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Damage Inc.'s Teespring Trials & Facebook Foray

A detailed account of a Fastlane process...

Damage Inc.

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I've canceled the advertising for all of my first five shirts, and ended their teespring campaigns early.

After doing some more research I ended up downloading Gimp (photo editing software). I was a little bit frustrated at having to wait for my Fiverr contact to reply, and having to explain every detail, and not being able to just execute on an idea. I watched some tutorials, played with the software a bit, and got down the basics. I will just use Fiverr for custom from scratch illustrations - some of which I may be able to re-use on different shirt designs. With Gimp I can take one illustration that I pay for and apply it to 10 different shirts to test. Obviously this is much more cost effective than paying someone to design 10 different shirts. And for simpler designs, or ones where I can use a photo and modify the effects, I can execute by myself.

So I've created 2 new designs with Gimp, launched shirts, and started advertising about 5-6 hours ago. These designs came out looking much better than the ones I used the teespring design tool for. They are both related to hobbies, and one is also related to a specific place. Going to try and test a couple of other ideas today as well. I'll post some advertising data later on today.
 

William T.

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I know a few guys who live by TeeSpring. Guy 1 - says he did over a million in sales last year and guy 2 says he did 60k last year. I took a swing at it for a couple of weeks, invested about $100 in total. I ran multiple designs and multiple adds on Facebook, and made zero dollars. Keep in mind I own a graphic design business and screen print for a living (among other things such as the occasional website build). When I asked the guys mentioned above how the did it they have two different approaches. "Million Dollar Man" had multiple designs, multiple niches, however he spent $1200 marketing his campaigns....gotta have money to make money...this guy also sells other items online. "60K Guy" said he found one niche that he felt was a winner. Researched groups, forums, etc. to target. Then created what he felt was a winning design and created 10 different ads with the same shirt with various ad design concepts. He spent $5 a day on each ad. After 2 days dropped the ones that weren't producing clicks. Told me he did this a few times with different niches and sold 5,000 shirts last year. It is a good opportunity to make money but it is a numbers game. Just like selling an ebook in order to sell a 1,000 a million people need to see the ad. Thanks for sharing your experience, I look forward to hearing what happens next.
 

Damage Inc.

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My first two sales/reservations came in this morning. Both for the same shirt. I'm less than $4.00 into advertising it, so it's a positive return so far (if they go to print). If I can get 3 more buyers it will print and I'll have my first successful campaign on my hands.

2-22-15%20first%20sales_zpscnrx0yqq.png



2-22%20fb%20stats_zpskzqesmkx.png
 
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Jascha

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The first time ever I hear of teespring and that some guys made so much money out off it.

No wait, thats not true!

I read a post a few days ago that talked about scraping fan pages and groups to target them via a custom audience on facebook. It was named "How to steal the fans of your competitors". The article explained how some people scraped the Facebook IDs of persons with specific lastnames and then created an ad calling them by their name and selling them a Tshirt with their lastname. Know that I think about it, it was probabl teespring. (Btw facebook prohibited this kind of advertising now).

I think its great that you share your experience and see it just as that: An experience. Probably great to learn something about facebook ads, but nothing more. Its to late to make money with that as already too much people have thought about it or tried it for their self.

I have been loosing a lot of time with these kinds of siteprojects, becoming excited about the idea and dream. But it was every time exactly that: lost time. I would go for sideprojects that really can teach you something
 

Damage Inc.

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The first time ever I hear of teespring and that some guys made so much money out off it.

No wait, thats not true!

I read a post a few days ago that talked about scraping fan pages and groups to target them via a custom audience on facebook. It was named "How to steal the fans of your competitors". The article explained how some people scraped the Facebook IDs of persons with specific lastnames and then created an ad calling them by their name and selling them a Tshirt with their lastname. Know that I think about it, it was probabl teespring. (Btw facebook prohibited this kind of advertising now).

I think its great that you share your experience and see it just as that: An experience. Probably great to learn something about facebook ads, but nothing more. Its to late to make money with that as already too much people have thought about it or tried it for their self.

