How To Make $100 A Day Teespring: Step-by-Step Print-on-Demand Guide

You don’t need a warehouse, a screen printer, or a single dollar upfront to start selling t-shirts online. That’s the promise behind Teespring (now called Spring), a print-on-demand platform where you design the product, set your price, share a link, and collect profit every time someone buys. In this video, Alston walks through the exact math, the product lineup, and three specific traffic strategies you can use to hit $100 per day with Teespring. Let’s break it all down.

The numbers Alston shares are blunt and straightforward: sell four blankets at $25 profit each and you’ve cleared $100. Sell eight t-shirts at $14 profit each and you’re there too. The platform handles printing, shipping, and customer complaints so you never touch inventory. What’s left for you is coming up with designs, picking a niche, and driving traffic. That’s a slim job description for a real business, which is exactly why this model attracts beginners.

What You’ll Walk Out With

A clear picture of how Teespring’s print-on-demand model actually works end-to-end
The real profit numbers per product type (blanket, t-shirt, iPhone case) so you know how many sales you actually need
Three traffic strategies Alston covers: social media trending topics, YouTube channel integration, and Fiverr design outsourcing
The honest drawback Alston flags: why “semi-passive” means something different from “passive”
A niche idea (family reunions) that sidesteps broad market competition entirely
How to know whether Teespring fits your situation or whether a different path makes more sense — find out at finder.platformproof.com

What Teespring Actually Is

Teespring is a print-on-demand platform. That phrase gets thrown around a lot, so here’s what it means in practice: you upload a design, choose which products to put it on, set a retail price, and Teespring generates a storefront URL for you. When a customer buys, Teespring charges the customer, prints the item, ships it to their door, handles returns and complaints, and then deposits your profit margin into your account. You never see the physical product.

The product catalog is wider than most beginners expect. In the video, Alston shows the full lineup: unisex t-shirts, women’s t-shirts, hoodies, sweatshirts, tank tops, kids’ apparel, bags, long-sleeve tees, iPhone cases, and blankets. Each product has a base cost (production plus fulfillment) and a retail price floor. You set the price above the base cost and the difference is your margin. There’s no monthly fee and no inventory commitment. You can list a product for free and it will sit there indefinitely waiting to sell.

One thing worth noting: Teespring rebranded to Spring in 2021, but the platform operates the same way. If you search for it today you’ll find it under the Spring name, but the mechanics Alston describes apply directly to how it still works. Same zero-inventory model, same profit-margin structure, same free account setup.

The Profit Math: How Many Sales Do You Actually Need?

Alston pulls up the pricing breakdown in the video and the numbers are concrete. Here’s what he shows:

Blankets: Retail price $60, base cost $35, profit per sale $25. To make $100 per day you need 4 blanket sales. That’s it. Four people deciding to spend $60 on a blanket with your design on it.

T-shirts: Retail price $24, base cost $10, profit per sale $14. To make $100 per day you need roughly 8 to 9 t-shirt sales. T-shirts are the most familiar product for buyers, which can help conversion, but you need more of them to hit the daily target.

iPhone cases: Retail price $28, base cost $16, profit per sale $12. Similar math to t-shirts — you’d need 8 to 9 sales daily to clear $100.

Alston’s framing throughout the video is that 4 to 12 sales per day is the realistic range to hit $100, depending on which product you focus on. That’s not a massive volume number. If you’re building an audience or tapping into a trending moment, 8 to 12 sales in a day is achievable once traffic is flowing. The harder problem is getting that traffic consistently, which is where the three strategies he covers come in.

One more thing the math implies: higher-margin products give you more breathing room. A blanket sale at $25 profit means a single bad day with only 2 sales still puts $50 in your account. A t-shirt at $14 means a bad day hits harder. If you’re trying to get to $100 with less volume pressure, start with higher-ticket products like blankets, hoodies, or sweatshirts rather than chasing the cheapest item in the catalog.

