What's your opinion on print-on-demand businesses?
I'm building a side project and I want to monetize it by selling print-on-demand products (with Printful). It's a pretty simple project and it's more like a test to see how far I can go with it.
But honestly I don't know what to expect from a POD business. I haven't seen any success cases other than people claiming to make $10k a day to sell you bs courses.
I'll launch the project anyway because it's being fun to build it, but I'd love to have an idea about what to expect from it. Can I build a sustainable business just by selling POD stuff? Can I make a living of it?
Do you have a success case to share? I'd love to hear!
Thanks! (:
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I just finished running a POD startup fulltime for the past two years (Tribefire). We were generating $30K+ a month. Ultimately, we burnt out because of what I perceive as the shittest thing about POD: fulfillment time.
Printing and then dropshipping takes longer than people are used to in an Amazon world, which means you are constantly, constantly dealing with upset customers who are hassling you for shipping information. It's relentless, and ultimately we stopped because we couldn't deal with it any longer. I wouldn't recommend it, if delivering a quality experience is a priority.
thanks for sharing your experience! This helps a lot.
If you don't mind to answer, how did you manage prints and fulfilling? Were you using any third party service such as Printful or Printify or were you doing it "manually"?
For the first two months we did it through a Printful variant (CustomCat); after that, we found a factory in China and a fulfillment center.
My experience is doing merch a bit more complicated than shirts/mugs etc, and also we were serving international audiences. These two factors basically mean its impossible to serve your customers quickly.
Using a service like Printful is definitely a lot quicker fulfillment, if they serve your needs, but you will still undoubtedly deal with a lot of customer service; turn around will still be long internationally, and things will go wrong all of the time (misprints, wrong sizes etc.).
Thank you so much for your reply! That's exactly the kind of experience I was expecting to hear from other indie hackers :P
I'm decided to give a try on this business idea
My brother has a business in my hometown called Print 2 Press (https://www.print2press.com) that sells to the crowd that makes their t-shirts with Cricuts and whatnot. I have an uncle that ran a screen printing business for ages.
You definitely can build a business making custom orders easier. I'm not sure I'd call anything a silver bullet, but I'm curious about the networking part of it that you're trying to do. You want to create a network where consumers can purchase prints from the system (or their work). The consumer side is what makes this different than just a standard POD business, so the question I think is just what you make of it.
Manufacturing and shipping seem like the challenge here to me.
I'm actually thinking about using printful.com to fulfill the orders since I don't want to deal directly with manufacturing and shipping. But I have no idea if anyone has succeeded using this type of "outsourcing"
My partner has set up a printing business not quite POD but she prints garments and also does glassware currently she is doing very well, we are looking at upscaling to have more machinery and debating a second business in another niche. If you can keep your initial outgoings low while you build things up its a great idea, but i wouldn't claim its an instant success model.
Thanks for sharing!
Have you considered outsourcing the printing/manufacturing?
Yes when she first started we never had machinery to cut or print materials, so we outsourced this until we could afford to purchase machinery. Now she can offer more bespoke solutions, it costs her less to produce and she can do it much faster.
I'd love to hear stories around this as well. I have ideas to do some tshirts, mostly for fun, but would be cool if it actually ended up providing a decent income.