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BlackBox
- daxfohl 10y agoLost me at 1489167 -> 1489280 -.> F5 1489167 -> 1489280 -.> At least pretend to get your realtime data right before posting on HN.
- wingerlang 10y agoThey seems to link the stuff to this https://cdn.blackbox.cool/uploads/json/boxes_shipped.json https://cdn.blackbox.cool/uploads/json/boxes_shipped.json Perhaps they do sent the real number, but it is being cached by the CDN?
- daxfohl 10y agoEven if that's the awesomest tech available, the "realtime update" is so fake and so immediately identifiable as such and so immediately confirmable as such (and the most eye-drawing component of their homepage!) that the company loses all credibility. Without knowing anything else about them, it's a pretty bad indicator.
- davnn 10y agoDo you really think people care that much about the counter?
- wingerlang 10y agoOr it is just a case of dead-reckoning... which is pretty standard.
- vacri 10y agoYou needed to press F5? I just assumed it was nonsense - a new order shipping company, shipping 100+ items per second?
- qwtel 10y agoIt seems like a cool company and much needed as well, but I'm a bit puzzled by the political rhetoric mixed into the marketing page. It's not even that there's politics involved at all (after all you could make the argument that Tesla/SpaceX are like that as well), it's just how short-sighted it is. Ignoring for a moment that the "bloodsucking middleman" of today were the hot new shit in their time, what other than innocent looking gifs do we have in way of them not becoming bloodsuckers themselves, once or if they reach a position with that kind of pricing power? It's easy to act all nice when you don't have a choice anyway... Also, the company shipping the product from the producer to the customer seems pretty "in the middle" to me, no matter their size or political ideas.
- daxfohl 10y agoComparing a company with a horrible homepage gif that helped out a fortune cookie company, to Tesla/SpaceX? So 2028. (No idea what that's supposed to mean).
- Jarwain 10y agoIf it didn't come across, there is no fortune cookie company. Blackbox created the site and product for the fortune cookie company to advertise their actual product: distribution.
- BHSPitMonkey 10y agoThese are the makers of Cards Against Humanity you're talking about; it's simply their sense of humor.
- qwtel 10y agothat would make sense...
- dceddia 10y agoI think that line is pretty smart actually. It's funny, and more importantly, it echoes a worldview that many artists and creatives share -- business is slimy, middlemen are bloodsuckers, and "I just want to sell my thing and make a living doing what I love." Not saying they all feel this way, but it looks to me like Blackbox knows their audience.
- hazelnut 10y agoseems to be down
- ryanlol 10y agoWorks fine from London.
- hartror 10y agoWho is the pixel artist?
- Everlag 10y agoI'm interested to see how 'We pay your sales tax' works out. Also, should there be an epilepsy warning for the header?
- ajdlinux 10y agoThat sounds like an... interesting accounting challenge. Are they actually paying sales tax on behalf of the vendor, or are they paying sales tax in their own name and acting as the legal retail seller?
- wierdaaron 10y agoThey're handling the CC processing and the whole checkout flow, too. It's not so much a shipping company as a "sell stuff online" company. I don't get why they're presenting themselves that way.
- kennywinker 10y agoI'd guess because there are a lot of "sell stuff online" companies, but most of them leave it up to you to handle the shipping.
- homero 10y agoYes like ClickBank
- lelandbatey 10y agoThis seems like an interesting service, but I want too toss out a suggestion for those looking to disseminate info about a product or service: Tell me a story. More specifically, use a hypothetical story to provide context and an example of why the hell I'm reading your page. This is the explanatory copy on this page: Our mission is to help you sell and ship stuff directly to your fans for a fraction of the cost and effort of doing it yourself. Blackbox works like a co-op: if we all go in together, we get the cheapest pricing, the fastest shipping, and the best service. The shipping is fast. We pay your sales tax. You can customize the packaging and the inserts. It’s pretty great. At the end of this, I still am confused about what you do. What would help is a hypothetical use case and narative, and to demonstrate that, I'll invent one: Let's say you're running a Kickstarter. You're a domain expert who's built something awesome, and you've even successfully kickstarted a project to build what you love. Now though, after having built all these gizmos you need to ship those to your backers, and this is something you're NOT an expert in. Looking in to shipping, you see it's going to involve complicated contracts and procedures to ship your gizmo at any scale, and at a cost that FAR exceeds your back of the envelope calculation of price and effort. You wish there where some simple shipping service where you only worry about the packaging, and they handle picking up from the manufacturer, storage, and shipping; a service with straightforward pricing, and customer service oriented at helping someone with your needs and your scale. That's where BlackBox comes in. Our mission is to help you sell and ship stuff directly to your fans for a fraction of the cost and effort of doing it yourself. Blackbox works like a co-op: if we all go in together, we get the cheapest pricing, the fastest shipping, and the best service. The shipping is fast. We pay your sales tax. You can customize the packaging and the inserts. It’s pretty great. I don't know if the above story accurately represents what it is that BlackBox provides, but I hope you can see that having a story helps a reader answer the question of "is this helpful or relevant to my situation or goals?".