Traffic Strategy 1: Social Media Trending Topics

The first traffic method Alston describes is the most time-sensitive one. You monitor trending topics across Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram, identify something with real momentum, create a relevant design in Teespring around that topic, and then share your product link directly in the conversation around that trend. You’re essentially surfing the wave while it’s still rising.

Alston’s example in the video: say “No Football Monday” is trending on a given day. You open Teespring, design a shirt with that phrase and a football graphic, generate your store URL, and post it under the relevant hashtag. People who are already engaged with that conversation see your product in the feed and some of them buy. You paid nothing for that traffic — it was already congregating under the hashtag before you showed up.

For Instagram specifically, Alston suggests taking a screenshot of your product listing, posting it to your Instagram, and putting your Teespring store link in your bio. When someone clicks your bio link, they go directly to the product. The friction is low and the intent from the viewer is already there because they just saw what the product looks like.

The honest limitation Alston flags here is real: this is a hamster wheel. Trending topics have a short shelf life. What’s hot on Monday is forgotten by Wednesday. That means you have to be active and attentive every single day. You’re not building something that runs without you — you’re grinding to find the next wave before it crests and crashes. For someone who already spends a lot of time on social media and enjoys spotting what’s moving culturally, this can be a natural fit. For someone who finds that exhausting, the second strategy is a better long-term play.

Traffic Strategy 2: YouTube Channel Integration

Teespring has a native integration with YouTube. Once a channel reaches 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours (the standard YouTube monetization threshold), creators can link their Teespring store directly to their channel. When they do, product listings appear below the video in a shelf — viewers can see the merch without ever leaving the YouTube page.

Alston points this out in the video and uses his own potential example: if he created a shirt that said “Escape the Cube” with a graphic of someone running out of a cubicle, his viewers who already identify with that message would be natural buyers. The purchase decision is almost pre-made for them. They’ve been watching his content about escaping their 9-to-5, they resonate with the phrase, and there’s a $24 item right below the video that lets them wear that identity.

This approach has a different quality than the trending-topic method. It’s slower to build (you need that subscriber and watch-hour threshold first) but more durable once it’s there. Your audience already trusts you, already cares about your message, and your products are visible on every video you publish. You don’t have to chase trends because you are the niche. If you already have a YouTube channel with a defined audience — even a small one — integrating a Teespring store is one of the lowest-friction monetization moves available to you.

If you don’t have a YouTube channel yet, this strategy is a longer path — but Alston’s broader content is about building that kind of presence as a foundation for income. The channel and the Teespring store can grow together if you design them that way from the start.

Traffic Strategy 3: Outsource Designs on Fiverr

The third approach Alston covers is the most scalable and the least dependent on your own creativity or social media activity. Instead of designing shirts yourself or waiting for the right trending topic to come along, you hire graphic designers on Fiverr to produce multiple designs at low cost, upload all of them to Teespring, and see which ones sell.

Alston’s specific recommendation: spend about $20, contact 5 to 10 Fiverr designers, and ask each of them for a design you can print on a t-shirt. They’ll come back in 3 to 4 days with options. You collect everything that comes back, upload it all to Teespring, and let the market decide what people want to buy. Some designs will flop. Some will pop. You don’t know which ones in advance, so you cast a wide net with low individual cost.

The math Alston describes: $20 might get you 4 to 6 distinct designs. If even one or two of those designs sell consistently, you recover that $20 in a single day. If you’re selling blankets at $25 profit, one sale covers your entire design budget. If you’re selling t-shirts at $14, you need two sales to be in the clear. The upside after that is pure margin with no additional design cost since the file is already uploaded.

This method also lets you build a catalog without needing to be a designer. Most people who try to sell on print-on-demand platforms stall out because they don’t know how to create visual designs or don’t have tools like Photoshop. Fiverr removes that bottleneck entirely. You’re now the curator and the marketer rather than the artist. That’s a job description a lot more people can fill.

Not sure whether Teespring is the right starting point for you?

Take the quiz at finder.platformproof.com and get matched to the online income method that fits your actual skills, schedule, and starting capital.

