Please give me some feedback on this idea.
If you read this article below you can tell that there are a lot of direct to consumer brands trying to get their name out there. They spend a ton on advertising even stuff that they cannot verify the effectiveness of, like billboards.
I am interested in setting up a web app for early adopters, think about the type of people who use product hunt/ hacker news, to vote on the logos (or even products too?) of these brands and the most upvoted logo of the month gets printed on t-shirts and sent to some of the people who voted on it (for free). I think it would be a fun way to reward people for hearing about new brands that they may want to buy from. What I mean by this is that each brand, or tech company, would post a card and it would have their logo and website and maybe you could flip the card to see a few of their products on the back.
To make this possible financially it would have to partner with a t shirt printing company or have the companies pay to post or pay for the shirts if they win. We could even give promo codes on the cards to verify the effectiveness of the advertising. Or some ads could pay for it too, but I think that would generate less revenue. Does anyone find this interesting or have any feedback for it?
https://www.inc.com/magazine/201805/tom-foster/direct-consumer-brands-middleman-warby-parker.html
If I'm a company trying to get noticed, I want to make sure I'm getting noticed by my target customer. If you can show me that I'm getting in front of the type of people I want to sell to, I may consider this approach.
For the companies, qualified leads and quality eyeballs are really valuable. Unqualified leads aren't worth paying for.
You don't think that they would be willing to pay to get the eyes of early adopters? They are spending a ton on billboard advertising to get their name out there anyway.
I'm not your target audience on this one, because I don't spend money on billboards :)
It sounds like the brands you're talking about are big brands with big advertising budgets. It's hard for me to provide much insight here, aside from making sure you're validating with your target audience. From the sounds of it, Indie Hackers probably isn't where your target market hangs out, unless I'm not understanding correctly.
As an anecdote, my day job is for a firm building voice apps (Alexa, Google Assistant) for big brands. The vast majority of our potential customers don't feel like these platforms, with millions of users, are worth investing in to get exposure. I'm not saying it's the same for you, but it's something I'm really sensitive to at the moment. If there's no ROI, there's no buy.
Ditto. It's all about the return on investment a company gets from advertising with you.
So to parse that back into a Value Prop:
Service X will help new brands reach early adopters by using free merchandise to incentivize social sharing and increase brand value/sales
I agree with @andrew_bpco & @JonathanL that the only way to drive value in that business model is showing that it's more cost-effective to buy someone a t-shirt than pay for them to click on your advert (or other marketing activity).
A friend of mine runs www.ramptshirts.com, he'd argue that t-shirts are a great brand tool. The challenge is usually distribution versus cost. In that sense focusing on an audience and being an expert in what incentivizes them to support/share/buy from a new brand would probably be an interesting proposition. The more valuable that audience the better.
How can I prove this?
Run some tests. It's not hard to find data on how much a click costs, or how much a t-shirt costs. You just need to show the t-shirt has a better impact on the business.
I'd suggest you find a new brand who is willing to work with you on the test (if you can't I'd question the model). My guess is that there will be certain markets where existing user acquisition costs are high and merchandise is valued by users e.g. Gaming (don't know this for certain, worth researching).
So the test would be: "Can I get company A to pay me to use merch to drive traffic for them and can I prove this is more cost-effective for than their existing channels for user acquisition"
Interesting idea! Isn't there a problem though where PH/HN people are congregated online, but spread out over the entire world in person? Among my friends here in Missouri, I'm not sure many of them have even heard of Stripe, much less the latest companies on PH/HN.
I am not sure what you are getting at here? That the t shirts wouldn't be good advertising for them?
Mostly echoing Andrew's point, that tshirts are going to be fairly untargeted in most cases. Maybe you could get around this by sending t-shirts to places with targeted audiences? For example, a ton of companies give out t-shirts at universities to advertise to potential employees. But just giving out tshirts to random people on PH/HN might not be the best idea.