Our up-front payment of $300 is more than most make with a 10% commission (cafe press & redbubble), and we plan to increase it over time as our sales numbers go up.
The community aspect of Chirply also drives more views and sales, versus the silo'd store aspect of the others you mentioned - where you are responsible for driving your own traffic.
In the end, we'll be a much better place for designers as our payments increase over time, and the level of exposure for not only your Chirply products, but also your portfolio.
nice post, unfortunately SF payroll tax is 1.5% over $150,000 in payroll, not $250k in payroll as mentioned in your article :( It's a racket and is one of the reasons Twitter and Zynga are threatening to leave SF if the city doesn't give them a break on the tax. But it hurts the little guys more. If you have 4 employees making $40k each you have to pay 1.5% of 160k, which is $2400 (that amounts to almost 2 months of office rent or 75% of one employees monthly salary).
Personally, I'd be willing to take a 1.5% paycut to work in SF instead of the Valley, because I can't stand suburban commutes. But that kind of reasoning is probably why I'm in NYC instead of out west to begin with.
EDIT: Also, I'd suspect that the "1.5% on payrolls over 150k" only applies to the amount in overage, because that's the way most graduated taxes work. So it'd be 150 bucks on the 10k of overage in your 160k example.
Yeah, and that doesn't even bother me, because I love living here and wouldn't trade that 1.5% for a suburban commute. To start with, I don't have to own a car, so that alone probably puts me ahead on income (the cost of rent puts me right back behind again, though).
I am still upset as a Red Sox fan that a bunch of that money went to subsidizing the new Yankee Stadium, though.
"It's a racket and is one of the reasons Twitter and Zynga are threatening to leave SF if the city doesn't give them a break on the tax."
Lots of cities have payroll taxes, and they're not a "racket" -- it's the cost of doing business in a city. What's unusual about SF is that it has a law that considers gains on employee stock options as taxable pay, not that it has a payroll tax.
Yeah. It's a shame we don't get anything like clean water, sewage treatment, police protection, 24/7 fire response, trash pickup, recycling, public transit, street repair or parks in exchange for our taxes.
Possible variant: Accept a picture/image of a handwritten message, and apply it (cleanly) to the card / piece to be mailed.
EDIT: I'm thinking of e.g. an image from a cell phone, if you can get sufficient quality. Not something that becomes significant effort for the user. Bonus points if, or necessary that it looks (fairly well) handwritten.
Probably the more appropriate question is - how it's different than http://minted.com? I know TinyPrints is not crowd-sourced, but Minted is.
Please note, I'm not trying to demean your service or existence by any means, but just trying to learn how you're distinguishing and plan to compete with this super growing startups?
The community aspect of Chirply also drives more views and sales, versus the silo'd store aspect of the others you mentioned - where you are responsible for driving your own traffic.
In the end, we'll be a much better place for designers as our payments increase over time, and the level of exposure for not only your Chirply products, but also your portfolio.