- aug24ta 10y agoAccording to their FAQ, they sell merchandise on consignment. I think the source of your confusion is that they refer to themselves as a shipping company when that's not what they are.
- cormacrelf 10y ago
- jethro_tell 10y agoThat intro. Seems like they are selling headaches not shipping.
- shash7 10y agoI agree its a bit in your face but it does a good job of getting your attention instead of making it look like another garden variety slap-stick startup web template.
- justrossthings 10y agoThese guys spent more time on animating their team portraits than explaining their product
- culturestate 10y agoAs a person who needs this kind of thing, I immediately understood what they do and the value they provide. I think the messaging is quite well directed at their target while staying within the CAH brand.
- jseip 10y agoImmediately hit 'inspect element' on bb-animated-header
- dpcan 10y agoThat's one gnarly gif. Did the same thing.
- bigiain 10y agoSlightly disappointingly it's just a big 1.4MB file with 32 frames in it... I wonder if if could be done two orders of magnitude smaller with old-school 8-bit demoscene colour palette cycling? That's clearly the aesthetic they're referencing... I bet some early '90's graphics hacker could have made that in 4096 bytes ;-) (probably not - certainly not at the full 700+ x 500+ resolution...)
- wingerlang 10y agoThe color cycling images I've seen have all been static. How would it work when there's this much animation involved?
- BillinghamJ 10y agoIt wouldn't
- icebraining 10y agoIt actually would! Someone posted this on HN recently: http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/?sound=0 http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/?sound=0
- wingerlang 10y agoThey are all static. Maybe it would work if you can color cycle a gif, and keep the animated parts solid colors and cycle the background.
- cercatrova 10y agoSo like Massdrop but for any arbitrary product?
- kajecounterhack 10y agoMore like 1 big massdrop for specifically seller's shipping & fulfillment costs (vs paying full price for shipping, negotiating fulfillment deals yourself, or paying amazong to do it).
- tux1968 10y agoPresumably you have to pay to ship all your inventory to them in the first place. Didn't see any mention of that in the details.
- failrate 10y agoYes, that is how this kind of fulfillment works.
- fisherjeff 10y agoI'd assume you'd just have your finished product drop shipped to their fulfillment center.
- ng-user 10y agoThat's what I got from the info provided.. essentially bulk ship all of the stock you have now and then get back to producing content until you've got another worth-while batch to ship.. interesting. That's a bold move cotton, let's see how it plays out.
- jessriedel 10y agoIsn't this much, much cheaper than shipping each item individually, so the per-item cost won't change much?
- kajecounterhack 10y agoSounds to me like yet another fulfillment service but maybe they take care of more? Anyone know how it compares to fulfilled by Amazon or what comparable services exist? I'm curious to know if it's cheaper or just easier. (Or both, or neither!)
- voltagex_ 10y ago$50.75 US to ship to Australia.
- cormacrelf 10y agoDepends on the item. Looks like the press kit's kinda large, because buying a cool little pin from Max Temkin (http://maxistentialism.com http://maxistentialism.com) says $10 for shipping.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- paulrosenzweig 10y agoSo is this Gumroad but for physical goods? The sales flow is similarly out of your hands, but it's super easy to set up.
- Whostasay 10y agoWow, what an offensive website! First thing I do when I visit websites like that is to close the tab. Hope they aren't a business. The horrible pixel art from 1980s doesn't help.
- Trufa 10y agoI actually came here to comment on how amazing it looks, truly well done and captivating.
- gsmethells 10y agoFor a second there I thought the Window Manager Blackbox had risen from the dead. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbox
- wise0wl 10y agopfft, fluxbox ftw
- gsmethells 10y agoYeah, I'm old. I used blackbox on Linux in '98. Nostalgia.
- karmajunkie 10y agoI used to switch back and forth between that and enlightenment... those were the days...
- busterarm 10y agoNow I just have tmux open fullscreen with a couple of window splits & sessions open all the time. Honestly though, the experience is way better this way.
