What I learned from being on LifeHacker 9 days after starting work on ShirtFitFinder.com

The biggest thing that happened last month was that my site-in-a-week experiment, Shirt Fit Finder, ended up on LifeHacker two days after it launched.  This was a far better reaction than I had ever hoped for, and much bigger than I knew how to handle.  In fact, the site went down for at least 6 hours while it was featured.  I was asleep in China, and my friend who submitted it couldn’t get a hold of me because I had my phone set up to ignore calls from the US in the middle of the night, precisely so that people don’t wake me up accidentally.  Unfortunately, this time was on purpose…

Regardless of the reason, I learned a lot from the experience of finally getting a lot of attention focused on something I had worked on.  Here’s the good and the bad of how I handled it, and also some financial results:

Results

• Upgrade of server to bigger plan on Linode: -$16
• Money from affiliate links on SFF: $0 (Really!  Experimenting to see if affiliate links would be a better way to make money was actually the original purpose of the site.)
• New customers for Bespoke Row: 5 (which was actually more orders, because some of them ordered a second time after getting their shirts)

Good

• Quickly responded to comments online – e.g. on Reddit where people thought I should make the connection to Bespoke Row more clear, so I changed the site in a few hours.
• Created a new channel to my main business – The visitors to Bespoke Row who came from SFF generally converted at a better rate than other visitors, which I think is because SF basically acts as a demonstration of why they need a custom shirt before they come over.  There are also now a lot more links to SFF than to Bespoke Row on the web, too, so I hope it will continue to work this way for a long time.
• Learned that affiliate links are also a hard way to make a living – The fact that I had thousands of people on my site and not a single affiliate sale pretty much answered my question about how many visitors would be needed to make money from affiliate links to clothing sites.

Bad

• No Analytics – I built the site so quickly that I didn’t even add in any analytics packages.  This is so easy to do, and I missed it.  Now I don’t even know how much traffic I actually got.
• No way for people to sign up for future news and updates – I have a feeling I lost a lot of potential sales here.  A lot of people visited the site, but I have no way to identify them or to follow up because I didn’t have a newsletter signup or a link to a Twitter account that people could follow, etc.  Even though part of the appeal of SFF was that you don’t need to sign up, you can just use it, some percentage of people would probably have wanted to leave feedback or hear about changes.  I will definitely remember this for any future projects.  I added a Twitter account pretty quickly, but all it could do was message people who had shared SFF or the LifeHacker link.  That’s a bit different than having a group of followers that would see any future tweets.
• No way for people to share – Traffic died off pretty quickly after about a week.  It was old news on LifeHacker, and people didn’t think to come back.  In combination with not having any way to remind them (see above), I also didn’t have any way for the current traffic to lead to more traffic.  In retrospect, SFF results would be great to share with family or friends right before people go shopping for Christmas gifts.  Even beyond that, just giving people the opportunity to tell their friends on Twitter and Facebook might have led to traffic that built over time instead of falling off.
• No way to grow the database – There are a lot of ways to get no results on Shirt Fit Finder – for example, if you’re taller than the tallest shirt we knew about, we don’t have anything to show you.  This happened to many people.  There were also a lot of people who didn’t own any of the shirts listed, so they couldn’t even search for something better.  A week later, I added a way for people to search with their own shirts and add different brands to the database, but it was a little too late.
• No way to know about the site going down during the day – I didn’t leave any way for people to wake me up during the night, and the notices from my host were all sent to my personal email so my partner in Boston didn’t even realize what was happening.  I fixed this by changing my linode account to be associated with a shared Bespoke Row email address instead.

Overall, though, Shirt Fit Finder was a huge success.  I will definitely be doing more side projects in the future to see what other ideas can gain traction.  They may or may not be related to Bespoke Row, but because I’m thinking quite a lot about the problems of choice and knowledge when making fashion decisions these days, they probably will be.