gghootch

http://www.contentforce.de/iptv/swf/xflv/showIt3.swf?plugin_...

- Publish three academic papers.

- Get a job.

- Start a side project which actually has a chance of making some money.

- Find the woman of my dreams.

Many users out there are stingy as hell. I have actually heard people argue that they don't want an iPhone because you have to pay for whatsapp...

Let's hope that their dominance of the market is enough to incentivize users to pay forever. Oh, and that they do not actually sell out to Facebook.

http://imgur.com/itWft

A strikingly accurate description of his contribution!

(shameless plug) I made a new album notification tool for Last.FM focused on easily excluding non-important artists a while back: http://releasification.frapp.it

Think of a product; ask a hundred potential customers whether they'd buy that product. If not, discard and repeat this process.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/03/ff_drugsub/all/

It failed when it comes to user adaptation, conversion, monetization etc but is definitely a success when you only look at churn. 1.75% unsubscribed over the course of about six months.

My guess is they'll integrate both products after which Mailgun and SendGrid will become largely equivalent services.

Note: I wish that link to the scratch cat did not result in a 404.

If a 3rd party is involved, shouldn't we move to stop Godaddy from providing this information to them? If it is a case of rogue employees domain squatting, shouldn't Godaddy act to put a halt to this practice?

Then again, teaching the entire year how to use NET SEND to send direct messages to every computer on the network was fun. So simple, yet total chaos soon followed. Imagine hundreds of Windows popups with messages such as: "Hi i79, did you know that miss Lengstein is wearing a thong today?". Every single person behind a computer in the building had to click through all these messages individually when they booted up their machine.

We thought it was amusing, especially the invidivuals who could not figure out what the hell was going on. As was the moment when the horrible miss from the library shouted 'WHAT IS THIS, HELP! I'M BEING HACKED!!!'. The resulting crackdown started out fairly scary at first but became outright hilarious when every single authority figure started their frowning speech with "I am sure you have been punished enough". (Never punished, parents did not even find out, IT department just told me 'whenever you figure someone else out, please do not tell the rest').

I took that advise to heart and told only a select few when I uploaded mugshots of every single person in the school to photobucket. Fairly sure no one every found out, even when we hung pictures of other kids with drawings on their faces around the school and got busted they did not even stop to think about where we got those pictures. To think this all played out in a top five high school makes me smile like I am up to no good again.

See http://earlyretirementextreme.com/how-i-live-on-7000-per-yea... as also seen in @ProCynic's post.

Edit: ok, fail.

I do have reservations about going after international and hyper-local markets at the same time.

International + hyper-local is more of an end goal than the begin stage. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4013608

And I have a concern that it sounds like you do not have a graphic designer to create the t-shirt designs

I know some contractors that are likely willing to help me out. Currently, I do not have anyone to structurally think/discuss/build this. I have reserved the summer to work on this and attend a bunch of networking events, hopefully someone will turn up!

Btw, if you think of anything else you'd like to discuss; don't hesitate to contact me at garm@frapp.it

I wholeheartedly agree. However, this will change when an actual landing page is in place.

I would like to know that in front side of T-shirt there would not be something opposite of what I would like my brand to be

Manual filtering/personal design for the companies that advertise is probably the first step. Next comes incentivizing users to contribute their own design and let the smaller customers pick their company designs. I think that'll work out, though there's obviously no way of being sure.

The system I intend to implement should make this relatively painless.

Presumably,and I may be way off here, you're sub-contracting out the screen-printing of the t-shirts. And, as I understand it, the cost of producing t-shirts can be significant and you would probably have to hold a large inventory of t-shirts in various sizes.

Entirely true. But if Lockerz story is any indication of how it can work out, inventory turnover is likely to be ridiculously fast.

- What kind of advertiser are you trying to appeal to?

Large consumer goods and local stores. Got a nifty solution in mind on how this'll scale.

* Does an advertiser pay only when there's evidence that the t-shirts are worn? Or why do you have to upload three pictures of yourself in the t-shirt?*

No, pay up front. Receive elaborate statistics afterwards.

- Roughly, what kind of margins are you expecting to get?

Back of napkin style; profit margins somewhere between 30%-50%. Margins on t-shirts alone 50%-75%.

Are you trying to focus in a local region or nationally?

International user base. Allow advertisers to segment their target users by region/age/interests.

What happens with any left over inventory?

Promote them to first time users. Loyal users get cooler/more shirts.

Lastly, I may be interested in a t-shirt that combines an advertising with "pop art", but that's just a quick idea...

Definitely a great design idea. The one that's currently on the site is a drawing an ex-girlfriend of mine made over a year ago. I thought it was pretty amazing and asked her whether I could print that instead of my own terrible attempt at a mash-up of several freely available vectors.

Ad will be completely visible before the shirt is sent.

Thanks for the tip on order. Hadn't thought of it that way. Is receive better? Feels like it's less clear on how that t-shirt will end up at your place.

Copy definitely needs work. I'll be trying some different things in the future. Thanks for the tip :)

Hadn't heard of iwearyourshirt, very interesting proposition. Thanks again!

Can't please anyone, although it does not hurt to try.

I'm not seeing that anywhere on the page.

Pitched this idea once at some startup contest. Judges didn't get the concept. Spoke to other contestants and later stage judges that did get it; advice #1 'simplify, simplify, simplify'. Although I can talk on for an hour detailing the concept, it's best not too cause information overload.

That's what I figured. Lockerz grew enormously until it imploded due to many factors. Rethink their business model, go niche and this is where I ended up at.

the HN demographic aren't really the sort of people this will appeal to

But at least they are likely to provide slightly more insightful feedback than the average feedback I've received from friends/family.

Thanks for the responses btw :)