Our path to $1M in sales

Do you know why this blog post is great?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>This author deserves nothing short of an applause, thank you so much!

That is a pretty canonical example of bootstrapping a company. Congratulations on crossing $1M!<p>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'.<p>Congratulations again, next up $10M ! :-)

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?

<i>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.</i><p>What a great quote; this should be on my wall. Thank you.

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

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

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).<p>So loving watching Teespring's efforts - onwards and upwards and thanks for sharing all the info!

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

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.)

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.

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

Congrats on reaching profitability!<p>Post was a great read, so thanks for sharing. Gives us some good inspiration over at OpenRent.<p>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.<p>Keep it up!

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?

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?

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 ;]

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

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

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

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

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

How big a problem are charge-backs?

Is the graph cumulative?

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