I know this is not the norm for projects here on Hacker News and I realize that it may be seen as rather exploitive, so here's a very very brief background and my thought process:
- Idea was conceived around 2am this morning. Saw a few events on facebook picking up speed (hundreds of thousands of attendees) so decided to leverage that instant-market
- Wasn't sure whether or not it would work, but I didn't have too much to lose ($8 url and a few hours) so I went for it and started hacking away
- Around 10am the project was launched, complete with a website, domain name, and orignal t-shirt design, all done by me
- 4 minutes later the first orders came in, thus paying for the domain name and becoming profitable (minus my time value)
- Since then the site has gone slightly viral, with several thousand hits, hundreds of "likes" and a bunch of tweets (not to mention t-shirt sales)
- Became the "official t-shirt" and event photo for the Snowpocalypse 2011 facebook event with 300,000 attendees. That's a nice little market to advertise to, no?
This is really just a social + eCommerce experiment with a taste of vitality. While I have designed t-shirts and sold them online before, I have never done anything quite like this, ie "hopping on the bandwagon" and riding out a live-fast-die-fast trend. I have also never experimented with any sort of viral platforms. I hope to implement some potentially viral features in my current startup/project, so I figured it would be worth it to test the waters with this mini-project. It was indeed. I learned a lot, and hope to do a case study with detailed steps and statistics in the near future.
i wouldn't call it exploitive, rather i would say it's very savvy. even if it's a one-time shot, it's real money and you're not doing anything shady to earn it. that's how people build wealth -- seizing opportunity. congrats on the success.
I think there is absolutely nothing wrong with what you did.
On the other hand however, I also think that some people have way too much money on their hands or a lack of intelligent spending habits if they are buying stuff like this. We are a very strange country indeed.
Have you ever seen the packets of clothing that are sold to vendors in third-world countries by the likes of Goodwill and such? They are full of t-shirts like this from 10, even 20 years ago and kids running around wearing them, barefoot and starving, while they put the hope for any local clothing industry out of business. Very strange stuff.
How did you get your first order in 4min? I mean, how were you promoting it?
I have decided I would like to leave my current job and town (as in "post haste" instead of "someday") and I need funds to do so. A quick influx of money would do wonders for moving that goal forward. Would love to learn anything you can share.
Could you please provide details about the logistics behind the tshirts? Are you using Zazzle/CafePress? Do you have a contact in the industry that allowed you to very quickly start printing and shipping them?
I think that's the part most hackers will be interested in. Congrats on your success!
I don't think the idea is exploitive...just opportunistic, which is an awesome mindset to have in business if you stay on the right side of things. So, kudos on the idea.
That said, I do have a problem with the execution:
The section "Please don't buy this shirt if you died. That's just lying, and nobody likes a liar..." is obviously intended just for laughs, but it's not really that funny and you run the risk of offending someone that, say, knows someone who actually died in the "Snowpacalypse." My wife, for example, knew one of the seven people that are known to have died in Chicago as a result of the blizzard. I'm one of the least sensitive or "PC" people on earth, but I think you might rethink what you gain vs. what you lose with that particular sentence. Offending people can be fine (and inevitable), but there should usually be a reason for it. [BTW, "I survived X" is a common T-shirt meme and Snowpacalypse is a recent meme, so I didn't think anything of it until the one sentence made a more concrete connection between 'death' and the blizzard...which made me think of the news reports etc. - which might tip the creepy scale for some potential buyers. Maybe A/B test it?]
Hey Loren, this really got the gears turning in my head. It covers two things I've been thinking about a lot lately:
1. Low downside, high upside: You got in for $8 and a few hours, and it had a shot to do some great things... I think taking these low-investment shots at doing things can add up really fast.
2. Getting in front of trends/timely marketing - I think there's a ton of potential in this, and I've been thinking on it a lot lately.
It was a great way to seize an opportunity and I think you should reiterate it.
Next time you see a huge trend like this, design another t-shirt and create another website. You have already all you need: code for the website/order infrastructure and contacts with some t-shirt maker. It will require even less than 4 hours ;)
Can't believe it. When I was getting bored of discussions like "trying to hire an igloo", "move to California" over the snow-storm, this HN came along and made my day/night. Hacker of the year award! Maybe YC should start such an award if it doesn't already exist.
I tried a similar thing about a fad in Germany during the soccer WC but it didn't go anywhere as I sucked at marketing it.
Can you tell how you did marketing and especially how did you became the official T-Shirt for that facebook event?
A non-relevant question, which one? St. Louis, Tulsa, Chicago, New York, etc... Since the shirt doesn't say, it won't make a difference from the sales point of view, just wondering which one was your inspiration?
