The Problem

I was an incoming freshman in one of the top engineering programs in the United States. That means they can charge more for their textbooks and get away with it. My first semester textbooks and required course materials totaled almost $1000. OUCH! I was shocked, but there was nothing I could do about it. If I wanted to get the grades, I had to have the materials, right? Turns out this isn’t entirely true. Some professors merely recommend the “required” textbooks as supplementary materials. Wish I would have known beforehand, but hey… better late than never. Second semester hurt a bit less since I only purchased the textbooks that were absolutely essential, but it still hurt.

The Solution

Sophomore year I got scrappy. I won’t go into the ridiculous price of textbooks / monopoly / whatever, but I was determined to not spend a single cent on textbooks. Downloading didn’t work – couldn’t find the books online. Scanning was far too slow at 20 seconds a page, not to mention cumbersome and tedious. After exhausting every other means possible (and coming up with nothing), I went with a crazy last ditch effort. I would photograph every single page of every textbook I needed for the semester… then return the textbooks.

I whipped together this contraption using only found objects in my apartment and a bit of ingenuity:

At the top, a shoebox holds the camera (with a hole cut for the lens and flash) which rests upon a partially disassembled shelving unit that holds the book at the bottom. The camera zoom was adjusted and resolution set to maximum. With a bit of experimentation and a huge memory card I was good to go.

Went to the bookstore and purchased ~$700 worth of books, noting the 7 day return policy. That night I photographed every page of every textbook I purchased. I got into a rhythm and was able to photograph a 600 800+ page textbook in 30 minutes. Over the next week, I returned the books one at a time to avoid suspicion. Repeat second semester and $1500 saved using a shoebox, shelf, and a camera. Woohoo!

Junior year I learned that all required textbooks were available in the library (though they could not be checked out of the library), and that was the end of my ingenious contraption :D

Elon Musk is usually transparent with his industry-disrupting and world-changing ideas, but he’s got a secret up his sleeve. When asked about ideas for future projects at the Pando Daily Fireside Chat, he quickly rattled off three – an electric-powered jet, pre-constructed segments of highway, and fusion. After that, he paused, then introduced a fourth idea:

“Maybe I should patent it, and then offer to open source the patent to anyone that could make the credible case that they could actually do it.”

Musk’s face was glowing, like a kid that could barely contain his excitement. He shared the concept’s name – The Hyperloop.

The motivation behind this idea is the current state of transportation: it’s broken, and the future isn’t looking too bright. Musk is frustrated with the California High-Speed Rail (aka bullet train) in particular. Not only is it a ridiculously expensive endeavor, the train will be the slowest relative to others in its class. Some quick facts:

• $68 billion construction costs (current estimate)
• $2.23 billion net operating revenue by 2023
• 2028 scheduled completion for San Francisco to Los Angeles
• 150,000 employees for construction

Yep, all that for a train.

Musk shared the attributes of the Hyperloop:

• 10% of the cost of California High-Speed Rail
• never crashes
• immune to weather
• 3-4x faster than bullet train
• average speed of 2x aircraft speed
• downtown LA to downtown SF in under 30 minutes
• self-powered via attached solar panels
• would generate more power than the system consumes
• power would be stored to run 24/7 without using batteries

To most, this probably sounds crazy. But given Elon Musk’s track record, I think it can be done. And apparently he does to.

“You think this is possible?”

“Yes, absolutely.”

The only problem is Musk forgot to share the technology that would power this futuristic transportation system, or even vaguely hint at how it could exist. Any ideas?

Open for discussion on Hacker News

Rocketr, you still don’t get it.

I applaud the fact that you’re reflecting on your chat with PG – analyzing what went wrong and how you could have done it differently. Unfortunately, I don’t think you see the core issue at hand. It has nothing to do with storytelling – it has to do with answering some fucking questions – something you still failed to do even in retrospection.

Your revised intro:

"Rocketr bridges two worlds that could not be further apart right now – how we capture information (using personal tools), and how we get work done (using team-based tools). We’re betting that these worlds will converge, because if they don’t, it will get harder and harder for teams if they can’t collaborate at the speed that information is changing around them. Oh… and the medium we use to facilitate all this, is note-taking – something we all know how to do."

