Two years of abandoned ideas: what should we give up on next?

@Moose They always happened when I was working and unable to tune in.

@Moose Was this that silly periscope thing?

@Moose I watched some of them. I wish there were more.

@Moose I didn’t even know about these streams. Did I miss an announcement or something? I probably would have watched

@ninjaemilee I’m with @ninjaemilee on this one. What streams?

@Moose I would listen to a goofy Meh podcast at least once.

@Ignorant Some changes are for the better.

@DrunkCat That would be really jerky to put something on the main page and only let some people buy it.

Having special offers for VMPs, however, that’s something else entirely.

@DrunkCat I don’t agree. The very first time I came to meh, it was just before midnight and the clock rolled over and I clicked ‘buy’ and had time to enter my card. It worked, and I still remember the electric jolt. I’ve been here ever since, off and on. The VMP perks, however, are nice.

@chacham So… No different then?

@DrunkCat As much as I like shirts, I don’t think this is viable. Mediocre does NOT need to set up the next “shirt.woot” now. Biggest reason - there’s a lot of sites that already does daily shirts, and with the print-on-demand sites that exist nowadays, the options are even greater.

As shirt.woot offers an AA option too, blank quality isn’t a reason to run away from them anymore. And they still have the Derby.

@narfcake None of those reasons really explain why it’s not viable. I thought you were gonna go into shirt distributors or screen printing logistics. Not just say “well, other people already do it.”

Though I realized I should clarify that I think meh should have a shirt derby specifically; not so much the daily shirt thing.

@DrunkCat it’s called market saturation. Screen printing is a volume dependent industry, you need to be able to turn over thousands of shirts every week for it to really be viable. As @narfcake said, there are a plethora of sites doing this shit now, back when shirt.woot started it was one of only a few. The market is fairly well saturated at this point, I’ve seen more shirt sites shut down over the past few years than have opened including the site where I got my favorite star wars shirt.

Further, it’s not a market to enter lightly due to all of the equipment, personnel, and material expenses involved. They’d catch some breaks on packing materials as they already qualify for volume pricing on those but even a single DTG printer costs many thousands of dollars (my figures on this are rather dated, last one the company I worked for looked at started at $30,000 and it wasn’t one with many bells and whistles) and they can only print one shirt at a time. Traditional screen printing is more economical but far less flexible and would only really be viable for doing large batches of shirts at a time.

@DrunkCat When shirt.woot was launched 9 years ago, Threadless was its only major competitor. Design by Humans then came into play, followed by several other like TeeFury, RipT, ShirtPunch, Qwertee, TheYetee, TeeVillain, and even larger companies like Mighty Fine/We Love Fine got into the crowdsourced shirt design market. At the same time, print-on-demand sites means artists can sell their designs themselves, skipping these daily shirt sites completely.

The nonviable part remains that there are a lot of competitors in this field already – and as the resident shirt nerd, I cannot suggest Mediocre to enter where the margins are low and the customer base is one that can easily change (as shirt.woot could attest to).

Granted, that last one was of their own doing. I mean, who could’ve thought that changing the blanks to a cheaper one and ignoring the more petite women right after raising the price could have a negative effect on sales …

@jbartus Thanks, that was a better explanation. I still think market saturation is phooey considering the number of deal sites out there and yet meh is still here. But the logistics of it all do sound daunting.

@DrunkCat Are the other deal sites one item a day? The paradox of choice is what makes meh standout.

The same can’t be said for crowdsourced shirt sites right now, especially with POD sites as a legitimate competitor.

@jbartus Decent DTG printers like the Spectra 3000 can be had for under $10k, but the rest of the equipment still adds up. A bigger criteria is the environment it’s installed in - ambient heat and humidity are super critical with DTG printing.

@narfcake Yeah my info is about 5 years out of date on the pricing, though I was also relating the cost at the time of printers from ah… I don’t want to say reputable… maybe… more renowned names in the industry like Brother?

