About Us

I created From Pink Slip after many trial and error experiments coming up with ideas on how to start a small business.  It seemed like every idea I had already had a large player in the market or would cost way too much in startup costs. 

I was looking to start a small business because I know the agony of essentially receiving a pink slip and no longer having a job.  This is not an experience I would like to repeat and one of the ways to try and ensure that is to begin a small business at night just like some people go to school at night.

If you would like to learn more about how I got started, read My Pink Slip Story

I would also like to hear from you as we learn how to make money from the internet.

Slippy

MORE:

“Slippy” is the handle I am using for From Pink Slip.  Believe it or not, it is not my real name.  From Pink Slip is 1 of 5 blogs I started, to teach people how to make money on the internet using mostly free tools.  I wanted to give others the chance to start small businesses from home.  Each of the 5 blogs covers a slightly different topic.  The topic on this site is obviously how to create product-on-demand merchandise. 

Check out my Johnny Optimist About Us page to learn more about me and my other sites.

Relevant Experience for this site:

Relevant experience for this site include years of having and developing a shop on CafePress called Ha Ha Shirt Shop.  This shop currently has over 700 individual sections in it.  CafePress recently put a limit on the size a shop can reach, and grandfathered-in shops that had more than their limit.  I happened to be one of the grandfathered shops since I had more than 400 sections.  Their press release said only about 1% had more than 400, which meant I was in the top 1% in terms of a size of a single shop (although some shopkeepers have multiple shops to fit specific niches).  Each section has a specific design on many products.  I have amassed that many designs through A LOT of time and work.  I also have 2 shops on Zazzle, but those don’t have nearly the amount of products / designs loaded yet.  I have also read many affiliate program contracts, but not yet signed up for one (if you don’t have enough traffic then you have to pay them - yikes).

I started out just like you, not knowing anything about product-on-demand sites.  I logged in, signed up and put up a single design just to see what the site was about.  I originally had a “basic” shop for about 7 months, then decided to upgrade to a premium shop.  The first design I had was simply “joe”.  That is it, no pictures, nothing fancy, just the word joe uncapitalized.  That was mainly just to see how the site worked.  I put a mark up of $5, and within a week I had a sale. 

This just astounded me and I thought - is it that easy?  So I decided to create a lot more designs and uploaded those.  Sales weren’t all that brisk, but I generally had 1 sale a month.  I had originally made my markup at $5 because if you pay for the premium shop all at once for the year, then it is $60 or so which means sell 1 shirt a month and you break even.

Then I wondered why I wasn’t making more sales, so I started reading the forums and quickly found out.  I had been doing A LOT of things wrong.  I hadn’t made descriptions, I hadn’t placed the products in a appealing order, I hadn’t put the keywords (tags) on them correctly.  So then I spent 2 weeks going through about 400 designs one by one basically re-doing everything.  I thought to myself “it would have been nice to know all of this off the start”.  And here we are.

Now you can follow me and start a shop correctly from the outset while feeling comfortable with your guide.

Want your very own “joe” shirt?  click on the shirt below to go to my shop.

joe