

4-Hour Profitable Project: Viral Marketing Explained - guynamedloren
http://madebyloren.com/posts/13

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synnik
It sounds like your "4 Hour" mantra is really not accurate -- you are spending
more hours on fulfillment, and even more on all the posts and discussions.

I'd be interested to see what the actual profit/hour ends up being once you
take all of that into account.

~~~
makmanalp
Sort of like Tim Ferris!

edit: There's nothing shameful about spending more than 4 hours on your thing.
The other thing is that this also looks like Sprezzatura [0] (someone else
made this analogy on HN before, although I can't recall who.) in that it
probably took lots of experience to achieve the state in which you can
recognize a good idea, decide to go for it, design a great landing page, set
up payments and analytics, know how to advertise and encourage viralness etc.
in such a short period of time.

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprezzatura>

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jaysonelliot
I had a similar experience during the presidential debates. When McCain
pointed at Obama and called him "that one," I quickly made a CafePress t-shirt
and began pointing to it using #thatone as a hashtag on Twitter.

Shirt sales began before the debate had even ended.

I ended up selling 118 t-shirts, nearly all of them sold within 3 days of the
debate.

Loren, would you mind sharing your sales totals?

~~~
guynamedloren
Back of the envelope calculation: 200+ shirts (over half in the first day) in
a few days, ~$9 profit per shirt. Should be an interesting trip to the post
office.

Just curious - what kind of profits did you get for your Cafepress shirts and
how much did you sell them for?

~~~
bmr
I seem to remember you saying you had a new visitor every 4.5 seconds for 48
hours (can't find it again though). That works out to about 38,000 visitors.

So the conversion rate was 200/38000 = 0.5%? Or am I missing something?

~~~
guynamedloren
Good memory, and your calculations are pretty much spot on. Low conversion
rate, but high traffic - so I can live with it.

~~~
bmr
Sure, I was just curious if paid traffic could have been profitable for you.
With $8 in profit per shirt and a conversion rate of 0.5%, it looks like
anything over $0.04 per click would have resulted in a loss.

Your site was gorgeous, and the idea was strong. Amazing how hard it is to
push people to action.

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guynamedloren
In a previous post (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2173155>) there were
many, many questions regarding marketing. I decided to do a detailed writeup
of exactly how I marketed my little project. Hope this helps!

~~~
HardyLeung
Once again your willingness to share is very much appreciated!

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kgtm
Moneyshot:

 _"The guy who started the larger of the two events emailed me several hours
after I began posting links, and half-jokingly asked for “royalties”. How
could I pass that up? I didn’t know what his privileges were as an event
administrator, but I told him he would be subsidized if he could leverage the
attendees (200,000+ at that point). He agreed[...]"_

I see the above as the most important factor in the huge success! It would be
interesting to hear if guynamedloren agrees with this.

Generalizing: One should attempt to achieve exclusiveness in the promoting
medium.

~~~
acrum
I can see where it would help a ton to have that link up there. Very
interesting write up!

Loren, just out of curiosity, would you be able to say how much you promised
him for posting the link and removing the other T-Shirt links? ...or if you
promised him a set amount/shirt at all. If that is coming up in another write-
up, I can be patient. Thanks for sharing!

~~~
guynamedloren
To be honest, I had absolutely no idea how the shirts would sell so I didn't
make any promises or mention a specific number up front. At the time of the
initial email (a few hours in) I had sold a handful of shirts.

I ended up giving him $25 and a free shirt, which he gladly accepted. After
all, he did only spend a few minutes uploading a photo and adding the link, so
for his effort, I think it was plenty. Like I said before, it's hard to
quantify how many sales came as a result of his effort. About 8 hours after I
started marketing is when things really picked up and went viral, which I
think had little to do with the event itself and more to do with so many
"shares". The events were a good launchpad, however. FWIW, my profits for this
project (after costs of shirts, shipping, paypal fees etc) were in the low
4-figure range over a couple days. Some were estimating I made upwards of
$100,000, which is obviously nowhere near accurate. I am ecstatic with how
things turned out, considering it only took a few hours to build and I am now
covered for 5 months rent (yea, cheap college apartment).

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espadagroup
You might be addressing this in the next post but I am very much interested in
the manufacturing and shipping portion of this project. Will it be a big job
to match up the addresses to each size that they ordered and ship them? Are
you just going to receive in the mail all the different shirts of the
different sizes and have to ship them yourself or is there some fulfillment
company you're using?

~~~
guynamedloren
Lots of questions regarding manufacturing/processing/shipping, so it's coming
in detail in another post. Here's the gist of it: wholesale screenprinted tees
(no fulfillment service), giant paypal spreadsheet to match addresses with
sizes, and USPS first class mail. Shouldn't take more than a night to complete
once the shirts arrive.

~~~
espadagroup
Thanks, ok that answers a lot of questions, one though I still have is if you
are buying all of the necessary USPS boxes before hand and just filling those
yourself?

~~~
guynamedloren
Yes, but not boxes - bags. They're called polybags, and they're cheap,
durable, and very professional.

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krmmalik
This is not a criticism, but an observation. I felt that the simplicity of the
website itself (it was real easy to understand what you were selling, and what
we get for our money) really helped.

My biggest problem is, i can never do a simple elegant design. Im not a
designer and always have to rely on either wordpress or html templates.

~~~
jaysonelliot
I'm not a great designer myself, so I always go with a simple rule of thumb -
keep it simple and don't try to do things I'm not good at.

You don't have to be a a capital-D designer to make good work. I'd recommend
picking up "The Non-Designer's Design Book" by Robin Williams.

Sometimes all you need to do is not make any glaring mistakes in order to
create a design that works.

~~~
krmmalik
Thanks!

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karterk
Thanks for sharing this on HN. I have a question: When you posted the link on
the FB events, didn't it cross your mind that the admins of the event might
have considered that as form of spamming or advertising? Or, is such a thing
fairly common? (I don't use Facebook, so I don't have much of a clue.)

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chopsueyar
Congrats on your success, dude!

