
Part One: Strategy – Hatclone.com: A Study in Hybrid Physical/Digital Virality - jonward
Part Two is here -&gt; https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22286545<p>I studied physics and math as an undergraduate at Harvard not so long ago. So I love to break things down into conceptual building blocks. After a stint working at a quantum computing startup, I&#x27;ve found myself in the software startup world and increasingly fascinated by consumer tech. Lately I&#x27;ve been thinking about the elements distinguish &quot;soft-tech&quot; winners from losers.<p>The element which I aimed to master first is the &quot;viral loop&quot;. I set out to build a product which has the shortest path from first impression to purchase. I wanted someone to be able to go from seeing a peer use the product to being able to purchase the product themselves in less than 10 seconds.<p>For my first product I wanted to create something that was easily monetizable. I wanted to prioritize rapid development and avoid investing a lot of engineering time into building a full-fledged app. So I elected to sell physical merchandise.<p>So I was constrained to sell physical merchandise with a viral element. Enter the QR-code. I wanted a loop of see, scan, purchase, show, repeat.<p>The next step was to choose the physical product to sell. I wanted a product that would be highly visible and accessible for scanning. This led me to choose apparel, and in particular I wanted something ubiquitous, inexpensive, and above all easily customizable. This narrowed the search down to two options: hats and t-shirts. I picked hats, and in particular I chose bucket hats because they are currently trendy.<p>So in summary the plan was to build a short viral loop that let people buy qr-code bucket hats that when scanned also let other people buy qr-code bucket hats.<p>TLDR: I made hatclone.com. Buy QR code hats, your friends scan the code, they buy hats, cycle repeats.
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mdonahoe
Have you sold any? The site looks pretty barebones on mobile.