I’m illustrating the pain, the trends, and only at the end do I mention the vehicle by which we go about it.

I still don’t see the problem here. What are you solving? What are the tools that are currently being used? Why are they so horrible? Do people wake agonize over these treacherous solutions, ripping their hair out and wishing there was something better?

Your revised response about customers:

"Paul, we think Y Combinator needs this in a big way. You’re managing 460+ companies. I’m guessing you send them articles, competitive intel, potential customer leads, and a wealth of other ideas. You’re probably using email to do it. And while you might use labels or folders to keep all this information organized on your end, your startups don’t have access to that. You’re effectively relying on them to either a) action every idea immediately, or b) do multiple queries of their inbox every time they want to revisit an idea you guys discussed."

Interesting tactic, but you’re assuming PG and YC have a problem that they might not actually have – and that’s a risky assumption, because the response could flush your whole ‘story’ down the shitter. Aside: I'm not sure you're even familiar with how YC works - to say they 'manage 460 companies' is a gross exaggeration. They are investing in founders, advising them, guiding them, networking them, and sending them off into the wild with the occasional chat every once in a while. So step 0: know your customer.

Anyway, back on subject: maybe they do use email, and maybe it works flawlessly. Maybe there is no issue. So who actually needs what you’re building? Have you talked to potential customers? Have you reached out and gathered honest opinions?

Incredibly, after all of this, I still couldn’t figure out what Rocketr actually does or what problem it aims to solve. I explored your website, only to be confronted with “Collaborative notetaking” (and some other fluff). I’m not sure what that’s supposed to mean. Why do I want to take notes with other people? How will this note-taking happen? Is this an iPad app? Web app? Can I use it on my Kindle Fire? Is it a new electronic device altogether?

Ultimately, the I’m left wondering what the eff your product does and how it does it. I’m sure PG felt the same way.

You need to rethink this storytelling thing. Jason Lotito says it nicely:

"You need an elevator pitch. Something that describe what the product is, who the customer is, and what problem does it solve for the customer, and how it solves it.
From there, you can expand, but something simple, something straight forward. Something that is filled with nouns and verbs. Because, I honestly believe if you can't define your product like that, you don't completely understand it as well."

Please heed this advice.

Apparently people are still mind-fucked about the Instagram acquisition. They can’t get over how a simple photo-sharing app could ever be worth $1 billion dollars. A free, simple, ad-less photo-sharing app without a business model to boot! This is craziness! Facebook has so much money they just want to give it away! We must be in a bubble, right?

Wrong.

First, let’s get our facts straight:

1) Instagram is not just a photo sharing app
2) The acquisition was almost entirely defensive
3) Facebook will probably never see an ROI on Instagram

With that, we can dig deeper.

Many people view Instagram as a means to share photos on other (more established) social networks. Turns out Instagram itself is actually a social network. Granted, there aren’t many features, but there are plenty of users – over 35 million at the time of acquisition. Based on that number alone, the $1BN price tag seems like a great deal in comparison to other acquisitions in the past decade. The flaw with this argument is that there is a likely a huge overlap between the Instagram userbase and Facebook userbase. Anyway, what matters is that Instagram is not just a photo app with filters – it’s a social network, which brings us to the next point.

Facebook didn’t buy Instagram because of some magical, futuristic technology that they just couldn’t figure out. They could have built that shit overnight. Facebook didn’t buy Instagram because they were desperate for 35 million more users that were already their users anyway. Facebook didn’t buy Instagram because it was raking in boatloads of cash and would provide a huge ROI someday. Nope.

Zuck was scared, so he snatched up Instagram to avoid another one of these situations. Zuck knew Instagram had the potential to become a huge competitor, and had he not acted quickly, it just might have. Zuck knows better than anybody that when a $1BN social network goes unacquired, it can become a $100BN company. Nobody likes dropping a billion dollars (I try to avoid it if I can), but Zuck did what he had to do when he saw Instagram as a threat to his baby. The cost of doing business, as they say.