Pretty cool. Really liked the emphasis on the inclusion of shipping costs in the price. The design is perfect in my opinion and no wonder the sales are going viral. Congratulations and keep up the good work.
As an aside, selling t-shirts is how Peter Shankman (creator of Help-A-Report-Out) got started with his own advertising agency. He saw an opportunity (Titanic) and capitalized on it by selling t-shirts that said "It sank. Get Over It."
These costs are already factored into the price of the shirts, so you don't have to pay any additional costs for shipping
Nice touch -- both for including the shipping price in the advertised price and for not calling it "free".
I also thought it's a good idea that you de-emphasized the "2011" in the design, so the shirt remains mostly relevant if there's another "snowpocalypse" sometime :)
You might want to keep an eye on that Pay Pal account - the "pay me now and I'll send you $stuff in a few weeks" pattern is exactly the sort of thing that trips their "might be fraud, lock the account and keep all the money for 6 months" response.
That's a great point, bigian. FWIW that's not a PayPal-specific policy - Visa and MasterCard's TOS explicitly state that you cannot bill the credit card until the merchandise has shipped.
Is there any way to specifically contact or call paypal and premptively warn them that your account is about to get a huge influx of orders, so they can help you prepare all of the paperwork they're going to ask you for in advance? Many people talk about paypal screwing them, but I rarely hear of anyone taking any preemptive action. If its not possible, then its something they should make more evident.
For what it's worth, I just remembered two somewhat interesting points:
1) There were several copycat shirts that came out on Cafepress/Zazzle shortly after mine started gaining traction. The shirt concept itself is not completely unique as we've all seen "I SURVIVED ..." shirts before, but the copycat shirts used the same font, word placement, and everything. Am I upset? Absolutely not. Those just validate my idea. And I wasn't too worried about losing sales as the copycats were way overpriced ($24+s/h vs $16) with lower quality and far inferior presentation. I would be surprised if they sold any at all, really.
2) The copycat shirts went as far as using very similar descriptions for the shirts. Not only does this show a complete lack of creativity, it shows that I may have been onto something with the humorous/witty/questionable description that has been mentioned here a few times. Is it offensive? Possibly. But I think it did more good than harm (in terms of measurable things like sales and hits).
Just thought I'd throw those thoughts out there for pondering.
I think you would be very surprised as to what does and doesn't sell on CafePress. Are they doing as well as you are, I doubt they are, but are they doing anywhere near the work you are, no way in hell. They are likely targeting an entirely different market than you are. You're going with viral marketing centered around Facebook. CafePress is largely populated by middle aged women. I would guess the cross over for those two groups isn't that large.
I think he'll mostly earn his conversions from the Facebook event, but it never hurts to spend twenty seconds to do a TinEye search and see what shows up.
Thank you for the kind words. I guess that means the years of hardwork are paying off, even if the direct time investment was a few hours.
HA! I can't believe somebody registered that domain name. Too funny, it didn't even cross my mind. Snowday2011.com was my backup - I really wanted snowpocalypse.com!
What would be cool, and a nice courtesy gesture since HN gave you so much traffic, is if you shared actual numbers with us. Data we can use. I'd like to see:
Cost price of your tshirts, how many you sold over X time, conversion rate on the site, main sources of traffic, highest conversion source, lowest conversion source, fraud levels if known yet. Thanks.
I totally agree with you, it's the least I could do. For now, some of these rough figures are in my other responses scattered around here. In the next day or so I plan to do a detailed writeup on my (currently blank) blog http://madebyloren.com - and I'll post on HN when the writeup is available.
if I understand this model, he has to get a certain number of orders (say 100) before he can actually print. the price of each shirt depends on a bulk amount and if he doesn't hit that, he can't ship the shirts. for these shirts I'd suspect it costs about $10 each (silkscreen printing), plus whatever shipping and handling. maybe $3-$4 profit each shirt x 100 = $300-$400
> Shipping & Handling
>
> These costs are already factored into the price of the shirts, so you don't have to pay any additional costs for shipping. All shirts will be shipped via USPS First-Class Mail. Shirts will only be shipped within US/Canada/Mexico.
I can't emphasize how brilliant this is. It really is a privilege to only worry about people on in three countries.
You've really done a great job of refining a website - one that was made in four hours to boot!
I would love a blog post describing the steps you used to get to a MVP; how you got the shirts en masse to be printed and shipped, platforms you used to quickly iterate, etc. Really inspiring.
