


I told these people – “I don’t care whether you wear them or wash your car with them, just take a few shirts.” I even donated a bunch to the Salvation Army and later came across a homeless person wearing a Single Grain t-shirt.įree Startup Growth Resources Cheat Sheetīy this point, our shirts were everywhere. I ordered multiple colors and enough that I could give 4-5 shirts to every person that wanted them. Versions 1.0 and 2.0 of the t-shirts were in pretty short supply, but once I started to notice that people knew Single Grain’s name, I decided to go all in on Version 3.0. That excitement told me that I was on to something. Not only did this allow me to help capture people’s physical addresses for use in future t-shirt giveaways, my friends were so excited that they personally thanked me on Facebook and started wearing the shirts around town. Since my supply was short, I put together an email list of people who were interested and started sending out the shirts with personalized notes. Clearly there was a demand for my shirts! I posted to Facebook to see who wanted a few shirts and was surprised when I ran out just a few hours after I put up the message. I started out with an order of 25-30 shirts, and since this was more than enough to fill up my closet, I decided to give the rest away to friends. Not because I thought it’d be some genius marketing move, but because I knew I’d be able to wear them every day and never have to go clothes shopping again.

But when it comes to a lot of other things in my life, I can be pretty lazy.Īs soon as I started making money with Single Grain, one of the first things I did was to go out and get some t-shirts made. I’m going to let you in on a little secret… When it comes to business, I’m passionate, motivated and driven. We honored every order but had to stop offering free t-shirts as being on the Reddit homepage cost us $280,000 🙁 Long story short, we gave away 30,000 tshirts. Update 3: A few hours after I posted update 2, one of my awesome readers submitted us to Reddit. We’re using t-shirts for marketing purposes: Grab yours here: Update 2: I sold my marketing agency and moved across the country from SF to Minnesota (wtf, right?) to work at When I Work. Update 1: I wrote this post a few years ago and since then I’ve made even more money (total is up to $980k) using t-shirt marketing and sold the company.
