Walker Williams
CEO of Teespring
Discussion
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Walker Williams
@walkerteespring · CEO, Teespring
I'm Walker Williams, CEO and co-founder of Teespring, a commerce platform that has shipped more than 15M products and paid out more than $150M in the last two years. I love all things UX, ecommerce, entrepreneurship, and startup. Ask me anything!
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Jack Altman
@jack_altman
What are your top three business book recommendations? And, besides me, who in business do you look up to most?
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Walker Williams
@walkerteespring · CEO, Teespring
@jaltma Pulling out the hard ball questions I see....
I love the Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz (to remind me that every startup is a chaotic rollercoaster), High Output Management by Andy Grove (effective managment is a difficult skill to master and it's something I try to learn as much about as I possibly can), and then more on the fun side I absolutely love reading biographies of entrepreneurs... Delivery Happiness, Hatching Twitter, The Everything Store, The Perfect Store: Inside eBay.
Jack Altman
@jack_altman
@walkerteespring @jaltma I'm not afraid to ask the tough question. Didn't know the eBay one exists, ordering now.
JJ Tang
@jjrichardtang
@walkerteespring Hi Walker - If you could time travel back to day one of Teespring and have 15min with your former self to communicate any lessons you've acquired with the intention of saving yourself mistakes and heart ache, what would you tell yourself?
More importantly what is your favourite emoji and when will you visit Toronto? :)
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Walker Williams
@walkerteespring · CEO, Teespring
@jjrichardtang Hmm... that's a good one. I think the biggest lesson I've learned is the cost of hiring the wrong people. In the early days, I tended to avoid conflict and sometimes that meant saying yes to candidates that I didn't have the best feeling about. My basic line of logic was that it wasn't worth worrying about and that they'd probably be just fine. Other times, I've seen someone doing poorly but loved them as a person and ended up waiting to take any action. What I learned is that it's far better for everyone to make a change quickly then to let it drag out and end up picking up the pieces later.
Corley
@corleyh · COO @ Product Hunt
Hi @walkerwilliams thanks for joining us! We are huge fans of Teespring. I'd be curious to know, what was the moment you knew you were on to something - not just that you had an idea, but that you had something people were excited about?
PS - you have a great team. Matt Duffy has done an amazing job helping us out!
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Walker Williams
@walkerteespring · CEO, Teespring
@corleyh Thanks for having me! The first time I knew we were on to something that people would love was right after we launched freefishco.com, which was the prototype Evan and I created at Brown that eventually became Teespring. It was this extremely simple one page sales site, and yet not only was the design selling like crazy but we were getting emails from all sorts of different people asking "I have an idea for a product I want to make, can you build me a site like this?". We knew right away something was special here, people were taking a leap of logic from our basic site to imagining what they could do if they had something similar.
Sydney Liu
@sydney_liu_sl · Co-Founder of Commaful
@walkerteespring
Hey Walker! Thanks for doing the AMA! Always love seeing Teespring active in the hackathon community.
Can you talk about how you approached growing the community? It's not every day that somebody says "Oh, I want to make a T-Shirt!" What was the strategy in the early days to get people to actually make T-shirts?
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Walker Williams
@walkerteespring · CEO, Teespring
@sydney_liu_sl Happy to do it and proud to be part of the hackathon community!
In the early days it wasn't easy by any means. I've talked about it before, but that entire first year was pretty rough for us. The only way Teespring grew was because we spent countless hours writing emails and on the phone trying to convince people to give us a chance. We did everything and anything to grow, created designs, spent hours in meetings and hand delivered samples for non-profits that would only end up selling 50-60 products, etc. Eventually we reached an inflection point where there were so many success stories that entrepreneurial people started to see the opportunity and began to come to us.
In terms of growing the community, I believe the most important thing you can do is actually listen to and respect your users. Because Evan and I started as customers (we build Teespring to solve a personal pain point we'd felt when trying to create physical products), we do our best to stay as connected as possible. I still spend 1-2 hours a night reading through our community forums and responding to questions/issues.
Ryan Hoover
@rrhoover · Founder, Product Hunt
BIG fan of Teespring (we've run several t-shirt campaigns at Product Hunt). I saw you speak once at an a16z event and you discussed your vision to empower everyday people to make, sell, and distribute goods. Of course, this isn't limited to t-shirts but can you hint at what's next? 😊
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Walker Williams
@walkerteespring · CEO, Teespring
@rrhoover Thanks for inviting me, Ryan!
We're not revealing specifics, but our goal through 2016 and 2017 is to allow someone to run their full stores/brand through Teespring. So any products that you traditionally associate with lifestyle brands, expect to see on Teespring in the near future :). Sorry I can't get into more specifics!
Tom Lynam
@tomlynam · Venture for America Fellow // Teespring
What are three apps/platforms/products that you've used in the past year that had such a delightful UX that you HAD to show someone else at Teespring?
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Walker Williams
@walkerteespring · CEO, Teespring
@tomlynam GoFundMe is the one that jumps out. Their sign-up/onboarding flow for new users is incredible (if you haven't seen it, go sign up for GoFundMe and see how they push you to make decisions that will help you be successful). I'll come back with a couple more!
Larry
@larry_lawal
@walkerteespring In addition to apparel, what other areas do you think a crowdfunding-style model could be successful?
What was the most important thing you learned from participating in Y Combinator?
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Walker Williams
@walkerteespring · CEO, Teespring
@larry_lawal It feels like we're only getting started with this movement, and to me it's more about removing barriers between smart people and what they are trying to get done vs. crowdfunding or any other specific model. I believe that any barrier that can be removed/abstracted/automated (for us, it was manufacturing/fulfillment) will be removed over time.
In terms of YCombinator, the biggest thing I learned is that every startup journey is bumpy and chaotic. Every startup, even the biggest/most famous tech companies today, has a crazy rollercoaster ride on their way to success. I keep that lesson in my head whenever we face some big challenge, it helps me keep calm and solve the problem rationally!