I suppose I'll be in the minority on a site run by a VC, but I'm pretty disappointed that a get-"rich"-quick story like this can outpace technical articles here - no doubt the word "profitable" in the title helped. I certainly don't think there's anything "wrong" with what you did, it's just not what I come here to read. I'd always kind of held the belief that this was a site for lots of really smart folks talking about current technical issues, but maybe I've been fooling myself a bit.
Credit where it's due though, the site appears to have been coded up pretty well
Nice work, your good site design is a big part of why it works. Maybe you can turn this into a brand that makes more ironic t-shirts about overblown current events?
Looking at the way he states there will be a 2 week delay I assume he'll wait for the peak and then go ahead and contact his printer (I assume he's got contacts to make it easier) and get the amount he needs printed, that way he keeps costs down (ordering in bulk). If he got to the point where he couldn't handle the orders himself I'm pretty sure he'd be in the revenue areas that allowed him to contract multiple printers to do the work, printing t-shirts in bulk is cheap.
Could you post a follow up statistics in a week or so? As this is a one shot sort of deal I wouldn't imagine you feel the need to keep the numbers under wraps.
Created an account just to upvote this. Brilliant. There's nothing stopping you (or one of us) from doing it for every significant event in every country...
What did you use to build the page, if you don't mind me asking?
I've been wondering for ages if pages like that share some common tool/template, or it it's just that the 'full width' idea makes them look cut from the same cloth.
Nice! This reminds me of a similar sieze-the-moment kind of situation: When pluto was no more recognised as a planet, someone printed a shirt that said, "Pluto is still a planet!" (and several variations)...
I love online shirt designs / prints / creativity. I'm a regular fan of shirt woot, threadless, design by humans, etc. etc. Great job capitalizing on a fast trend, you can use the income to reinvest into other ideas and fast trend products.
[+] [-] guynamedloren|15 years ago|reply
- Idea was conceived around 2am this morning. Saw a few events on facebook picking up speed (hundreds of thousands of attendees) so decided to leverage that instant-market
- Wasn't sure whether or not it would work, but I didn't have too much to lose ($8 url and a few hours) so I went for it and started hacking away
- Around 10am the project was launched, complete with a website, domain name, and orignal t-shirt design, all done by me
- 4 minutes later the first orders came in, thus paying for the domain name and becoming profitable (minus my time value)
- Since then the site has gone slightly viral, with several thousand hits, hundreds of "likes" and a bunch of tweets (not to mention t-shirt sales)
- Became the "official t-shirt" and event photo for the Snowpocalypse 2011 facebook event with 300,000 attendees. That's a nice little market to advertise to, no?
This is really just a social + eCommerce experiment with a taste of vitality. While I have designed t-shirts and sold them online before, I have never done anything quite like this, ie "hopping on the bandwagon" and riding out a live-fast-die-fast trend. I have also never experimented with any sort of viral platforms. I hope to implement some potentially viral features in my current startup/project, so I figured it would be worth it to test the waters with this mini-project. It was indeed. I learned a lot, and hope to do a case study with detailed steps and statistics in the near future.
[+] [-] unshift|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ck2|15 years ago|reply
On the other hand however, I also think that some people have way too much money on their hands or a lack of intelligent spending habits if they are buying stuff like this. We are a very strange country indeed.
Have you ever seen the packets of clothing that are sold to vendors in third-world countries by the likes of Goodwill and such? They are full of t-shirts like this from 10, even 20 years ago and kids running around wearing them, barefoot and starving, while they put the hope for any local clothing industry out of business. Very strange stuff.
aha, found the link: T-SHIRT TRAVELS
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/tshirttravels/film.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeCIlgUeYlM
[+] [-] Mz|15 years ago|reply
I have decided I would like to leave my current job and town (as in "post haste" instead of "someday") and I need funds to do so. A quick influx of money would do wonders for moving that goal forward. Would love to learn anything you can share.
[+] [-] makmanalp|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SkyMarshal|15 years ago|reply
The Four Hour Startup
[+] [-] endlessvoid94|15 years ago|reply
Could you please provide details about the logistics behind the tshirts? Are you using Zazzle/CafePress? Do you have a contact in the industry that allowed you to very quickly start printing and shipping them?
I think that's the part most hackers will be interested in. Congrats on your success!
[+] [-] kenjackson|15 years ago|reply
Dude, this is HACKER News. It's all about exploiting opportunities in the system.
My only complaint is that 2am I was sleeping rather than hacking.
