Instant Viral Business-one of us should have thought of this!

by tomcam
7 replies
Hacker News has an article about how this site (selling a $16 T shirt saying you survived the big snowstorm) was built in 4 hours and made its first sale in...4 minutes, thanks to savvy Facebook usage. The site is elegant in so many facets.
  • It's only a single page of spare but beautiful HTML, yet it has copy, sales buttons, and even a contact form
  • The idea is painfully obvious and the T shirt graphics are barely whelming-much less impressive than the site itself, which is a miracle of brevity. Most of us could do this with GIMP or Photoshop
  • SEO largely takes care of itself thanks to Google's instant results
  • On-page SEO is minimal. No title or description tags, for example
  • Other than time his only investment was an $8 GoDaddy domain name
  • Ordering is through a simple PayPal link and all shirts are priced the same, streamlining the workflow
  • He views this as a test. If it hadn't been an instant hit, no prob-just use PayPal's refund mechanism
With great stories like this you always look for the gotchas. Not too many here, but a few.

The gent running the site is experienced in the T shirt business. He plans to fulfill all the orders himself because he knows how to get shirts done cheaply enough that he'll net $7/shirt minimum. Using CafePress or Zazzle would be far less profitable-on the other hand, if you've got the chops to do this in four hours who cares? Plus you can recycle the thing for another event (I LOOTED A MUMMY FROM THE CAIRO MUSEUM AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT, anyone?)

Many of us could have done this with WordPress. The site would take longer to load but would be more maintainable. Still, who cares? Anyone interested enough to buy a $16 T about a snowstorm is willing to wait the extra second.

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#business #businessone #instant #thought #viral

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