Show HN: My 4-hour project, already profitable
I know this is not the norm for projects here on Hacker News and I realize that it may be seen as rather exploitive, so here's a very very brief background and my thought process:<p>- Idea was conceived around 2am this morning.  Saw a few events on facebook picking up speed (hundreds of thousands of attendees) so decided to leverage that instant-market<p>- Wasn't sure whether or not it would work, but I didn't have too much to lose ($8 url and a few hours) so I went for it and started hacking away<p>- Around 10am the project was launched, complete with a website, domain name, and orignal t-shirt design, all done by me<p>- 4 minutes later the first orders came in, thus paying for the domain name and becoming profitable (minus my time value)<p>- Since then the site has gone slightly viral, with several thousand hits, hundreds of "likes" and a bunch of tweets (not to mention t-shirt sales)<p>- Became the "official t-shirt" and event photo for the Snowpocalypse 2011 facebook event with 300,000 attendees.  That's a nice little market to advertise to, no?<p>This is really just a social + eCommerce experiment with a taste of vitality.  While I have designed t-shirts and sold them online before, I have never done anything quite like this, ie "hopping on the bandwagon" and riding out a live-fast-die-fast trend.  I have also never experimented with any sort of viral platforms.  I hope to implement some potentially viral features in my current startup/project, so I figured it would be worth it to test the waters with this mini-project.  It was indeed.  I learned a lot, and hope to do a case study with detailed steps and statistics in the near future.