How I made $40k within Shopify's trial period | Hacker News Reader

How I made $40k within Shopify's trial period

thatshirtwascash.com

That's awesome. Few questions:

40k revenue or profit? If it was rev then what was your profit (and vice versa)? And are you worried that the sort of initial wave of traffic will die down and you'll be left only selling a couple dozen shirts a week? I mean this sort of thing (to me) seems like it is an awesome effort at capitalizing on something that went viral, but how do you plan on sustaining (or even growing) these numbers?

$40,159 in revenue

is at the end of the first paragraph

As another mentioned, a ton of people want to do the shirt business. It's not about follow-through on this one though, because shirt business isn't as profitable as you might think. I would guess he/she is lucky if 1/3 is profit, and that's with massive quantity. It's a lot of work for 'little' return. Getting them printed, shipping, returns, etc...

Tried commenting on this earlier but was spam blocked.

1. Revenue 2. Estimated ~25% That number gets larger with quantity. I'm more focused on getting more people exposed to the concept and signed up for our shirt picking surveys. 3. Not really but it is a real worry. The submitted designs -> voting -> new shirts concept is repeatable. I also have my thoughts towards building a platform around that. Imgur for shirts. 4. Sustaining and growing, yes since my livelihood depends on it but really I love this concept and am having a lot of fun. I don't see why we wouldn't grow, that would be a failure to execute. I am also going to look for a minor seed investment to enable me to do more things.

Thanks for the reply. Good luck with everything.

How did you make $40k?

Post says TINhouse was useless and reddit has the lowest conversion rate (but still accounted for 25% of the sales).

Could your talk about the "engaging people on various forums/communities" part and where the majority of that 40k came from?

Sure, we seem to be popular on forums with people sharing "wtf is up with these shirts" or "would you wear these"? The first comment always seems to be "no." then the rest are positive. Also, a few of those shutupandtakemymoney type places have done posts on us and those have really high conversion rates. Lastly, I use places like FunnyJunk and 9GAG as a place to repost twitter pics. It's my first time on those, so I'm still trying to learn their communities.

Our Kim Jong Il shirt is crushing it, which I didn't expect, and people are sharing it / finding up on Instagram and twitter. I am going to expand and utilize those social media platforms more such as a "4chan designs shirts" board on pinterest. We have virality on our side with this, but I think most B2C companies need something others want to talk about.

We have high conversion off facebook but I don't do anything on it. So, it most be others sharing links and pictures that I can't see. We also have a large "direct" group of sales that I have no information on how they found us.

EDIT: I can't reply as fast as I'd like to due to spam restrictions in place. I didn't use my main account for this post.

Just looked at TINhouse's twitter and, well, I have no words. I would pay to not be featured with these people...

Maybe I've met 100 people in my life who've wanted to make t-shirts for a living. It's not always about the ideas, but the execution. Congrats.

Well done for making it. Good luck now that you've handed in your notice.

I think the true lesson here is understanding your market. The 'giggly teenage boys' market doesn't want refined style or a corporate look. You need to present yourself as homebrew and authentic.

I find it a shame that smart people like silly things, but hey that's the Internet.

edit: punctuation

> I find it a shame that smart people like silly things

Why? I don't see how this matters at all. Besides, possibly, disrupting your vision for society

I've been sharing this site quite a bit with fellow redditors. I'm not for all the shirts (of course), but I find a lot of them hilarious and wearable! Especially with the internet savvy crowd.

Congrats, I love the idea of asking the market for feedback on demand early on.

Are there one or two shirts that generate the majority of the revenue, or is it all pretty evenly spread?

Also, I'm interested in the different prices of the shirts. Are they adjusted for demand or just based purely on printing costs?

Both cost and demand. One shirt is crushing it compared to the rest and then we have three groups. Ones that sell really well, ones that sell, and ones that don't. Some of the non-sellers provide good comical value though. I would say it's pretty spreadout as you can see with this graph: http://i.imgur.com/W5pCFSl.png.

Each bar represents a different shirt.

What are you shirt printing costs? I know the amount of colors and things used factor in as well as the amount of shirts ordered.

also how many shirts to you print for your first run?

We use nice shirts and printers. The shirts cost ~$5 - 5.50 (and more for larger sizes). The coverage of the shirt dictates the price of that, full coverage being ~$10 for loq quantity. Cost decrease quite a bit if the order of that shirt is high. (down to $7.50). We're using a market penetration model but really I just want to reach out and talk to people I want involved in creating shirts, voting, and selling. I am very responsive and available.

Just in case someone is wondering what designs inspired him, one was a shirt with a picture of a man hanging head down naked from a chain that was attached to his pubic region. I realize there are two degrees of separation here and it was foolish of me to click on a link with 4chan t-shirt designs. Still i don't think it is necessary to promote yet another shitty t-shirt design website.

That's why we have a voting process. I hear you though and made some changes: bolded, underlined and added 'very' to the NSFW. Thanks for feedback.

That man is not dead. Look again. He is carefully balancing being sure to make no sudden movements. In the original photo there is a bottle of talcum powder nearby. The dead don't need talc.

I'd rather not, I take your word for it.

yes, there were some truly tasteless tshirts in that list but when you click on any link prefaced with 4chan, you have to assume the worst.

i have to admit, reading this post to eventually come across a t-shirt with a pair of pants on it really made my day though

Huge copyright infringement on so many of their designs...

"then we do licensing / design work"

I would guess by that the person means they work out arrangements on licensing and or decide if any licensing is necessary.

Yeah, that shapes what we can offer.

Does anyone know how the T-shirts are being printed?

Read the article.

I hate to be a downer but you're flirting with disaster here. Copyright infringement everywhere.

We only offer shirts we have agreements with the artists with, are created/recreated by us, or have no searchable creation. There has been a couple times someone said "I made that!" and we add them into the royalty group when it looks like they are. I don't know if we have to do that even, but we do.

Most shirts people submit have licensing issues and the shirts we have with licensing besides Astrosloth don't sell as well.

EDIT: Spam blocker has limited my capability to respond, so I hope you see this:

"You're right, when we first launched based on community reddit posts. We had whatever was most popular since it was being made just for them but we grew past that quickly and realized it was going to keep going. This was just going to be a fun one-off ordeal. Now I have an adviser for licensing and I take it very seriously. Thanks for the compliments too!"

Do you mean the original artist or whoever random internet dweller decided to submit one of the memes?

Both. Original artists are easy to find and talk to. Or if a post was obviously originated somewhere, I messag ethem on whatever site that is.

I'm interested how long it took you for a huge company like Disney to get back to you. Did they charge you anything?

I hate this guy so much.

Agreed.

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