Congratulations to the genius called Simon Oliver who has had a big chunk of success with his iPhone Rolando app.  So much so that the Beeb wrote about him this week as a great British success. I’m proud of him!

Simon and I were part of the team that started Bountee – that has now evolved in mysoti – and he’s an awesome developer. But I just want to know – is that me on the left hand side of the image above?

Take a look at some Rolando action here:

My friend Steve started a wonderful t-shirt company a couple of years ago called Bountee. It was great. You could upload your own designs and sell them in your own shop. It attracted some amazing designers. And you’ll probably notice that I’m talking about it in the past tense. That’s because it’s been replaced by his even bigger and better creation – mysoti.com.

I know it’s a weird name. It stands for ‘My Stuff On The Internet’. (And I think it’s probably a sign that all of the good domain names are gone!)

It’s a lot more than t-shirts now. You can also design and sell your own posters and canvasses. And I don’t know if I’m supposed to say – so keep it under your hat – but I hear that they’re also planning to do wallpaper and decals.

If it sounds like your bag (which they’ll probably do in the future, too) go along and get an account. And start putting your own stuff on the internet.

Design de TShirt pour le groupe MONNOMESTFRANK sur le site de Bountee

Wow! Quite a busy week for our competition and the whole site in general. So first off a really big thanks to EVERYONE who’s been through the Bountee doors over these past 9 days!

But back to the competition. We now have over 60 designs competing for the grand prize of a month -full of shirts (31) and the Blueflipart.com vouchers.

But I think we need more.

We’ve seen a lot of people just re-tagging their designs as ‘Drawn.ca’ – which is cool an’ all – but what about the new creations? Where’s the designs inspired by your inspiration?

Don’t forget that you only have until October 31st to get the best voting score – so it pays to show your hand early and drum up the votes!

And you do know that all shirts entered for the competition are still available for you to sell don’t you? So think of it as just one, big shop-window for your personal store!

Still to come:

Big news about the CREATE Tool coming soon! Stay Tuned… 

This entire month of October, the good folks at Drawn! and ourselves are teaming up to offer a fun contest to get your creative juices flowing.

From now until October 31st we’re asking you to submit shirt designs to bountee.com based upon the theme of ‘creativity and inspiration‘. There’s no limit to the amount of times you can enter, and submitting a design is as simple as tagging your entry with the word ‘drawn.ca‘.

The winners will be chosen based on the entries with the highest user ratings. Closing date for entries is 11:59pm, October 31st.

So what’s in it for you?

Grand prize: One t-shirt for every day of the month — that’s 31 t-shirts! PLUS a $75 gift certificate from BlueFlip Art

Runner-up: 5 shirts plus a $25 gift certificate from BlueFlip Art.

Submit your entries and vote for the winner at www.bountee.com/drawn/

Hi Everyone,

We’ve been working hard behind the scenes on stuff these past few weeks and thought that you might appreciate a little competition that we’re running along with Amateur Illustrator!

Head on over to their site for the full details…

In order to enter you must take part in Amateur Illustrators weekly sketchgroup. The Amateur Illustrator sketchgroup is held each week in the Work in progress forum. Each week members do a sketch based on a theme (last week it was rain, this week it is self portait). Any member who enters a sketch can suggest a theme for the next weeks sketchgroup. At the end of the week one of the ai moderators starts a new sketchgroup based on a theme chosen from the suggestions of the previous week.

The member who has their theme suggestion chosen at the end of the week is the winner.

So get over there and get sketching…

Amateur Illustrator – Articles » Blog Archive » Weekly t-shirt competition on ai

So today – as well as listening to too much Kanye & 50 cent – we’ve done a few little updates to speed up the site. We hope they’ll help you get to your shirts that whole bit quicker

Also we sent out our first newsletter overnight, so you should check your inboxes for lovely, Bountee goodness.

For those of you not signed up with a Bountee account (shame on you – it’s free!) here is a link to the mail:

http://www.bountee.com/newsletter/01_sep_12.html

So how is everyone today?

If you do own a Maestro card, and you fancy placing an order AND you’re the first person to reply here with your transaction number we’ll give you a FREE SHIRT!

Seriously, we need to test something out with ‘live’ data

p.s. We can only offer a free shirt to the FIRST person who orders, so please make sure you let others know that you’ve ordered using the comments below. Thanks.

