Best sticker + t-shirting printing service for brand awareness and fundraising?
I've been developing an app for about a month and I have the first version ready for iOS and Android release this weekend/early next week.
Last week, I made a Discord server and have been able to attract over 500 pre-release fans of the app to join the server. They've been asking if I have any fundraising plans because they would like to donate somehow to help me with the app. I've been wanting to setup a sticker/t-shirt campaign where I could take merch orders and either dispatch them from my house or outsource this to a service, but I can't decide on what the cheapest option would be. Ultimately, I want to use the money from merch to help fund this venture.
What's the best merch campaign service that yields the most profit from merch sold?
Trending on Indie Hackers
I've personally found https://www.printful.com to be the best balance of margin and quality printing for on-demand options. Other services are a little bit cheaper, but the print quality is much lower. They do stickers, shirts, and lots of other products that seem to have pretty consistent quality across the board. Surprisingly, coffee mugs come out really great and have decent margin on them too!
That said, the MOST margin will come from doing larger batches rather than on-demand (which Printful does too, but you'll almost certainly get even better rates and quality from a local vendor). The tradeoff there is that you'll be responsible for shipping products to your buyers, and your shipping rates won't be as good as selling through someone who does large volume. But as a one-time thing, that's the best option when optimizing for margin.