Teespring: How To Build A T-Shirt Company, The Hacker Way | Hacker News Reader

Teespring: How To Build A T-Shirt Company, The Hacker Way

blog.leanstack.io

71 pointsyonasb37 comments

"Because we’re in this transition period between PHP and Ruby, we couldn’t use PostgreSQL on Heroku because PHP doesn’t speak PostgreSQL."

sigh

Wait, what am I missing here? http://php.net/pgsql

Yeah, I've used both MySQL and Postgres in the same app before (legacy transition/migration). There is no issue with Postgres in PHP, and it works just fine with, e.g., PDO.

Walker from Teespring here. Wanted to jump in and say I was also confused by this, and Evan is on a well-deserved vacation right now so he's not around to clarify.

This was a real-time interview, and I was the one who edited for grammar because Evan had already left. I'm assuming this didn't come out the way he intended it to. I can't imagine (though I could be wrong I suppose) he is under the impression Postgres doesn't work with PHP.

When he gets back I'll have him chime in!

Right on. I didn't imagine that anyone as evidently technically savvy as Evan didn't understand it -- I just wanted to put out the confirmation that PHP and Postgres (in the general case, maybe not at Heroku) work fine together for casual readers.

This limitation (of Heroku's?) is fairly interesting to me. I'm curious as to why (perhaps there just isn't enough demand for Postgres/PHP apps in their experience so they haven't developed support for it?).

I'm guessing that it might mean that Heroku's PHP runtime (or the common PHP buildpack, or however it works) doesn't come with a Postgres driver.

Yonas from Leanstack here. I also edited for grammar after the initial transcription and it looks like his full statement was inaudible. So *Eric was simply saying that Heroku Postgres does not support PHP (https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-postgresql). I'll be making the corrections soon.

I don't usually carp about grammatical errors, but if you have any editorial sway, that article has one in the second word of the first sentence.

> Teespring let’s anyone easily create and sell t-shirts.

has a grocer's apostrophe on "let's". It should be "lets", sans apostrophe.

Got it, thanks. We'll have a better editorial process moving forward, sorry for the errors guys.

Are you sure? This repo suggests otherwise: https://github.com/kch/heroku-php-pg/blob/master/index.php

A friend and I built a t-shirt site too. It's so incredibly basic (ours is ugly) but was fun to do to actually write some software for the web (we arent really web guys).

The code is actually really cool because we never have to touch a shirt. Shirts.io handles all the t-shirt fulfillment, stripe handles payments, and we design shirts and add them to the site. If you don't have a t-shirt company, you should, just because it's cool to write a program that turns your own money into tshirts.

The site I made was www.binarytees.in

That's an awesome name!

Also great idea for a cool beginner web project.

Really cool.

I totally agree. I've been playing around with Shopify and Merchify (similar "never touch a shirt" workflow) in the same way. For someone who mainly plays in engineering, testing ads on facebook and adwords and playing marketer for a while (without committing any meaningful amount of capital or attaching my name to anything) has been really enlightening and fun.

www.roguethreadsdesigns.com

For anyone who wants to set up a first business so you get a basic sense of selling things [online], highly recommended.

How do you market the site?

Your blog link leads to a 404 page.

I thought this was going to be a joke post along the lines of "disrupt threadmaking" -> "disrupt sewing machines" -> "disrupt sweatshop labor issues" -> "disrupt textile design and manufacturing process cycle" -> "disrupt fashion industry" -> "disrupt ecommerce" -> "disrupt logistics"

Why don't you allow single orders? I always thought you required 10+ shirts because you had to create some sort of mold and load it into the printers, but it seems that isn't the case.

With everything automated, you could easily allow anyone to create any number of shirts.

i think your initial thought is spot on unless they've figured out someway to automate the molds and store them for retrieval at a later time.

apparently they are on the verge of releasing an API and widget so that t shirt designers can embed directly onto their own site. http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/11/teespring-wants-to-be-the-p...

If they are able to allow single orders along with the widget I don't see whats stopping them from taking over the entire market as they are taking all of the hard work out of running a t shirt company.

good luck fellas

Probably because they choose screen printing for the process, in which most of the cost is in the setup (so its not cost effective to do all that work for 1 shirt).

Great write up and insights into Teespring's history, current stack and workflow, really fun read! Awesome to learn from others tribulations, especially enjoyed reading about their solution to getting correct postal addresses, and the tech they used to do so.

Why would you want to redo in Ruby and Rails if the current solution is working fine in php? Are there significant benefits? You could significantly improve upon and/or add to the current system/application instead of rewriting, no?

From the article, it seems that the major benefit of the change would be the freedom to use PostgreSQL on Heroku.

The url to Teespring in the header is broken:

"Editor’s note: Evan Stites-Clayton is Co-Founder at Teespring. Eric Koslow is Lead Developer at Teespring."

=> hhttp://www.teespring.com/

I've been building a t-shirt website at http://electricfairground.com so this article was a really interesting read.

How long did it take you guys to get traction?

Why do you have images of the design and (presumably you) wearing the t-shirt design? It looks duplicative and jarring.

It's not me, they are stock images. You're right, it does look jarring. I'm currently working on making a number of new products available. Eventually there will be very little duplication on the front page.

About a year! I wrote about the first nine months at http://wiwillia.com/post/41810471731/our-path-to-1m-in-sales

Nice article, I had went through a few phone calls with Evan early this year about coming on board as a developer. I really like what these guys are doing.

Good job Evan and Walker.

CustomInk.com is worth looking at as a comparison - similar approach started 10+ years ago, now apparently selling several hundred million dollars of T-shirts.

> We make more, on average, than $1 per visit.

that is VERY impressive.

What kind of t-shirts are you printing on? American Apparel?

I was hoping they might be getting robots to make t-shirts.

Don't tempt us

If you do, I promise I will buy one.

I'll buy a dozen if you manage to make the fabric as well.

And I will send thousands of adorable kittens, on the hour, every hour, if you manage to grow/produce your own fibre or at least make sure it is traceably sourced to groups that are not total bastards.

If you are going to hack t-shirts, you might as well do the entire chain. :)

edit - note: you are not allowed to source the fibre from the kittens just to get the kittens, that's cheating.

Kitten cotton (sustainably sourced of course) sounds like a billion dollar idea if I've ever heard one

I can see it now, Kitton. The future of fabric.

Each Kitton t-shirt is guaranteed to contain as a minimum, the fluff of 30 of the fluffiest kittens and we at Kitton are dedicated to acting sustainably, with full regard for the environment, all while keeping a close eye on the bottom line, at our unstaffed combined kitty processing plant and owl sanctuary.

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