I have been loosing a lot of time with these kinds of siteprojects, becoming excited about the idea and dream. But it was every time exactly that: lost time. I would go for sideprojects that really can teach you something

If you look around you will find that you absolutely can still make money doing this. It comes down to the level of commitment. No offense, but "it's been done before, too late" is a horrible excuse and almost never true. I can't speak as a successful teespring campaigner yet, but I have made money doing other things that people said were impossible, too saturated, or too hard. There's always an angle.
 

JasonR

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Here's my question.

The average CPA on Facebook is $20-30

How are you going to make money selling t-shirts?

One more piece of advice. If you KNOW you're going to spend $100 (or $50) on a campaign/ad set, I'd rather have that data in ONE day then a little bit of spend spread across a week. Gotta fail fast.
 
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Damage Inc.

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Here's my question.

The average CPA on Facebook is $20-30

How are you going to make money selling t-shirts?

One more piece of advice. If you're KNOW you're going to spend $100 (or $50) on a campaign/ad set, I'd rather have that data in ONE day then a little bit of spend spread across a week. Gotta fail fast.

Thanks for replying. I actually hadn't given enough thought to CPA vs my net take away per shirt, and I might be cutting it closer than I realized. That CPA seems really high though for the teespring shirt campaigns. If I do need to spend $30 per acquisition then this project will die pretty quickly. My sense though is that the good campaigns are around $5 and mediocre closer to $10, and for a failure you'll blow $20-30 and then kill it. Supposedly though, the good times happen when you uncover an untapped design or customer base through testing. When you hit a home run design the volume goes up and the CPA goes down, people are sharing it, teespring is featuring it, etc. Also you can get away with better margins on hoodies. You're right though obviously, at the end of the day my CPA needs to be lower than my take away per item. With how I have my pricing right now I make about $5-$7 on the tee shirts and $10-15 on the hoodies. That might not be enough, I really don't know yet.


Thanks Jason.
 
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openminded790

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I read a lot of the above, skimmed through a bit so apologies if I missed anything.

You're targeting for the dog shirt was spot on, those interests are HUGE fans of dogs.

Your 90s shirt appeals to people who are 25 and under. These guys wear things that are cool so your shirt has to look good! If you won't wear it chances are no one will buy it.

For those around 40 and above, you can usually get away with boring text designs.

JasonR is right, you want to fail fast, prioritize data collection. The more you throw out there, the quicker you learn BUT the more you'll spend. I've had days where I test 20 designs, lose $600, (none are profitable), BUT I learn a lot about 20 different niches. At this stage however, you want to refine your process so I would suggest keeping it to 2-3.

great work with downloading Gimp and doing your own designs. Your SPOT ON about having a template and just varying it here and there so you can make different designs quickly. this has been a big thing for my business. One design I varied up about 40-60 times, 5 of them did real well and bought in over 40k collectively in revenue.

You NEED to be able to design yourself or at least a local, in-house designer who can put out designs ASAP. You don't want to be depending on someone to be getting back to you all the time for small design mods, etc.

Anyway, you're doing things right, just keep going.

Also, work on creating a quicker process. ei,

- Have one generic description you can copy paste between teespring camps
- Be posting on the ONE facebook page, only branch out when camps are successful

As you get quicker, the process will become less frustrating so keep going through the hurdles.

~ Mateen
 

Damage Inc.

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I read a lot of the above, skimmed through a bit so apologies if I missed anything.

You're targeting for the dog shirt was spot on, those interests are HUGE fans of dogs.

Your 90s shirt appeals to people who are 25 and under. These guys wear things that are cool so your shirt has to look good! If you won't wear it chances are no one will buy it.

For those around 40 and above, you can usually get away with boring text designs.

JasonR is right, you want to fail fast, prioritize data collection. The more you throw out there, the quicker you learn BUT the more you'll spend. I've had days where I test 20 designs, lose $600, (none are profitable), BUT I learn a lot about 20 different niches. At this stage however, you want to refine your process so I would suggest keeping it to 2-3.

great work with downloading Gimp and doing your own designs. Your SPOT ON about having a template and just varying it here and there so you can make different designs quickly. this has been a big thing for my business. One design I varied up about 40-60 times, 5 of them did real well and bought in over 40k collectively in revenue.

You NEED to be able to design yourself or at least a local, in-house designer who can put out designs ASAP. You don't want to be depending on someone to be getting back to you all the time for small design mods, etc.

Anyway, you're doing things right, just keep going.

