Startup Threads

Make Something People Love: Featuring HyperInk

With this turn of spring and April here at Startup Threads, we’ve been preparing an awesome shirt for a new startup: HyperInk.

HyperInk

HyperInk offers e-books from experts and bloggers on a range of subjects, from startup life to current events. Best of all, they come DRM-free for all of your devices: Kindle, Nook, iPad, or Mac/PC! Offerings include Jeff Atwood’s How to Stop Sucking and Be Awesome Instead and Make Something People Love: Lesson From a Startup Guy (pictured)by Alexis Ohanian. Subscribers this month will get a discount for Alexis Ohanian’s book on HyperInk.

New Colors and Hoodies Available on Teespring

Did we tell you that this awesome t-shirt is available in multiple colors and an exclusive hoodie edition? Head over to our Teespring campaign and fund our “Make Something People Love” shirt for not only new assets to your startup t-shirt collection, but a chance to win a free class at General Assembly! T-shirts and hoodies, in both red and royal blue are available for $16 and $26, respectively. There’s only a few days left to grab one of these, so head over to that link now and tell your friends! Pictures of the hoodies are below.

Finally, we’ll be both at Disrupt NY and NY Tech Day this year, so if your company is in need of swag, contact us about it or give us a shoutout on Twitter!

Dennis Crowley Photobomb GIF w/ Startup Threads @ Foursquare SXSW Party

March Featured Company - Shopify

Our March Shirt is Sponsored by

Subscribe here to get this shirt

Shopify is the designer friendly ecommerce platform that powers over 40,000 successful stores worldwide. Themes are easy to build and you can create your own or customize one of over 100 available templates. Shopify lets you have complete control over the look and feel of your ecommerce website, allowing you to make it look just like the way you designed it. The only design restriction is your imagination. Join the Shopify Partner Program and start building beautiful ecommerce sites today. Shopify Partners get a 20% lifetime revenue share for any online store that was referred by them.

There are several ways for designers and developers to build a business around the Shopify platform.

• Build custom stores for your clients
• Design Shopify themes to sell in the Theme Store
• Build apps to extend the functionality of Shopify
• Refer new customers and earn a 20% lifetime revenue share

We run our store on Shopify and are quite pleased with the results!

February Startup Threads: Featuring SendGrid’s Mystery Shirt

Get ready for a new mystery shirt this month going out with Bag #13 for February. Subscribe before the 18th to receive this month’s shirt from SendGrid and other surprises!

Featured Company: SendGrid

SendGrid is a startup focused on providing the best transactional email delivery service for developers. Reliable scalability and real-time analytics makes for easy integration into both mobile apps and web experiences. Many companies and startups alike trust their transactional email to SendGrid, including Pinterest and Foursquare! Be sure to check them out (http://sendgrid.com) and let them simplify your email delivery.

Our shirt for SendGrid this month won’t be revealed on our home page, but we’ll give you a few clues for its design:

• The color of the shirt and design are SendGrid’s company colors
• The shirt features a play on words
• Think: SendGrid puts ________ in _________. 
• There is design on both the front and back this time

We hope you enjoy this month’s bag of swag! Also: don’t forget to grab a bag of swag or two for your friends; our new swag-gifting feature is still available for this month’s bag until the 18th! We’re sure that your startup-loving friends and family would love the shirts we have to offer.

Stay tuned for sticker and surprise companies, subscribers!

Startup Threads Clothing Drive Party

Come hang out with us this Wednesday February 13th at our event “One Of A Kind”.

We are asking you to come donate your old startup tshirts to charity (Sunshine Child Care Center in Spanish Town, Jamaica and Goodwill)

Should be a fun event! Open bar for the first hour at 1OAK.

Sponsored by Amicus, Aggregift, AlleyNYC and Coalition for Queens.

Get tickets here: http://bit.ly/114P5bH

Gary Vaynerchuk on Building Customer Loyalty

We got a chance to talk to Gary Vaynerchuk of Vaynermedia about building customer loyalty, creating the culture of service within your organization, and the day to day grind of making customers happy. Check out his Inc 500 talk for more of his perspective and the 1aDayQ&A site for more great interviews.

Headed down to SXSW? Let us know and we’ll help with your swag/merchandise strategy!

Startup Threads Store Now Open: Grab past designs, t-shirts, and brand-new hoodie!

For our subscribers out there: have you ever seen pictures of Startup Threads bags from the past and really wished you had subscribed earlier? 

About a week ago, we emailed subscribers about an upcoming store for people who want startup swag without a subscription. We’ve listened, and we now have a brand-new online shop full of past designs. Now, you can easily pick your shirt, pick your size, and a great shirt like our first design from Hipmunk will arrive at your doorstep!

Also something you want to check out is our new hoodies. Only $32 for these limited edition Startup Threads designs. They’re comfortably printed on warm

and good-quality material from Independent Trading Co, only the best for all our startup-loving friends. The design for the hoodie is to the right. It’s also available as a t-shirt on American Apparel. Grab ‘em quick, because this limited-edition swag will only be available until next Monday, January 21st!

Tomorrow marks the deadline for our Startup Weekend shirt for the subscription, so don’t forget to sign up for a new bag of swag this month. We have some awesome new companies planned ahead, so stick around and check this blog frequently for exclusive updates on the next featured companies.

