Our path to $1M in sales

http://wiwillia.com/post/41810471731/our-path-to-1m-in-sales

by wiwillia • 13 years ago

223 61 13 years ago

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!

wiwillia19• 13 years ago

Thanks and good luck with OpenRent!

euroclydon• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

ChuckMcM2• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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

ChuckMcM2• 13 years ago

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

jusben1369• 13 years ago

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?

wiwillia19• 13 years ago

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.

iceron• 13 years ago

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.

wiwillia19• 13 years ago

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

netrus• 13 years ago

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

wiwillia19• 13 years ago

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.

taloft• 13 years ago

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

wiwillia19• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

Spreadshirt uses a number of different techniques:

http://www.spreadshirt.com/us/US/-/--1328/categoryId/9/artic...

ph0rque• 13 years ago

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

manuelflara• 13 years ago

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

pc86• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

I couldn't find it easily, either.

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

wiwillia19• 13 years ago

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!

jseakle• 13 years ago

We're working on expanding our discovery tools, as wiwillia explained above, but any discovery tools will always be filtered, either manually, or by fairly stringent criteria, such as already having sold a number of shirts. As with any website that freely accepts user-submitted content, making it easily viewable to the public is inviting abusive and spammy submissions.

eps• 13 years ago

I too thought it was a variation of threadless.com, but it sounds like it's different... Though it still doesn't make much sense why they wouldn't let random people stumble into and join existing campaigns. A Kickstarter version of Threadless would be a very intesting thing to explore, especially if campaigns are allowed to last for a while (hint, hint).

rexreed2• 13 years ago

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?

wiwillia19• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

robomartin4• 13 years ago

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.

wiwillia19• 13 years ago

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

robomartin4• 13 years ago

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?

jjsz4• 13 years ago

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 ;]

wiwillia19• 13 years ago

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

jjsz4• 13 years ago

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!

forgingahead• 13 years ago

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

wiwillia19• 13 years ago

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

n9com• 13 years ago

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

wiwillia19• 13 years ago

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.

JacobAldridge• 13 years ago

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!

wiwillia19• 13 years ago

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

hknews• 13 years ago

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.

bcx• 13 years ago

Is the graph cumulative?

wiwillia19• 13 years ago

No - the graph is month by month

ianstormtaylor• 13 years ago

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

wiwillia19• 13 years ago

It was a sad sad day

rlander• 13 years ago

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.

dear• 13 years ago

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

neya• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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...

sk24iam• 13 years ago

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?

alok-g• 13 years ago

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.)

drfuchs• 13 years ago

How big a problem are charge-backs?

Our path to $1M in sales

Related Stories