How two design students built a successful online business with Teespring

Anik and Nazmul are classmates, friends, and recent design graduates from Chittagong University in Bangladesh. After graduation, they discovered it was difficult to secure a steady job, so they began looking for alternative ways to support themselves financially. While researching job options, Anik came across Teespring, a platform that empowers anyone to create and sell custom products with no cost, risk, or hassle.

With limited funds for investing in paid ads the team focused on free and organic promotion. They created unique designs, optimized their listings, and shared their products with followers online. Their methods proved successful and Anik and Nazmul have been able to open their own office and work full-time as Teespring sellers. So how were they able to make the leap from design student to online entrepreneur? Let’s find out!

Creating an online business

Many Teespring sellers promote their products through Facebook ads, but budget limitations meant the Anik and Nazmul needed to rely heavily on organic and free marketing at first. They began using channels such as Instagram to grow an organic following and drive sales.

Currently, Instagram is their primary channel for organic sales. They recommend creating one Instagram profile per niche. Also, staying on top of trending hashtags and including relevant hashtags in their Instagram posts helps shoppers find their products. They usually add 20 – 30 hashtags per Instagram post and share content when their followers are most active.

Make sure to create or convert your Instagram account to a “Business Profile” so you get additional insight on your content’s performance such as your most engaging content, when your users are most active, etc.

Increasing sales with the Boosted Network

Anik and Nazmul have seen their monthly sales increase by 20% since the launch of Teespring’s Boosted Network. This powerful tool drives more sales for the team by listing their content within global marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Wish, Walmart, etc. Online research plays a significant role in how they find designs that perform well on the Boosted Network. Some of they ways they search for design inspiration includes:

• Searching for niche related quotes and ideas for inspiration on Pinterest.
• Searching for popular hashtags on Instagram to see what’s trending.
• Searching Google Trends for the latest online search queries and social trends.

The team also scales winning designs for new niches. This means they take a design that sells and adapt it for a new audience or add a variation of the design for the same audience (see the “Scaling Out” section in Training Center to learn more). Anik and Nazmul usually look to their followers for guidance on how they should scale designs; they’ll read through buyer comments on social media and post a variety of content to see how their audience reacts.

It’s important to note they also optimize all of their listings for marketplace search and use tools like Keywords Everywhere for insight on the top performing, relevant words they can include in their listing title and description.

The future with Teespring

As they look to the future Anik and Nazmul are excited about their possibilities as online entrepreneurs with Teespring.  

Teespring has helped us create a repeat customer base thanks to their high-quality products and trusted customer support. Now they’re helping us drive even more sales through Teespring Marketplace and Boosted Network. We feel fortunate because we have been able to use our creativity as designers to establish a successful business with Teespring…this stable income allows us to invest in more paid advertising, test new niches and designs, and increase our income. We are looking forward to what the future holds and hope to continue providing our buyers with products and designs they love!

Thank you for sharing your story Anik & Nazmul