative review on my Etsy shop (being a new shop) could affect my tiny shop tremendously, at the time. I took a chance and I listed it….. and it took about a month for my items to be discovered and finally purchased. Knowing I made my first physical order was nerve wrecking, I worked on it, shipped it out and got a 5 star. Oh I was happy! This motivated me even more, this gave me more confidence.

I learned that sometimes we have to take a leap of faith and hope for the best. If you don’t take the chance you will never know the outcome it would have had.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Hey y’all! My name is Daniela and I was once homeless. I was born, raised and currently located in the big apple- New York. I am a mom, a wife, a great believer of our Lord Jesus Christ, a cash budgeter, a content creator and a small shop owner. My content and shop is all budgeting related. I sell anything from cash envelopes, savings challenge templates, savings boxes to cash binders/planners. I am not a financial advisor but Ive been budgeting for over 11 years and so I like to share my knowledge in budgeting with others to help them create financial budgets and help them stay motivated to reach their goal.

A little more in depth about myself. When I found out I was having my first baby with my husband (almost 11 years ago) I knew things were going to get serious. What I mean by serious is actual responsibilities. This is when we realized we needed to learn how to manage our money better to be able to not only support ourselves but our baby. We also realized that as our family grew we needed a place to raise our family. We looked into apartments and found an affordable one within our budget. Everything was great until we lost our apartment first then lost our jobs due to our landlords negligence. This led to my family becoming homeless and having to seek for help from the city. We were placed in 4 to 5 different shelters for 4 years, where we were treated unfairly. Went nights without eating, had cold baths, were humiliated, harassed all of the above. It was a nightmare we couldn’t wait to wake up from.
But this didn’t stop us there. This motivated us to want better for our family. We knew this couldn’t be it for our family. So we worked together to strive to provide our family.

During our homelessness I worked on my Accounting Degree online, sold desserts to make extra cash. My husband worked 2 to 3 jobs to be able to put money on the side for a future apartment deposit. We then decided to get married in our church during our homelessness, no wedding reception, no honey moon just a simple yes I do and back to the shelter. 12 days later we received the blessing of a newly constructed apartment that worked perfect with our budget. This is where everything started to fall back into place.

I decided to create an Instagram, a YouTube and build my business with budgeting related things to show others through my testimony that things happen in life but that is up to you to make a change. You can come back up stronger than ever. I feel that this experience not only brought my family together more but it made us stronger to overcome any obstacle. We also learned the importance of building an Emergency Fund for unexpected circumstances and saving for the future.

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

PROMOTE! Just like consistency is the key to success so is promoting. We have the ability to promote in the comfort of our own home from our devices. When you promote you are putting your items out there for everyone around the world to see. Social media gives you that boost you need for your products to be discovered by potential customers.

Do you sell on your site, or do you use a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc?

All of my products are sold through Etsy. I believe that Etsy is very easy to use, it also helps target the right audience to your shop. The only con about Etsy is their processing and transaction fee is high and this is one of the main reasons, many are creating their own website. But if you do not have an audience, if you do not have a stable and consistent platform where you promote your product creating your own website would not be such a good idea.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://instagram.com/simpleshopz_?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
• Youtube: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCwZcRQmP2WMivM_KS-sx_ig
• Other: Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/shop/SimpleShopz?ref=simple-shop-header-name&listing_id=1287812718