Bootstrapped to 9 Figures
with HKR.TEAM

TeePublic never raised venture capital. They didn't need to. Over a decade, they built a $140M/year e-commerce platform profitably with a 100+ person co-managed team through HKR.TEAM running customer support, content moderation, affiliate growth, and lead generation.
No investor cushion. No bloated payroll. Just a model that paid for itself.

Case Study Snapshot

$0

Venture Capital Raised

100+

HKR.TEAM Members

~$2M/yr

Payroll savings

teepublic old 3

The Challenge

When There's No Investor Cushion, Every Hire Has to Earn Its Keep

Most outsourcing case studies come from VC-backed companies with room to experiment. TeePublic didn't have that luxury.

Adam Schwartz and Josh Abramson built TeePublic without raising a dollar. That meant every function in the business had to justify itself on the P&L, including customer support. And as the platform grew (thousands of independent artists, millions of products, customers across every time zone), the support operation needed to grow with it.

Hiring 100+ support reps in New York wasn't financially viable. But TeePublic had already been burned by outsourcing providers who promised quality and delivered churn, poor cultural fit, and mediocre performance. The typical BPO playbook (high headcount, low accountability, vanish after the sale) was exactly what they couldn't afford to repeat.

The constraint was specific: build a massive, multilingual customer support operation that performs at the level of NYC-based staff, while keeping the company profitable and the payroll lean. No safety net.

"I don't know how we could have scaled without HKR. We were about 10 people when we started working together. This last holiday season, we had a total team of 122 people. We were not in a position in the United States to scale anything close to that." - Lisa Herring, CS Manager, TeePublic

The Solution

Start With One Person. Prove the Model. Then Keep Going for Nine Years.

The partnership started in 2016 with a single hire. One person to help scale TeePublic's affiliate marketing program.

That's it. No 50-person rollout. No multi-year contract. One person, doing real work, proving the model could hold.

It held. So TeePublic kept going.

An account manager joined the affiliate program. Then the first customer service reps. Then more. The growth followed the business, never ahead of demand, never behind it. By Q4 2022, HKR.TEAM was co-managing TeePublic's entire customer support department: over 100 people handling live chat, chargebacks, disputes, production issues, customer reviews, voicemails, returns, B2B orders, and social media.

The scope grew beyond support, too. Content moderators screened everything uploaded to the platform. Account managers maintained relationships with creators and affiliates. HKR.TEAM provided recruiting support and ran lead generation campaigns, including sourcing US-based TikTok creators with 20k+ followings for partnership outreach. The affiliate program grew to four full-time members, generating 7-figure monthly revenues during peak seasons.

When TeePublic needed to surge for the holidays (85+ reps in under two months) HKR.TEAM delivered with time-to-hire under 14 days.

For a bootstrapped company, this kind of elastic scaling is what keeps the model profitable. You don't carry a 122-person payroll year-round if you don't need to. You scale up for Q4, scale back after, and only pay for what you use.

The Results

The leadership team at TeePublic expected competent support. They got something they didn't anticipate.

"People at HKR.TEAM can do an astonishing amount of tickets. Sometimes we look at the numbers and we're like, how did this person do this much and have a 99% QA score. The work ethic is really impressive. When we were starting, we were expecting people to do the bare minimum. That was not the experience with HKR.TEAM. From day one it was like: how can we do great?"
- Lisa Herring, CS Manager, TeePublic

The numbers across the operation:

97% CSAT across customer support
99% QA Score, consistently, not as a one-off peak
<2% attrition in a function where industry turnover runs 30-40%
<14 days time to hire, including during holiday surges
85+ reps added in under 2 months for seasonal scaling
Multilingual coverage in German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Korean
~$2M/year in payroll savings compared to equivalent US-based hiring

For a company that never took outside funding, that $2M isn't a line item improvement. It's the margin that kept the business profitable while competitors burned through investor capital.

"HKR.TEAM performs at or above our NYC-based staff in the same roles while saving our business close to $2M a year in payroll costs." - Adam Schwartz, Co-Founder, TeePublic

The Outcome

Nine Years and Counting

"We built TeePublic from idea to 9 figures in revenue without venture money and we did it profitably for 10 years straight. Our secret weapon in scaling and reducing costs: HKR.TEAM." - Adam Schwartz, Co-Founder, TeePublic

Nine years into the partnership, the co-managed team isn't something TeePublic thinks of as outsourcing. It's the operating model.

The company scaled from a 10-person startup to a 9-figure business without raising capital, without building an expensive US-based support org, and without sacrificing quality. The <2% attrition rate means knowledge stays in the team. The 99% QA score means leadership doesn't spend time firefighting. The $2M in annual savings means the business stays profitable while competitors subsidize growth with investor money.

For founders building without a safety net, that's the whole point. You don't need a massive budget to build a massive team. You need the right model and a partner who stays in the room.