Two posts in one day – blimey! But today is worth it for one reason:

We’ve got new stuff!

Granted – it may mean a little bit more to us than it does you in the grand scheme of things, but we’ve been wanting to improve the voting on the site for a while now, and we finally think we’ve done it.

So now, once you’ve logged in, you will be greeted with the latest 5 designs submitted for Most Wanted status – you can of course view all of the latest design submitted here -  but now there is the added bonus of being able to provide some critique on the design right within that window; so you can justify your Yay or Nay!

It may seem like small functionality, but as someone who has had designs rejected on a nearly weekly basis I really hope it’ll be useful to receive some constructive feedback from my peers.

We hope you like it!

(As always, we’d love your feedback on it below)

We get a load of emails here into Bountee HQ. And most of them are nice

The majority of them have a question or two attached as well – with perhaps 80% of them talking around issues of copyright and ownership of designs.

Here’s an example of one we had today:

I have a little question about using the site to produce some merchandise for my band . Is there any issue with reselling t-shirts on another site?

And just briefly, here is our answer:

If you mean in linking to us from another site? = No problem at all.

If you mean selling stuff that you have bought from us on another site? = No problem at all.

If you mean having the same shirt design on another site for sale by another company similar to us? = No problem at all (as long as THEY let you!).

It’s your designs dude… You do what you feel is right with them!

Other than perhaps the misplaced ‘dude’ in that last sentence – we like to think that our sentiment is spot on.

Let’s be honest here – this site is nothing without your help, your designs and ultimately your talent. We can’t speak for other people and other business/websites who ask for ownership of your work and everything else, but for Bountee -unless you and us have an agreement that says otherwise – YOU own YOUR work. And always will.

I just thought that it would be nice to mention that.

Oops! In all the fuss and excitement of the past week or so we forgot to say that the Pay Day for August happened at the end of last week!

All of you who made money from 20th July to the 21st of August would have received an email from PayPal by now.

If you didn’t?

Well… You could always design more shirts? or tell everyone where to buy yours from?

p.s. A little update happening very soon. Keep watching…

So the site is doing well. We’re happy and we hope you’re enjoying the extra creative freedom that the new system is providing? Certainly we’ve had a load of new designs put up over the past couple of days.

But how to search through them all eh? Well, we’ve updated the search page a little today, so now you can look through just the wonderful, most wanted designs or EVERYTHING (and by that we mean EVERYTHING – so please be ready for some pretty err… experimental stuff!)

We’ve also made voting a lot, lot easier too. So now you can view 50 submitted designs at a time on our big, vote page. We think that this makes picking out the good stuff a whole lot easier – but please don’t forget that NO votes are just as important as the YES ones! The quality of the designs on the Most Wanted section really do depend on you making that vote count.

Anyway, more exciting vote – as well as design tool – news to come over the next week or so.

Enjoy!

haha – brilliant. See what I did there? Beta, better… Get it.

[sorry]

Right then. We had quite a bit of traffic yesterday it seems, and this caused a few problems. Thanks for all the emails letting us know.

So to say thanks – and apologies – we’re extending the 50% until Monday!

Again, just type bonitas into your checkout.

Enjoy.

Well, it’s a Bank Holiday here in the UK – and we figured it would be nice to offer the same kind of happiness that a holiday brings to the rest of our friends who use Bountee.

So… valid for the next 48 hours only – feel free to type ‘bonitas‘ into the Gift Code box when you check out. It’s only fair that if we’re in a good mood then we should share the love right?

Oh and did we mention that this is a 50% sale? Oh we did? Lovely.

Wow! What a few weeks this has been.

And before I go any further I just wanted to say thankyou to ALL of you for being so patient.

We’re aware that we’ve been focused on other things these past few days, and the fact that you’ve been so blimmin’ nice in your emails and comments is really, really appreciated.

So then, onto business.
We’ve gone and made some changes – and we think you’ll like ‘em!

We’ve taken all of your feedback over the past couple of months (we only launched in April!) and think that we’ve made some great improvements.

- EVERY shirt can now be bought!
We can’t tell you how happy this one has made us – No longer do you have to wrestle with the trauma of the dreaded ‘approvals process’! If you want to create a shirt and buy it yourself you can!

Just want to make shirts available to your mates? No problem – you even have a fab new URL just for you!

