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Capital Market Event: hats for milestones

The problem. Floor traders on the NYSE used to wear silly hats for nominal milestones, like the Dow hitting 25,000. I made a Dow 100,000 hat on Zazzle, and it sold a few. That raised a bigger question: what if a store made its own merchandise?

What I built. The website, and much of the engine behind it. The idea: scour social media for popular memes and turn them into merchandise programmatically. Not just stock indexes: every popular stock could have hats for its milestones, and the engine would make new hats for new milestones as the old ones are reached. A person approves or denies new items at one or more checkpoints; everything else runs behind the scenes. Set it up, hit go, approve new merch now and then: residual income.

Where it stands. The site builds, but nothing is connected or automated yet. Zazzle doesn't offer a suitable item-creation API and requires frequent activity, so the store will move to another maker that sells and ships on demand through an API.

What I learned. I need more time.