15 ms·
Instapainting – From $4k in debt to $32k/mo in passive revenue with no employees
- chrischen 10y agoI can answer any questions, whether about how to get a great Christmas present, or questions about the article!
- aaawow 10y agodo you see deep learning artistic services as competitors to real artists? e.g. https://deepart.io/ https://deepart.io/
- chrischen 10y agoTo real artists, perhaps, but we currently only offer direct photo to painting services, which mean the only services offered by artists on our site are directly copying photos and turning them into physical artworks. So unless deepart.io is combined with a painting robot, we don't feel threatened. And in fact we already released both a painting robot and the first free-to-use neural network style transfer demo.
- jacquesm 10y agoYou keep saying 'we' whereas my impression is that this is a solo project, is the lady you mention in the article your partner in the business (since you mention no employees)?
- csallen 10y agoI have a question! (Even though I could've just asked you this during the interview itself.) You say that you've automated most of the process of running the business: "I've gradually adapted the software over time to automate every process, and generally I only have to step in in rare instances of high-level disputes." How much time do you spend working nowadays? And on what? What's your typical day look like?
- chrischen 10y agoIt's passive income in the sense that if I just dropped everything and played video games all day, the income would sustain itself. However that's far from what I actually do :). It simply means I can free myself up to work on new features or increase revenue. So I'm still working about on average 5-8 hours per day, 6-7 days a week. I like to travel a bit, and work while traveling. Since I have no employees, this makes it easier to have this lifestyle. Whenever I get a chance to sit down in a coffee shop I'll usually stay a few hours and do work.
- antaviana 10y agoDo you ever take several days off? Like a two-three week vacation without being online at all. This is what I find most difficult to do for a 1-employee operation that offers a 24/7 service.
- chrischen 10y agoAll the time. Customer service is handled by the sellers directly.
- ska 10y agoSo it is not passive. That's ok, almost all "passive income" isn't, and the term has been abused into near uselessness. Sounds like the term you are actually looking for is "lifestyle business" Nothing wrong than that, and it's a more sensible (i.e. well defined) goal that passive income.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- thang 10y agoHow much customer support (for either artists or buyers) did you have to do as this grew before you managed to automate everything? How long did it take to define/implement/automate these processes?
- chrischen 10y agoI'm primarily a coder. So it doesn't take long to identify something that I have to repeatedly do manually, and then automate a solution that would reduce the incidences of it. A feature can be pushed out as fast as a day or sometimes take a week, if it's a complex problem.
- pdog 10y agoI have a question about the concept of hiring artists and sourcing from factories in China. What does Instapainting do—in terms of due diligence—to ensure safe working conditions and fair labor practices for workers in the factories that make the product?
- chrischen 10y agoWe're just a marketplace, like Etsy or Ebay behind the scenes. That being said, I have personally visited many of the sellers and for advanced products such as highly detailed portrait paintings (the ones sold on Instapainting.com), the artists always work from their home and are independent contractors. It's only for large quantity mass replica work that are actually done in factories, and I've visited those factories as well, however they do not provide the detailed portraits type of work.
- dilemma 10y agoDid you also ask Tesla and SpaceX about what they do to ensure humane working conditions? I've worked in a studio/factory in China and visited plenty; from what I've read, they're far better than SpaceX.
- countryqt30 10y agoWhat keywords / search terms did you optimize for?
- chrischen 10y agoThe keyword discovery at first was mostly accidental. Basically after the techcrunch article was pushed out, I eventually noticed that certain keywords were ranking based on that article, and certain ones were converting to sales. Then it was a matter of pushing out more publicity to rank higher, and then later on identify other keywords.
- franciscop 10y agoHow do you learn the business part of what you are doing? I can and do program fancy websites quickly, but I fail to see how I could monetize it. I mean about things that scale well, are kind of low-work and mostly an experiment. So, how do you pick which experiments to try? Do you have like many ideas constantly like that? Do you try few of them until one sticks? How do you know you will be able to pull it off later on?