- Only want to see the truly GREAT shirts? Introducing Bountee’s Most Wanted!
I think it’s fair to say that your feedback on the designs on the site has been wonderfully positive, but the approvals process really didn’t allow the truly ‘amazing’ talent that we have managed to grab over these past few months to shine. Now with the introduction of our Most Wanted shirts you can finally get a chance to buy the best of the best, or even allow your shirt the opportunity to become one of the glittering few!

- Photo comments allow everyone to make some money!
Even if you’re not a designer now, you can still support the community and your own wallets by adding photos to comments on shirt designs. Add a photo, wait for it to be approved by our moderators and then – ‘kerblammo!’ – you get yourself a gift code for future Bountee purchases! Cool eh?

- Archive your designs!
And perhaps the biggest, most requested change of all: you can now remove designs from your main list / remove items from sale or try your luck with the Most Wanted vote!

And we’re not finished yet – keep checking back over the next few weeks to see some fantastic additions!

Thanks again everyone – we really like to think of Bountee.com as ‘our’ site – and your feedback as made us proud to be part of this wonderful community!

——-

Note: The site will be a bit weird for the next couple of hours as we update everything. Please bear with us as we make things ‘right’.

Oh go on then… It’s August after all.

Please find in your respective email accounts messages from Bountee via PayPal letting you know how much moolah you’ve made from Bountee this past month.

If you haven’t got any email from us it probably means you didn’t make any sales yet. Sorry about that – but you could always try adding another design or two?

Enjoy!

p.s. These are all for sales made from June 21st through to July 20th inclusive. The next dates for payment will be the 21st of July through to the 2oth of August.

Oooh, what could it mean? Why have we been so quiet lately? Can it be true that you’ll soon be able to buy *every* shirt that gets uploaded and not just those that have been approved? What happens to the Bountee vote?

Keep checking back – we have stuff to show. And we think you’ll like…

Oh ok, so it was actually last week that we sent the payments out! But I just realised we forgot to blog about it here.So that’s our third month of payments now, and they are getting bigger (on average) month after month.

We’re still not in the ‘quit day jobs and do this gig full time’ stage – but you know what? – we’re are really, really enjoying the site – and we hope you are too!

IN OTHER NEWS:
Development on the new functionality is going really well. And we mean really well. We don’t want to shout too much about the new stuff on it’s way; but I personally think that you’ll be pleased (yes, even you p00neil!).

Did someone say EVERY design is available? BUT we still maintain the community vote?

(ahem) I couldn’t possibly comment.

Hello again, I’m getting quite good at the blog thing now eh?

Today – in response to a few mails and comments – I wanted to talk sales. Or more explicitly – what on earth that screen means within the Sales tab on your profile.

Well, this is what it looks like:

And whilst most of it is pretty straightforward, I’m aware that some of it (the last column in particular) is actually pretty nuts. So although we’re going to redo this page I figured it would be worth pointing out what is what.

Column One:
This is the date of your last order.

Column Two:
This is your superb design – look at mine! Ain’t it a beauty? No? It was for my daughter – be nice!

Column Three:
This is the total number of sales that this design has made EVER. Not just last month, or in the last 24 hours. But EVER – as in eternity.

Column Four:
This is a contentious screen, but it needs to be shown here because it is actually the cost of the shirts in each currency.

And yes, we know it’s unfair that the UK and EU have to pay more in relation to our cousins out across the pond – but blame Gordon Brown and the IMF or someone; anyone but us. We live here. This is the price that even Bountee staff members pay. Really. We hate it too – and are doing everything we can to reduce costs! Promise.

This is also the cost of the shirt with your commission percentage added to it. So this is what people pay for your shirt in each of these currencies.

Column Five:
And this is the complicated one that nobody but us seems to understand (in other words the one we are fixing first :p) – this is the earnings column.

The numbers in brackets (if I had made any sales this month) show the amount you’ve earned in each currency that is waiting to be paid to you upon next months Pay Day.

The number to the left (not in the brackets) is the amount that you have earned so far.

So here you can see that I have sold FOUR shirts in TOTAL, and I have made £9.19 in TOTAL with NOTHING owing to me this month (probably because I didn’t pimp the shirt hard enough on my MySpace or on Facebook, or blogger, or Flickr or whatever is new in the social networking space this afternoon).

And that is it really. Nothing too complicated, but we acknowledge that we need to work on the layout somewhat.

