How two guys from North Carolina became millionaires on Teespring

Keegan Rush is a long time Springer hailing from North Carolina. For Rush, running his Teespring Business is a family affair.

Hit a milestone the other day, 1,000+ units sold in 1 day, on a Monday at that. Have done this a couple times back in the day but I thought these days might be over. I was wrong. Hope I can pass off some information to help those who may be struggling. I genuinely hope this can help somebody who is having a tough go at it. I don’t need congratulations, admiration, pats on the back. I want this to help people, not help me. 🙂

Debated sharing this, but have heard from numerous people that stuff like this can help/motivate. I always chime in on the doom & gloom/sales are down posts with how well we are doing. This usually draws replies and questions that “you are always doing well”.

That is true and the reason it’s true is because of our process. I have had a ton of people reach out to me and ask for advice. The three things I keep seeing that is consistent with most of the people reaching out is Design, Process, and Niche Cultivation

Design

You cannot put out slapjob designs that look like what was constantly launched and easily replicated out 2-3 years ago. Think slap-on sayings such as “Never underestimate the power of a woman that/has ______”. If you look on Fiverr and search for T-Shirt designs, the designs they showcase are often the very designs that just do not sell well anymore. Creativity and Originality wins out. You can be the one on Teespy gettings the ideas, or you can come up with the ideas by doing a little research. Originality always outsells the copies.

Process

You can do well and still have runners by launching any day of the week. Having a defined process has made it easy on us (Myself /Cortland Rush) to scale. Doing that with 1-2 pages of shirts (12-24 shirts) is easy but when you have 10+ pages and you’re launching 100 shirts a week, if you launch a chunk of them at different days/times, cutting/scale will be a daily task and a nightmare to deal with.

Our process is that all ads start on Wednesday at 8AM. Each Shirt has 2 ads set at $10/day. I leave them the hell alone for 48 hours. This is the tough part, patience wins. Gives FB plenty of time to optimize the ad before scaling up. I will only scale any of them if they go nuts and sell 10+ off the first $5-10 dollars. 98% of the time, I leave them alone though.

Come Friday morning, each ad will have spent $20 (Total of $35-$40 per shirt because they will be prorated a bit from starting at 8AM on Wed.). If it has 1 sale from $20 spent, I will bump the budget down from $10 to $5. Sometimes you will have gems that get a couple more days at a small budget and really start to turn up and be profitable. If it has 2-4 sales, I’ll leave the ad at $10/day. If it has 5+ sales I’ll bump it to $25. If one does really well 10+ off about $10, I’ll still slow scale it to $25 but with the idea that I’ll be bumping it to $50 the following day. Then I’ll check again on Saturday for what I should bump from $25 to $50. If I get any runner type ads, sometimes I’ll forego $50 and go straight to $100. With interest ads, I never go above $100/day. Lookalikes I’ve scaled to $200/day with no issue but any dollar over $100/day on Interest based ads, and the ROI will fall out completely. At least for me.

Friday anything that we can tell is going to be a solid seller (25+ sales) we’ll create the Website Custom Audience for it. Come Saturday morning, anything that is $25+ sales I’ll make 3 Lookalike ads for it based off the Shirt Retargeting Audience WCA that I created the day before based off clicks….1%, 1-2%, 2-3%. Generally 1 of them does very well, 1 of them loses, and one of them does marginal.

Sunday/Monday/Tuesday all we do with the ads from the previous week is scale them. The ones that you bumped down to $5/day gotta keep an eye on come Saturday/Sunday and cut them because if they don’t sell another 1 after the 1st sale (which made you bump from $10 down to $5), you’ll want to cut it.

Niche Research

I have sold a ton of shirts in 2 niches and grown pages to over 90,000. They were my bread & butter. If I crack a niche and it was guaranteed to work forever, life would be gravy. With how much Facebook changes, you have to change and adapt as well. All of a sudden overnight both of those niches seemed to have dried up over night. Badass Designs, awesome LLAs, WCAs, Emails, etc. Tried from new pages, pixels, etc. same results. I couldn’t get them to work. I’ll have the occasional winner with them but if I only focused on my old bread & butter niches, my business would be shitty and I wouldn’t have as many sales.

For that reason, we constantly launch into new niches each week, that we know nothing about. We have sold into some of the craziest niches that I never thought people would be interested in. If we test out 5 new niches a week, and only 1 works. That is good for us because we’ll be able to scale more designs into that niche in the following weeks. We launch 120+ new shirts a week and that makes up about 30-40 niches. Sometimes we’ll launch 1-2 shirts per niche and then the bread & butter ones get 5-10 shirts. It’s like playing baseball, everybody wants to hit a home run but if I can hit a couple triples, bunch of doubles & singles, I’ll still be driving in runs and then the occasional home run will put things over the top. This week we had 11 shirts sell over 100 and that was composed of 7 different niches. The more shirts you launch, the more you can sift for gold, the more you can dig for home runs. TS calls this launches per day (LPD)

Our Team – Myself and Cortland Rush are partners. Then we have 1 full time designer, 2 part time designers, and then 2 administrative positions (VAs) that are all domestic employees in the US. Designers design every day of the week. We can manage so much volume because on Monday we have the admins create the posts for the new shirts to launch and then on Tuesday we grind it out all day scheduling the ads to start on Wednesday.

Screenshot Explanations

Total Revenue = $18,400 (With volume discount & $2k rev off TS)
Total Ad Spend = $6,697.88 ($817 spend off TS)
Total Profit = $11,703

I used to believe in slow days of the week. I would never do much of anything on Mondays/Tuesday and now it’s the best days of the week for us. It isn’t because things are slow but it’s because those days fall on Day 6 and Day 7 of our 7 Day listings. It picks up on Wednesday, Thursday, and has a big jump on Friday, slow down 10% on Saturday, and then increases about 30-40% on Sunday. Then an uptick in sales on Monday & Tuesday as well.

I hope this helps. Process is everything. There are many top sellers that I’ve helped formalize their own version of this process and I am sure they can attest that it works. Hope you enjoyed the novel. Thank you to those who have helped us over our selling journey, you know who you are!

So what are you waiting for? Put Keegan’s tips to work right now. Have questions? Ask ’em. Email Campaigns@teespring.com if you’d like help with anything from Niche Research, to Design, to Process and Beyond!

Ready to dive right in? Click HERE to get launching today!

And as always, visit Teespring Training Center to learn more about how to start a Teespring Business of your own.