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You know, every so often you have an amazing thing happen with something new on the Internet, and you just get jazzed all over again...
So I was at work late on Thursday night, and some co-worker friends upstairs called me up and said "Dude, you have to get in on this... Arnold Schwarzenegger just announced he's running for Governor of California, and we're going to launch this parody site to sell classic Arnold one liner t-shirts". And the first thing I think is -- um, yeah right, I got work to do... have fun!
But they were serious -- granted, a crazy lunatic streaker-on-the-soccer-field kind of serious, but serious nonetheless -- so I decided to help out a little just for the hell of it. Hey, I'm still not sure about Arnold's politics, but I'm a total fan of his movies. At least he says he's pro-choice, so maybe my mom won't disown me....
Besides, my co-workers were gung-ho and had already got the domain for the site (www.TotalRecall2003.com), and I was impressed by their effort at 2am on Friday morning. One person got the site design laid out (pretty simple 3-4 page site to start), another person got started on logo designs and slapped together the PayPal code to sell them, and another person put together a mock press release. They even put together the cool looking animated banner below. Within 24 hours of Arnold announcing he was in, we had the site up & running and ready to take orders. The next day I jumped in and got my friend Chris Pirillo to pimp the site, and then we setup some Google Adword campaigns, and all of a sudden...
We had people clicking on our ads. We had traffic coming to our site. We had orders for the t-shirts -- LOTS of orders (including one from Germany!). In fact, we had customers asking us to produce MORE products for them to buy like bumper stickers, buttons, etc.
Literally within 48 hours of launch, we had sold over 100 t-shirts and had about $2,000 in our PayPal account.
Holy Internet Batman, this stuff really works!
So, it might be a bit of a lark, but it is kind of amazing when the work you do and the research you spend time learning all come together and produce results. If nothing else, it's a great exercise for us to learn how our own products work, how they integrate with other online services, and what kind of challenges our small business customers experience selling stuff online.
And hey, if we get a little cash along the way to help fuel our interest and efforts, now that ain't all bad, is it?
Whoops. There's another order coming in...
More Startups. More Jobs.