- chrischen 10y agoI learned everything I know how to do through practice and execution. Yes I've had many ideas. Many terrible, most inconsequential. You'll of course only read about the 1 or 2 successful ones on HN ;). After trying hundreds of ideas, you get lazy and get faster at pushing out ideas. Then just keep at the ones that stick.
- franciscop 10y agoI see, so it's basically the same as releasing Open Source software only that you need a plausible selling thing, possibly with a physical product. I'll start trying to sell some of them, thanks (:
- noddingham 10y agoI'm interested in your thoughts on how you came about the idea. I don't want to be disparaging but do you consider it "lucky" that you had a friend point you towards selling art reproductions online? Were you already thinking of similar ideas? There's that gulf between ideas and execution, and you clearly executed well. Given that you had previous ideas that you weren't able to successfully execute on (relative to Instapainting), I'm also curious of your thoughts comparing those experiences? Also, congrats on the success and thanks for sharing some of the inside details.
- chrischen 10y agoThe short answer is I tested hundreds of ideas. At that point, you could tell I was cutting all the bullshit. The original Instapainting.com page was just a single page with some pictures and a Stripe Checkout form after all.
- shostack 10y agoCan you elaborate on your testing process and some of the other things you tested? What was your criteria for success?
- niccolop 10y agoWhat other verticals do you think you’ll expand into?
- z3t4 10y agoCan I ask how old you are ? You seem to have amazing determination and knowledge. Thanks for sharing! It's refreshing to see you doing "old school" public relations instead of relying solely on SEO witch is very risky.
- 6stringmerc 10y agoI'm a somewhat vain individual. Any of your talented artists capable of making me one of those Dorian Gray type portraits[1]? Kidding aside, I compliment you on the innovation and using technology to streamline the relationship between customer and producer. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Picture_of_Dorian_Gray https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Picture_of_Dorian_Gray
- charlierguo 10y agoWhat were your favorite resources for learning SEO?
- reledi 10y ago- Have you experimented with painters from areas other than China? - What's the onboarding process like for a painter? - I read on the reddit soft-launch post that one way the business handled scaling was by printing out the photos and then painting over them. Did it turn out to be a successful strategy?
- mistermann 10y agoWhat a great idea....I woulda kept that one a secret.
- ehsanu1 10y agoCongrats Chris, I knew you'd make it!
- rmsaksida 10y agoCould you elaborate on the marketplace backing Instapainting? You've mentioned sellers and painters - if I understood correctly, does that mean Instapainting immediately delegates to 3rd party sellers once a sale is done through the website, and it's the sellers who handle hiring the painters, shipping and (some of) customer service? If so, that's amazing and quite surprising. It really is a marketplace/bidding portal wholly abstracted for the end user. Congrats on the website and success, very inspiring story!
- chrischen 10y agoYes. It is fundamentally a marketplace abstracted for the end user. It evolved into this way over time, and I didn't set out planning to build it this way.
- linuxlewis 10y agoSites down.
- vatotemking 10y ago> I've used PHP, Node.js, Mongo, and React.js. The stack consists largely of micro-services, which is crucial in allowing me (the only developer) to migrate the site to new technologies. Can you pls elaborate on this?
- jgorn 10y agoHi Chris, question about a very minor part of your sales funnel. The question about sharing the customers photo & painting on your site defaults to YES (which is 'free') and offers a NO option at +$3 extra charge. Pricing theory, I'm particularly thinking of loss aversion, would suggest you'd get more customers selecting your preferred option of YES if you offer a discount for making this selection (-$3) and leave the rate unchanged for those declining to share. I'm curious if you A/B tested this pricing option and found the +$3 charge more successful (assuming you are trying to maximise customers opting to share their photos)? Anecdotally I'd be more inclined to pick the option that gives me a discount, if it existed.