Will Facebook ever see a return on their investment? Probably not – at least not directly. Arguably the Instagram acquisition has secured a higher IPO valuation, which could be construed as an inadvertent ROI, but that’s an entirely different story. No, Facebook paid $1BN for a photo-sharing app because that photo-sharing app was a legitimate threat to the future of Facebook. Oh, did somebody say Instagram didn’t have a business model? That sounds like a perfectly valid business model to me...

Well played, Instagram. Well played, Facebook.

Running a startup is loads of work. It demands vast amounts of time, effort, and energy. It’s tough to gain traction and it’s tough to keep going. There’s pressure from colleagues, family, and friends. You may have employees who depend on you and investors with high expectations. That’s a lot to deal with. We know that.

So how you could you possibly give up even a minute of your day with so much to do and so little time?

Well, here’s the thing: we don’t want your work to consume you. We want you to be happy and we want you to succeed. It’s okay to take a break and stop working to enjoy life for a bit. Really.

Startup folks like lists, so here’s a list of reasons why you should take a break:

1) Nobody will think less of you if you enjoy life sometimes

You put in long hours. You work mornings, afternoons, nights and weekends. During the little sleep you get, you dream about your startup. We won’t think any less of you if you take a break or disappear once in a while. We won’t think you’re slacking. We already know you’re a hard worker.

2) Your startup won’t die overnight

Whether your startup is early stage or has millions of users, chances are you can put it on autopilot for a few hours. The internet doesn’t turn off when you leave your computer. It’s always on, even if you’re not there. Just like successful startups aren’t born overnight, they won’t die overnight.

3) Fresh ideas will present themselves

This is the best part. Chances are you’re so caught up in the little, meaningless details that you’ve actually lost sight of what’s important – or your sight is at least a bit blurred (figuratively). Stepping away from your startup will help you realize what matters and where to focus. Who knows, you may even find that killer feature you’ve been waiting for. The world is full of ideas, and they’ll find you if you let them.

So that’s that. Please take a break. Please enjoy your life.

This is a true story about a guy I know. Let’s call him Abe.

In August of last year, Abe contacted me because I recently moved to Los Angeles and he had been thinking of making the move as well. He’d been thinking about it for quite a while, in fact. He graduated with a degree in Music Business almost two years prior and had come to the realization that there were not many relevant career opportunities in the Southern United States. His degree was going to waste while he bounced around between minimum wage jobs. Los Angeles was where he needed to be, but he was hesitant to make the move.

Abe is a family friend and I was more than willing to help him out. I told him everything I knew about LA and offered to let him crash in my guest bedroom for a bit until he could find a place of his own. He was planning on making the move to LA in September. He had already established several industry contacts from career fairs, had references in hand, and even went as far as setting up interviews months in advance. Off to a great start, right?

September came around and Abe hadn’t left yet. He was worried his high mileage car wouldn’t make the journey across the country, so he was looking to replace it with a more reliable vehicle. Fair enough.

He then pushed the trip back another few months because Sept/Oct/Nov/Dec is the “slow season” in entertainment. Pilot season starts in January, so he’ll come then. Jobs will be readily available and he should be able to snatch one up in a jiffy.

Abe’s expected date of departure was now January 11th. January rolled around and that date was pushed back to January 13th. Well wouldn’t you know it, that just happens to be Friday the 13th, and of course it’s unsafe to drive on Friday the 13th, so the departure was pushed back another day, and then a couple more.

The following Monday, after 4 months of delays, Abe finally began his journey. He had taken the first tiny step toward achieving his dreams of working in the music industry.

When Abe arrived in LA, my girlfriend and I were extremely accommodating. Not only did we open our doors and put a (rent-free) roof over his head, we went out of our way to show him around town and make sure he was comfortable. Los Angeles can be overwhelming, and we wanted to ensure he would be able to find his dream job and a place of his own as painlessly as possible. We were in the position to provide such an opportunity.