[+] [-] Shooter|15 years ago|reply
That said, I do have a problem with the execution:
The section "Please don't buy this shirt if you died. That's just lying, and nobody likes a liar..." is obviously intended just for laughs, but it's not really that funny and you run the risk of offending someone that, say, knows someone who actually died in the "Snowpacalypse." My wife, for example, knew one of the seven people that are known to have died in Chicago as a result of the blizzard. I'm one of the least sensitive or "PC" people on earth, but I think you might rethink what you gain vs. what you lose with that particular sentence. Offending people can be fine (and inevitable), but there should usually be a reason for it. [BTW, "I survived X" is a common T-shirt meme and Snowpacalypse is a recent meme, so I didn't think anything of it until the one sentence made a more concrete connection between 'death' and the blizzard...which made me think of the news reports etc. - which might tip the creepy scale for some potential buyers. Maybe A/B test it?]
[+] [-] lionhearted|15 years ago|reply
1. Low downside, high upside: You got in for $8 and a few hours, and it had a shot to do some great things... I think taking these low-investment shots at doing things can add up really fast.
2. Getting in front of trends/timely marketing - I think there's a ton of potential in this, and I've been thinking on it a lot lately.
Thanks for sharing this - very cool stuff here.
[+] [-] gilaniali|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DeusExMachina|15 years ago|reply
Next time you see a huge trend like this, design another t-shirt and create another website. You have already all you need: code for the website/order infrastructure and contacts with some t-shirt maker. It will require even less than 4 hours ;)
[+] [-] KedarMhaswade|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tectonic|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Geoooorge|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fduffner|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hsmyers|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deepGem|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dacort|15 years ago|reply
Brief story here: http://www.collective-e.com/how-tos-and-advice/how-did-you/a...
[+] [-] soamv|15 years ago|reply
Nice touch -- both for including the shipping price in the advertised price and for not calling it "free".
I also thought it's a good idea that you de-emphasized the "2011" in the design, so the shirt remains mostly relevant if there's another "snowpocalypse" sometime :)
[+] [-] bigiain|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qeorge|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nolite|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guynamedloren|15 years ago|reply
1) There were several copycat shirts that came out on Cafepress/Zazzle shortly after mine started gaining traction. The shirt concept itself is not completely unique as we've all seen "I SURVIVED ..." shirts before, but the copycat shirts used the same font, word placement, and everything. Am I upset? Absolutely not. Those just validate my idea. And I wasn't too worried about losing sales as the copycats were way overpriced ($24+s/h vs $16) with lower quality and far inferior presentation. I would be surprised if they sold any at all, really.
2) The copycat shirts went as far as using very similar descriptions for the shirts. Not only does this show a complete lack of creativity, it shows that I may have been onto something with the humorous/witty/questionable description that has been mentioned here a few times. Is it offensive? Possibly. But I think it did more good than harm (in terms of measurable things like sales and hits).
Just thought I'd throw those thoughts out there for pondering.
[+] [-] lessthanideal|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kmfrk|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] komlenic|15 years ago|reply
Domain Name: SNOWDAY2012.COM Created Date: 03-Feb-2011 Expiry Date: 03-Feb-2012 Registrant Name: Paul Jefferiesr
[+] [-] guynamedloren|15 years ago|reply
HA! I can't believe somebody registered that domain name. Too funny, it didn't even cross my mind. Snowday2011.com was my backup - I really wanted snowpocalypse.com!
[+] [-] mmaunder|15 years ago|reply
Cost price of your tshirts, how many you sold over X time, conversion rate on the site, main sources of traffic, highest conversion source, lowest conversion source, fraud levels if known yet. Thanks.
[+] [-] rmc|15 years ago|reply
Traffic to his website is not as important as sales. I suspect a poor percentage of visitors from HN converted to sales.
[+] [-] guynamedloren|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmtame|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kmfrk|15 years ago|reply
You've really done a great job of refining a website - one that was made in four hours to boot!
[+] [-] genieyclo|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djahng|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danielhfrank|15 years ago|reply
Credit where it's due though, the site appears to have been coded up pretty well
[+] [-] joelmichael|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonymouslambda|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raganwald|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrchess|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] citricsquid|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shykes|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guynamedloren|15 years ago|reply
Absolute worst case scenario is that I refund everybody's money and end up exactly where I am now. But I don't see that happening.
[+] [-] hartror|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aith|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tycho|15 years ago|reply
I've been wondering for ages if pages like that share some common tool/template, or it it's just that the 'full width' idea makes them look cut from the same cloth.
[+] [-] xtacy|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcromartie|15 years ago|reply
Did we already forget about the blizzard last year?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DCA_Blizzard_02_2010_9127....
[+] [-] chops|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kalpeshjoshi|15 years ago|reply