4-Hour Profitable Project: Viral Marketing Explained | Hacker News Reader

4-Hour Profitable Project: Viral Marketing Explained

madebyloren.com

92 pointsguynamedloren28 comments

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.

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

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?

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?

I'm not sure anymore, but I did go to Cafepress and take a look at my sales history just now.

It doesn't give much detail, but feel free to have a look: http://twitpic.com/3y0pg0/full

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?

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

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.

No issues with Paypal?

One small issue. Somebody wanted a refund (which is totally fine), but they stupidly filed an "unauthorized funds" dispute, basically implying that I hacked their account and stole the money. Paypal froze the funds temporarily, but I issued a refund and cleared it up right away.

Very interesting - do you mean to say that people watching for new tweets came across that tweet and the whole thing just took off? Or, did you publicize it on other mediums like FB too?

In my case, the hashtag was all I used. McCain's "That one" moment was enough of an insta-meme that it exploded pretty quickly.

I think the key was spotting that the phrase would resonate with so many people as soon as he said it. By the time the press picked up on it and columnists started writing about it, I had already made the bulk of my sales, and the dropoff was as fast as the spike had been.

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!

Once again your willingness to share is very much appreciated!

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.

Hard to say. I didn't do a whole lot to track the results of his efforts, but it definitely didn't hurt.

I do believe, however, the "sharing" resulted in more traffic than the event (once the project started to gain a bit) for the following reasons:

- More eyeballs on "shares", which are posted to news feeds. If we assume that each person has 100 active facebook friends over the course of 48 hours (easily achievable and realistic), and the link was shared almost 4,000 times, that's 400,000 impressions.

- Events are passive. If you don't make an effort to go out of your way to visit the event page, you will never see the photo/description/comments etc, meaning they are basically non-existent for you.

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!

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).

kgtm is right. The most important dynamic of the strategy is the collaboration you established with the Event admin.

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?

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

Thanks!

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.)

Congrats on your success, dude!

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