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Show HN: My 4-hour project, already profitable
- random42 16y agoThis looks very polished for a 4 hour effort. Congrats on being profitable. :)
- jcromartie 16y agoSnowpocalypse? Did we already forget about the blizzard last year? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DCA_Blizzard_02_2010_9127.JPG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DCA_Blizzard_02_2010_9127....
- chops 16y agoSnowpocalypse 2011
- zoowar 16y agoWhen you earn enough to eat, let us know.
- guynamedloren 16y agoIn 8 hours I earned enough to pay for 3 months rent. How's that?
- jim_h 16y agoThat's pretty cool. I assume you have prior experience with the industry? Clothing and prints, I mean. Definitely a great way to capitalize on the moment. I wonder if anybody have a business that visits with a truck to melt all the snow. So much snow I don't know where to put it anymore.
- bhudman 16y agoHe runs http://beetnikaesthetics.com/ http://beetnikaesthetics.com/ so this is an off shoot of what he does already. Nice site for sure..
- guynamedloren 16y agoFWIW that site/project/business is pretty much defunct. Not that it failed or anything, but it was really just too slow paced for me and I got bored with it. High effort for low return. I actually ordered hundreds of shirts that I never even posted for sale on the site. They have been sitting on shelves in my bedroom for 2 years. Hm.
- eru 16y agoPerhaps you can convert some customers from the snow-shirts?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- DTrejo 16y agoYou should write a book and call it 4 Hour Work-Month
- naithemilkman 16y agolol
- joelrunyon 16y agoAlternate title: The 4 Hour Blizzard of Cash.
- jjcm 16y agoI'd love to see a write-up on your final takeaway on this. I know it's a bit personal, but it'd be inspiring to see.
- guynamedloren 16y agoI 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.
- dacort 16y agoAs 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." Brief story here: http://www.collective-e.com/how-tos-and-advice/how-did-you/advertising/peter-shankman-starting-his-first-advertising-agency http://www.collective-e.com/how-tos-and-advice/how-did-you/a...
- Mz 16y agoHow 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.
- anonymouslambda 16y agoCongrats. I suggest a "Snowmageddon" t-shirt as well.
- pitdesi 16y agoI would suggest a shirt that says "SNOW MY GOD!!!"
- chr15 16y agosnOMG
- andresmh 16y agohow are you dealing with shipping to Mexico without paying for importation costs?
- djahng 16y agoWhere are the shirts being made? Are they made to order and drop-shipped like Cafe Press/Zazzle? Or are you building up inventory?
- chrisaycock 16y agoHe answered that in another thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2173482 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2173482
- djahng 16y agoYeah I saw that. I also asked this question before endlessvoid94 did.
- guynamedloren 16y agoBuilding up orders to place a bulk wholesale order. Cafe press and zazzle are overpriced for the customers and too low profits for sellers. Why would I charge somebody $24 + shipping for a shirt if I would never pay that myself?
- ramanujam 16y agoAre you taking care of the shipping (after printing the T-shirts locally) or is the wholesaler taking care of everything? Congrats!
- guynamedloren 16y agoI'm doing everything aside from printing. Good experience and more profit that way - cant go wrong there, right?
- mrchess 16y agoWhat if your orders go viral. How can you possibly fulfill them?
- shykes 16y agoThat sounds like a great problem to have.
- citricsquid 16y agoLooking 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.
- guynamedloren 16y agoWhat's the saying - desperation drives innovation? Maybe I'm thinking of "necessity is the mother of invention".. either way, i'll figure it out. 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.
- genieyclo 16y agoI 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.
- aith 16y agoCreated 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...
- soamv 16y agoThese 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 :)
- icandoitbetter 16y agoYou found the opportunity and owned it. I can't see how that deserves any criticism. How much did you make so far?
- joelmichael 16y agoNice 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?
- namityadav 16y agoMy first reaction to this comment was: Why would you want to have a business model that relies so much on overblown current events? And then I thought of all the news channels, and suddenly it doesn't sound like a bad model.
- happyrichpinoy 16y agoit's only a matter of time until someone will try to capitalize on what's happening right now in Egypt...something like "I survived Mubarak"
- naithemilkman 16y agowhat stack did you build it on? Really impressive from conceptual to live site in 8 hours. Your profile says you're currently learning RoR. Is that the stack you built on?
- guynamedloren 16y agoNope, this one was just straight up css and html. Nothing fancy here - no reason to, its only a single page :) oh and its hosted on whatever my cheap web hosting is. Is it sad that I don't even know the tech specs? Maybe that's s reason for the success - only focusing on what matters.. now there's a good takeaway point
- naithemilkman 16y agoSo when someone orders a shirt, where does that data go? via email?
- guynamedloren 16y agoPaypal takes care of everything. They send an email when an order goes through and also have all order details available in the Paypal account dashboard. Doesn't get much simpler than that. I've always used paypal, but for once in my life I actually feel that the paypal fees are worth it. Good value and good service for a fair price. No complaints (yet).
- kalpeshjoshi 16y agoI 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.
- komlenic 16y agoWow on the idea, wow on the execution, and wow on the design! Out of curiosity: Domain Name: SNOWDAY2012.COM Created Date: 03-Feb-2011 Expiry Date: 03-Feb-2012 Registrant Name: Paul Jefferiesr
- guynamedloren 16y agoThank 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!
- komlenic 16y agoThe site design alone really is a superb lesson in simple effective good-looking usability. As someone else pointed out: one click ordering, brilliantly-worded concise text, good design, immediately understandable purpose and call to action. These things all instill confidence, and are no accident. Anyone who's ever tried should know how difficult it is to make something "simple"... so yes I'd say your years of hard work have paid off.
