Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Teespring Says It's Minting New Millionaires Selling Its T-Shirts, Raises $35M

forbes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 66 posts

Re: Teespring Says It's Minting New Millionaires Selling Its T-Shirts, Raises $35M

#31

Post by fabiandesimone »

dangrossman wrote: post #4

It's surprising to me the degree to which Teespring has become part of the affiliate marketing community. The same group of people that normally spend all their time pushing "get rich quick" schemes, MLM programs, dating site ads on social networks and fake news articles about diet pills have really embraced t-shirts for some reason. There's a whole ecosystem of products around Teespring marketing businesses -- landi…

I'm an affiliate marketeer. Couple of points:

1) Not sure why all the hate towards us. We can take a company from zero to millions overnight. I get that there are some shady stuff floating around but that's not 100% of the industry.

2) Facebook + Teespring is almost a perfect combination.

3) Aff. Marketeers have created some issues in FB using Custom Audiences (T-shirts that said stuff like "This was made specifically for Joe"). Those sold like hot-cakes but FB went down hard on them.

4) Everyone wants a piece of the action, that's why you see so much tutorials and stuff around it. It's also a great way to learn Aff. Marketing if you are into that.

Re: Teespring Says It's Minting New Millionaires Selling Its T-Shirts, Raises $35M

#32

Post by askinakhan »

jedberg wrote: post #14

If you want to build a huge business, building a platform where other people can make money using it is a great way to do that. eBay, AirBnB, Uber/Lyft/etc, Teespring. Even Google, with their adwords product (and reddit with it's self serve ads). There's lots of great businesses where people pay you for a service, but if you can create one where people make money when you do, they are heavily invested in your success…

Yeh absolutely. It's another extension of the sharing economy. These kind of business models change societal habits and as generations shed, the sharing model will become more prominent (It's even been predicted by Gartner; not that this should be taken as gospel). Think about the amount of income you could make from renting your flat (AirBnB), Being a driver on Uber, Selling your skills on Udemy and now selling your fanbase personalised t-shirts on TeeSpring. Indeed it's similar to sites like Zazzle but adds a twist by combining the concept with Kickstarter.

We are making entrepreneurs out of ordinary people, it's fking awesome.

Re: Teespring Says It's Minting New Millionaires Selling Its T-Shirts, Raises $35M

#33

Post by shostack »

fabiandesimone wrote: post #31
dangrossman wrote: post #4

It's surprising to me the degree to which Teespring has become part of the affiliate marketing community. The same group of people that normally spend all their time pushing "get rich quick" schemes, MLM programs, dating site ads on social networks and fake news articles about diet pills have really embraced t-shirts for some reason. There's a whole ecosystem of products around Teespring marketing businesses -- landi…

I'm an affiliate marketeer. Couple of points: 1) Not sure why all the hate towards us. We can take a company from zero to millions overnight. I get that there are some shady stuff floating around but that's not 100% of the industry. 2) Facebook + Teespring is almost a perfect combination. 3) Aff. Marketeers have created some issues in FB using Custom Audiences (T-shirts that said stuff like "This was made specificall…

As someone well versed in the affiliate space, I can say that a lot of the hate comes from the highly-visible low-quality affiliates out there.

People associate it with the most intrusive forms of online advertising including spam, toolbars, pop-ups/unders, misleading ads, annoying banners, and much scummier stuff.

It also doesn't help that is a strong association and overlap with the "get rich quick" folks.

There are definitely affiliates out there that add value, and affiliate programs in general can be a very profitable channel when managed properly. But there are MANY bad actors out there, and just as many eager newbies ready to take what they say as gospel based on promises of quick cash.

Re: Teespring Says It's Minting New Millionaires Selling Its T-Shirts, Raises $35M

#34

Post by nikhilalmeida »

fabiandesimone wrote: post #31
dangrossman wrote: post #4

It's surprising to me the degree to which Teespring has become part of the affiliate marketing community. The same group of people that normally spend all their time pushing "get rich quick" schemes, MLM programs, dating site ads on social networks and fake news articles about diet pills have really embraced t-shirts for some reason. There's a whole ecosystem of products around Teespring marketing businesses -- landi…

I'm an affiliate marketeer. Couple of points: 1) Not sure why all the hate towards us. We can take a company from zero to millions overnight. I get that there are some shady stuff floating around but that's not 100% of the industry. 2) Facebook + Teespring is almost a perfect combination. 3) Aff. Marketeers have created some issues in FB using Custom Audiences (T-shirts that said stuff like "This was made specificall…

Mind sharing any resources to affiliate marketing the right way? (non spamy)

Re: Teespring Says It's Minting New Millionaires Selling Its T-Shirts, Raises $35M

#35

Post by innguest »

askinakhan wrote: post #32
jedberg wrote: post #14

If you want to build a huge business, building a platform where other people can make money using it is a great way to do that. eBay, AirBnB, Uber/Lyft/etc, Teespring. Even Google, with their adwords product (and reddit with it's self serve ads). There's lots of great businesses where people pay you for a service, but if you can create one where people make money when you do, they are heavily invested in your success…

Yeh absolutely. It's another extension of the sharing economy. These kind of business models change societal habits and as generations shed, the sharing model will become more prominent (It's even been predicted by Gartner; not that this should be taken as gospel). Think about the amount of income you could make from renting your flat (AirBnB), Being a driver on Uber, Selling your skills on Udemy and now selling your…

> We are making entrepreneurs out of ordinary people, it's fking awesome.

