In today’s episode we share how you can start making a full-time income by selling T-shirts online on a new platform called Teespring!
Making money on Teespring – Episode Highlights:
- How Benny Hsu segued from an app business to making full time income by selling T-shirts on Teespring.
- Where to find designers for your T-shirts, and how much should it cost?
- How to get traffic to your Teespring campaigns without breaking any sweat (or the bank)!
- How to find and tap into the hottest trends and themes that already work on Teespring .
- How to get started right now!
Today’s Guest: App developer & T-shirt Entrepreneur!
I first met Benny Hsu at the 2013 New Media Expo in Las Vegas. Back then, he was the latest and hottest app developer success story. I’ve just interviewed him as a cover story for the Inspiring Innovation magazine, and we became good friends.
Benny’s story became a mini-legend. After all, he went from working at his family’s restaurant, to developing apps. Then, his first app, ‘Photo365’, generated over $31,000 in sales in under 30 days!
Benny went on and created more apps, mostly following his “365” theme. None of them was as successful as the first one, and last I spoke with him he was dabbling with app re-skinning.
From App Re-Skinning To Selling T-Shirts On Teespring
App re-skinning is an easy way for anyone to get into the app development game. By buying one ready-made app and only changing its graphics, you create tens if not hundreds of apps… fast.
With each app generating a few tens, or even hundreds, of dollars every month, the more apps you re-skin – the more money you make.
The problem is that as app re-skinning is just changing the graphical design of an app. You’re not adding any value to the end user. That makes it too easy for competition to grow… and that’s exactly what happened.
Competition in the re-skinning world grew quickly, and exponentially. Today, using app re-skinning as a business model to generate a full-time income has become hard.
Seeing where the market was going, Benny resolved to pivot. He had a business re-birth, and created something completely new.
Making A Full Time Income By Selling T-Shirts Online
It all started with an interview Benny was listening to. Some guy was making a six-figure monthly income by selling T-shirts. What interested Benny was that he was using a new platform called ‘Teespring’.
You should know that Benny has been thinking of selling t-shirts ever since he read the 4 Hour Work Week. He just never had an option to make it happen; The set-up costs were always too high, the profit margins too low.
But listening to that interview, Benny knew that Teespring will change everything.
What Is Teespring
Teespring is for apparel what Kickstarter is for startups. It allows anyone to create a t-shirt design, and set up a fundraising campaign to get it made.
When a campaign meets its sales goals, Teespring handles everything. They take care of the charging, producing, manufacturing and shipping of the t-shirts to all the buyers. All the designer has to do – is to collects the profits.
If not enough people agree to buy the shirt, the campaign failes. In such case, the customers doesn’t pay a penny, the t-shirts are not made, and nobody loses any money.
This new model removes all the old risks of manufacturing first, validating later. With Teespring, you confirm the market wants it, before you make it. And when they want it – you don’t need to worry about producing it. Teespring takes care of it for you!
Launching A Successful Teespring Campaign
As you will hear in today’s episode, Bennie’s start with the platform was far from perfect. In fact, his first 21 campaigns failed to get funded(!).
But perseverance paid off… big time. Campaign 22 was a hit, and Benny has cracked the code. Once he had his first win, Benny repeated what worked and ditched what didn’t. He was quickly making a full time income selling T-shirts online!
Listen to today’s episode to learn:
- How Benny managed his experiments
- What stats did Benny measure to determine what designs he should pursue
- How Benny kept his experimenting costs to the bare minimum.
It is extremely possible that you can sell your first hundred T-shirts online before New Year’s! But if will happen ONLY if you don’t miss out, listen to today’s episode, and then… take action!
Mentioned resources call on
I’ll be taking a short holiday until 2015. I want to wish you happy holidays, Merry Xmas, happy Hanukkah, and a fantastic and exciting new year!
Yours always,
Meron
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I wish this interview lasted longer!!! Ugh!!!
Grab job everyone and congrats Benny to your success!
Thanks Alex! So good to see you here! And Happy 2015!!! 🙂 🙂 🙂 Are you inspired to try teespring out?
tee spring looks soooo interesting i want to try it out. Is there alot of risk invovled? hard to do? how much is it to be trained.
Hey Jake! You can start for free. It’s not hard – they have an online tool to design all the t-shirts and you don’t pay for anything – you only share the revenue if and when your campaign sells out.
The only risk involved is if you invest money in getting a designer to do more advanced designs (if the design doesn’t sell – you don’t make money but still need to pay your designer). Another possible risk is if you promote the t-shirt using paid ads on Facebook or other platforms. The risk then is that you pay for ads but the t-shirt doesn’t sell, so you don’t make your money back.
The way to reduce risk is do “small bets” instead of spending tons of money on a campaign. For instance, you’d spend $10 a day for a day or two on Facebook ads, and then see if you make enough sales to cover the costs. If not, you’d ditch the design and do a new one. This way you only lose $10-20 and not more if something doesn’t work.
Does this make sense? Let me know if you have any more questions about it!
Where does one listen to the podcast on Benny?
Hello, Chris! 🙂 You should be seeing a player right above the “Making money on Teespring – Episode Highlights” title. If you can’t find it, you can also click on this link: http://traffic.libsyn.com/inspiringinnovation/IIP087__Make_A_Full_Time_Income_Selling_T-Shirts_Online.mp3 to reach the MP3 file directly. Let me know if you have any troubles
Just getting ready for my first teespring campaign and ran across this. Awesome information. Thank you. I have building fan pages which is great. But now I know I don’t need to wait for 10k+ followers, just run ads through facebook. How cool is that? Giving it a go this weekend. Will follow up with number of t-shirts sold. Thanks a bunch.
How did it go, Shane?
Hi Meron, really nice post, Teespring is doing a great job its a great income opportunity to earn from tee income. Thanks for sharing your experiences here. Facebook advert. is a good way to get sales and good percentage of ROI
I know Benny from the teespring facebook group, he’s well known there, great job Benny and keep up the hustle.