wiwillia

Hi there - Walker from Teespring here. Both rdl and earbitscom are right. We took money to give ourselves the cushion we need to scale and aim big, and we raised it from people we believe can make a difference to our business.

I'm writing a follow up to my first blog post (wiwillia.com) where I'll get a little more into the details of why we chose to raise.

I love the concept of Posthaven because it says that a huge exit doesn't have to be the end game for every startup.

They've made a promise to their users to live by a sustainable business model instead of shooting the moon. Writing should be permanent, but the model of startups is one that favors the temporary. This seems like a logical next step.

Posthaven has made a promise to users that they won't sell (and given that Garry is behind it, I don't think that's a promise made lightly). It's built for people who are tired of seeing their content eventually become dead links.

Instead of offering it free they have a sustainable business model @ $5/mo, so they won't be beholden to finding a big exit or raising a ton of cash.

We're working on that! The MVP for Teespring was originally built to support only 1 product, we've since realized that almost everyone wants to sell their tees on a few different styles/colors and have been revising the system to support the new functionality.

We looked into this and surprisingly it's cheaper to produce the t-shirts here in the US. Their isn't the same level of competition on blank garment suppliers and screen printers, so the costs are significantly higher. Coupled with the fact you don't capture the bulk discounts it actually ends up a little more expensive!

We'll continue to look into it though, perhaps when we reach a certain scale we'll be able to command better prices.

I also added that to the campaign! Just click the thumbnails on www.teespring.com/hntees.

Hi from Teespring! If you guys wanted to collect a few UK orders together we'd be happy to ship them for free on us!

We used to use a cheaper international shipping service, but things would get lost too often and we hated seeing people wait weeks for their tees. We recently upgraded to USPS Priority International.

For sure, shoot me an email at walker@teespring.com and we'll organize it!

We're working on accepting Bitcoin through Coinbase, just wasn't quite ready for this tee!

I can set that up for you - shoot me an email at walker@teespring.com!

Very fair feedback, we just added a Slate Grey option to check out - let me know if that works.

We just added a Slate Grey option to checkout, you can now purchase! Thanks for the feedback.

Hi Seb, we just added a Slate Grey option to checkout!

Thanks for the feedback, we've just added a Slate Grey option on checkout!

Hi lance, we just added a grey option on checkout!

Per request, we just added a Grey option in both men's and women's cuts!

The specific color is Slate - you can check it out on American Apparel's website at http://store.americanapparel.net/product/?productId=2001.

Most definitely in the works! We're planning on releasing a product iteration that has more discovery tools soon.

Yep! These will be printed on 100% cotton tees.

Hey jneal, sorry to hear you're having trouble - want to shoot me an email at walker@teespring.com? We can tell you what error we're getting from the cc processor.

Google, Tumblr, etc. all have investors and shareholders which are trying to turn a profit. I think the idea here (and Garry can correct me if I'm wrong) is that they'll never take on outside funding or entertain selling the company, the sole purpose of the site will be to build something that is sustainable and lasting as opposed focusing on profit.

Awesome ideas, we might try a $10k to the best idea around a theme (maybe programming or entrepreneurship) next month

No - the graph is month by month

It was a sad sad day

I loved those blog posts, that's a great idea. One of the craziest things we've learned is that dark shirts outperform light shirts by 2:1.

Awesome, would love to hear your thoughts - shoot me an email if you want to chat sometime!

Yep - campaigns can run as little as 3 days or as long as 30 days, unfortunately that's a hard limitation due to the amount of time we can hold a charge authorization on a credit card (we also don't want buyers waiting TOO long for their product to arrive)!

We actually hit profitability in November and have maintained that since! Might not have made that clear enough.

Not all that money goes to us - in December alone we paid out over $90,000 to campaign organizers.

Hey guys - I replied above (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5173296) but the short story is that until quite recently we didn't have enough traffic to really help organizers sell their tees, and didn't want to imply that we did by offering a marketplace.

We also didn't have a huge amount of cool campaigns at any one time (up until recently) - which would have made for a pretty poor browsing experience!

Thank you! We work with a couple awesome screen printers and a fulfillment house on the East Coast (New Hampshire and Rhode Island).

My fault - I stand corrected. However I do believe that screen printing is still the leading printing technique for both quality and cost. Almost all tees sold in retail are screen printed.