Or, people are naturally entrepreneurs stifled by regulation and AirBnB, Uber, Udemy and TeeSpring are simply allowing the people's natural entrepreneur spirit to shine through by shifting the compliance burden away from them.

Re: Teespring Says It's Minting New Millionaires Selling Its T-Shirts, Raises $35M

#36

Post by dsugarman »

fabiandesimone wrote: post #31
dangrossman wrote: post #4

It's surprising to me the degree to which Teespring has become part of the affiliate marketing community. The same group of people that normally spend all their time pushing "get rich quick" schemes, MLM programs, dating site ads on social networks and fake news articles about diet pills have really embraced t-shirts for some reason. There's a whole ecosystem of products around Teespring marketing businesses -- landi…

I'm an affiliate marketeer. Couple of points: 1) Not sure why all the hate towards us. We can take a company from zero to millions overnight. I get that there are some shady stuff floating around but that's not 100% of the industry. 2) Facebook + Teespring is almost a perfect combination. 3) Aff. Marketeers have created some issues in FB using Custom Audiences (T-shirts that said stuff like "This was made specificall…

we work with and it is really hard for us to find quality affiliates. it feels like they do whatever they can to get us trapped into browser software and coupon websites, our profits are just completely cannibalized. can you please email me at dsugarman @ zentail, we would love to work with you!

Re: Teespring Says It's Minting New Millionaires Selling Its T-Shirts, Raises $35M

#37

Post by pbhjpbhj »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #18
taude wrote: post #16

How's this different than something like Big Cartel ( http://bigcartel.com/ )? Not asking about business stuff specifically, but the usability or whatever-it-is that this newer stuff does that the older online t-shirt printing businesses don't? I don't really understand their story about starting because they couldn't find someone to make their t-shirts...

It's about who is taking the risk, with BigCartel you shell out money upfront to buy shirts + print (guessing how many to get in each size, how big an order you need, etc.) then try to sell them. TeeSpring is kind of like a Kickstarter, you setup a picture of what the T-shirt would look like when printed and then no money changes hands until you hit your "funding level" of a certain number of shirts, and there's no e…

>TeeSpring is kind of like a Kickstarter //

TeeSpring is almost exactly like CafePress or Spreadshirt or Zazzle or Threadless or ... isn't it? Aren't Reddit just moving in to this space (perhaps white-labelling one of these services?). Fair play to them if they broke in to this market (which seems pretty crammed) and took a relatively large slice of the pie.

Re: Teespring Says It's Minting New Millionaires Selling Its T-Shirts, Raises $35M

#38

Post by fabiandesimone »

dsugarman wrote: post #36
fabiandesimone wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an affiliate marketeer. Couple of points: 1) Not sure why all the hate towards us. We can take a company from zero to millions overnight. I get that there are some shady stuff floating around but that's not 100% of the industry. 2) Facebook + Teespring is almost a perfect combination. 3) Aff. Marketeers have created some issues in FB using Custom Audiences (T-shirts that said stuff like "This was made specificall…

we work with and it is really hard for us to find quality affiliates. it feels like they do whatever they can to get us trapped into browser software and coupon websites, our profits are just completely cannibalized. can you please email me at dsugarman @ zentail, we would love to work with you!

Great, I'll shoot you guys an email :)

Re: Teespring Says It's Minting New Millionaires Selling Its T-Shirts, Raises $35M

#39

Post by coldtea »

spatulon wrote: post #28
_almosnow wrote: post #3

Honest question. If your business is doing good, why would you want to raise money?

My favourite analogy is that a successful business is like a machine that takes money and then, one hour later, spits out 1.2 times whatever amount you put in. You could start by feeding the machine $1, waiting an hour, then feeding the $1.20 back in, and so on. But you'll get richer far quicker if you persuade somebody to lend you $1M and directly dump that in to the machine.

I don't think that's a good analogy or in any way illuminating the mechanics of the situation.

Re: Teespring Says It's Minting New Millionaires Selling Its T-Shirts, Raises $35M

#40

Post by ensignavenger »

anigbrowl wrote: post #23
_almosnow wrote: post #3

Honest question. If your business is doing good, why would you want to raise money?

Economics. Suppose you have a factory and a growing order book but you're running at or near full capacity; if you get any substantial increase in the number of orders, it's going to take longer and longer to fulfill them, and customers might start to go your competitors if they feel the quality of your service has dropped. This is a diseconomy of scale - you've run out of room to grow and the more business you get t…

Excellent answer- I wonder though why more start ups don't take out loans/issue debt? Is it simply because they can't find anyone willing to lend to them at reasonable interest rates? I would think a company like the one you describe would be a pretty good bet for a lender to give a loan to build a factory.
Post reply on HN