A Niche Idea That Sidesteps Broad Competition

Alston drops a creative niche idea in the video that’s easy to overlook: family reunions. If you’re part of a family that holds annual or biennial reunions, you can create custom shirts through Teespring specifically for that event and sell them to family members before the gathering. The demand is captive — everyone wants to show up in the same colors with the same design — and you’re the only supplier since you made the shirt.

Alston jokes that this “might skirt the line of ethics” when it comes to profiting off family, but the practical point is real: captive audiences with a shared identity buy. Family reunions are just the most literal version of that. The same logic applies to any closed or semi-closed group: church communities, local sports teams, school clubs, employee groups. If you can reach a defined group of people who share a common identity and give them a product that represents that identity, you don’t need broad social media traffic at all. You just need access to that group’s communication channel.

This is actually one of the lower-risk entry points into Teespring because you have a guaranteed audience before you design anything. Instead of creating a shirt and hoping strangers find it, you find the group first and then make something specifically for them. The conversion rate on that kind of targeted sale is dramatically higher than cold social media traffic.

Honest Drawbacks: What “Semi-Passive” Actually Means

Alston is direct in the video about this: Teespring is semi-passive, not passive. The word “passive” gets abused relentlessly in the online income space and Alston’s qualifier matters. Here’s what he actually means by it.

The passive part: once a product is uploaded and a customer finds it, the sale happens without you doing anything. Teespring processes the payment, prints the item, ships it, handles any complaints, and sends you the profit. You can genuinely be asleep when that happens. That’s real and that’s a significant advantage over a traditional retail business.

The active part: getting traffic to that product in the first place. If you’re using the trending-topic strategy, you’re actively monitoring social media every day looking for what to ride. If you’re building a YouTube channel, you’re creating content consistently to grow the audience that will eventually see your merch shelf. If you’re using Fiverr designs, you’re still doing the research, placing the orders, uploading designs, and figuring out where to send traffic. None of that runs itself.

The exception is if you already have a large, engaged following. If 50,000 people are subscribed to your YouTube channel and you drop a relevant shirt today, some of them will buy it with no additional effort from you. At that point the income becomes genuinely more passive because the traffic infrastructure is already built. But getting to that point took sustained active work to build. There’s no shortcut past that phase.

One other honest drawback the video doesn’t cover but is worth noting: saturation. The low barrier to entry on Teespring means millions of products are already listed there. Generic designs — a funny phrase slapped on a black t-shirt — compete in an extremely crowded market. The strategies that actually work are the ones that get traffic without depending on Teespring’s internal search: your own social media presence, your own YouTube audience, or the captive niche groups discussed above. Plan for the traffic problem upfront rather than hoping a good design alone will attract buyers.

A Realistic Step-by-Step Starting Plan

If you want to test Teespring with minimal risk, here’s a logical sequence based on what Alston covers in the video:

Create your free Teespring account. It takes under 10 minutes. You don’t need a credit card and there’s no monthly cost.
Pick one product type to start. Don’t try to sell everything at once. Blankets have the highest margin per sale ($25 profit vs. 4 needed to hit $100/day). Start there or with hoodies and sweatshirts.
Choose a traffic strategy before you design anything. If you have no following, the Fiverr approach is the most practical start. If you have a small but engaged audience anywhere online, design for them specifically.
Spend $20 on Fiverr. Contact 5 designers and ask for print-ready designs around your chosen niche. Collect everything you get back and upload all of it to Teespring as separate listings.
Share the listings on social media with specific targeting. Don’t post to your personal Facebook with no context. Post to groups, hashtags, or communities where the design’s niche is already congregating.
Track which listings get clicks and which ones sell. Teespring gives you basic analytics. After two weeks, double down on the designs and product types that are moving and let the rest sit.
Reinvest early profits into more Fiverr designs. If your first $20 generates $60 in profit, use $20 of that to order the next batch of designs and pocket the rest.