- bigiain 16y agoYou 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.
- qeorge 16y agoThat'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.
- bigiain 16y agoTrue, but I don't hear nearly so many horror stories about Visa/MasterCard choosing to keep all the money people think they have given you for 180 days (exactly as you agreed they could when you signed up) while they "investigate". I also hear regular reports of businesses which perhaps should have chosen their payment processor more carefully given the nature of their business, who clearly have a product which doesn't get "shipped" in any way that could comply with that policy - I think a European Ruby conference was the most recent one I've seen discussed here, how should a conference organizer manage their bookings to comply with this sort of policy? He'll, even Burningman got burnt by their ticket seller a year or two back "we're just gonna hang on to a few million dollars worth of ticket sales money, because your annual event that's been running successfully for ~20 years now with ~50,000 people a year recently - it might all be a big fraud!"... Unfortunately, choosing to sign up with PayPal means explicitly agreeing to allow them to do exactly that with very little recourse - and it's not necessarily _wrong_ - PayPals business is basically built on betting they can do a better job of fraud prevention than e banks/credit card companies are doing, and offer payment services to more people than the banks will and earn money from people the banks consider "too high risk". This allows then to provide a service that let's people like the OP go from idea to fully functional ecommerce website in 4 hours, but it also means you're giving them rights to retain "your" money to cover any fraud risk they might consider you to expose them too. Its not a wrong/bad policy of PayPals, but it's a policy that I've seen many people not realize they were signing up for.
- hartror 16y agoCould 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.
- guynamedloren 16y agoYep, planning on it. Keep an eye out on http://madebyloren.com http://madebyloren.com - my future blog for my startups/projects. I'll certainly make a post here on HN as well.
- mattparcher 16y agoI would suggest publishing an RSS feed for your posts, because I probably won’t remember to check your website again. Either way, please keep submitting updates to HN. Looking at your site, you seem to be using a custom blog engine. Any details on your setup and how it came to be?
- guynamedloren 16y agoI wrote the blog engine from scratch with Ruby on Rails. I wanted something really lightweight and suited for my needs, plus I figured it would be a good exercise. It's not finished yet, however. Sidetracked with instantly gratifying opportunities :)
- parkq 16y agoIt might be a sensitive question for you. If you use PayPal as a payment platform, do they charge you income tax or will you have to claim income tax by yourself?
- guynamedloren 16y agoWhen you're setting up the "buy now" links/buttons, you can choose to add sales tax. As for income tax, every man for himself I believe. That's not Paypal's business.
- joelrunyon 16y agoany word on revenue figures for this? kudos.
- cpeterso 16y agoThis success story reminds me of the just-in-time fashion design companies. They track the big runway shows and can quickly turn-out copy-cat fashions.
- xtacy 16y agoNice! 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)...
- mmaunder 16y agoWhat 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.
- guynamedloren 16y agoI 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 http://madebyloren.com - and I'll post on HN when the writeup is available.
- rmc 16y agogave you so much traffic Traffic to his website is not as important as sales. I suspect a poor percentage of visitors from HN converted to sales.
- jmtame 16y agoif 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
- jmtame 16y agoi just realized you do other shirts on your main site, so maybe you have a special deal arranged to do shirts. if so, that's really cool. plus i didn't realize you went to the same school as me ;)
- guynamedloren 16y agoI've mentioned this several times, but I'll bring it up again because I'm legitimately surprised at how expensive many seem to think these shirts are. Screen printing should absolutely not cost $10/ea for a 2-color print, especially for anything over 36 shirts. If you're paying this, then you're being robbed. End of story. I have had many shirts printed before so I know where to look, but it's really not that difficult to find a decent printer with fair prices. Right now my costs are below $6/ea, and that's for medium-grade, fashion fitted tees. If I went with cheapy Gildan tees, I would be at less than $5/ea, but I'd rather not sacrifice the quality to squeeze out a tiny more profit. I want people to be pleased with what they're buying. I'm thinking of myself in their shoes.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- lurchpop 16y agokeep us appraised of your sales, dude!
- Tycho 16y agoWhat 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.
- guynamedloren 16y agoNo templates or tools, unless you count Illustrator. This, along with all of my other projects, came straight from my crazy little mind, everything from design to code. I am a big fan of the "full width" style, and it definitely works well here. Re templates: I'm sure they exist (especially on wordpress theme sites), but I really just prefer to create things on my own. Even coded my blog from scratch =]
- guynamedloren 16y agoFor 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.
- lessthanideal 16y agoI 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.
- kmfrk 16y agoI 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.
- kmfrk 16y ago> 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!
- u48998 16y agoSo are we expected to wear these T-Shirts in summer in Chicago? Nice idea at the right time but I am not sure why people would buy such things. But then again, you'd know better.
- gnosis 16y ago"So are we expected to wear these T-Shirts in summer in Chicago?" You're thinking way too far ahead compared to the people who are ordering these shirts. This product is clearly meant to be an impulse buy, in the same category as a mountain of junk sold on street corners, at festivals, and in souvenir shops. If the prospective buyer thought about it for a couple of seconds, they'd probably realize that they really didn't need this, and might never even use it. But at the time it looks funny, or cute, or otherwise "brilliant". And they really feel like buying something, almost anything. And that's how someone winds up walking out having bought a baseball cap with antlers on it, a singing fish, dancing Santa, or Snowpocalypse t-shirt. The OP was just lucky enough to latch on to a trend before it died out.
- raganwald 16y agohttps://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Pet_Rock https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Pet_Rock
- guynamedloren 16y agoI wish!
- danielhfrank 16y agoI 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
- HackrNwsDesignr 16y agohow much are you making?