Why we shut down our Monograph service
medium.com
medium.com
The entire site is still available at http://archive.monograph.io/
However, they aren't adding new projects.
Their first year lessons learned from about a month ago : https://medium.com/@moeamaya/agency-year-1-make-all-the-mist...
They are pivoting to an architecture rather than maker/engineering focus: http://beta.monograph.io
EDIT: Questions for Moe -- You said that Monograph is a side project and was difficult for two to support at $2500 / yr.
1) That seems like a fairly low yearly cost. What was your backend, and are you pursuing lower costs with the new beta or is it just a better / more appropriate market focusing on architecture that should be sustainable?
2) How much of that was advertising?
3) What is the main-project of which this was a side project?
1) The stack is Rails and Postgres on Heroku, static assets (video/images) on S3/Cloudfront, and transloadit for video processing. $2500 isn't a crazy sum but the project doesn't make any money and the value for us is mostly the fact we created the website. Like any public project, the other non-intuitive costs are maintenance and customer support. We love that it's become a resource so we're moving everything to a static site and keeping the work archived.
The new beta is focused on B2B (with a need) and a lot of the manual processes of uploading and formatting projects has been automated, which is how we can offer the "human" element.
2) We had zero spend on advertising since the content is so damn compelling. A couple of projects hit the top of reddit/fb/HN.
3) The "main" project is our digital consultancy in SF which a small part came as a result of Monograph exposure. The business is growing, but we really enjoy building products so the beta is a primary focus for us this year.
I was a somewhat inspired by Monograph when I started on Car Projects (a space for people to share their garage projects). I had seen Monograph somewhere a while back, and then when I wanted to find it again I'd forgotten the name and it was REALLY hard to find. Googling things like 'website for sharing physical projects' took forever.
I'll email you when I get closer to launch with Car Projects because I'd love to get your thoughts Moe.