And what did we get in return? Excuses. A whole fucking month of excuses. Abe spent almost a year preparing for this trip, and when he finally made it to LA, he did nothing. Absolutely nothing. He managed to delay pre-arranged interviews (yeah, the ones he had prepared months in advance) because he didn’t want to deal with traffic. He blew off appointments with his important industry contacts because he was sick (he wasn’t). He didn’t leave the apartment for days on end because he didn’t want to lose his street parking spot. He didn’t get a part time job because it would deter him from finding his dream job. He didn’t go to clubs in Hollywood because they were too exclusive. Oh – and I learnt that he had a handful of friends in the area, but he couldn’t visit them because it’s tough to find parking where they live. I kid you not.

Instead of taking advantage of the tremendous opportunity that Abe had been given, he locked himself in a bedroom and rattled off any excuse he could muster up. And you know what? We kicked him out. He had more than enough time to land on his feet and find direction. But he didn’t. Now he’s renting a room at the YMCA because he didn’t look at a single apartment during his month long stay (despite the tips I gave him on finding a place) and I don’t think he’s found a job yet.

The only person Abe hurt: himself.

* * *

Are you fucking kidding me? It’s 2012, and I call bullshit. We are living in an age of virtually unlimited access to knowledge and opportunity. It’s not okay to have excuses anymore. We complain that we don’t have enough time, but we spend hours a day on Facebook and Youtube. We complain that we don’t have the proper knowledge or skill, but anything we could ever want to know is right at our fingertips and the information infrastructure is expanding so rapidly that we can literally learn forever.

If you aren’t doing exactly what you want to be doing, there’s only one reason: you don’t want it badly enough. That’s all there is to it.

- Antanas Mockus, former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia

- Sean Parker, Napster / Facebook / etc.

Just over a month ago, I shared my first Ruby on Rails app, Pocket, with Hacker News. Since then, I've been working on other projects so I haven't been able to spend as much time on development as I would have liked, but I still use the app every single day for my own note-taking needs.

During the course of design and development, I've loosely followed the the self-proclaimed mantra "so easy my grandma could use it" - i.e. I literally wanted this app to be so easy that my own grandma could, and would, use it for everyday note-taking and reminders. After all, the reason I began developing Pocket (and learning Rails at all) was because I was so frustrated with the inherent difficulties and lack of intuitive user interfaces of existing solutions.

The last time I visited my family, I accidentally left Pocket open in the browser. I stepped away from the computer for a few minutes, and to my surprise, this is what I saw when I returned:

My sneaky little sister, who just turned six a few months ago, had hijacked my Pocket! Not only did she figure out how to make new notes, she had figured out how to change the note colors, rearrange the notes, and edit the contents of existing notes. She did all of this with no instruction whatsoever (though it is possible she may have briefly spied on me while I used the application). If that doesn't exemplify ease of use, then I don't know what does. I dreamt about the day my grandmother would use Pocket, but I never once thought my little sisters, who are just learning to read and write, would be able to pick it up so quickly and effortlessly.

Every app should be this easy to use.

- Loren

- Dane Maxwell, Founder of Zannee

In the past, I’ve dabbled with internet marketing, submitted articles and tips to blogs, and played with Adwords, but I had never experimented with any sort of social or viral marketing before this project … and oh what an experiment it was! We all know the power of viral marketing from designed-for-viral sites like Hipster, Threewords.me, and FMyLife, but could it work for eCommerce? Is it possible to utilize social networks (hint: yep) to sell products? I was willing to give it a shot and find out.

Facebook Events

Like I mentioned before, I’m quite inexperienced when it comes to internet marketing. I don’t have a giant web platform from which I can shout at thousands of adoring fans and my mailing lists consists of a grand total of 0 people. My social reach goes as far as the 179 friends on my Facebook account. But, luckily for me, none of that mattered, because I saw a platform experiencing exponential growth right before my eyes. Over the course of a few hours I had witnessed a single spontaneous Facebook event grow from 50,000 attendees to well over 100,000, and another with similar growth. Not only were they growing – they were extremely active, with new comments and photos rolling in every few seconds. In short: these impromptu Facebook communities were my only chance, and they were mine for the taking. If they didn’t work out, the project was dead.