The goal in the first month is not to hit $100 per day. The goal is to understand which product types and niches respond in your specific situation. Once you have even one design that sells consistently, you have a real signal to build on.

Find Your X

Teespring works for some people and doesn’t for others. The ones it works for tend to have one of three things: a following they can sell to directly, a knack for spotting cultural moments before they peak, or the discipline to treat it like a business (testing designs systematically, tracking numbers, reinvesting). If you’re not sure whether that description fits you — or whether a completely different method would be a better match for where you are right now — take the quiz at finder.platformproof.com. It takes a few minutes and points you toward the specific method that fits your skills, schedule, and starting capital.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does it cost money to start selling on Teespring?

No. Creating an account and listing products is free. Teespring only takes its cut (the base cost) when a sale actually happens. You don’t pay anything unless you earn something first. The only optional cost is if you choose to buy Fiverr designs, which Alston recommends spending about $20 on to get 4 to 6 usable designs.

What is the profit margin on a Teespring t-shirt?

Alston shows in the video that selling a t-shirt at $24 with a base cost of $10 gives you $14 profit per sale. You can set the retail price higher or lower than $24, which adjusts your margin accordingly. Higher price means more profit per sale but potentially fewer buyers. Lower price means more buyers but thinner margin. Most sellers land in a similar range to what Alston shows because the market has a ceiling for how much someone will pay for a print-on-demand shirt from an unknown brand.

How many sales per day do you actually need to make $100?

It depends on the product. At $25 profit per blanket sale, you need 4. At $14 profit per t-shirt sale, you need about 8 to 9. At $12 profit per iPhone case, you need roughly 9. Alston summarizes it as 4 to 12 sales per day across different products to reach the $100 mark. Higher-margin products (blankets, hoodies) give you more room for slow days.

Is Teespring truly passive income?

Alston calls it “semi-passive” and that’s accurate. The fulfillment side is passive — Teespring prints and ships without you doing anything. The traffic side is not passive unless you already have an audience. Building that audience (through YouTube, social media, or another channel) requires consistent active work before the income starts flowing on autopilot. Anyone who tells you Teespring is fully passive from day one is skipping the hard part.

Do I need design skills to sell on Teespring?

No. Alston explicitly covers outsourcing design work on Fiverr. You provide the concept and direction, a freelance designer creates the print-ready file, and you upload it to Teespring. His recommendation is to spend about $20 to get 4 to 6 designs from multiple designers, upload all of them, and see which ones sell. You’re the curator, not the creator.

What are the best products to sell on Teespring for higher profits?

Based on the pricing Alston shows, blankets have the best margin per unit at $25 profit on a $60 sale. That means you need the fewest sales to hit $100 per day. Hoodies and sweatshirts are another high-margin category that people buy at higher price points than basic tees. iPhone cases are at the lower end of the margin range. If you’re starting cold with no existing traffic, focusing on products where each sale counts more gives you more financial runway while you build traffic.

Can you connect a Teespring store to a YouTube channel?

Yes. Alston mentions this in the video. Once a YouTube channel reaches 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours, you can link your Teespring store to your channel and products will appear in a merchandise shelf below your videos. Viewers can buy directly through YouTube without navigating to a separate site. This is one of the most natural integrations for creators who already have a presence on the platform.

Is Teespring still a good opportunity or has it become too saturated?

Teespring (now Spring) is still a real platform with real buyers. The saturation problem is real but it’s specifically a problem for people who try to rely on Teespring’s internal discovery to find their products. If you’re building traffic through your own channels (YouTube, social media, a niche community), the platform’s internal saturation doesn’t affect you as much — your buyers come from your audience, not from searching Teespring. The business model remains sound; the traffic strategy is what determines whether it works for you specifically.

Sources

Alston Godbolt, “How To Make 100 Dollars A Day Teespring” (YouTube video, youtu.be/SuNw8pzSwoo)
Teespring / Spring platform (spring.com) — product pricing and profit structure as shown in video
Fiverr (fiverr.com) — freelance graphic design marketplace referenced for outsourcing designs