At the same time I came out with the Gluten Free T-shirt idea as part of my attempt to earn $10,000 in my spare time using the T-shirt platforms Teechip and Teespring, I also came up with a T-shirt for stand up paddleboarders. I’m not sure exactly how I got to paddleboarding (I was searching all kinds of ideas and made my way to surfing, which eventually led me to paddleboarding), but I ended up seeing the quote, “Paddleboarders are stand up people.”
I decided to make it gender specific with the idea if it work with men, I could easily create another one specifically for women. I had Joseph M (another graphic design artists I hired off of Craigslist – his site and Facebook page) create the following “I’m a stand up type of a guy” T-shirt:


One main failure with this campaign was choosing a topic which I wasn’t extremely knowledgeable about. I’ve been paddleboarding before, but only a few times. I think taking chances on new areas like this makes sense, but it makes sense when I have a better marketing foundation with which to promote it. What I really should have done is spent some time talking to some friends who paddleboard a lot more than I do to get their opinion of what would have made a good T-shirt. Again, this isn’t to say this wouldn’t have worked, I think I simply jumped the gun in picking a topic I wasn’t as familiar with as I should have been.
What I did learn from the first two campaigns is I’m paying too much for each click with Facebook ads at the moment. I need to figure out a way to decrease this amount. I would ideally like to get clicks to a maximum of $0.10 a click, and preferably much lower. I think this will be the sweet spot to get 2 or more T-shirt sales for $10.
The failure to make any sales on my second attempt puts me further into the negative.
Amount spent: $11.90 ($1.90 ad buy and $10 T-shirt design)
Amount made: $0.00
Current total: -$26.70