- legulere 10y agoAnd I used BBlean on windows in the 2000s.
- destructionator 10y agoI love Blackbox and still use it today, though I privately maintain my own fork with a few bug fixes and hacks for my personal preferences. Best WM I have ever used.
- karim 10y agoI'm interested --- is your fork public?
- blazespin 10y agoIt's the sharing economy hitting creating companies. it's about freaking time...
- RobertLong 10y agoI really thought this was going to be my favorite yet evil puzzle game Blackbox. http://blackboxpuzzles.com/ http://blackboxpuzzles.com/
- function_seven 10y agoJust downloaded and started playing it. This game is fun, weird, and I can already see frustration in my future. ROT01 spoiler: When I had to [ivou epxo nz ifbeqipoft] I knew this game meant business :)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Cogito 10y agopedantic, but isn't that ROT25? I helped beta test blackbox, was really fun and the developer was fun to work with for the few pieces of feedback I had.
- ryanmcleod 10y agoHah yep. And once again I learn that I don't know the alphabet as well as you'd think! Thank _you_ for the help Cogito! FYI: New beta is going out soon ;)
- function_seven 10y agoOh, so you're the one responsible for me tossing my phone about and abusing it in ways it was not intended to be used? I'm on Stage 3 of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kübler-Ross_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kübler-Ross_model right now, pleading with the stupid lights to respond. Seriously, this game is fantastic and frustrating. Good job.
- Jarwain 10y agoSince you're here... Any timeline on an android port?
- empressplay 10y ago$35 shipping to Canada for a box of fortune cookies. Pass. Unless you _only_ want to sell stuff inside the US. Then it's okay.
- aetherspawn 10y agoThis needs an NSFW tag, like, when you open this page and your monitor starts psychedelically flashing, everyone turns around and stares at you to shame.
- Animats 10y agoOh, it's a fulfillment house. There are lots of companies which do that, including Amazon and UPS. The site seems to be addressed to people who don't know that. Nice art, though. Not to be confused with "blackbox.com", which sells networking accessories.
- sgentle 10y agoIt may be that they are functionally identical to other fulfilment companies, but if they do a better job of convincing their indie seller target market to use them and respond better to their needs, it probably doesn't matter. > Oh, it's team chat. There are lots of companies which do that, including HipChat and Campfire. The site seems to be addressed to people who don't know that. Nice UI, though. > Not to be confused with "slackware.com", which is a Linux distribution.
- joshkpeterson 10y agoExactly. And if people are curious about the type of pain that might drive people to a service like this, they can read about episodes like: >"After fighting through FedEx's rigorous claim process they declared that the package is not valuable beyond the cost of the paper it took to create this handcrafted, original artwork," Scofield and Shuey wrote. "Even though the package was insured, they aren't willing to pay the full $6,000 it cost to create the intricate set and are only covering the cost of the materials." http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2014/12/17/fedex-loses-enormous-hand-cut-setpiece-in-zoe-scofield-and-juniper-shueys-latest-show http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2014/12/17/fedex-l...
- whamlastxmas 10y agoI side with FedEx on this and it makes perfect sense. I doubt blackbox would handle it any differently. The problem is that $6000 is just an arbitrary price made up by a single person. There's nothing stopping me from drawing a stick figure, saying I charge $1 million for the labor that goes into this drawing, shipping+insuring it for a ton of money, then attempting to convince FedEx it was damaged during shipping to claim my money. Additionally, FedEx did tremendously more than just pay for the materials. A piece of Tyvek like that costs a few dollars, they paid out $1000 for it.
- oftenwrong 10y agoYet another HN title that says nothing about what lies on the other side of the link. "BlackBox: a new shipping company from the creators of Cards Against Humanity" Isn't that just a bit more descriptive?
- verroq 10y agoHow else are they going to bait you into clicking it?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- monokrome 10y agoBlackBox: A website designed to stimulate seizures
- Bluestrike2 10y agoI'd love to see the design brief just to see if that was the goal from the start or they just wound up there after playing on a SNES emulator or something. It's a crazy aesthetic, but a very pleasing sort of crazy in an overpowering way.
- ryanmcleod 10y agoRelevant to this one too ;P http://blackboxpuzzles.com/ http://blackboxpuzzles.com/
- SuperPaintMan 10y agoBlackBox: Art As A Service ( https://theblackbox.ca/hn.html https://theblackbox.ca/hn.html ) Damn, Blackbox is a excellently generic name. Had a heart attack seeing this on the front page. Blackbox should use Blackbox for shipping.