Also, work on creating a quicker process. ei,

- Have one generic description you can copy paste between teespring camps
- Be posting on the ONE facebook page, only branch out when camps are successful

As you get quicker, the process will become less frustrating so keep going through the hurdles.

~ Mateen

Thanks for all the tips again, you've sped up my learning curve with this stuff quite a bit. I'm just trying to keep at it, be as objective as possible, and make sure my eyes and ears are open to catch the right signs. Hopefully I can manage to find a successful campaign and recoup some of these advertising costs soon and get this to profit.
 
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Damage Inc.

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One more piece of advice. If you KNOW you're going to spend $100 (or $50) on a campaign/ad set, I'd rather have that data in ONE day then a little bit of spend spread across a week. Gotta fail fast.

Sorry I totally mis-intepreted this the first time, I thought you meant you don't want to see me posting my results over the course of a week. You're saying just spend my $30 bucks in a day instead of $10 a day for 3 days. This is a good point and I've been slowly heading in that direction. I know with eBay certain days and times are optimal for sales and optimal for ending auctions. Do you take anything like that into account for FB advertising? Like, do you think I run a risk of advertising with $30 for a day on Tuesday and failing, whereas if I had run it on a Sunday it may have been successful?
 

JasonR

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Like, do you think I run a risk of advertising with $30 for a day on Tuesday and failing, whereas if I had run it on a Sunday it may have been successful?

No, for the most part, different days should not matter especially at the volume you're running.

When you start running traffic at $500, $1k + a day you can start to see some difference in between days - but - I've NEVER had a profitable campaign that became unprofitable because of what day I ran it.

I ran a campaign on a Friday, did 100% ROI, did 360% ROI on Saturday, and then just over 100% ROI on Sunday. That was a nice weekend. :) However that wasn't normal for me, and for the most part sales were mostly consistent day to day.

Usually other factors will cause campaigns to fluctuate. I don't what it was about that particular Saturday, but it was good.

Anyways, I can't help but think, are you tripping over nickels when you she be chasing 100 dollar bills with this t-spring stuff?
 

Journey2Million$

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I've been studying teespring & facebook for 10 days so far. I still need to learn more and find some niches to try out. I'll begin campaigning in a couple of weeks more or less. I heard one guy had a successful 1st campaign (19 sales) and then he had 40 fails in a row before he got another success. I also heard another guy had a 15/1 fail/success ratio when he was a beginner, and now he has a 5/1 ratio. So yeah I'm taking my time learning this stuff first. I want to have a reasonably solid foundation before I begin campaigning. It looks to me like the experienced guys spend about 10% of their profits on ads. All these Teespring & Facebook mechanics are very new to me. Once I have a good grasp of the mechanics I should do pretty well, unless something is terribly wrong. Most of the designs I've seen on Teespring are pretty bad and it looks like most people don't know what they're doing (as usual).
 
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Damage Inc.

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I've been studying teespring & facebook for 10 days so far. I still need to learn more and find some niches to try out. I'll begin campaigning in a couple of weeks more or less. I heard one guy had a successful 1st campaign (19 sales) and then he had 40 fails in a row before he got another success. I also heard another guy had a 15/1 fail/success ratio when he was a beginner, and now he has a 5/1 ratio. So yeah I'm taking my time learning this stuff first. I want to have a reasonably solid foundation before I begin campaigning. It looks to me like the experienced guys spend about 10% of their profits on ads. All these Teespring & Facebook mechanics are very new to me. Once I have a good grasp of the mechanics I should do pretty well, unless something is terribly wrong. Most of the shirts I've seen on Teespring are pretty bad and it looks like most people don't know what they're doing (as usual).

Wish you well with it. It's all new to me too, fun learning experience so far.
 

Damage Inc.

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Quick morning update. The design that had 2 sales yesterday now has 5, and is officially going to print. I'm not in the the profit yet though because it seems that the first few shirts eat up the initial profit and I'm almost $30 in to ads. That's why they don't print unless you sell at least 5, and why your profit/unit goes up the more you sell. My CPA for this shirt design is $5.60. If anyone is curious, the advertisement on facebook has over 100 likes, about 20 comments, and almost 30 shares. Data below.

