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

>people are naturally entrepreneurs stifled by regulation and AirBnB, Uber, Udemy and TeeSpring...

Not really. Renting out your house to someone is not entrepreneurial. Neither is driving people around in your car or teaching people. Further, I know of no regulation that prevents people from teaching for money. As far as Teespring "designers", those people are not entrepreneurs either. They are simply affiliates who market for Teespring and who also happen to give over whatever creative ability they have to Teespring with the hope of being paid for it.

In all of these cases, the people being touted as "entrepreneurs" are no different from employees working as independent contractors, and in some cases it's worse. The only entrepreneurs here are the companies that built the platforms and convinced people to give over their time and resources to generate revenue for their business.

One can make value judgments about whether it's good or bad for the people who participate, but to say that they are creating entrepreneurs is literally saddening.

Let's say you are buying ads from FB. It's common practice to test multiple ads. (Images, Headlines, Ad copy in the body, targeting (who the ads will be shown to).

The hope and idea is that one or more of these ads will work better than the rest. It's a bit like how YC invests in a lot of startups, not all succeed, the ones that do get more money, the rest run out of cash and go out of business.

To help you see which ads are working FB cookies and tracks everyone who clicks your ads. However they don't know if a click results in a sale/lead unless you send them confirmation that a sale/lead happened.

That's where the pixels come in. The term pixel can sometimes be confusing, because these days it's usually a snippet of javascript that makes a call to FB. I haven't looked at the back end implementation, but I assume the JS loads an image.

In short, this allows FB to attribute the sale/lead to a particular ad. With enough data, you can then weed out the ads that are wasting money, and focus on the ones that work. Al lot of time you can optimize further by building out variations of the winning combination.

All this is cool, but if you don't control the conversion page, and this is the case for 99.999% of affiliates you can't place your FB pixel unless the company you are working with provides a means for you to do so. Sometimes it's manually done, other times it's automate like what Teespring did.

QUICK PRIVACY WARNING: Placing a 3rd party pixel code on a conversion page has to potential to leak private information to the 3rd party. This usually happens if your customer's info is in the url variables of the page hosting the pixel. When the page loads, all the info is passed to the 3rd party pixel in the referer info.