
Our path to $1M in sales - wiwillia
http://wiwillia.com/post/41810471731/our-path-to-1m-in-sales
======
neya
Do you know why this blog post is great?

1) The author is humble. Which is very important, especially in a world where
people get away selling clumsy photo filters for a billion and think it's
something revolutionary.

2) VALID Advice. Everyone wants to tell you the happy part of their story -
How they got rich, how those riches let them buy the stuff they wanted to buy
and how successful they were. How all this happened in less than 'x' months,
etc. They just want to make success sound so easy.

But this author takes the pain and effort to tell you the truth - That hard
work is the only key to success. Anything else is as temporary as it sounds.
This author tells you that success isn't easy, which is VERY important.

3) Success without PR and the funding. When was the last time on Hackernews
that you got to read someone being successful without getting PR and funding?
There have been a couple maybe, but not much. And everyone of them only wants
to share with you how much success they've had getting funded by some VC firm
'X' or even being a part of something like 500 Startups or YC, being an 'ex-
product manager' from Google, Facebook, etc with all their fancy getting
featured INSTANTLY on Techcrunch strategies, etc. Ofcourse, they did get
featured on TC, but doesn't mean, they got it instantly - They worked for it.

What teespring has written there is most likely going to be the case for the
ordinary you and me, and that's why this is very important and ofcourse, it
also gives you a lot of perspective.

This author deserves nothing short of an applause, thank you so much!

~~~
aytekin
Not to take anybody away from this great story but I had a similar post last
week. I posted on HN in a bad time so it didn't go front page with only 3
upvotes. Without any funding or PR we reached 1 million users in a B2B
startup. You might also like that post.
[http://www.jotform.com/blog/68-1-Million-Users-What-I-
Learne...](http://www.jotform.com/blog/68-1-Million-Users-What-I-Learned)

------
ChuckMcM
That is a pretty canonical example of bootstrapping a company. Congratulations
on crossing $1M!

On the question of 'what happened in august', I don't know of course but I
find that there is a definite lag between launching, and being "real" in the
eyes of the readership. We are so overwhelmed with marketing buzz and hype in
our daily lives that it becomes noise, and what falls out are things that just
keep moving forward and moving forward. When someone encounters your brand for
the second, third, or fourth time over the course of 6 months to a year it
seems to move you from 'idea' to 'actual company'.

Congratulations again, next up $10M ! :-)

~~~
chapel
You do realized that bootstrapping requires not taking funding, which
Teespring has taken plenty so far. Not to discredit their success, just
clarifying.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Fair enough. Another term compromised :-).

For clarification, back in my day if the only funding you got was from
founders and maybe an individual or two who believed in your idea [1], and
consequently made it all the way to profitability, that was 'bootstrapping'
the company.

Now get off my lawn sonny! :-)

[1] <http://www.crunchbase.com/company/teespring>

~~~
wiwillia
That would be the case with us - we have raised a seed round but it was from a
local angel (Bill Cesare) who joined the team full-time and is now our COO.

------
rexreed
I've tried 3 T-Shirt Campaigns on Teespring and they've all failed for me
(didn't reach minimum thresholds). Any insight into what makes for the more
successful ones? Is it just about the community one has, or does Teespring
have a ready base of those interested in shirts from other campaigns?

~~~
wiwillia
Hi Rex! As some other comments have pointed out, we don't actually have any
significant discovery featured right now - so a large % of hitting your goal
is your community!

That's something we hope to change in the near future though.

Always happy to talk strategy with you if you're interested, my email is
walker@teespring.com.

~~~
tobtoh
Maybe you could OkCupid style analysis blog posts on t-shirt design, what's
popular, what sells ets ... I'd imagine that could drive quite a bit of
traffic/lead generation.

OkC doesn't do those blogs anymore, but you can read their old entries at
blog.okcupid.com.

~~~
wiwillia
I loved those blog posts, that's a great idea. One of the craziest things
we've learned is that dark shirts outperform light shirts by 2:1.

~~~
djt
No one likes to separate their whites

~~~
rexreed
Or more likely, doesn't like to do their laundry as often and dark shirts hide
stains better.

------
rlander
_We pretty quickly figured out that there was no way to completely eliminate
errors, but we could control how we reacted to those errors when they did pop
up._

What a great quote; this should be on my wall. Thank you.

------
pc86
Is it just me or is there no easy way to just browse through currently
available designs (not the featured area below the CTA)?

~~~
pgrote
I couldn't find it easily, either.

Featured and Exciting Campaigns were the only ones. Is there a complete list
of active ones?