- redleggedfrog 10y agoUg, is it just me, or does that he took money before actually having anyone to paint the pictures seem unethical? Would people have ordered if they had of known there were no artists as yet, or for that matter the artist were going to be friends of the website owner?
- chrischen 10y agoThey ordered under the promise that I would deliver the product, somehow, and I did. I hired my friends who were artists in San Francisco to do them—at a loss too. That being said, worse case scenario would have been a refund, and most people paid via credit card which is interest free for 30 days anyways.
- redleggedfrog 10y agoI guess it's just me then. :^) For me it's the difference between purchasing a product and investing in your business. If presented as an investment, where my money is going to enable you to produce the item for me, then I'd be fine with it, because I would know the current state of your business. Now, if I knew you had no artists and were just floating an idea I would most likely refrain. The worst case scenario also assumes that the value of the product purchased is only the cost. What if it was purchased as a gift, with a specific timeline? I do understand that this is a tried and true business practice, just one that I am not comfortable with when the customer is not aware of it.
- dismantlethesun 10y agoWorst case scenario, he'd have returned the money for any specific painting that couldn't be done, right?
- zem 10y agowell, worst-case scenario the customer wanted the painting as, e.g., a graduation gift for their kid, and suddenly got told at the last minute "we couldn't do it, here's a refund"
- avitzurel 10y ago"acquiring artists turned out to be far from the hardest part of the business." This. I consulted many businesses as an engineer and often times technology can get you so far. You have to "get your hands dirty" and do the work. Tech is rarely the bottleneck, it's often sales, understanding needs, contracting work to 3rd parties etc... Kudos to the owner, great job
- TAForObvReasons 10y ago... the author was saying the opposite. "far from the hardest" = "not the hardest" and you can see it in context: > Shortly after the launch I was contacted by many artists, mostly from China (they already saturate other marketplaces like eBay, Alibaba, and Etsy). The initial batch of orders were break even, but once the market-rate artists contacted us, I knew it was going to be profitable. Sounds like the difficulty wasn't in finding artists
- chrischen 10y agoThat's true, the difficulty wasn't finding the artists. It was finding customers, and growing the customer base, if any thing. That being said, the OP is correct also in that the tech wasn't the hardest part either. The tech was always something I had to worry about after the fact of acquiring more customers. You can always find customers first and support them manually, and then revise the tech later to reduce costs.
- throwaway1892 10y agoReminds me of "Do things that don't scale" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6041765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6041765) by Paul Graham.
- avitzurel 10y agoReading is hard :) You're right. I guess I read what I wanted it to say and what what it actually said. I'll leave it up here as a reminder to read better next time.
- supersan 10y agoLove reading such stories. Also every interview I've read on indiehackers always has this one advice as the most important one: build quickly, iterate later.
- hiou 10y agoNothing like exploiting people to make a living. Maybe the people doing the actual paintings should get that $32/mo? Gross US imperialism at its finest. So embarrassed to be from this country. FYI: Exploiting artists isn't some kind of disruptive innovation. Ever wonder why the arts are much less likely to adopt open source licensing? People like this jerk. Oh wait, I forgot. They aren't real artists because they happen to live in China. This is so so so gross.
- chrischen 10y agoWe operate almost exactly like Etsy or Ebay in this regard, we just don't expose the marketplace to the front end because we offer only a single product type (photo to painting) at the moment. Many of our sellers are listed on Ebay or Etsy too (at higher prices).
- hiou 10y agoSo what is your percentage per work?
- chrischen 10y agoI currently put out a fixed price, and then the artists dynamically price based on the actual piece. It ranges from 5%-40% depending on the actual picture and subject matter. The plan is to fix to a fixed commission once the new marketplace is rolled out to the user facing portion of the site.
- hiou 10y ago1. How does that compare to eBay and Etsy now that you have used SEO tricks to push yourself up in the rankings so artists now have to go through you? 2. 5-40% quite a broad range. Who determines this percentage and what percentage does the highest volume quintile pay out?
