Kao shares insight on building a successful online business with Teespring

Kao is a successful Teespring seller based in Thailand. He has a full-time job, but Kao’s passion is growing his online business. He first started building a sustainable business with Teespring three years ago and now enjoys the extra income generated by Teespring product sales.

Kao and Teespring Team enjoying the Songkran festival last year

Kao says the secret to his success has been mostly due to his Facebook page management skills as well as his stable customer base—for this reason, Kao focuses on ‘evergreen niches’. 

How has your success with Teespring impacted your life?

It has increased my income which makes life easier. I’m also proud and happy of my success on Teespring.

What was your biggest challenge when you first started selling? How did you overcome it?

The biggest challenge I experienced was finding niches that could be profitable indefinitely, a so-called ‘evergreen niche’. After many failures, I’ve learned to target very large audiences (at least 1 million people) that have significant purchasing power (which I determine through research). Also the niches I target do not “expire”, as we see with trends and seasonal designs. These elements have proven to be strong foundations for my Teespring sales.

In order to find profitable evergreen niches, you’ve got to do a lot of research first. Make sure you understand the kind of designs and products your audience is interested in. Also, to avoid losing money, once I make some initial sales with niche (of an “okay” design), I will then invest in creating quality designs. Creating quality designs helps me to stand out against other, similar designs.

Victory dinner for hitting the 5k milestone 😉

What are some common mistakes you see new sellers make?

I think that most mistakes among ‘newbies’ probably arise from insufficient research. They should take more time to study, and read articles or discussions from their target niche. The only way to improve your Facebook Ads performance is through trial and error, and although we can teach ourselves, if you get training from a coach this learning process becomes faster. Research, however, is harder to teach…you just have to do it!

When testing new designs or new niches, what is your ad budget? What is the main factor for deciding whether to increase your budget (scale), continue, or kill the ad?

My normal daily budget is $2-5 per advert. I have a few factors which determine whether I continue running, scale or kill an ad:

1. Good sales today ( 2 sales or more ) ➔ increase daily budget
2. Normal sales today (at least 1 sale ) ➔ continue
3. No sales today but had good sales several days before ➔ continue until the cost per purchase in a lifetime budget gets too high
4. No sale today but have good number of shares and comments ➔ continue until shares and comments stop
5. Less sales today than yesterday ➔ decrease daily budget and kill the ads when no more sales occur
6. First day no sale, not good number of shares and comments (less than 10 comments and shares ) ➔ kill ads
7. No sales for several days and the number of shares and comments are decreasing ➔ kill ads

T2 updates give sellers access to buyer emails, flat product pricing, storefront customization, and much more. Which is your favorite new feature and why?

The thing that I like the most in T2 is the new pricing system and tiered discounts. In the past, we made a significant profit only when sold more than 10 units per campaign. Now we can make much more profit per item just by selling one product. When we are running many campaigns, each campaign sells around 1-5 units per run so this pricing setup is better. Another feature that I like is the flat pricing for unlimited colors; this allows us to experiment with designs and make them more unique.

Kao holding a Teespring training session in Chiang Mai

Why did you decide to work in a team?

This year political niches are very popular and I enjoy selling products to this niche even though it’s totally different compared to what I have been doing—it may not be evergreen, but it has very high demand. I decided to put together a team with two other individuals to help me sell to political niches; we split up the tasks of research, design, and marketing. I manage the ads, and my teammate (who I met at a Teespring meetup) focuses on design. He has a friend who performs our niche research. Working as a team is much more fun because we get to share ideas and learn from each other.

Ready for your own success story?