Stop developing apps. It seems you can make money faster by selling T-shirts online.
I once saw an interesting report (opens in a new tab) on Bay Area Daily (opens in a new tab) anowskim.com/2017/05/10/selling-t-shirt-selling-mobile-apps/), in order to raise travel expenses to attend the WWDC conference, and also to show his support for Objective-C, an App developer 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 developing 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 his 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), you can directly express your creativity and invest marketing resources.
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 consumers like the style or pattern design of the clothes, or even support the seller’s value proposition (opens in a new tab) (for example: supporting the use of Objective-C to develop apps), they will buy and support it.
Is it better to make more money by selling apps or 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?
★ Featured image source: Dinosaurs Store (opens in a new tab)
★ Want to build your personal brand? Come and sign up for the “Personal Brand Management Practice (opens in a new tab)” online course.
Further reading
- Make good use of AI tools to help you understand what foreign language videos are saying in seconds
- Krenz talks about personal business model design: use the Hakka spirit to create a successful flywheel
- Seizing the craze of game audio and video live streaming, Twitch makes money in a good way
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Vista Cheng speaks and runs workshops on AI workflows, writing and content systems for companies, schools and public agencies.
