“Teespring allows you to create & sell custom apparel with ZERO Hassle, ZERO upfront costs, and ZERO risk”. That’s the promise, stated on their website. I talked to Walker Williams, co-founder of Teespring, to find out more about the company and their plans.
In a nutshell, what is Teespring and how did the idea come about?
Teespring came from a personal need. I was a senior in college when an infamous local dive bar, The Fish Company, was shut down (for a variety of good reasons). I saw this intense energy around the moment and wanted to do something to celebrate this place that so many people felt strongly about, as well as hopefully make some money. I created a cool design for a t-shirt, posted it to Facebook, and got a ton of interest — but when I explored what it would take to actually make that idea real I quickly realized that physical products has expensive upfront costs, were risky in that you had to guess how many you needed in advance, and actually individually packing and shipping those products to buyers was time-consuming and difficult.
I almost gave up on the idea, but at the last-minute I decided to hack together a website with a simple premise: If we could get 200 people to pre-reserve the product, we’d print and ship them to buyers. This way we skipped upfront costs, knew exactly how many we needed, etc.
The website (which is still up today at freefishco.com) was a big success, but more importantly I got so many emails from people who had interesting ideas for products they wanted to sell, but all of them were stuck on the same problems I had encountered. That’s what clued me on to the larger opportunity!
What are your expansion plans? Is Europe included?
We plan on being a global company! We recently acquired Fabrily.com, a fast growing European version of Teespring, to further that mission.
What’s the single mistake you learned the most from?
That’s a hard one, I’d say it’s not spending enough time to talk to the people who use our product every day. It’s too easy to get detached and operate in a bubble, but at the end of the day no one knows better what the customer needs than the customer themselves. These days I spend lots of time meeting and talking to our users, and it’s both one of my favorite things to do and simultaneously invaluable.
If you were starting right now, what would you do differently?
Hard to say, I try not to live too much in the past, but probably be a little more aggressive with hiring early so we could have moved a little faster! There’s always too much to be done.
Are we living a new tech bubble? Should startups worry?
I don’t, personally, think so. But that said I’m no financial pro (I don’t invest in stocks or pay much attention to the market). There are certainly more high-growth, high-potential startups today than ever before, but I would say that is a byproduct of tools like Heroku, Google Apps, Paypal, Stripe, AWS, etc. etc. which have come along and drastically lowered the barriers to entry — where now you can really start a tech company with nothing more than a couple hundred dollars and a great idea. Teespring wouldn’t be here today if I had needed anymore than $15 to get it off the ground.
In the same way I hope that Teespring enables a whole new wave of hyper-successful brands by drastically lowering the barriers to entry for people looking to produce physical product.
What other startup is on your radar and why?
Zenefits, because I know Parker and he’s an amazing founder and because I believe that they are on the path to building one of the biggest SAAS companies of the decade.
Find out more about Teespring at http://teespring.com/
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