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Selling t-shirt > selling mobile apps. Dinosaurs.

Stop doing the apps. Start selling t-shirts.

I spent an enormous amount of time doing apps, or even programs (before we begun to call it apps). I spent days on doing more or less challenging stuff like PGP implementation or Cryptography. Even the PDF counts (the spec is 756 pages). That was incredible but... I choose the wrong path of my career. I should sell t-shirts the whole my life.

This is why

A month ago I tweeted about “Dinosaur Objective-C” t-shirt available for sale.

The night before, I prepared the t-shirt design, that is great and is not mine originally. I got such t-shirt some time ago, about the time when the Swift was announced, during the SwiftCrunch by Base hackathon. Accidentally this is where the ambitious CryptoSwift project was initiated. I back next year with less ambitious project, and we won the event this time. Anyway... back to the t-shirt

The sentiment reference is obvious for the iOS developers. We all hate Swift, and we all love Objective-C because we all love what we know, and Swift doesn't even work, apparently.[1]

beyond the expectations

The success of the campaign is beyond my expectations. The sale was set for three days. I used TeeSpring to do all the job like payments, manufacturing, delivery. Literally everything.
The prices vary from $23.99 to $24.99, that is about 24x more expensive than the mobile app you're working on at the moment.

I'll share you some stats that you may find interesting.

Some stats

The campaign lasted for 3 days.

Promotion

The single tweet earned 12.1K impressions and 1.737 tweet engagements, that converted to 641 views of the product page. It's about 5% conversion to the store.

Orders

The 5% of the tweeter users that decided to go to the store, did place 21 orders. That means that the 3% of the people who visited the store, decided to place the actual order. 21 orders were for 30 pieces of the t-shirts in the various sizes and colors.

Profit

You paid $824. After TeeSpring cut, I earned $272, that is ⅓ of the total amount. In 3 days.

I think it's pretty nice. That's more than I get monthly from the single app I have in AppStore. And nobody would buy the app for $24 today.

I spend it all for a flight and stay in San Jose during the WWDC 2017, this year. See you there! I'll find you with the t-shirt!

Result

I'm pretty happy with the result. Some of you are happy as well:

Another round

I'm starting another round, the same design, slightly improved (the stronger line). The campaign will last for four-five days. The goal is set to 30. If you order now, you'll get it before the WWDC. Due to high delivery to Europe, I'll create another campaign, especially for the Europe (prices in EUR). Bear in mind that TeeSpring has the minimum order, and if the minimum is not reached, they will probably cancel all the orders.

The Dinosaur Store is here: https://teespring.com/stores/dinosaurs-store

USA: https://teespring.com/dinosaur_objectivec
Europe: https://teespring.com/objective-c-dinosaur

  1. Trolling alert ↩︎

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