Our path to $1M in Sales (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Our path to $1M in Sales (2013)

wiwillia.com

73 pointsJarred6 comments

What I'm curious about is what that original MVP looked like. How did the cash collection get sorted out? Was it just dumping it into a Stripe account, and then any refunds for situations where there weren't enough orders would be manually processed?

Also, I wish the article talked more about the affiliate program. A while back, I remember a distinct uptick in the number of stories and content marketing spam hitting various startup forums around how people were making it rich with Teespring and Facebook ads. It was very obvious it was the next fad in the affiliate marketing space.

How much of that was a conscious marketing push by the Teespring crew vs. just something that sprung up on its own? The "get rich quick" crowd was all over it, and I can't help but think that was a big leader in initial growth as well as content that drove organic traffic back to them (perhaps one step removed via an affiliate).

The fad isn't over by a long shot. The TeeSpring guys were brilliant and helped create a whole new category of marketing, the social internet marketer. The concept that you could create an ad on FB that targets people by a niche turned out to be a huge winner for these marketers. Conversion rates went from 1-3% to 10+%. It spawned a whole industry that has expanded out to other countries. It is now possible for someone sitting in Vietnam to create a business selling tshirts to someone in the US, all through targeted social advertising. Kind of amazing really.

> Was it just dumping it into a Stripe account, and then any refunds for situations where there weren't enough orders would be manually processed?

I'd love some confirmation on this too. I had a protracted email exchange with some members of the Stripe support team which I didn't find favourable. Mainly because they didn't understand my actual business. But it lead me to choose a competitor who was actually happy to work with me.

Their main issue was the amount of refunds that I may be getting due to the business model. At the time of the email exchange I hadn't even started to operate!

So with respect to refunds. What's the operating procedure? If you get too many, do they suddenly close your account? In my instance, if my current provider were to close my account. I'd be out of business, instantly!

That's why I didn't go with Stripe. Which is a shame, as I wanted to use them, as I heard some good things about them.

Thanks

Out of curiosity, what did you go with in the end?

It almost seems like some sort of escrow type service is more appropriate. Is there anything like that with a similar developer-friendly platform/API like Stripe to facilitate crowd-funding? I'd honestly be surprised if there wasn't at this point.

I built an online registration service. We needed to be able to do refunds easily (free) in case the event was canceled. We used WePay because at the time, they were the only company that offered free refunds.

WePay has been through several incarnations/pivots over the years, not sure how they are now as I've moved onto another business now.

Thanks for the suggestion about WePay. Sent them an email requesting more information.

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