It’s hard to believe our app has been on the Shopify app store for 5 years now. I can remember when it all started.
Before teelaunch discovered Shopify, you wouldn’t call us “successful”. After 2 years and $800k in debt, we just couldn’t find a way to sell enough t-shirts to even quit our day jobs. One day while frantically searching Facebook to try and find new customers, I saw posts about people who were making millions on Teespring that decided to now set up their own stores on this thing called Shopify.
The more research I did, I was sure making a Shopify app would save our business.
We had never undertaken anything like this before. I had no idea how much this was going to cost. I messaged every Shopify developer I could find but all of them wanted WAY more money than I could ever scrap together. Finally we found one shop who understood our vision and believed in us. They charged us 1/4 of what any other firm wanted to charge us (we’ve been with them ever since).
But even that amount wasn’t something I had on hand, so I split it up between 3 credit cards. We had just enough cash to last through the end of the year and if something didn’t change we’d be done.
I remember the day I quit my day job, to this point I never took a dollar from the business so I had a 9 to 5 working as a digital strategist. But as the app launch neared I knew there was no way for me to do both and was so sure of the the success of the app, I gave my notice and took the plunge. How ironic that teelaunch provided we a way to “quit my day job” the same way it has for thousands of other people over the years.
On August 14th we launched and sold 4 shirts. But I was sure I was right, so we kept pushing and a month later we were selling 3k shirts a day. By the end of 2015, we had sold over 140k.
5 years later. Our customers have created over 47 million products on Shopify, over 157,000 store owners have trusted us with their store, and we’ve shipped millions and millions of products all over the world.
We’re so grateful for the many customers we’ve have, a few since the very beginning and we’re looking to the future to do all we can to support our users