| Part Two is here -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22286545 I studied physics and math as an undergraduate at Harvard not so long ago. So I love to break things down into conceptual building blocks. After a stint working at a quantum computing startup, I've found myself in the software startup world and increasingly fascinated by consumer tech. Lately I've been thinking about the elements distinguish "soft-tech" winners from losers. The element which I aimed to master first is the "viral loop". I set out to build a product which has the shortest path from first impression to purchase. I wanted someone to be able to go from seeing a peer use the product to being able to purchase the product themselves in less than 10 seconds. For my first product I wanted to create something that was easily monetizable. I wanted to prioritize rapid development and avoid investing a lot of engineering time into building a full-fledged app. So I elected to sell physical merchandise. So I was constrained to sell physical merchandise with a viral element. Enter the QR-code. I wanted a loop of see, scan, purchase, show, repeat. The next step was to choose the physical product to sell. I wanted a product that would be highly visible and accessible for scanning. This led me to choose apparel, and in particular I wanted something ubiquitous, inexpensive, and above all easily customizable. This narrowed the search down to two options: hats and t-shirts. I picked hats, and in particular I chose bucket hats because they are currently trendy. So in summary the plan was to build a short viral loop that let people buy qr-code bucket hats that when scanned also let other people buy qr-code bucket hats. TLDR: I made hatclone.com. Buy QR code hats, your friends scan the code, they buy hats, cycle repeats. |