One Velociraptor Per Child
This is another micro-essay from my Harvard Business School app. It is about One Velociraptor Per Child.
Last summer, one of my friends worked for the One Laptop Per Child organization, which strives to enable education in third world countries. She had an idea for a funny parody of OLPC, “One Velociraptor Per Child.” Velociraptors are a popular meme in many web comics, so we thought many people would find the joke as funny as we did. We put together a website for our fictional Darwinian philanthropy, documenting the breakthroughs in paleontology that enabled our bold vision to put a velociraptor in every school. Visitors could fill out a form to express interest OVPC apparel.
With a flood of interest behind us, we invested in 200 t-shirts sporting our logo, then e-mailed our visitors and told them we were taking orders. It turns out there are a lot of steps to selling t-shirts online, but my roommate was nice enough to let me turn my dorm room into a shipping center while we figured them out. We took a financial risk on our funny idea, but we ended up selling out, and we now hear t-shirt spottings from friends in other cities.
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