Facebook ad data
2-23-15%20sales%20fb%20ads_zpsfbw3rneb.png



Sales
2-23-15%20sales_zps2jmav3lb.png

 
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Damage Inc.

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Congrats on printing, now maybe you can get a few more, become profitable, throw some more into the marketing and have it roll.

Thanks! I hope so too.

It's worth noting that what they say about "layering" and defined targeting seems to be true. Of my 3 shirts right now, the two that aren't selling are cool looking and have a message that people like - but nobody feels enough of a connection to buy. The one that's printing not only targets a hobby niche, but it targets people who are extra passionate about that hobby AND have been to a specific place. These people have probably never been offered a t shirt online like this - and I didn't see any past campaigns on teespring. They may have gone to this place 2 years ago and wish they had a memento. This particular design isn't very scalable though, so that's a downside. And it remains to be seen if enough people are passionate enough to buy this to make it profitable. I may be able to adapt for a couple of other similar locations, we'll see.
 

Damage Inc.

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Question for the more experienced FB marketers:

What are my options for deleting or hiding bad comments? A few people have posted things like "cool, but I'm not paying $xx for a shirt". Am I able to delete that, and should I? If I click hide does that hide it from everyone or just from myself? Thanks.

EDIT: I clicked hide and it's only see-able to the person who posted and their friends. That should work.
 
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theag

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Question for the more experienced FB marketers:

What are my options for deleting or hiding bad comments? A few people have posted things like "cool, but I'm not paying $xx for a shirt". Am I able to delete that, and should I? If I click hide does that hide it from everyone or just from myself? Thanks.

EDIT: I clicked hide and it's only see-able to the person who posted and their friends. That should work.

I got this tip from @AlterJoule

You can add a list of the top 1000 or so words in the english language in your page's settings under "page moderation". then almost no comment will come through. then I go to my ad permalink in the morning and evening, sort by last comments, and only unhide the positive ones.

:cool:

Made my life SO much easier.
 

Damage Inc.

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Another design has sold enough to hit printing, so that's 2 of 3 of my current active designs. The 3rd I killed the advertising on. So far I have $70.09 into advertising these two and $41 in Teespring profit from them. I'm going to continue running the ads tomorrow and see if the profits overtake the ad spend. Stats below.

Shirt A (7 sales)
2-23-15%20shirt%20a%20stats%20fb_zpsfuu6dwr6.png



Shirt B (5 sales)
2-23-15%20shirt%20b%20stats%20fb_zpsfh7x0fqu.png



Tee Spring Sales
2-23-15%20ts%20sales%20final_zpsi4cflilp.png



Tee Spring Profit
2-23-15%20pending%20profit_zpsbiadgngd.png
 

theag

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I'm going to continue running the ads tomorrow and see if the profits overtake the ad spend.

Are you using the tactics from the link I sent you in the PM? Think that would help with scaling/profitability.
 
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Damage Inc.

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Are you using the tactics from the link I sent you in the PM? Think that would help with scaling/profitability.

Not yet I haven't had a chance to do it but I haven't forgotten about it.
 

Damage Inc.

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I've been busy with some other things so I haven't done a ton with this in the last couple of days aside from manage/cancel advertising and launched 2 more shirts (both of which failed). The advertising for shirts A and B weren't converting enough so I ended up ending the ads. I did sell 2 more units of shirt A, and one was sold after I ended advertising. In total (failed designs included) I'm at about $200 in FB ad spend, and I've got $48 in estimated profit from Tee Spring. Data below.

2-26-15%20TS%20Profit_zps5kwyxt1k.png



2-26-15%20TS%20Shirt%20Sales_zps9q84szsy.png



Also, I wanted to mention that @JasonR was kind enough to take time out of his schedule to talk with me a couple of days ago. He gave me some really good insight as to what direction I should be heading in, and general advice for business and life. We talked a bit about this project, my main business, and other new possibilities. I have a lot going on in my head right now and I'm just trying to figure out where I want to go with everything, prioritize, and stay motivated. Thanks for taking the time for me Jason.
 
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I was checking out teespring.com/discover and noticed it was not very common to have >500 sales. What constitutes a good campaign? I realize that is dependent on how much you are spending in advertisement versus how many shirts you are selling but it seems like a couple hundred shirts sold means you are doing fairly well. Does that sound accurate?
 

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