- jonknee 10y agoIt's not like there is one artist who is doing all the work and is in the dark about how much their talents are worth. Painting is a skill, but it's not a super valuable one unless you're one in a million and create original pieces. Making a photo into a painting is valuable, but only to the person who has memories wrapped up in the photo.
- 6stringmerc 10y agoHow enterprising. It's like the internet's very own Thomas Kinkade as a service. Clever arbitrage of artistic labor markets, that's for sure.
- alistproducer2 10y agoUsually I don't like these kinds of pieces, but this one had lots of good examples that anyone could apply. Congrats on your success!
- asenna 10y agoOut of curiosity, why do you usually not like these kinds of pieces? I have enjoyed all of the IndieHackers interviews and find them pretty inspirational.
- TekMol 10y agoWhen the 2048 game came out, I quickly hacked up a 2 player version and placed it under the Instapainting.com domain for SEO purposes. Does this really work? Does Google think you are a better site for ordering paintings because you host a game? I tend to think Google is smarter by now. In fact, I would expect that Google almost exclusively relies on real user behaviour these days.
- chrischen 10y agoI'm fairly certain it worked. It's more like the page gets lots of link, thus lots of clout, and I link to Instapainting from that page, which means I transfer some of that clout. And Google can't classify Instapainting.com as a "photo to painting" site. It just knows it's a site that contains some content. Since Yahoo.com would get better rankings even with disparate topics under the domain.
- TekMol 10y agoWhat makes you certain? I am fairly certain that the world's best search engine is not falling for that. How can we decide who is right?
- chrischen 10y agoI don't think it's necessarily tricking google. Again, the page has clout, and not everyone can simply make a popular page. By associating Instapainting with that page, it's saying Instapainting knows that guy who made that popular game, so Instapainting should have more visibility too.
- n0us 10y agoWhat makes you certain that the world's best search engine is not falling for that?
- danso 10y agoUh, what experiences have you had that make you think otherwise? Google is the greatest information-finding service invented but it can still surface poor results. But in this case, I don't think Google was necessarily "fooled". The developer happened to be multitalented enough to create a game that was popular. Assuming that the traffic it receives was legitimate (which I imagine Google can know based on Google Analytics), how is that not a signal that the domain belongs to someone of more notability than just some random domain? The problem would be if Google used that signal as the sole determiner of whether Instapainting.com was a place to find good paintings. But there's no indication that that is the case, just that clout gained from the popular game may have helped Instapainting overall be seen as a legit domain, generally.
- countryqt30 10y ago"Majority of traffic is coming from SEO" What are your primary keywords?
- googletazer 10y agoGreat business, congratulations! Could you elaborate on how your shipping pipeline works from China to US/worldwide? Also if there were any problems shipping works of art, e.g. if I upload a picture of Starry Night, an artist paints that and it is shipped to me, would that cause a problem at the border?
- 0xCAFEFARE 10y agoI'm interested in this as well. I'm not wholly familiar with the shipping process, but does the business rely on taking advantage of any shipping cost discrepancies?
- chrischen 10y agoIn the early days, we used a startup called BoxC (now defunct I think) and took a more hands-on approach to shipping. They would drop off at or ship their their completed products to BoxC shipping locations which then handles fulfillment. The site actually functions as a marketplace now, and the independent sellers handle their own shipping methods.
- gm-conspiracy 10y agoWhat is the largest size possible (that can be shipped without an ordeal)? Lynn Boggess, paints on large canvases (some over 4 ft x 4 ft) using cement trowels: http://www.lynnboggess.com/ http://www.lynnboggess.com/ Obviously, that is probably unrealistic for shipping from China. Also, I was interested in having some abstract paintings "copied", using some of the images from: https://open_nsfw.gitlab.io/ https://open_nsfw.gitlab.io/ The images are only 224pxx224px. Would that be possible? The image resolution is not that big, but I would like something like 2 or 3 feet in length/width.