~~~
wiwillia
Hey guys - I replied above (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5173296>) but
the short story is that until quite recently we didn't have enough traffic to
really help organizers sell their tees, and didn't want to imply that we did
by offering a marketplace.

We also didn't have a huge amount of cool campaigns at any one time (up until
recently) - which would have made for a pretty poor browsing experience!

------
robomartin
Hmmm. I was thinking of trying it out but the one big problem I see is that
there isn't a "Browse Campaigns" button anywhere to be found. I would think
this would be a very important feature for potential campaign originators as
one obvious advantage here is to try and benefit form existing traffic.

Any thoughts/feedback on this? I'd love to understand why that feature isn't
there already.

~~~
wiwillia
The initial thought behind it was we didn't want to disappoint organizers
(campaign creators) by implying we had a market that was going to buy their
design. We also didn't have that many cool campaigns up and running at any one
time, and didn't know if that would impact user's perception of us.

As we've grown that has definitely changed, and we're in the midst of a
redesign that adds a discovery portion to our website!

Here's an early WIP mockup showing the new discover functionality:
<http://i.imgur.com/2Khj2A6.jpg>

~~~
robomartin
Nothing wrong with that. It's a common chicken-and-egg situation.

Suggestions:

Now that you have some money, hire a designer or three and have them produce a
couple of dozen designs for you under various themes. Now you have something
to browse. And promote.

Another thought: Hold a contest of some sort. $10K to the design that pulls in
the most sales over a period of time.

The best Obama t-shirt contest?

The nerdiest t-shirt contest?

The funniest t-shirt contest?

All of the above?

~~~
wiwillia
Awesome ideas, we might try a $10k to the best idea around a theme (maybe
programming or entrepreneurship) next month

~~~
robomartin
One other thought. Be sure you really think this through. People will try to
scam you.

For example, you might want to state that the reward will be paid in three
monthly chunks starting thirty days after the contest closes.

Why? Someone can easily put $3,000 on a credit card to win and then reverse
the charges on you five days later. The installment payment approach will not
prevent all fraud, it's just one idea to at least filter out some of it. Check
with credit card companies/PayPal before you do anything.

It might be intelligent to install other limits as well. Again, take your time
to think it through.

------
JacobAldridge
I've done a fair amount of research into this space, from the belief that the
awesome value proposition would be no minimum order number. The margins for
that are even worse than I imagined (even when ratcheting prices up past the
point where I think the buyer would see value).

So loving watching Teespring's efforts - onwards and upwards and thanks for
sharing all the info!

~~~
wiwillia
Awesome, would love to hear your thoughts - shoot me an email if you want to
chat sometime!

~~~
hknews
Would be very interesting to get a summary of what you guys talk about.
Business model discussion from those deeply involved in the business -- an
example of domain exploration vs actual execution with real financial numbers.

------
ph0rque
Question for you guys: what's your gross margin, if you don't mind sharing
that (before things like refunds and shipping)?

~~~
manuelflara
Based on this comment[1] and the graph on the blog post I assume they get to
keep around 30% after paying for production, shipping, etc.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5172890>

------
alok-g
Once a campaign succeeds, do you have any plans about the designs beyond the
campaign? Could the designer be selling on an on-going basis rather than
specifically setting up more campaigns for the same design? (This may require
the discover functionality to be in place.)

------
iceron
Excellent read. I've been wanting to try out Teespring for a relatively
popular (~ 46k followers) Twitter account I manage ever since I saw veb's
post. Time to get thinking about some designs.

~~~
wiwillia
Thanks! We actually offer free design help, shoot me an email at
walker@teespring.com and I'll get you set up.

------
euroclydon
Interesting that they wrote their own design tool. I see it's in SVG. I use
Fabric.js for the cupcake wrapper website's custom design tool. Fabric is a
screen graph library (and more) for Canvas. I think Fabric actually was born
out of a t-shirt company, hence the name, and Juriy (the author) still works
there.

[EDIT] I see why they wrote their own editor -- it's very nice!

~~~
nicolasroy
Thanks, we created our mvp with raphael for handling svg manipulations and
have since grown with it.

The svg environment has some limitations and we compensate with canvas
whenever it makes sense.

------
dazbradbury
Congrats on reaching profitability!

Post was a great read, so thanks for sharing. Gives us some good inspiration
over at OpenRent.

Have to agree that remembering to celebrate the little wins is really
important when you are constantly looking to hit that 40% growth. Without
celebrating your successes you'll find it hard to keep pushing the following
month - even when you are doing well.

Keep it up!

