Ultralight startups: little capital, just computer
sfgate.com
sfgate.com
I'm trying to do something similar right now as a side project. I'm not selling t-shirts, but the economics are similar. If you actually research it, it takes very little startup capital(several thousand dollars) to go to a manufacturer and create your own product, even professional-looking consumer packaged goods.
These types of business may not attract investors or get acquired, but it's a great way to generate easy, automatic income streams while you work on something bigger.
The problem is, it's too easy - there's no challenge there for me and running an e-commerce site is a lot of hassle, especially if you ship products yourself, hold inventory etc etc.
That's why at the moment, I'm focusing on my stock photo startup, it's more of a challenge, and if it works how I hope it will, it should require less physical work on my part (no shipping products etc).
I helped build a fairly successful online business that sold a single laptop accessory which we had produced, packaged by hand, and sold directly to consumers. The site generated 60k in yearly revenue on somewhere between 5-10k (Christmas peaked at 20k+) unique visitors per month. The margins were really good since we had it produced ourselves and priced high. It was great business while it lasted but I ended up walking away from it because of partner issues.
My old partner still operates it today and it's nearly 4 years later! She tells me that it still generates about half of what it did at peak, but it's slowly fading away because of bigger companies that deliver a better, and cheaper product.
It's great experience and takes time but isn't hard to do.
The web in general is flooded with stores selling the same dropshipped products, so to stand out I believe someone has to take the path you did and have something unique produced, otherwise you're just competing with Amazon and the like.
I remember reading an article in Business 2.0 about "micro-multinationals" [1] and the thought has always been in the back of my mind to try creating a completely distributed company, with ecommerce being the initial distribution channel. Work and grad school kept me too occupied to give it much thought, but reading about things like this always reminds of the article.
[1] http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2...
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hDbvr90jK7...
I need to do some more digging for salary implications...anecdotally I know that salaries for top-end software folks are still very high.
The Obama administration has the chance to change the narrative away from the WPA-type government works, consumer stimulus and all these other FDR/Keynesian tricks that tea partiers liken to Soviet Russia and instead focus on the biggest driver of employment and b2b consumption: Small business.
I think it's well passed time for us to really soak corporations who in the early 2000s took every tax break and still continued outsourcing, offshoring, right-sizing, and "pivoting toward core competencies" or whatever that hell the new PHB term is today. Tax the s--t out of them. What are they doing with that cash, anyway? They're definitely not hiring here and they're not reinvesting except outside of the US, where the growth is larger and the market less stagnant. Tax them until they hurt or move to Dubai or wherever the hell they go nowadays. Don't believe their narrative in the press that they're the biggest driver of employment. SMBs have _always_ been the big hirer; larger than the Fed, larger than the megacorps.
Obama's administrative focus should be almost laser-like on small business and entrepreneurship, and not just Green ones. ALL of small business should get every damn tax break his administration can give. That, added with tax incentives for SMB purchase of health care, can make working for an SMB even more attractive to potential hires.
This is the moment for the SBA to become one of the most important departments in the Government during this recession. They should be flush with cash, doling out loans at-cost or at lower rates than the stingy big banks that won't lend to Main St. anymore. Let them sit on the sidelines while the government guarantees the survival of the US economy. They'll come around eventually and drop their CDO and leveraged funny money games and start focussing on lending money to fuel growth industries again.
Hey, one can dream.
If small business have merits, than they should be able to thrive on the free market.
That's why I see the SBA coming to the forefront with direct microlending and guaranteed super-low interest rates for mom and pop loans.
Not everyone has a business idea that can get the attention of YC or TechStars. It sometimes takes a nudge to get things going. It's a big country, with people that have varied skillsets, education levels, and means of opportunity. If we want to encourage entrepreneurship, we need to either empower them directly with tax dollars, or we give those dollars to banks who may or may not do it for us.
What we obviously can't do is cut taxes for the rich and corporations and hope they hire the unemployed, because I'm sure you'll agree that it obviously hasn't happened.
I prefer the method of cutting down regulations and coercions put out by government then see if it help small business stack their advantages against big business' disadvantages.
I also dislike favoring anybody, even the little guys.
In reality , though, the solution is a simple matter of tax revenue arbitrage. Instead of providing tax breaks to the lethargic corporations that will take those tax breaks but won't hire anybody anyway, give it as a guaranteed loan to a small business who will use it to directly hire workers and consume products and services expressly for business continuity and growth. Spread thinly enough, while the failure rate outpaces the successes, the succeeding companies have the potential to hit it _really_ big, spurring ancillary and supporting feeder companies sprouting around it and possibly creating a new industry.
Is this much different than opening up a local McDonalds and advertising? Is this really relevant to HN?
He gives business to t-shirts producers who wouldn't necessarily be able to chose what t-shirts to make, to market them, charge for them, etc. And he helps buyers by giving them a convenient way to order and pay for t-shirts.
This is an article someone who created a very successful startup at a young age by "hacking" the traditional clothing value chain and business model.
This is exactly hacker news. If it doesn't strike your fancy, there's an article about pants that I'm sure you would enjoy more right over there <--.
Compare: http://www.ooshirts.com/ vs http://www.customink.com/.
Maybe it doesn't take too much money to start up a company that is more or less ripping off another company.
This isn't to say that competition in providing tshirts is a bad thing. But a profile of a company that lavishes praise on the cleverness of starting up an ultralight, while discreetly ignoring that his web application is a page-for-page knockoff of a larger company is fairly disingenuous.
It's possible that the reporter didn't know about CustomInk. But that doesn't excuse Raymond Lei's profiting by stealing the inventiveness of another company.
And, it's not the idea that the story is focussing on anyway, it's the fact that it's basically a two-man shop with a 19 year old founder completely bootstrapping it while waiting to declare a major in college, and the grim economic realities nurturing these "ultralight" businesses.
But when the web application is a painstakingly detailed clone of another company's, I think that the virtue of "completely bootstrapping it" to be undermined, and reduced to little more than a "me too" business.
I think that if someone started up a company called MacRonald's, specialized in selling cheap hamburgers, and had a clown mascot who wore a funny tophat, it wouldn't be praised much. Even if the founder was a 19-year-old.
Obviously, ooshirts is not doing anything revolutionary, but that 6th ranking must have come somehow, not by just ripping off customink.
Would be interesting to see, how Lei did it.
A startup can have three kinds of IP: new product niche; new customer niche; new marketing niche. Innovation in all three is risky. Its safer to change just one.
If this guy out-marketed the others, that's a fair win. Like Subway beat McD's.
This is just someone middlemaning an affiliate program - something that's really old hat in the ecommerce world.
I too think this article isn't HN type material.