90 Mysteries Later: What Our First 90 Etsy Sales Taught Us

Ninety doesn’t sound like a huge number.

Not in a world where businesses announce thousands of orders, sold-out launches, and overnight success stories.

But when you’re two sisters running a niche murder mystery business? Ninety is a lot of mysteries.

It’s 90 times someone stumbled across Skills Murder Mysteries and decided that, yes, murder sounded like a pretty good way to spend the evening.

And after roughly two and a half years on Etsy, we think that is worth celebrating.

Not because 90 is some magical number. Because getting there taught us a lot.

Turns Out, “Any Time Can Be Mystery Time” Takes Some Convincing

We have always operated under a fairly simple philosophy: Any time can be mystery time.

Birthday? Murder mystery.

Holiday? Murder mystery.

Girls’ night? Murder mystery.

Family reunion? You already have a suspicious cast of characters. Might as well give them motives.

The problem is that we are still working on convincing the rest of the world.

Murder mysteries are a niche product. Plenty of people love them, but a lot of people still think of them as something you do once at Halloween, at a themed dinner theater, or when someone in the friend group suddenly decides everybody needs to own a feather boa.

Part of growing Skills has been figuring out how to meet people where they are and then showing them just how many excuses there are to host one.

That means creating mysteries for different seasons, group sizes, themes, and types of players. It means paying attention to what people are searching for and, sometimes more importantly, what they aren’t finding.

Every new theme is another opportunity to answer the question: What kind of night are people trying to create?

Ninety Sales Did Not Come From Uploading a PDF and Hoping for the Best

We wish.

The Skills Murder Mysteries Etsy shop that exists today does not look like the shop we started with in 2023.

We have changed how our games are packaged. We have changed how files are delivered. We have rewritten listings. Then rewritten them again.

We have updated graphics, experimented with thumbnails, and learned that designing something pretty and designing something that actually explains what you are selling are, unfortunately, two different skills.

We have learned more about SEO than we ever expected to know when we decided writing fictional murders sounded fun.

We have paid attention to Etsy search terms. We have figured out where customers are finding us. We have worked on social media, our website, and this blog because sometimes the person who eventually buys a murder mystery does not start by searching “buy murder mystery.”

Sometimes they start by wondering what to do for a birthday. Or how to entertain 15 people. Or whether a murder mystery is too complicated to host. Or what everybody is supposed to wear.

There are a lot of roads that can eventually lead to murder.

We have been slowly learning how to put up signs.

Sometimes the Data Tells You What You’re Doing Right

At the time of writing this, our Etsy shop has received more than 2,000 visits. We have repeat buyers. Our games have reached customers in dozens of cities and multiple countries.

Those numbers matter to us because they represent something beyond a transaction. A repeat buyer means someone played one of our games and decided they wanted to do it again. That might be one of our favorite measurements of success.

The same goes for the people we meet at vendor events and conventions who get introduced to Skills in person, talk to us about how the games work, and later turn around and purchase one to host themselves.

There is something incredibly satisfying about watching somebody go from: "Oh, you make murder mysteries?" to: "Okay, I think I need to host one of these."

That is the part of the business we cannot fit neatly into an Etsy graph.

Etsy Is Only One Piece of Skills

There is another important disclaimer attached to our 90-sale milestone: Etsy is not the only place we sell.

Skills Murder Mysteries also exists through our own website and through Fourthwall, along with the in-person events and opportunities that introduce people to what we do.

Could spreading ourselves across multiple platforms mean it takes longer to hit an Etsy-specific milestone?

Probably.

Someone who finds us through our website may never become an Etsy sale. Someone who sees us at an event may go directly to Skills Murder Mysteries afterward. Someone else may simply prefer one storefront over another.

And that is okay.

We would rather make it easy for people to find and buy from us in the way that makes sense for them than funnel every single customer toward one marketplace for the sake of making one number climb faster.

Etsy has helped new people discover us. Our website gives us our own little corner of the internet. Fourthwall gives us another way to reach customers and experiment as Skills grows. They are different doors into the same suspicious building.

We Have Also Learned to Actually Participate

This sounds obvious.

It apparently was not obvious to us immediately.

Running an Etsy shop means participating in Etsy.

That means understanding seasonal shopping habits. Looking at promotions. Paying attention to marketplace-wide sales. Updating listings before a holiday instead of three days after everybody has already made their plans.

It means recognizing when people are shopping for Valentine's Day, Halloween, Christmas parties, family gatherings, summer cookouts, or ski weekends and making sure the mysteries we already created for those occasions can actually be found.

Creating the product is only one part of selling the product.

Ninety Sales Also Means Ninety Chances to Learn Something

Not every experiment works. Not every listing performs the way we expect.

Sometimes a theme we adore sits quietly while another game takes off.

Sometimes customers ask questions that make us realize something we thought was perfectly clear is, in fact, not perfectly clear.

Sometimes we discover an entire kind of mystery we do not have yet.

And sometimes the best thing we can do for an existing game is not write another one; it is to make the one we already have easier to understand, easier to find, or easier to host.

The work between sale one and sale 90 has involved a lot more than writing mysteries.

It has been designing, editing, researching, troubleshooting, marketing, learning, testing, and occasionally staring at an Etsy listing wondering which combination of words will convince the algorithm that yes, people really are searching for fictional homicide.

Very normal small-business activities.

Small Numbers Can Represent a Lot of Work

There is a strange pressure online to only celebrate when the number is enormous.

Your first thousand followers. Ten thousand orders. Six figures. A sold-out launch.

But if we waited until Skills looked enormous from the outside before acknowledging its growth, we would miss a lot of what makes building it exciting.

Ninety Etsy sales took us roughly two and a half years.

We are okay saying that.

We are a niche business. We are still growing. We are still figuring out where our audience hangs out. We are still learning what themes people want, how they shop, and how to make it easier for someone who has never hosted a murder mystery before to take the leap.

There was no overnight explosion. There were just a lot of little decisions.

A rewritten description. A new graphic. A better keyword. A blog post. A vendor event. A social post that actually reached the right person. A returning customer.

One sale. Then another. Then another. Until one day, there were 90.

So, What Did 90 Mysteries Teach Us?

That niche does not mean nonexistent. That repeat customers mean more to us than a flashy number ever could. That the person you meet at a convention might become the host of their own murder mystery months later. That our website, Etsy, Fourthwall, social media, events, and blog are not separate projects. They are different pieces of the same business. That sometimes you need a new product. Sometimes you need better SEO. And sometimes you just need to make it much clearer what the heck people are supposed to download.

Most importantly? People are willing to make room for a little murder in their lives.

Maybe not everybody has caught on to our “any time can be mystery time” philosophy yet.

Give us time. We’re working on them.

And to everyone who has been part of the first 90 mysteries sold through our Etsy shop—whether you found us through Etsy search, met us somewhere in person, stumbled across a blog post, or came back after hosting one before:

Thank you. Seriously.

Here’s to mystery number 91. And 92. And whatever suspicious nonsense comes after that.

Celebrating with us? Through November 30, 2026, use code MYSTERY90 for 20% off in our Etsy shop as our little thank-you for helping us reach this milestone.