- themagician 10y agoDo you think people know they are paying for cheap Chinese labor when they purchase? If not, do you think they would care? When I read something like,"100% free-hand painted onto a canvas by a master artist," my impression isn't, "we outsource the painting to cheap Chinese labor." My impression is clearly wrong. I suspect others have this impression though. I think the concept is cool, but I'm not sure people would be so willing to pay if they knew some desperate artist in China was getting paid below minimum wage to create the artwork. I guess what I'm saying is you are selling the idea of a premium service at a great price—too good to be true—and it is, because it's not true. Or maybe it just doesn't matter. I don't know. Also, reading this over my tone sounds a little condescending. I don't mean to be. Generally curious what others think about this.
- chrischen 10y agoI think you're coming to this with preconceived notions. Not all artists registered are "cheap Chinese labor," and that label is also disparaging to the artists that do happen to be in China, and are Chinese, including myself, as I was born in China. I wouldn't like it if you called Instapainting a piece of work produced by cheap Chinese labor (which it could very well be described since I only made about 36k salary in the first year). That being said, for this product category (photo to painting), nearly all sellers on Etsy, Ebay, or other sites, are dominated by Chinese sellers. We don't produce the product, rather these sellers are selling through us. > I think the concept is cool, but I'm not sure people would be so willing to pay if they knew some desperate artist in China was getting paid below minimum wage to create the artwork. I guess what I'm saying is you are selling the idea of a premium service at a great price—too good to be true—and it is, because it's not true. I can't guarantee all the wages the artists are paid, as many sellers on the site are simply reselling or doling orders out to subcontractors (the artists). However from the ones I've visited, they are paid well above minimum wage, and in fact above the average salary in China. Most people do know that the paintings come from China, and I'm actually one of the only sites that publicly reveals this (I released an article about the painters in China on the company blog). But as you can also understand, putting big text on our home page that says "Get paintings from cheap Chinese labor" would sound condescending, not be 100% true (since we're a marketplace behind the scenes), and probably negatively affect sales as well.
- OJFord 10y ago> micro-services, which is crucial in allowing me (the > only developer) to migrate the site to new technologies. I know it's 5 years old, but I still don't see why it's been so crucial to have kept migrating to "new technologies"?
- chrischen 10y agoIt lets me upgrade the application piecewise. For example I have pages that are just PHP/HTML, and some that are rendered with Node/React, and the site works seamlessly together (seamless sessions and everything).
- phodo 10y agoAre there any perspectives you can share with respect to SEO and client-side React?
- MrMullen 10y agoIt's not "migrating to" that is the driving force, it's the you have to "migrate from" that is the driving force. Don't get stuck on old tech.
- ethanbond 10y agoThat doesn't really answer the "why."
- paulddraper 10y ago"Build one to throw away"? As the business evolves, the needs evolve, and it may be appropriate for the tech to evolve. It's less a fault of choosing the wrong tech stack to begin with and more a virtue of prototyping quickly.
- antarrah 10y agoI find it amusing how HN readers just believe anything they read about how much people are making. For all we know this might be a guy who's making very little and wanted coverage on indiehackers.com.
- csallen 10y agoChris is a personal friend of mine I've known since 2011 when we went through Y Combinator together. I can vouch for his integrity.
- harrisreynolds 10y agoWhat are the profit margins?
- meritt 10y agoAlso interested in this. Revenue is solid but I imagine a lot of that is pass-thru to the artists? Middle-man platforms can usually only do about 10% margin before opex.
