Show HN: Hashtagtee.me – A weekend attempt at passive income

From the About page:

We use the highest quality shirts and deliver them with the most affordable pricing.

Does this imply that the $25 price is the lowest possible point at which the OP can attain reasonable margins? If so, they really need to reevaluate their infrastructure, as $25 for a text-only tee shirt is very, very high, and the OP is likely being ripped off by their suppliers.

Given the price, I have doubts about the willingness of potential customers to purchase shirts of this sort. The precedent for comparable services like Teespring and even for individual shirt vendors seems to be $10 to $20, substantially lower than what the OP is charging.

Other than the pricing, I'm not entirely sure whether hashtags would make suitable shirts. Hashtags tend to be highly ephemeral, and most cease to be relevant within a few days. Most people keep shirts for years, and thus would be likely be wearing these shirts for a period far longer than the life of the hashtag. It's a novel idea, but at the end of the day it's trying to turn what are highly transient cultural artifacts into something permanent.

Automate that shit son. Use Shirts.io and grab trending tags from Twitter, and display them, even tweet about them when a new trending tag hits, also allow users to enter their own hashtags... I'd buy one right now if I could input my own hashtag.

Google "order a tshirt with your text", first hit that came up was for example this - http://www.spreadshirt.com/design-your-own-t-shirt-C59

Type in what ever #tag you want, $13.90

I bet with little more googlefu there's some cheaper places out there.

#toomanychoices

have a shirt of the day, pick it from the Twitter trending list, lather, rinse, repeat.

Holy crap, I like this simplification so much I might go build it myself...

If your volume price on 1 off shirts is $12.99-14 on shirts.io, I honestly think you'd get 5-10x the volume at $20 flat price vs 25, 20 is closer to impulse buy range than $25.

What is your marketing strategy - other than the initial launch on Hacker News?

I'm curious how other people market their passive income apps. I'm doubly curious because I've got my own t-shirt passive income app that I've been working on for a couple weekends now.

EDIT: I just realized you are (wisely) tweeting out each shirt to the appropriate hashtag. So the marketing is essentially baked in. Nice.

I'd consider springing for a hashtagtee if the price was circa $10.

$25 for a shirt I could print at Zazzle for less?

No thanks.

I don't understand hash tags and I don't understand why someone would want them on a shirt. Is this best understood by immersing myself in the twitter culture? I don't get it from the outside. The main place I see hash tags is where networks will display them with a TV show. Aside from that, I don't understand how people come up with them and how they are used other than searching and linking?

For example, #SalmonCat (a TV shirt on the home page) apparently refers to some tv show called Sam and Cat? Googling that reveals it's the 17th episode that aired today. If I loved the show enough, would I go buy a shirt with the hash tag on it? http://hashtagtee.me/products/salmoncat-shirt

I am admittedly not one of the 230 million+ twitter users.

I have made a t-shirt generator (http://sonarcore.com) in a similar attempt at a passive income. It took me much longer than a weekend to build but anyway. I'm very anxious to wait to see how your project goes :)

I think the trick is going to be either: 1) finding hashtags with enough people desiring them so that you can order in bulk OR 2) finding a production method that is cheap/efficient enough that you can print 1 or 2 shirts without breaking the bank

I wonder if you could do something like threadless did, where people vote for the "best hashtag" with their wallet, saying they would buy one if you produced the lot.

Not bad for a weekend project though! Props to you!

With all due respect to your work, somehow I never understood the "t-shirt" startup idea. We live in a world where there are many problems to tackle in health, science, government and politics, yet I've seen dozens of attempts at these t-shirt startups.

I do not mean to discredit your work, that being said.

If you make your blog a place where we can be updated about how your business are going in real time, it ll retain and grow your traffic and build a great comunnity around

Good reference: http://groovehq.com/blog

Very nice. Good luck!

I would hide the hello world post from your blog :) Also, not sure what message it sends out when you write it runs from your basement.. perhaps it will hurt conversion.

You could also use the Twitter API to get hashtags trending in the user's location and create shirts based on those hashtags.

Sorry for the offtopic, but it's such a pleasure to see #Pacers on the 1st position.

Holy crap, I thought somebody had submitted my Hashtagify.me without telling me :)

Nice, who are you sourcing your t-shirts from? Good luck.

not bad for a weekend project!