It was worth a shot, so I went for it. Just minutes after I finished building the site, I posted a link in each in the two events. The picture, title and description were pulled directly from the Snowpocalyse website, so that made posting easy – ctrl+c and ctrl+v (yeah, no MacBook for Loren). The first sale came in just four minutes later, and another just a minute after that. With profits at $8/shirt, the first sale paid for my domain name and the second made the project profitable. Profitable in 5 minutes – can’t beat that!

At that point, I figured there must have been quite a few hits to the site, so I set up a bit.ly link to track clicks in real time. Google Analytics was tracking all visits to the site, but I only used bit.ly to share the link in the two Facebook events to see whether or not my posts were driving traffic. They were:

*Note that these are only clicks on a few links. The actual traffic was significantly higher*
*Tweet count is completely inaccurate since it does not represent other links*

This is the total aggregated data, but most of those clicks occurred within the first two days. 3,857 clicks on links that I had only posted a handful of times, and that doesn’t even include links that others had shared (since I was the only one using the bit.ly link). Keep in mind the structure of Facebook events: the only people who see links posted to the event wall are those who visit the actual event page – event wall posts don’t show up in news feeds. So that means 3,857 people who were looking at the Facebook event pages deliberately clicked my links. CPC = practically 0. Not too shabby, but it got better.

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, and here’s the result:

And just like that, my t-shirt was effectively in the eyes of hundreds of thousands of people, almost for free. Can’t complain about free advertising! He also removed a few of the spammy low-quality shirt links from the event, though I did not ask or expect him to do this, nor do I think it had a significant effect. In another post I’ll tell you exactly how many hits that silly little Facebook even drove to the website.

Make Sharing Easy

People like to share, and they’re more likely to share if they don’t have to put in a lot of effort. It doesn’t take a rocket surgeonist :D to figure out that placing social media buttons on your website works like freaking magic. So I went ahead and did that.

And how well did that work? Ridiculously well:

According to Facebook, Snowday2011.com was shared a total of 3,730 times over a couple days. Those “shares” are fantastic because they are prominently displayed in news feeds – large, glorious, image and all, with each “share” in front of hundreds of people. Here’s a little secret: “likes” don’t do that. They just get a little tiny line with some text – hardly noticeable compared to “shares”.

I also had a button to share on Twitter, but I’m not sure how well it performed. At its peak, I saw the snowday2011.com link being posted every few minutes, which can’t be bad. I’m not nearly as active on Twitter as Facebook, so I didn’t focus on that medium as well as I probably should have. If anybody has tips here, feel free to share in the comments.

Etc.

Other than Facebook and Twitter, both of which required minimal knowledge and skill, I did almost no marketing. I posted a single link on Hacker News, which rose to the top and remained on the front page for at least 24 hours. The key with Hacker News is honesty and transparency, which are two of the reasons I appreciate the community so much. I didn’t just post a link and leave it at that – I followed up with a response outlining the approximate steps I took to bring the project to life and hung around all day making sure to answer (almost) every last question that was asked. It’s the little things that matter :)

What I Learned

The traffic that generated by these sites doesn't come close to the viral sites I mentioned at the beginning, but tens of thousands of hits a day to an impromptu site with nothing to offer but a silly t-shirt isn't exactly negligible traffic, especially when it results in sales (and profit) every few minutes. So, now you know exactly how I marketed my 4-hour profitable project, but what did I learn about social marketing along the way? Here are some takeaway points:

I also have some things to look into:

If you have questions or anything to contribute, please let me know in the comments, and subscribe to my RSS feed for future updates. Thanks for reading!

