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2 Comments

Developer focused idea

I think this is a relatively easy developer focused idea.

Someone create a Twitter bot that takes trending hashtags, adds an interesting font to them give a generic color background following color theory, generates a teespring campaign with the image on the shirts, and retweets it to the hashtag that's on the shirt. It can say something like "I support [random hashtag]" and links to the campaign. It keeps tweeting it every 45 mins or so for a few hours.

I think this has the potential to be big for a few reasons.

  1. The audience is already there because its trending. It's also similar to Google's paid search model because people who are interested in the trend will click the hashtag and read replies.

  2. Trending topics are usually polarizing, and polarizing sells.

  3. This hits a variety of different niches.

  4. One might end up being good and people buy.

  5. You can keep it running forever with no loss if nothing sells.

Let me know what you think and if you make it!

  1. 1

    Reposting every 45 minutes same thing to same hashtag will get the account banned for sure and your app/bot flagged for abuse. You'd need multiple accounts, and need to rotate them, those accounts must be authentic (have followers, tweets other than spamming)

    Generating a t-shirt is generally not at all complicated, you use a mock-up or template and just put text on top dynamically. Once you have a system, any text can show up and then backend of actually printing the t-shirt and sending it to an address can be done by t-shirt printing and fulfillment services.

    The only model I can see is you can allow real people to be your affiliates, then motivate them to do this often and get a commission. But it works only untill they make small amounts, if they see that they sold 1000 t-shirts they'll just try to do it themselves.

    Allowing real people to do this would save the spammy behavior and keep your app/bot safe.

    I am just saying you should try a t-shirt fullfilling service and test this idea, don't be spammy though but be genuine like hey check out the cool merchandise to support the idea, every product we sell one dollar goes an NGO working for this idea.

    If it works add more people to plan and maybe develop the landing page where you collect the data and payments there are many page builders with payment options and give them a link and commission.

    Once you have the team and buisness model then maybe add a developer to build the frontend saas , then automation for your affiliates so they can make more money , then maybe automatically try posting with a bot or try different automations to scale this and reduce dependency on affiliates. I would still rather build a Twitter account that when mentioned with a hashtag will create a hashtag based t-shirt (merch) link and post it to same hashtag or thread one or maybe 4-5 times during a couple days, also track the clicks if the first time posting have zero clicks maybe skip the hashtag and be safe.

    Spamming on Twitter is really a big problem , I talk from experience of having 2 accounts blocked and working on Twitter apis ( mostly login and ads apis).

  2. 1

    Nice idea, my only concern is that the shirt market is super saturated, but maybe targeting the long tail automatically can be competitive enough to build this :)

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