- dkrich 10y agoThe hardest part was actually conveying that it wasn't just some print or photo filter, and this is something I still have difficulty with today. Curious about whether people care about this. As somebody who takes a lot of pictures, if somebody could produce one of my photos as a painting using Photoshop that was indistinguishable (or close to it) from a person, I really don't think I'd care. From a business perspective, this seems like it would also carry the benefits of scaling better and having better quality control. You could also give the person multiple options (watercolor, oil, impressionist, etc.). I'm sure the OP knows the market much better than I do, I'm just curious whether going with simulated paintings was ever considered and whether customers really do care about having a person paint it?
- gm-conspiracy 10y agoHave you ever seen an oil painting up close? There was an article awhile ago about using a 3d printer and scanner to make a "copy" of an oil painting. http://www.designboom.com/art/oce-3d-printer-creates-identical-reproductions-of-fine-art-paintings-09-30-2013/ http://www.designboom.com/art/oce-3d-printer-creates-identic... Until Photoshop filters output STL files and color 3d printers come down in price, humans win.
- dkrich 10y agoNo, never. I just asked about it because I heard the term once a long time ago, but to be honest I'm note even sure what an oil painting is. Is it like the same thing they put in engines to make them run smoothly? This was actually a question for the OP, since he has experience in it, but I'll bite. If you use high quality paper and printing, you can make extremely high quality prints that imitate all kinds of effects like oil, watercolor, colored pencil, and sketching. I actually have quite a bit of experience in producing them, which is why I asked this question in the first place. There are many other factors besides texture to consider. Cost, color, consistency, etc.
- teh_klev 10y agoOil [0] (and acrylic) paintings aren't just flat things like you get off of your high quality printer. They have a 3D texture which you can visibly discern and run your fingers over (but probably shouldn't) and feel the brush or palette knife strokes laid by the artist. You really should get yourself to some decent art galleries; you'll then, I hope, discover there's no comparison between a hand painted or drawn picture to that produced by printer. Once you've viewed artwork produced by the human hand, prints produced by all those fancy effects and fancy papers become pale imitations. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_painting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_painting
- qwrusz 10y agoCongrats on the success. Thanks for sharing the business story too. Disclaimer: this is not a paid endorsement. I don't know Chris. But I happen to be a customer - having bought a painting as a gift. It is framed on the wall at this moment. My only feedback. Your prices felt too inexpensive. Knowing something was handmade I would have paid more than I did. I'm sure you have researched the market and margins and all that, just letting you know my experience. Also the artist being from China aspect that other comments are mentioning, almost everything we own is made in China, and the location or nationality of an artist shouldn't be any different than other types of work. Also there are some darn good artists in China, check Youtube for examples. Congrats again.
- jfoutz 10y agoReminds me of one of my favorite "jokes" about scale. If you're a one in a million, there are 1357 of you in china.
- caf 10y agoAlso similar to a line from the song Up Against The Wall by The Whitlams: She was one in a million, yeah So there's five more, just in New South Wales
- cloudjacker 10y agoIn NYC former Mayor Bloomberg used to say that about all the entrepreneurs trying to make it with original ideas and gusto "there's eight of you here"
- mseebach 10y agoIn a similar vein, I really like this line from "Try this at home" by Frank Turner: "If you’re oh so fucking different then who cares what you have to say?" The entire song, while nominally about making music, is pretty fun and inspiring and I feel applies very well to other kinds of entrepreneurialism as well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66knvY3vxsA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66knvY3vxsA
- 10y ago
- sampl 10y ago> The hardest part was actually conveying that it wasn't just some print or photo filter, and this is something I still have difficulty with today. I thought the same thing, maybe because it's called "instapainting"
- jeremybeckham 10y agoI had actually been to your site for the 2x2048 campaign, but never went to the homepage. Seeing this and having just been on vacation with the family made me decide to order a painting for my wife of our children in front of a water fountain that we took last week. Good timing.
