ThreadBasket 1.0

We ended 2020 with 116,000€ in revenue. We cut costs dramatically and shifted our energy and focus towards building our new stock design service which we dubbed "ThreadBasket 2.0" as a working title.

To clarify the branding, we also renamed our legacy product to "ThreadBasket Select". We made it clear to everyone that we would maintain the product for as long as it remained profitable. But no more development resources would be invested into it.

So far, it's been our cash-cow to slow build the new service.

By the end of the year we had stabalised the business and were averaging around 10,000€ to 11,000€ per month. That still sounds like a lot, but our costs for designers and developers were still very high.

The business model was clearly broken or at least fundamentally flawed. It was impossible to scale. The necessary demand simply wasn't there and the product itself became increasingly difficult to produce with scale.

It was time to start working on ThreadBasket 2.0.

Unsure about how our business would continue in the future, we tried a whole bunch things that seemed easy for us to do initially.

We had been in touch with companies such as Printful, Moteefe and Shirtee, discussing the possibility of integrating our design database right into their platforms.

Unfortunately dealing with growing companies is difficult. The priorities are almost always elsewhere and we obviously weren't big enough to be important enough.

However, turns out that our API would become the foundation for our business model pivot at the end of the year.

Our sales suddenly took an unexpected plunge and exposed our fragile business model to the headwinds of withering demand. Our revenue, which had peaked in December at 30,000€ in a single month, collapsed in 4 short months by more than 50%.

As much as it hurt and as embarrassing as it was, we had to make a hard decision. We told all our local part-time staff that we'd have to let them go by the end of June or ultimate face the consequences of the losses.

Feeling indestructable, we made one of the biggest mistakes that you can make at this early stage. It was a choice driven by vanity. We wanted that office space. And we got it at WeWork Labs.

In January we moved into the WeWork Stadthaus in Hamburg and started onboarding 4 more local part-time student staff.

After a wild ride through out 2018, we ended the year not only with over 230,000€ in gross revenue. As massive milestone for us and our tax advisors even said this was unusual for a bootstrapped company in its early stages.

What we did keep in mind, was the fact that our costs were rising in Lock-Step with our revenue. We were operating a highly fragile business because it wasn't based on recurring revenue from subscriptions, but rather from transactions.

Riding on the wave of 16,000€ in April 2018, we decided to hire our first part-time staff to help us with the workload.

We also started to scout the city for cheap office space, thinking that the growth would continue. It did, and it prompted us to make a decision that we would soon regret.

We launched ThreadBasket in October 2017 and immediately hit over 5,000€ that same month. The excited and demand was overwhelming.

Our business model at the time relied on elements of scarcity and new content every week. This drove demand to the point of breaking our server.

Exciting times!

I found my co-founder via a random correspondence that we had had after we read my eBook "Apparel on Autpilot". The book had clearly helped him a lot and he had since founded a German Facebook Group on print-on-demand.

His group grew quickly and became the largest European Facebook Group on the topic. We decided to join forces and create ThreadBasket.

Had recently handed in my resignation and came up with the idea while on holiday in Cape Town.

Having spent years side-hustling in the print-one-demand space, I had identified a need in the market that was linked to the recent growth of Merch by Amazon.