We use the highest quality shirts and deliver them with the most affordable pricing.
Does this imply that the $25 price is the lowest possible point at which the OP can attain reasonable margins? If so, they really need to reevaluate their infrastructure, as $25 for a text-only tee shirt is very, very high, and the OP is likely being ripped off by their suppliers.
Given the price, I have doubts about the willingness of potential customers to purchase shirts of this sort. The precedent for comparable services like Teespring and even for individual shirt vendors seems to be $10 to $20, substantially lower than what the OP is charging.
Other than the pricing, I'm not entirely sure whether hashtags would make suitable shirts. Hashtags tend to be highly ephemeral, and most cease to be relevant within a few days. Most people keep shirts for years, and thus would be likely be wearing these shirts for a period far longer than the life of the hashtag. It's a novel idea, but at the end of the day it's trying to turn what are highly transient cultural artifacts into something permanent.
The problem with teespring and the likes are that they have an MOQ that most people don't want to commit to.
As for hashtags and being irrelevant in a few minutes/days/weeks, I'd argue that a shirt that says "#GoBlue" will always be somewhat relevant. But hey, we'll see! More a fun project than anything else.
The MOQ is a drag but it serves a purpose: you can use a higher quality printing process (screen printing) which has most of the cost in the setup. Personally have not found too many Direct to Garment (what most one off shirts are printed with) printers that I was happy with in terms of consistent quality. Trust me, it would make my life so much easier if I could print quality one offs.
You may be better off doing each hashtag as a short term campaign, maybe Teespring has an API?
Love your idea though! Think you should consider different color shirts: when we did black shirts in our tshirt subscription, people complained that they already have too many black shirts in their closet and wanted something different.
Automate that shit son. Use Shirts.io and grab trending tags from Twitter, and display them, even tweet about them when a new trending tag hits, also allow users to enter their own hashtags... I'd buy one right now if I could input my own hashtag.
Have you ever the MobStub Facebook ads? They choose one item a day people really like/need (iPhone chargers for cheap) and feature it daily. Do something similar for your biz. Love the concept btw - saying this as a person experienced in the hashtag space (check my profile).
If your volume price on 1 off shirts is $12.99-14 on shirts.io, I honestly think you'd get 5-10x the volume at $20 flat price vs 25, 20 is closer to impulse buy range than $25.
What is your marketing strategy - other than the initial launch on Hacker News?
I'm curious how other people market their passive income apps. I'm doubly curious because I've got my own t-shirt passive income app that I've been working on for a couple weekends now.
EDIT: I just realized you are (wisely) tweeting out each shirt to the appropriate hashtag. So the marketing is essentially baked in. Nice.
I don't understand hash tags and I don't understand why someone would want them on a shirt. Is this best understood by immersing myself in the twitter culture? I don't get it from the outside. The main place I see hash tags is where networks will display them with a TV show. Aside from that, I don't understand how people come up with them and how they are used other than searching and linking?
For example, #SalmonCat (a TV shirt on the home page) apparently refers to some tv show called Sam and Cat? Googling that reveals it's the 17th episode that aired today. If I loved the show enough, would I go buy a shirt with the hash tag on it? http://hashtagtee.me/products/salmoncat-shirt
I am admittedly not one of the 230 million+ twitter users.
If you've used facebook recently you'd know they've also added hashtags, their main purpose (and the way twitter started using them originally) is to connect your posts to a topic.
I've also seen it used (and have used it myself) as a way to kinda add a punchline to a post that didn't have or need one.
I have made a t-shirt generator (http://sonarcore.com) in a similar attempt at a passive income. It took me much longer than a weekend to build but anyway. I'm very anxious to wait to see how your project goes :)
I think the trick is going to be either:
1) finding hashtags with enough people desiring them so that you can order in bulk
OR
2) finding a production method that is cheap/efficient enough that you can print 1 or 2 shirts without breaking the bank
I wonder if you could do something like threadless did, where people vote for the "best hashtag" with their wallet, saying they would buy one if you produced the lot.
Not bad for a weekend project though! Props to you!
With all due respect to your work, somehow I never understood the "t-shirt" startup idea. We live in a world where there are many problems to tackle in health, science, government and politics, yet I've seen dozens of attempts at these t-shirt startups.
I do not mean to discredit your work, that being said.
Probably because the OP was able to create this in a weekend or less in hopes of generating some passive income. That really doesn't compare to any problem (trivial or otherwise) in the areas you mentioned.
Its a $17 billion dollar market that has many ways of being served better. The OP did say that it was just a weekend project and we all have to start somewhere. Elon Musk's first company was an internet city guide.
You can pretty much use this rationale with 95% of the internet businesses out there. Why try to produce a film via kickstarter when you can go to Africa and volunteer... etc.
If you make your blog a place where we can be updated about how your business are going in real time, it ll retain and grow your traffic and build a great comunnity around
I would hide the hello world post from your blog :) Also, not sure what message it sends out when you write it runs from your basement.. perhaps it will hurt conversion.
Tried a niche, online T shop with a friend years ago (before Spreadshirt existed). We worked with a local T shop at first but their minimums were a drag. A big T shop in a lower income town about 100 miles from us (we were in Santa Monica) agreed to waive minimums and do drop shipping.
Problem ended up being quality we or the shop couldn't consistently control. It was great for weeks, then bad for a batch, then good again.
Returns and re-shipping costs due to low quality finally killed us.
We use the highest quality shirts and deliver them with the most affordable pricing.
Does this imply that the $25 price is the lowest possible point at which the OP can attain reasonable margins? If so, they really need to reevaluate their infrastructure, as $25 for a text-only tee shirt is very, very high, and the OP is likely being ripped off by their suppliers.
Given the price, I have doubts about the willingness of potential customers to purchase shirts of this sort. The precedent for comparable services like Teespring and even for individual shirt vendors seems to be $10 to $20, substantially lower than what the OP is charging.
Other than the pricing, I'm not entirely sure whether hashtags would make suitable shirts. Hashtags tend to be highly ephemeral, and most cease to be relevant within a few days. Most people keep shirts for years, and thus would be likely be wearing these shirts for a period far longer than the life of the hashtag. It's a novel idea, but at the end of the day it's trying to turn what are highly transient cultural artifacts into something permanent.