New swag for a New Year: featuring Startup Weekend

To kickoff the New Year, we at Startup Threads are proud to announce that Swag Bag #12 will feature a new, limited-edition shirt for January. Sign up now before the 18th to receive these packages for only $15/month + shipping!

Featured Company: Startup Weekend

Startup Weekend is an organization that hosts 54-hour events in which developers, designers, and entrepreneurs meet to form teams and launch their company. With over 10,000 startups launched out of this organization, Startup Weekend is taking the world by storm, with events scheduled from Las Vegas, Nevada to Perth, Australia. In the spirit of launching startups, our designers have created a special new t-shirt for subscribers in January- complete with gears, beakers, sprouting leaves, microchip parts and DNA.

Designer Austin Watts from One Day Vacation explains:

For the Startup Weekend graphic process, I began asking myself questions. “What is Startup Weekend? What do they do? How do they help?” In this brainstorm phase I usually start doodling icons that relate to the questions at hand. At the core I figured it’s about growth, opportunity, and ambition. 

After taking a poll from our subscribers, the final color will be green, “for growth,” Watts points out. Have a say in next month’s shirt design by visiting us on Facebook. You can see the final design above.

Contributing Company: 12Society

Here at Startup Threads, we love subscriptions. That’s why we’re excited to be delivering exciting surprises in your bags from them for January’s bag!

12Society is a subscription to products picked by your favorite celebrities and athletes for $39/month, a sweet deal given the fact that the monthly packages are valued at around $85.

Get your hands on these new limited-edition products here if you’re not already, as well as our subscription to fresh startup t-shirts that you’re already aware of. :)

P.S. Take pictures of your new swag every month for referrals! You can gain $5 credit off of your subscription! Check out your dashboard to learn more, or subscribe to our newsletter to receive occasional updates about new features.

Interesting Stories from YC Book (LaunchPad)

<plug>I started Startup Threads Monthly to bootstrap for my other projects. If you’re into startup swag, check it out at startupthreadsmonthly.com/signup</plug>

I received the Launch Pad book last week, and thought it was a good overview of the process that Y-Combinator has setup, from interviews to demo day. It follows the summer 2011 class from interviews to demo day. Nothing was shocking, but there were definitely some stories that I thought were interesting.

OnBoarding

From Jessica Livingston: “Sam (Altman), you know what my biggest, overused, meaningless tech lingo is? On-boarding….It’s driving me bananas”.

I’m not sure I get what the problem is here and wondered if there could be a discussion on this. I have found that sites that think a great deal about the first time user experience usually help to guide me through the product for the first time, dropping the hints and prods to visit certain parts of a product on the first go around. Thats what I would consider “on-boarding”. Am I missing the point of this?

Codecademy

My favorite story of the book. They went through 2 other ideas (a site for small business owners to make custom websites and a game based coding challenge site) before landing on Codecademy. I remember getting a random email from Zach last year about it and giving some feedback on it. The next thing I know it was blowing up the twittersphere! Comp Sci & programming education (if you’re in NYC, the Academy for Software Engineering high school is looking for mentors, more info here) is an area that I care about a great deal, so love seeing what Codecademy is growing into.

On learning to code:

“Reading books and watching online instructional videos was painful and had left him frustrated. It was like reading how to play basketball for two hours and then playing for five minutes”

A funny quote from the book on their accidental launch:

“Before releasing it, however, they need to get some feedback without launching. Hacker News seems like a good place to quietly invite hackers to pay a visit to the site and critique what Codecademy has so far”

Older Entrepreneurs

Kurt Mackey of NowSpot/MongoHQ (31) said regarding age: 

“I feel extremely- I don’t know—-’hungry,’ I guess, is the word, and I haven’t noticed that from everybody else. And a lot of its because” he laughs, “theres a lot riding on this for me compared to if I were twenty-two and had the Start Fund money and no kids to support.”

StartFund

The StartFund comes up a few times throughout the book, with the chapter on angels highlighting it:

“Asked if SV Angel’s blanket investment was designed to secure the chance to get an early look at the startups, like MongoHQ, for those follow on investments, Lee says no…Lee responds: “I’m not doing this because its a marketing ploy. I’m doing this because it’s a great investment. Time will tell. It’s an acknowledgement that it’s really hard at an early stage to know who is going to be the Dropbox or Airbnb….”

Startup Math

Another funny section was from Paul Graham on startup math on slides. When RideJoy was describing the 3 trillion dollars spent on transportation or the 3 trillion miles we drove last year, PG says:

“Don’t include macroeconomic stats like that. That just washes over people….Don’t even put that in. If you’re going to make some kind of estimate, do it from the bottom up. This is like saying, ‘We’re a software company. Software is a subset of business. Business last year generated-’ The audience laughs again”

Overall, you get a sense of how PG and the other partners at YC think. It’s helpful to all of us building things to hear all the tiny insights that can help companies to succeed. If you’re applying for YC this fall, I’d highly recommend checking it out.

P.S: I’m submitting my application for my music app Songsicle, so if you have any thoughts on the music industry, hit me up frank@songsicle.com.

P.P.S: Swag!