- Loren

A few days ago I discovered the power of RSS. Yes, I know I'm about 5 years behind the rest of the world, but that's okay. Because it looks like web-based RSS readers are right here with me. Upon learning about RSS readers and what they could do, I briefly googled around to see what I could dig up. I found Google Reader and was not impressed. It works, but it's ugly and not exactly pleasant to use. I couldn't see myself using Google Reader on a regular basis, so I began my search for some alternatives. I found some, but was still not impressed. I even made a post on Hacker News without very much of a response. Feedly is the best web-based RSS reader I've come across and it even has a Chrome/FF extension, but it still kind of sucks. I wouldn't use it.. Helvetireader is the best implementation I've seen, and it's built right on top of Google Reader. Really, it's just a stylesheet, but sometimes the smallest things make the biggest difference. Very nice, Helvetireader.

I lost hope and decided to give up my search for the perfect web-based RSS reader. As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't exist. On a whim, I browsed iPad RSS readers in the App Store to see what they had to offer. As expected, every single one of them was excellent, with gorgeous UIs and beautiful design. Why don't these exist for browsers? On second thought, why do almost all iPad apps surpass web apps in terms of usability and design? You don't have to have a 9.7" touch screen to make an app that just works.

Inspired by the iPad RSS apps, I got to thinking. It sucks when this happens, because I just can't stop once I get started. My mind is like a snowball. I came up with a rough idea of what I would build if I were to build this. It's not only an RSS reader, but somewhere between a dashboard / home screen / RSS reader / bookmarking app. I want the latest news and updates from my favorite blogs and I want a clean interface for my bookmarks, so I can go right where I want to go. This is what I want to see every time I open my browser:

There you go, I already did the design work for you. I even planned out the user interface and functionality. Here's how it would work:

1. Header. This is where you would have links to settings, tags, search, manage bookmarks, manage RSS, etc. Maybe even a clock and a date. Make it welcoming.

2. Bookmarks. * These should actually be much smaller that pictured * Maybe it would sync with an existing bookmarking service, maybe it would be standalone. Drag bookmarks to rearrange them. When you hover over a bookmark icon, it tells you the name of the website and has an "X" to remove. There would be three states for bookmarks: standard, all, and hidden. Standard is what you see here - two rows of your most visited bookmarks. All and hidden are self explanatory, but use some JQuery UI to slide between the different states. It should be nice to use and interact with.

3. RSS feed. * As the primary focus, these should have much more screen real estate than pictured * Sync with Google Reader, because they already did all of the programming for you and it would make migrating easy for new users. Again, three states here: standard, all, and hidden. Basically the same functionality as above with JQuery UI to switch between states. Headlines and sources for only - keep it simple. Clicking a headline opens a full article - JQuery effects again.

So there you have it. The design and the functionality. All you have to do is write the code and share the project with the world. It probably wouldn't take you savvy developers more than a weekend to hack together. I will make this if nobody else does, but I'm busy for at least the next month or two. It's dead simple, but if this existed I would use it every single day. If you plan on making this, please let me know. I want to see what you come up with. If not - tell your friends. Somebody needs to make this.

- Loren

It took less than four hours of work to bring Snowpocalypse from concept to functioning website. The essential ingredient during these four hours was decisiveness. I could have spent days going back and forth between color palettes and running through hundreds of different fonts, but do those little details matter for something like this? Not really. Heck, I don’t even know what font I used for the website. What matters is the big picture. The whole package. As long as it all fits together, the smaller pieces don’t really make a difference. That’s not a hall pass to be sloppy, however, because sloppiness stands out and instills lack of confidence in customers. And that’s always bad.

Design

For this project, there were two distinct design components: a t-shirt and a website. I view this like a picture in a picture frame; the t-shirt was the picture and website was the frame. Lots of other Snowpocalypse shirts popped up in online marketplaces like Zazzle and Cafepress, where the sellers have virtually no control over presentation. This is stupid. Assuming the shirts were well designed, that’s like displaying a beautiful picture in a crappy picture frame. And then trying to sell it to somebody. If you think presentation doesn’t matter, you’re wrong. Ask Johnny Cupcakes, who makes millions selling t-shirts in t-shirt shops disguised as bakeries. Presentation matters. It’s just as important to have a well-designed website as it is to have a nice product.