- OJFord 10y agoWhat's going on with the shipping pricing? > Standard delivery (approx 3 weeks) > Guaranteed (+$15) > Within 25 days (+$20) > Within 15 days (+$20) 3 weeks is 21 days, so assuming "guaranteed" just removes the "approx", why would I ever pay more for "within 25"? Further, why would I ever pay for "within 25" when "within 15" is the same price? Surely this can be condensed to: > Standard delivery (approx 3 weeks) > Guaranteed within 3 weeks (+$15) > Guaranteed within 15 days (+$20) without changing the effective pricing; while making the options clearer.
- hilop 10y agoDecimal weeks
- oDot 10y agoHere's a great bit by Dan Ariely (behavioral economics) that might answer your question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOhb4LwAaJk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOhb4LwAaJk And while I'm sharing Dan Ariely links, here's another one (but I can't tell you what it's about, just watch and wait for it): https://vimeo.com/63062967 https://vimeo.com/63062967
- chrischen 10y agoGuaranteed lets you select a specific day. If it falls within the bunber of days it gets that pricing. However selecting a shorter turnaround time reduces the pool of interested artists, so it shouldn't be used unless necessary.
- chromaton 10y agoDo you have a list of the failed ideas? How many actually did you get to the stage of having a web page for?
- meerkats1 10y agoCongrats on the success. Do you have concerns that posting details publicly, including showing internal financial numbers, for a business that has virtually no barrier to entry will invite competition? From the other comments I'm seeing here it looks as though people are already making their plans and running back of the envelope calculations. I would expect at least 5 new competitors to pop up as a result of this post.
- patio11 10y agoMaking plans and running back of the envelope calculations is easy and fun; businesses actually require violent execution. I spent almost 10 years doing an objectively easier business. I wrote a million words about it, including substantially all of the non-obvious secret sauce about e.g. our SEO strategy. I got a variant of your comment more than monthly: the competitors are coming, the competitors are coming! And the competitors did, in fact, come... with C grade execution that had minimal impact on me. I will note that the conversion rate between "I will totes clone your business in a weekend" and actually cloning the business was far, far below 1%.
- godot 10y agoNot sure if I'm missing something or why nobody else has asked this -- the things you've done "for SEO purposes" all seem like full time jobs on their own! Like: - Building a robot - Neural algorithm AI - Multiplayer 2048 clone Is there any secret to all of these, like outsourcing or anything, or are you just an insane genius? (which I don't doubt actually..)
- k__ 10y agoSounds like he is a rather intelligent person. I mean 4k in dept are hard, but all that he did (Microservices, Robotics, AI, Games) seems like way over the top of your average person.
- chrischen 10y agoI think the key is to leverage your existing skill sets. I'm primarily a coder so many of these hacks were technical, and their audience was HN. The other thing is to start with shortcuts. The robot's hardware I used mainly from a kit, and that left only the software.
- panorama 10y agoI saw Instapainting when it was launched and casually wondered how well it would do. Years later, I have my answer. Congratulations man, this is awesome to read and I'm really happy for your success!
- renafowler 10y agoThanks for sharing your story.It's inspiring!
- rockdiesel 10y agoI was pretty close to ordering a gift for the holidays until I saw the charge of $3.00 to NOT appear as a sample on your website. [1] Why are you making people pay $3.00 to NOT appear in your gallery of samples? Sorry, but that seems absolutely ridiculous and is a deal breaker for me. [1] http://imgur.com/a/RMcvV http://imgur.com/a/RMcvV
- caf 10y agoWhat if he offered a discount of $3 if you agreed to appear as a sample instead?
- TheGRS 10y agoWould you have agreed if it were a discount instead of an added charge? i.e. Yes is -$3?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- rockdiesel 10y agoAre you saying I either have to pay $3 to opt out or save $3 to opt in? Or are you saying the base price remains the same if I opt out, but I would get a $3 discount if I opt in? I would find scenario #2 a more suitable option. Meaning I'd happily pay the standard price in exchange for opting out, but people who choose to opt in receive a small discount in exchange for their willingness to be used as marketing collateral. Explicitly charging people to opt out just leaves a bad taste in mouth. And it just makes me thing you are going to nickel and dime me every chance you get. To be honest, if all the standard painting prices were increased by $3 to roll in the opt out cost, I probably wouldn't care. It's the explicit charging for opting out that rubs me the wrong way and I don't think I've ever encountered it before on any other online transaction I've completed.