~~~
wiwillia
Thanks and good luck with OpenRent!

------
jusben1369
Congrats! What did January look like? Your curve looks to me like it's
trending in the right direction but is subjected to some significant
seasonality too vs hurting and suddenly hitting a tipping point? Or is Jan
just an extension of Dec?

~~~
wiwillia
We grew a little bit in January but didn't maintain the 40% growth we had in
Dec. We were warned that January is a tough month for retail, so hopefully
that's the case. I'll do a follow up post in a few months if people are
interested.

------
sk24iam
Have you considered allowing campaign creators the ability to easily embed
their T-shirt sales directly on their blogs, similarly to how shoplocket does
it with purchases?

------
jjsz
You don't know the amount of love that's flowing through my veins right now
after discovering this. THANK YOU. TWO THINGS: SVGS and polo shirts. It'll
save me some time ;]

~~~
wiwillia
We don't offer those publicly yet, but we can set that up for you on the
backend - shoot me an email at walker@teespring.com

~~~
jjsz
Great. Also patiently waiting for your website redesign, that way I can browse
all campaigns. Are your campaigns limited to 30 day timers?

Off topic:

Whoever has the money and connections to do this but for sneakers (Supra
material, Nike material, Converse material, all types-- I will pay 10 extra
dollars to put my own logo on my sneakers), I will bow down and I will buy
sneakers from you all the time as if you were a virtual post-modern Zumiez.
When I take my sneakers off to socially meditate among other all black
sneakers a good sneaker tag like the Supra ones, including a logo in the back
of the sneakers would save me 10 seconds every day!

~~~
wiwillia
Yep - campaigns can run as little as 3 days or as long as 30 days,
unfortunately that's a hard limitation due to the amount of time we can hold a
charge authorization on a credit card (we also don't want buyers waiting TOO
long for their product to arrive)!

~~~
jjsz
Hey, you said 30 and it shows 21. Also, I've did a shirt and am doing some
more. Here's my first one: <http://teespring.com/opengov>. If more than a 100
people by the shirt it won't stop the campaign will it?

------
forgingahead
Congrats! Where do you manufacture and ship the t-shirts from?

~~~
wiwillia
Thank you! We work with a couple awesome screen printers and a fulfillment
house on the East Coast (New Hampshire and Rhode Island).

------
ianstormtaylor
Congrats guys. Really awesome idea. Also how did it take this long for me to
learn that Fishco got shut down? Jeez

~~~
wiwillia
It was a sad sad day

------
netrus
Looking at your chart, I would think you were profitable from the very
beginning - how to read that indicator?

~~~
wiwillia
Sorry about that I should have clarified - by profit I meant money after we'd
paid all our costs on the order (production, shipping, etc.) but not after
we'd paid for ourselves or our office space.

------
dear
Congrats! It's exciting to see people's hardwork translate into success! Keep
it up! The world is yours!

------
taloft
Can someone clue me in on the value proposition of this vs something like
spread shirt ?

~~~
wiwillia
For sure - companies like Spreadshirt and CafePress use digital printing as
opposed to screen printing in order to avoid the heavy upfront costs of screen
printing.

As soon as you print over 10 t-shirts screen printing becomes both lower cost
(a t-shirt that starts at $15 on Spreadshirt can be $6 on Teespring) and
higher quality (digital printing produces less vibrant colors and washes out
much quicker).

Short version: Teespring allows you to produce higher quality products at a
lower price point. We also add the benefit of game mechanics and make the
experience more social.

~~~
sutro
Spreadshirt uses a number of different techniques:

[http://www.spreadshirt.com/us/US/-/--1328/categoryId/9/artic...](http://www.spreadshirt.com/us/US/-/--1328/categoryId/9/articleId/51)

~~~
wiwillia
My fault - I stand corrected. However I do believe that screen printing is
still the leading printing technique for both quality and cost. Almost all
tees sold in retail are screen printed.

------
drfuchs
How big a problem are charge-backs?

------
bcx
Is the graph cumulative?

~~~
wiwillia
No - the graph is month by month

------
n9com
$1M in tshirt sales and not profitable? Something is wrong.

~~~
wiwillia
We actually hit profitability in November and have maintained that since!
Might not have made that clear enough.

Not all that money goes to us - in December alone we paid out over $90,000 to
campaign organizers.

