You know Jesse that is an excellent question.

For most designers starting out that are looking to scale, I recommend things like POD (Print on Demand), creating and leveraging online product sales of physical or digital products, or creating outlets for your design processes that can pay you a residual in terms of ad revenue or membership fee revenue.

These normally consist of partnering with established middle-men businesses such as Merch by Amazon, Redbubble, Teespring, YouTube, Udemy, Medium (shameless plug), and can include many more.

In these cases, you are normally giving up some ownership or stake in the total value to create a wider reach and net more value overall than you gave up initially, or would cost you in terms of time and effort, than you would gain if you attempted to do it all in-house by yourself.

Using these methods, a designer could start with virtually no investment of up-front capital, and then leverage their talents to create works that people buy on a niche, but wider-market platform to create profits that they have a stake in and can extract via payout as a portion of sales revenue.