So today was scheduled to be about selling t-shirts through your web 2.0 company in search of profit (and amazingly, no: I’m not joking), but because I’m short on time (got caught up reading Groundswell last night -and yes, if you find anything I write here interesting, go buy it now) it’s going to be a short-on-content post. BUT- this is another challenge for my blogging ability: can I actually write a short post?
Here’s the short of it- make a startup, do something to drive in traffic, then sell t-shirts to the hoards of visitors. It works pretty well actually.
Good Example (though not entirely web 2.0ey): Homestarrunner.com. I mean, these guys built something so amazingly hilarious that it drove in millions of viewers. There were no ads on the site, no membership fees. Just a t-shirt store. And they cleaned up.
In the middle of the t-shirt craze is Cafepress, a pretty cool site that helps people make their own shirts to sell. You can even set up a little shop on Cafepress- they take a cut of your sales- but you get to make fun shirts. Definitely something that’d be fun to play around with at the very least and the interactivity can be deemed as web 2.0ish, I think.
And on th worst-example end of the spectrum you have VC Wear a company that forgot the “do something” part of this business model. Instead of driving in traffic first, VC Wear just sells shirts targeted towards people who find making fun of web 2.0 really funny. I mean seriously, who makes fun of web 2.0 stuff? There’s no audience for that. Right?
And that’s it- I wrote a short post!
