Back in 2008 I put together some programmer T-shirt designs to raise money for charity. The project was a modest success, selling 99 t-shirts (92 from zazzle.com and 7 from spreadshirt.com). I was hoping it would have done better, but was somewhat hampered by the high price of print-on-demand T-shirts (especially when you have a charity commission on top) and not finding anyone with the time and skills to make up for my lack of design talent. But it has still raised $302.33+£8.94 to be split between worthy charities sightsavers.org and jaipurfoot.org (plus a generous donation from microISV stalwart Patrick McKenzie).
The 3 most popular designs were:
Sales have now slowed to a trickle. So I don’t intend to renew the programmer-tshirts.com domain and will shut down the shops in the next 7 days to pay out the rest of the commission. If you want to buy one of the t-shirt designs, I suggest you do it now! It would be nice to break 100. If anyone wants the domain I will transfer it for a donation to charity (email me).
Thanks for everyone who helped by sending me T-shirt ideas, linking from their blogs and buying T-shirts. Special thanks to Patrick McKenzie for setting up and hosting the programmer-tshirts.com web site and to Jeff Atwood for running some free ads on stackoverflow.com .
Successful Software 
Hi,
That’s a shame – they’re good actually, but I do know what you mean (from past experience) about the very high overheads for on-demand stuff.
If I’d know before, I’d gladly have put a free link (in place of all the other free links) on http://www.unix-manuals.com, which gets about 1200 hits a day, but is earning about 0.0001p a day in advertising revenue… I guess it’s too late now? Let me know if you change your mind and I’ll put a link up straight away.
Cheers,
Tom
Ordered the micro-ISV shirt. Pretty cool shirt. Keep us updated if you hit 100. Otherwise, Ill order a few more to hit the number.
Here is a shirt idea: a shirt with the Perfect Table Plan logo on the front, and the Bingo Card Creator logo on the back. That is showing off Micro-ISV pride!!
>Ordered the micro-ISV shirt. Pretty cool shirt. Keep us updated if you hit 100.
I think that makes it 100!
>Here is a shirt idea: a shirt with the Perfect Table Plan logo on the front, and the Bingo Card Creator logo on the back. That is showing off Micro-ISV pride!!
I am not sure there would be many takers! ;0)
sold 15 more t-shirts since I posted this. Cool!
Zazzle have a Halloween offer of $5 off all shirts. Use Code:
OCTSHIRTSALE
> I think that makes it 100!
For some reason I read 92…thats just from Zazzle. Glad to hear you sold 15 more! I think Ill order another shirt anyway using the discount.
What’s up with designs being different? I don’t see the 95% done on the Euro shop – or am I missing it?
I had problems with the spreadshirt designer and never duplicated all the designs on there.
Andy, well done for running the site for all this time. It’s a shame it didn’t sell more shirts, but $300 is $300. I’ve removed the link from my blog.
The final total was $350.59+£8.94. Now all paid out. I had to pay out the final $219.06 all to sightsavers.org as I couldn’t send money to jaipurfoot.org (PayPal link broken and no response to my email).