Live data from Hacker News

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

thatshirtwascash.com

1–10 of 38 posts

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

#2
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.

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

#3
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

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

#4
post #2

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.

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

#5
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?

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

#9
post #5

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.

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

#10

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!"

Post reply on HN