- creshal 10y agoBut do they use Blackbox? http://xwinman.org/blackbox.php http://xwinman.org/blackbox.php
- magic5227 10y ago5% retail price? That seems quite steep. I've personally shipped 1,000+ gifts for Kickstarter backers, I'd suggest using Easypost.com unless you really need a warehouse. It's super cheap.
- danpalmer 10y agoEasyPost aren't a "3PL" (third party logistics provider) though, just a layer on top of shipping companies. Warehouse space and people's time is expensive, that's what you're paying for. Even then, if you're just fulfilling a kickstarter campaign, the tools that the shipping companies provide for small-scale dispatch are plenty.
- homero 10y agoThat would go well with bitcoin
- brunorsini 10y agohttps://shotput.com https://shotput.com is a YC company also doing fulfillment. It seems focused at slightly larger customers though.
- davnn 10y agoI always wonder about the conversion metrics when I see an artistic website like that. I think the website would perform better without that huge header.
- dutchbrit 10y agoI actually saw the animated header and clicked the back button thinking it was just a gif and no actual page (until I read the comments).
- yAnonymous 10y ago"Quality and simplicity are more important than saving a few pennies on shipping. Our price includes the beautiful Blackbox checkout button, our real-time dashboard, and our dedicated customer support team." "Artists own the relationship with their customers and can talk to them whenever and however they want. That relationship works best without bloodsucking businessmen in the middle." Right.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- elliotpage 10y agoTried to give this a go (It sounds cool and shipping that scales is a massive pain) but the $5 press kit has $33 shipping to the UK! Guess this won't be solving my shipping problems after all.
- devitalizer 10y ago$61 to ship $5 press kit to Latvia. And takes a couple of weeks to do.
- metafunctor 10y ago$40 to Finland, would take a couple of weeks too.
- thesimon 10y agoThe cookies seem cheaper to ship though, $5.50 to Germany.
- thesmok 10y agoAnd they don't ship to Ukraine at all
- scandox 10y ago"..without publishers or bloodsucking middlemen taking most of the money..." Obviously publishers and bloodsucking middlemen are more or less synonymous in this sentence. I'm on the board of a publishing company and have also worked as an agent (a true bloodsucker). Two things: 1. In a practical sense it is easy to see publishers and agents as bloodsucking middlemen. Once you've actually worked with lots of creators and artists what you learn is that there'a very good reason for the middlemen. Artists do not generally wish to have too much to be doing with their public - especially not in a commercial sense. In the end of the day Publishers and Agents give writers the thing they really need most: faith. It sounds like corny bull - hell it is corny bull...but it's also incredibly important. 2. I remember reading a great article about Fintech startups trying to "cut out the middleman" and it had a great observation in it: the middleman is there because the two parties don't trust each other - not because they're stupid. I always think of that when I hear people trying this approach.
- benjamincburns 10y ago#2 is soo spot on. As somewhat of a professional middleman (I'm an engineering manager) I find quite often I've maximized the value I can provide when I've negotiated away this distrust and effectively put myself out of a job. It sounds a bit silly if you say it that way, but connecting people who wouldn't have otherwise connected and getting them to play nice with one another when they may not have otherwise done so is really quite rewarding and definitely quite necessary.
- humanrebar 10y agoHere's a great podcast on "The Middleman Economy". It expands on your points and brings up a few more use cases for value-added middlemen that you haven't listed here. http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/03/marina_krakovsk.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/03/marina_krakovsk.htm...
- awesomerobot 10y agoAren't promotion and partnerships/deals also part of the process? I see that what Blackbox does accomplishes some of the scale factors — but it's all about the logistical layer and not really about the service layer (as you mentioned).
- brakmic 10y agoSome clickbaits deserve more than just a single "downvote".
- skeltoac 10y agoI'm just going to watch that gif all day now. Thanks.
- dlevine 10y agoI believe that they were responsible for delivering the Exploding Kittens Kickstarter.
- kdamken 10y agoI saw the TLD and thought to myself, "What a silly thing to end your url with. This better be one badass website". Then I opened the page and saw that gif, and they totally redeemed themselves! Very mesmerizing.
- felipemesquita 10y agoShipping the promotional material package to Brazil is quite expensive and deliver date format is a bit confusing. Looks great for orders placed within the US, though. Regular Shipping Delivers 2/9-9/9 $43.25
- stevenwiles 10y ago"BlackBox: The makers of Cards Against Humanity do another stupid thing and get paid lots of money for it" ^ that is a much more accurate title