The very first thing I did was a rough sketch of the website layout. Many designers call this wireframing, but I don’t think mine qualifies. If you’re serious about building websites, you might use nifty wireframing tools like Balsamiq, but I prefer the trusty pen and paper. I always have a notebook or scrap paper lying around and it’s the absolute fastest way to bring an idea from your head to canvas.

The next step was transferring the layout to digital. While Photoshop is extremely popular among designers and hobbyists alike, Adobe Illustrator is my tool of choice – I love the infinite flexibility of vector artwork. In Illustrator, I usually find myself working from the top down, so I started with the obvious choice – the header. The header is an introduction for most websites – it sets the tone and says to each visitor "Hi, this is who I am and what I’m all about". I figured a nice, big header would grab the visitors’ attention and lure them in. Something bold and juicy. After about 30 minutes of tinkering (far too long), nothing about the header felt right. I had the sudden realization that I didn’t need a header – the t-shirt was the focus of the website and it would accomplish the header’s goal of grabbing attention and introducing the website. Goodbye header, I didn’t need you this time.

Out of frustration with the website design, I moved on to the t-shirt. I had no idea what I wanted the design to look like, but I knew it had to say "I Survived Snowpocalypse" in some form or another. I hopped onto my favorite font website and discovered Snowtop Caps. Bingo. White snow on black letters and the design was done minutes later. On to the mockup. Since I’ve sold t-shirts online before, I’ve had the pleasure of sifting through every shitty mockup template out there. Illustrated shirt mockups don’t cut it. They’re sloppy and make the seller look bad. Multi-layer realistic Photoshop templates are where it’s at. They look like actual photographed t-shirts (because they are) and they instill confidence in the customer. This is the one I used, and I adjusted the color to nice shade of blue. That looked good so I rolled with it – decisiveness is key. If I didn’t tell you that t-shirt was a mockup, would you think it was real? I would.

Back to the website design. With the t-shirt mockup complete, I had my color palette. The background colors were pulled from the shades of black and white in the t-shirt text, with hints of blue scattered throughout. Not much to say here, I just did what felt right based on previous experience. Practice, practice, practice. Here’s the website mockup right before I jumped into coding (notice how empty it is):

Code

Lately I have been teaching myself Ruby on Rails, but this project was so simple that it didn’t require the vast functionality that Rails has to offer. I decided to just write up some basic HTML and CSS in Adobe Dreamweaver (though a standard text-editor would have worked as well). As I wrote the code, I pushed it to the server (ctrl + shift + u) and switched back and forth between the browser and editor. It didn’t matter that the live website was incomplete and broken while I was working on it – nobody had ever seen it and nobody would until I started advertising hours later. After about 90 minutes of tinkering, I was happy with the result.

Coming into the project, I was a bit worried about the checkout process. I’ve used pre-made ecommerce platforms in the past, but I couldn’t see that working here. They have long checkout processes and are a pain in the ass to setup. I needed something quick and dirty, so I checked out Paypal’s Merchant Solutions and found the "Buy Now" buttons. It looked like these buttons could provide the functionality that I needed, but who wants big ugly buttons on their website – especially eight of them (one for each size)? A little more browsing and I discovered the hyperlink counterparts for the buttons. Though the links are intended for e-mail, I hard-coded them into my website and voila – the simplest checkout system you could possibly imagine. Not only that, I could create "products" (like 3XL shirts that weren’t listed on the website) on the fly and e-mail them to inquiring customers. It worked, and it was magical. In addition, Paypal handled the order records and confirmation e-mails like a champ. Less than 10 minutes invested to setup the entire checkout system and payment gateway.

With a grand total of 2 small files and 5 images, the website was complete. This is the simplest website I have I ever built. For the curious, here’s the source and here’s the css file. Feel free to sift through, but please don’t copy-paste… you wouldn’t be the first.

User Experience

This part is more of an art than science, but I’ll try to explain my thoughts anyway. During the entire building process, I had one primary goal: conversions. In order to maximize conversions, I made the website as simple and as easy to use as possible. I didn’t want any customer confusion or anything that could deter or distract visitors once they landed on the site. I also wanted them to be able to get to the website as easily as possible. There were several key factors that played into all of this.

