[mcantor]

I sell posters of a vim cheat sheet I designed (see my profile for link). I ship my inventory to a 3rd-party fulfillment provider who plugs in to Shopify with a custom app, so all I have to do is re-print when the inventory runs out and handle the occasional customer service problem. Digital downloads are a total freebie.

[statictype]

Neat. I've thought of doing things like this before. Do you mind sharing how many figures you make on this? How do you handle the actual printing? Is that also outsourced?

[mcantor]

I lucked out with this project; it began as a Kickstarter which got incredibly overfunded:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/maxcantor/beautiful-vim-...

It hit the front page of "Featured Technology" projects and lived there for almost the entire funding run.

I used UPrinting for the printing, who I'm quite happy with. It cost less than a thousand dollars to do the initial run of 500 posters.

Initially, my approach to shipping was to buy 500 poster tubes from Uline (no relation to UPrinting) and ship them myself. This was an unmitigated disaster; a cataclysm; a miserable shit-show of Brobdingnagian proportions. There is simply not sufficient support for the "hobbyist shipper"; USPS doesn't know what to do with you, UPS and Fedex charge too much (especially for international shipping), and the label-printing tools are across-the-board some of the worst software I've ever worked with. After months of Kafkaesque hijinks with USPS, I gave up and shipped my inventory to Fulfillrite, a third-party fulfillment provider. Thank God for those guys.

I haven't run the numbers to determine my exact profit & loss, but I make more than just beer money. I don't know if I'll ever sell enough to come even close to what the Kickstarter originally made, but the web store has been bringing in around $750/mo in revenue, which translates to something in the range of $350 - $500 of profit.

I tend to make money to the extent that more eyeballs hit the site. Last month, someone mentioned the poster in passing in the comment of a blog I'd never heard of, and I made $300 in six hours. I have no idea how to advertise, though, so that kind of thing is usually just lucky happenstance for me.

I'll probably do another couple of poster projects (bash, emacs, etc.); if they are even nearly as successful as this one, I might eventually be able to live exclusively off the profits! An exciting prospect, but one that is quite far off.

Feel free to drop me a line if you have any other questions. I really ought to condense this stuff into a blog post some time.