To be clear I’m not saying Spectra is good, bad, or otherwise, just… you typically pay more for a known and reputable brand so I dunno where Spectra was 5 years ago either.

But yeah, like you said, that’s not counting facilities, employees to operate the machines, packers, QC, etc. etc. etc.

@narfcake Pretty sure one of the key points touted when starting meh was the folly of going back to one deal a day due to saturation of deal sites.

@jbartus I think the guys who formed the company were working at other DTG companies 5 years ago. The machine is based on Epson mechanicals … which has since entered the DTG market themselves too. They’re currently priced at $15k, down from $20k at introduction.

@DrunkCat IIRC, it was listed as one of the risks in the Kickstarter campaign.

@DrunkCat The key thing to keep in mind is that Meh is but one facet of Mediocre’s activities so even if it failed they’d be okay. It also likely doesn’t involve the acquisition of a large volume of climate controlled warehouse space to operate distinct from the space already held for the wholesale operations.

@jbartus Yes, I conceded the actual logistics would be daunting. It’d still be cool to have meh.derby’s if they could figure a way how without making the shirts more than $10.

@DrunkCat the limiting availability of BOCs (as in, how many/what accounts/address/etc could buy one), the charades around it, using it as a marketing tool, then the over abundance - one thing leads to another - that’s what ruined them at woot. Would hate to see that here. And I’ve missed like the last 5.

@meh Oh believe me, meh.derby is the definitely the Picard line. That far, no further.

Some of those not in the industry might get confused by this thread. Just remember, “DTG” is short for “dirty t-shirt generator”.

@Starblind LOL

Direct-To-Garment. Think of an inkjet printer that prints t-shirts.

@chacham that’s a cat of a different color @drunkcat

@lichme Ouch Town: Population…me.

@JonT I also loved watching the streams whenever I could.

@JonT I had a great time drinking beer that one time!

@BillLehecka I was just thinking about Irk’s Fitness Challenge last week, wondering if anything had every happened with it that I entirely missed. But not enough to do a search. So yeah, this is ideal.

@baqui63 Or they were on their phones…

@baqui63 I competed all the captchas on my ipad and it still said I was a robot. It was unfixable. And I didn’t want to quit and start over to see if it was sold out. So you might think that’s a fun idea but I didn’t.

@sammydog01 I’m curious: did you also answer the poll (saying you were not a robot)?

@baqui63 Yes I did. At least if it sells out you know it right away. I spent 15 minutes trying to redo captchas I had already completed.

@baqui63 OK, retro whining over.

@baqui63 I guess I got lucky and hit the correct Captcha right off the bat. Now the Fuko that came up on my birthday in May didn’t believe I wasn’t a robot.

@curtise
/youtube what you talkin’ bout willis?

@curtise
/giphy no way

@curtise
/youtube hater’s gonna hate

@Moose Hey, don’t underestimate people. I still await the return of Drinking Terribly.

@DrunkCat I still have banana schnapps from Drinking Terrible. I do miss it. And thank you Meh for not following through with the weight loss challenge. Some things do not need to be seen.

@DrunkCat Me too! I mean, I understand that @matthew has to taken care of his liver, and stomach, and kidneys, and every other part of the body potentially destroyed by Drinking Terrible, but I will wait forever for more.

@ninjaemilee Still waiting on that beaver though.

@DrunkCat Giggidy

@meh lolololol

@Moose Woo! All my favorites were spared!

@Starblind It wasn’t part of that contest, but Ask Irk came from a random suggestion I made back in the day.

@Starblind It was mostly just lack of motivation and effort. @Matthew is the only full-time video guy and isn’t in Texas, so a lot of ideas had to be done during @chadp’s and my spare time. There have been a lot of video series ideas pitched (inside that thread and internally) that just didn’t get followthrough because of the time and effort it would take. The top comment was for Dramatic Readings, and we got as far as getting a costume, but once it came to making a set, it just got forgotten. We might come back to it someday, but… eh.

@Moose I love dramatic readings.

/giphy HOW IS BABBY FORMED

@somf69