Getting to Velocity: TeePublic Founder Adam Schwartz (Part 6)

Adam Schwartz: Through this marketplace, we started doing three things. One is, we invested heavily in improving the platform and the technology behind the store and product creation. There were some pretty serious technical challenges in taking a high resolution image from designers and turning that instantly into a ton of different product images. It’s a data challenge and an image processing challenge that we started working on.

We started nurturing the community of designers that we have and trying to expand it. We built a community team that’s out there talking to designers one at a time. They’re basically curators who are finding amazing art online. They were reaching out and bringing people to the site. We’re saying, “We have these new machines. They can do incredible things on-demand. We guarantee you’re going to be satisfied with the quality. We have insane QC processes in place.”

That’s one of the first things that we did. We put strict QC processes in place to make sure that all those early customers and designers were thrilled with the quality of the product. We pay the designers more than anybody else. They started coming to the site. We gave a lot of personal attention to each and everyone of them. We developed personal relationships with each and everyone of them. We started growing an internal community team. That’s why our head count grew early.

The other thing that we did was we said, “We’ve got great traffic that’s starting to turn from organic and social. Let’s see if we can do one more thing to bring more to these guys so they’re not responsible, solely, for their sales. All the artists and designers were creating all this varied work. The designers are from all around the world. They’re in some sort of register. It could be some sort of pop culture or fan art. Whatever it was, we wanted to help them find a home for this. We wanted to create the model that BustedTees had.

BustedTees began as the e-commerce arm of CollegeHumor. It sold funny t-shirts that were tangentially related. We said, “Let’s find all the CollegeHumor’s for the product that we have.” We found blogs and Facebook fan groups who were already creating content that was tangentially related to the content on TeePublic. We said, “You should come to TeePublic. You should create your own store here, curate it with art that you love, and share it with your audience. It will be a new revenue stream for you.”

As soon as we did that, we realized that instead of building out our own social channels we can build a network of social channels via all these different platforms. We started building that army while we were building the designer army. The two were helping each other a lot. They both benefit from each other. They both make money from each other. 2014 ended with TeePublic essentially going from zero to $4 million.

Sramana Mitra: Wow.

Adam Schwartz: It was starting to catch up withBustedTees a little bit. Even though it was still smaller than BustedTees at that time, there was a sense that the ceiling was higher.

Sramana Mitra: You have higher velocity.

Adam Schwartz: Exactly. BustedTees never grew that way. With TeePublic, I know why it’s working and as long as we feed the supply and good retention with designers, then we’re giving fuel to an engine. That engine will continue to turn. We focused solely on doing that. Holiday season of 2014 was really good. In 2015, TeePublic was probably around 12 to 13 people. The platform was growing. We hired some more developers. We were profitable in 2014, by the way. It was a pretty good margin. We just tried to scale the things that we saw were working.

We doubled-down on working with designers. We added a lot more products to the site. Instead of just t-shirts, you can create all kinds of different apparels. It grew every single month of 2015. The affiliate side kept growing. We kept building tools and finding new verticals like podcasts. We were international. The designer community that started to get attracted to us just came from all over the world. The customers started coming from all over the world. That was organic but critical. We’re here to enable people to focus on their passion. We do everything else.

That’s one of our core values and motivations for building the community. Maybe you’re a designer and make $300 or $400 a month off of TeePublic, you’re not quitting your day job. You’re still probably doing design for somebody else as well, but we have designers in Southeast Asia, South America, and all over, where an extra $400 a month is incredibly meaningful. They’re paying medical bills. They’re sending children to school. They’re supporting families. Not exclusively necessarily, but it’s helping a lot.

That creates a lot of retention and it creates a lot of dedicated designers who are now using TeePublic as their professional site. In 2015, we grew by 150%. We’re feeling like we’re on our way. The holidays were really big. We were met with a lot of challenges in terms of technical scale. By the end of 2015, we probably had a hundred million SKUs on the site. We start realizing that platforms and marketplaces are a big technical challenge. We start really bearing down and building out our tech team to meet those challenges.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Getting to Velocity: TeePublic Founder Adam Schwartz
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