Programmer’s business experience: Instead of racking your brains to write an app, it’s better to sell T-shirts online
I still remember one day, I saw an interesting report (opens in a new tab) from Bay Area Daily (opens in a new tab) im.com/2017/05/10/selling-t-shirt-selling-mobile-apps/): It turns out that in order to raise travel expenses to attend the WWDC conference and to show his support for the Objective-C programming language, an American programmer designed a T-shirt with a dinosaur pattern and promoted it through Twitter. Unexpectedly, it turned out to be a good success, which made him sigh that he should stop racking his brains to develop apps and just sell T-shirts!
The author generously published relevant data, allowing us to know the effect of the entire marketing campaign: During just three days of promotion, a single tweet was viewed 12,000 times, generating 1,737 interactions, and his dinosaur T-shirt product page (opens in a new tab) was viewed a total of 641 times. In other words, the conversion rate of this marketing campaign is 5%.
5% of Twitter users came to this developer’s dinosaur T-shirt product page (opens in a new tab), bringing a total of 21 orders, and actually ordered 30 T-shirts of different sizes. After deducting necessary expenses, the App developer who designed the “Dinosaur Objective-C” T-shirt earned US$272, which was just enough for him to buy a plane ticket to attend this year’s WWDC Conference (opens in a new tab).
This result made the App developer sigh: Compared with developing an App that requires a lot of effort to study information, and a lot of time to write programs and correct errors, selling T-shirts online seems to be really easy! Especially now that there are platforms like Teespring (opens in a new tab) to assist you, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel (opens in a new tab), just use your creativity and invest marketing resources (opens in a new tab).
In fact, developing apps and manufacturing garments are not simple tasks, and there are a lot of details involved. But now it seems that it is really difficult for the public to spend money to download apps. Although most paid apps are not very expensive, there may be too many free apps with similar functions. In addition, most people only use a few apps, which makes the app craze begin to subside and even enter a consolidation situation.
On the other hand, although a T-shirt costs US$24.99, as long as the consumer likes the style or pattern design of the clothing, or even supports the seller’s value proposition (for example: supporting the use of Objective-C to develop apps), they will buy it and support it.
Is it better to make more money by selling apps or selling T-shirts? Well, this is a really interesting question and presents a different way of thinking. If it were you, which option would you choose?
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Vista Cheng speaks and runs workshops on AI workflows, writing and content systems for companies, schools and public agencies.