- benlambert 10y agoQ. Price $120. Can we use this as a sample? (Yes: -$3) A. Happy to pay the full price! -- Q. Price $117. Can we use this as a sample? (No: +$3) A. No fucking way I'm paying $3 NOT appear in your gallery of samples!
- caf 10y agoI like the way that this article itself is an example of its own main subject (using articles like this to drive SEO for instapainting).
- overcast 10y ago"The hardest part was actually conveying that it wasn't just some print or photo filter, and this is something I still have difficulty with today." I can see how you'd have that problem with the name "Instapainting". If someone didn't describe to me exactly how this works, I would think it was just another photo filter app.
- supergirl 10y agoI wonder why many of the sites on indiehackers have that chat box popup.
- tuananh 10y agoHackerNews loves stories like this :D
- orbitingpluto 10y agoI think the oil and mixed media paintings are a great value from the samples. However, I wasn't to pleased with your monochrome samples however. Some of the samples look like they were made with an EZ-Tracer.
- neotek 10y agoWell it worked, I just bought a painting.
- jimmijazz 10y agoShoes of Prey have done a similar thing here in Australia with shoes. Last year they raised a solid amount of capital to expand into the U.S as well. I wonder, what other industries would the ability to produce unique products in China at scale apply to?
- reubano 10y agoCongrats on your success! Would you mind outlining how you made it on techcrunch? Also, which subreddits did you find most valuable to generate feedback/promote your site?
- galfarragem 10y agoRisking to be downvoted, what do SF artists (if you know any) think about this? I suspect if the founder had a background in art (as me) he would never launch something like this. I would feel ashamed by exploiting already a struggling market (art) and yet being 'painted' as an hero. Despite believing in capitalism, limits should exist.
- Kiro 10y agoHow is this exploitation? Just asking, I have no opinion.
- galfarragem 10y agoArt is a weak market that lives already of crumbs from society and this scheme vacuums most of them without adding any value to society in the long term. You could argue that Instapainting doesn't hurt relevant american artists once they live from a diferent market (patrons and benefactors), but by reducing the artists pool, the chances of having important ones reduces also. Why doesn't Instapainting hire american artists? A developed society needs a developed culture. Adopting European artists and scientists during early XX century helped US affirming themselves.
- chairmanwow 10y agoSo American artists (I'm assuming you mean creative people who paint things) want to be paid a lot of money to make something beautiful, and so art made by American artists is expensive and pushed even further to the fringes of society by the economics of it. Thus, it seems to be that people who are buy art are at the intersection of the set of people who can afford it (few) and those that appreciate it (a lot). This scheme as you so vehemently put it, is really aimed at getting more pretty things on people's walls. To do that, you need cheap and hopefully somewhat unique. Instapainting allows people to have both because they employ non-creative people who paint. I simply can't entertain the idea that the Chinese artists are being exploited by Instapainting by the very notion that they are being paid less than an artist would be in the US.
- 10y ago
- chairmanwow 10y agoI actually met Chris a couple of years ago when I was in San Francisco for an internship. We got lunch with a mutual friend. He was excited about the success he was experiencing and inspired me with his confidence about the future. I'm sure glad to know that he's actually made it.
- baccredited 10y agoNonsense. Creating a startup is the opposite of 'passive'. Also the word passive doesn't appear in the article title or text.
- baccredited 10y agoAlso I can think of at least one employee - the founder! This title is cringe-worthy.
- Cpoll 10y agoIf you don't have to full-time manage the startup after it's created, and it still makes you money, that money IS 'passive'. Passive income without initial effort is called a trust fund.