Anyhoo, I’m off to think of some more witty designs that can pay for my coffee addiction next month.

I hope that helped a little?

As always comments/questions welcome below.

Love you, bye!

Kerching!

Today is the second official Bountee PayDay. To celebrate I’m taking the $4 I made from my little pirate dog shirt – and am off to but a cappuccino!

Oh how I wish I had designed Dale’s Chewy shirt – he’s been all over the Internets!

Enjoy!

p.s. These are all for sales made from April 20th through to May 20th inclusive. The next dates for payment will be the 21st of May through to the 21st of June. 

We’ve had a load of great input these past few days (and weeks) so I wanted to share with you the current state of our to do list. I’m not sure it’s the most commercially sensible thing to do – but you guys deserve to know that we’re working day and (most) nights to make Bountee what you want it to be.

The List: 

1. Deleting shirts. But not only that – we’re going to make the shirts that are ‘unapproved’ by the community still ‘buyable’ by the person that made it. So even if you have something rudely unaccepted by your peers you can still go on and rock your threads for the super-basic price anyway!
2.  Colour Merging. In as much as we’re considering giving colour choice to the buyers rather than designers. So you as a designer submit a shirt in your preferred colours and styles i.e. you can make the design available in multiple shirts and multiple colours in one upload – and then if the user wants your design in Yellow then they can have it their way (but still within your chosen colour/style range)!
3. Actual real people in real shirt photo uploads. We want to encourage people to upload ‘proper’ shirt images – so we’re going to work on finding a way that allows people to add real images to the designs but doesn’t involve massive amounts of time spent removing/moderating the usual nekkid naughtiness that people with digital cameras just can’t help doing! (Unless of course you all actually *want* that! :-p)
4. Bug and Basic Fixes. Simple things that are actually more complex for our system than you would think like: Allow the design details form to all be processed from the one submit button etc

And that’s pretty much it for round 2 of the beta build I think. We’ve made great steps these past 7 weeks – yep that’s how young we are! – and so if you have any more suggestions it’d be great to here them!

Afternoon all. We’ve been getting quite a few emails to Bountee HQ from people depressed and upset that they are receiving a lot of rejection emails from their fellow Bountee’ites – telling them that their designs didn’t ‘make the grade’.

Because this is such a big issue (rejection is never nice) I wanted to explain a little about the process to see if it would help? I really do appreciate the frustration.

I too have been rejected – *sob* 

A little goes a long way
A lot of people are submitting 5 or 6 versions of the same design/illustration in several different colour-ways/versions – and this may be the downfall of many I feel.

You see, the way the system works is that any design needs to hit a ‘positive‘ votes threshold before it gets approved. The more positive votes it attracts compared to negative votes, the quicker it’ll be approved for the website.

The problem with this system at the moment – and we are constantly working on it – is that if you do a design that is the same over say, 10 shirts, then rather than gather the 10 collective votes for the great design, what you actually end up getting is just the 1 positive vote for 10 different designs (does that make sense?).

So actually, it may be worthwhile resubmitting but with only one, preferred colour way or style option.

Basically the advice is this. If you have a design that rocks try staggering it’s release over a couple of days, or sessions on the website – especially if you really feel it works well on several colours of t-shirt.

I hope this helps explain the system a little? Thoughts?

So today we’ve tweaked a couple of things with the site that were bothering us (and probably you also :-p).

If you take a look at the most popular bar on the right hand side of the page now you’ll see that it ranks designs far more efficiently – and if you ‘view all‘ you’ll notice that not only does this link actually work now [about time huh?] it also displays the number of votes that each item has received. So you’ll finally be able to make a more reasoned judgement as to just how *hot* that design is – or if it’s simply received one solitary 5 star vote from – I don’t know - some unscrupulous designer with more than one account  (perish the thought :-p)

There, that’ll do for today I think. Thanks again for all of your support and suggestions too – we’re updating the FAQ as fast and as thoroughly as we can!

Enjoy the weekend!

Most Popular Bountee – ever!

We’ve just been sent a nice little write-up on the site from TCritic today too.

Thanks as always for the link-love guys – and also worth popping over to join in the discussion on the DTG printing process that we use too.

Chewy In A Storm – T-Shirt from Bountee at Tcritic

Anyone else seen Bountee out in the wild?