We allowed this custom apparel platform to keep pace with their massive growth and scale.

$58M+

Venture capital raised

217

Product releases per year

10M+

Monthly site visitors

Problem

Like most startups, the team at Teespring was building fast and furious - pushing code as quickly as they could to build the new features their rapidly expanding customer base was asking for. The e-commerce site that enabled individuals to design and sell custom apparel had a small engineering team, and while they were about to experience massive success, the existing codebase wasn’t built with meteoric growth in mind.

Working across multiple platforms to migrate their PHP code-base to Ruby on Rails, Teespring required a way to ramp-up their team overnight with experienced Ruby on Rails developers who could complete the migration quickly in order to roll-out new features on a regular basis.

Assessment

Teespring brought us onboard to gain speed, as well as to gain knowledge and experience to guide the architecture of their new Ruby on Rails code base. They were experiencing the effects of technical debt; making incremental releases difficult without unknowingly introducing bugs in other areas.

Teespring’s CEO was already familiar with MojoTech’s CEO and CTO, having been mentored by both in year’s past. He knew of our success and experience in executing on similar problems where a migration, technical debt cleanup, and new feature development needed to be accomplished in parallel.

Mojo’s worked across two teams, one migrating the existing PHP code-base to Ruby on Rails, and the other building new features on the new Rails platform.

Progress

We started with a Team Strength of five engineers supported by one Product Manager. Over time that team more than doubled in size as we created a clear roadmap which allowed work to be done in parallel while maintaining efficiency. Part of the team focused on migrating the existing PHP code-base to Ruby on Rails, while the rest of the team helped to define and build new features on the new Rails platform. Due to Teespring’s massive growth we also had to build a robust production environment on AWS which could scale with their success.

As a startup, Teespring had limited processes in place for helping prioritize work in order to ensure that the right things were being focused on at the right time. We helped to implement an agile process that focused on maintaining the right prioritization and balance across initiatives.

Results

In partnering with MojoTech, Teespring was able to focus their efforts on building out features and enhancements without the specter of issues at scale. Supporting a complete rewrite of the codebase, setting up processes for prioritization, and building internal tooling to provide better service to their customers paid dividends in the end.

Teespring made headlines, securing $58 million in venture capital, with contributions from heavyweights Khosla Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. The company has since moved to Silicon Valley, signed a partnership deal with the NFL, and has its sights set on global expansion.

"They [MojoTech] were the difference between us being able to maintain a tremendously fast growth rate and completely falling off the horse. They've built tools that allowed us to sustain a growth rate of several hundred percent."

Sharon Burt

Director of Internal Products, Teespring

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