I’ve been on a real creative kick the past week, which might explain why I’m out doing things rather than taking the time to blog. I’ve done a little work for Noah’s project, betArcade. I’ve applied for the internship position available at Challenge Games—the people who created Duels as well as the new game Baseball Boss (the project I’d be working on if I get the position); both are browser-based games. They’ve gotten about $15M in funding from big daddy VC firm Sequoia within the past few months, so things are looking in their direction for sure. I’ll cover more on their market later.
Lately Jörg, my partner on Datewi.se, and I have been kicking around ideas regarding development for iPhone applications, and one very simple one came to mind today which I took the time to mock up: A gallery featuring t-shirt designs from companies all over the web displaying shirts randomly pulled from our database in a grid, where users can click on a design to order it if they like it.
T-Shirt Gallery displaying random shirts
The app would be monetized similarly to Gary Vaynerchuk’s brand new site Please Dress Me where shirts are sold via affiliate deals with the shirts’ retailer websites, and our app would also charge a listing fee per shirt hovering at about the same price as your average shirt ($15-20). The image above displays how the app could look when opened, shuffling through the database to display shirts at complete random (though I only used AntiClothes shirts in my demo). I’m not sure I like the grid; I think it could look much more structured and less cramped in the iPhone interface.
iPhone T-Shirt App Search Functions
It will also have a search function, allowing the user to search based on what color tee they are looking for, particular tagwords that interest them, and also price (not displayed). For instance AntiClothes’ Zombie shirt might be tagged with ‘zombie’, ‘blood’, ’smear’, ‘red’, ‘black’, etc. etc.—By the way, go get this shirt before Holloween; it’ll be a hit. In the demo, I searched for both a description and a brand name, so if you wanted to look specifically through one brand’s offerings, you can.
I intend to bring this to market. It’ll be a great exercise for me in developing the front-end of an iPhone application and will be great back-end work for Jorg, especially since we have a much heavier app in the pipeline, as well as other ideas we’d like to get out.
What do you guys think of this app? Would you use it? Should we charge users for it?
Comments (2)
disclaimer: i skimmed your post. it seems like you want me to pay to search for shirts. a) why do i need that on my phone b) what’s my incentive to pay?
Noah,
A) There’s a huge subculture of people who love tee’s. A lot. I’ve noticed lately there’s also a massive movement in being able to represent your individuality by what you wear or accessorize with (iPods, screen-printed tees, Nikes, etc). These fashion subcultures are exploding thanks to the social web and I get this vibe that it’s spilling over into everyones lives and everyone has a sort of heightened appreciation for this culture of wearable discussable art; your “typical” iPhone user is also more likely to be one of these people.
B) I would never charge users, but it made an excellent bait question.