So there you have it. That’s how I built the Snowpocalypse mini-brand with 4-hours of work. As mentioned in my previous post, plenty of experience helps, but a healthy combination of design, code, and user experience decisions is a necessity. Subscribe to the RSS feed to learn how I marketed the project, along with logistics, statistics, and what I found out along the way.

- Loren

After so many comments and suggestions for an RSS feed, I decided that it was probably worth investigating. I had never used one before and didn't exactly know how they worked, but it was relatively easy to throw together with Ruby on Rails and Feedburner. There's a button to subscribe to the RSS feed on the right. In case you missed that one, here's a gigantic button:

- Loren

Hi. If you haven’t heard, I hacked together a side-project in a few hours, brought it to profitability almost immediately, and made it go viral. Before I jump into explaining how I made that happen, let’s clear one thing up. This isn’t going to be a “look what I did, you can do it too!” blog post, because as much as some bloggers/founders/hackers may want you to believe that’s how things work, life just isn’t that simple. Life is tough. And if you’re looking for the easy path to success, I can’t help you. Just because I made something neat and it was easy for me does not mean that it can be duplicated with a step-by-step guide, even if it only took me a few hours from start to finish. The true fact of the matter is that those few hours of passionate hacking were backed by a lifetime of learning and experience. So, let’s just say this is going to be a “look what I did, maybe if you take notes, put your head down and grind like crazy you can do something amazing too” article. That’s how things really get done. Okay? Here we go.

Forewarning: I’m writing all of this as soon as I can while the whole ordeal is still fresh in my mind. I’ll try to be as clear and thorough as possible, but I haven’t slept in days so I apologize in advance if anything comes across as jumbled or confusing.

Opportunity

Over the past few days, quite a bit of hype has built up revolving around the snowstorm. I’ve seen snow before and didn’t think very much of it, but two Facebook events caught my eye: Snowpocalyse 2011 and Snowpocalyse!!!! Why did they stand out? In a few hours they went from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of attendees, and I had a feeling there would be more. Not only that, the participants were leaving comments and posting photos to the event several times a minute, showing that the little community that was building up around the events was active and interested. Lightbulb!

Around 2am Wednesday morning and I decided to leverage that instant-market. Could it fail? Absolutely. But there was also the slight chance that it could have succeeded (I’ll spare you the suspense: it did), so I went for it. Not knowing whether or not it would work, I pushed past the doubt and started hacking away to get something into the world as soon as possible. The worst case scenario was that I would end up exactly where I started, with a bit of gained experience in social marketing/virality.

Background

As much as it may seem like this just came out of the blue and fell into my lap, it didn’t. Yes, the project was thrown together in a matter of hours, but everything I did was backed with previous experience. I’ve received lots of questions about how I designed the website, how I worked the logistics of printing and shipping the shirts, how I handled the payment gateway, how I advertised, etc. Short answer: I’ve done it all before. I’ve built websites. I’ve developed web apps. I’ve worked with ecommerce platforms. I’ve designed t-shirts and ran a small t-shirt company. I’ve experimented with pricing and user interfaces, and I’ve become extremely efficient at minimizing printing and shipping costs while maintaining quality. Even if some of my past projects may have “failed”, each one added tools to my toolbox that ultimately made this all come together.

To Be Continued...

I could throw some stats and sales figures at you and write a short, fluffy article to make myself seem like a super-hacker, but let’s be honest: that won’t help anybody. Instead, I’ve decided to write a series of mini-articles to cover as much content as possible. The upcoming posts will provide a detailed account of the following:

Building – design, code, user experience decisions

Marketing – leveraging Facebook events and other social networks

Logistics – printing, shipping, and payment gateways

Statistics - hits, visitors, conversion rates, traffic sources/breakdown, etc

Conclusion – takeaways and key points that I picked up along the way

I sincerely hope that these articles can provide knowledge and value to fellow hackers/entrepreneurs. I’ll share as soon as I can - stay tuned!

- Loren