Instapainting – From $4k in debt to $32k/mo in passive revenue with no employees
indiehackers.com
indiehackers.com
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.
She was one in a million, yeah
So there's five more, just in New South Wales"there's eight of you here"
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.
All I can say is that the reason I don't charge more is it'd just be lining my pockets since the artists set their prices at a pretty consistent rate. I don't get lower rates from the artists than my competitors, so I just undercut them in final retail price instead.
What's wrong with lining your pockets? This is a business no?
Also, the intent of my question wasn't greedy-capitalism-gouge-the-customer...I meant if a business can charge more for their service and have better margins without pricing out would-be customers or losing them to lower priced competition (neither were his reasons) then why not charge more?
That extra money can be reinvested in this business or another business or used to retire early or go on vacation.
The guy runs a business, make a profit when you can. Every success is transitory here.
As we get into a more expanded marketplace with more varying products then wuality and pricing will be more of a varying point.
This definitely seems like an area where you might expect Baumol's cost disease to operate. China labor costs are increasing steadily and there's no obvious labor pool to replace them, and as far as hand painted paintings go, there's also no obvious productivity improvements which could keep costs constant - they already seem to be painted about as fast as possible. (So Instapainting's dabbling in robot painting can't fix Baumol's cost disease because the paintings will no longer be 'handmade'.)
Interesting if you read my comment elsewhere here that is a point that I made as well in a different way.
That said perhaps there is a way to tweak the pricing so that they have different perceptions of quality for the price paid. Don't lose the low end market but give an option for those that want to pay more.
Who knows when robots take over every job, maybe all that will be left is jobs where there is some demand preferences for handmade over machine made. Art, "home-style cooking" etc...
Of course there are multiple ways to tweak pricing to add more discrimination and differential pricing. Interestingly art sales happen to be one of the few examples where a business can reach ~perfect price discrimination, don't see that too often outside of econ textbooks. I'm not going to suggest it to a business owner or anything, looks like he knows what he is doing, just wanted to share my experience.
My wife tries to make me dinner most nights. Honestly I feel better most times if I make it myself. I find it relaxing. I also enjoy driving a 7 speed manual transmission in my car (a 911). Most of them sold are PDK's. To me that makes it to easy, even if (as they argue) the performance is better. Most times I enjoy driving, not all of the time but I wouldn't consider it a benefit to have a self driving car except in certain situations it would be helpful.
Writing slows things down and alters the thought process vs. typing. One downside is fountain pen ink seems to end up on your fingers no matter how careful.
Funny you mention a 911. I'm not really a car guy but I sit next one at work who claims the only legit Porsches are manual and just bought some special Porsche that only comes in manual, so I have been hearing a lot about this. I'd love to test drive it but haven't driven manual in years and am nervous to do so in someone else's brand new car.
Any suggestions on how one can practice driving manual without ruining someone else's clutch?
Btw Jay Leno is another manual > PDK guy "I bought the clutch and the car just happened to come with it" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0t2xia8xxs
Here's what you need to learn:
Find quiet flat road. Maybe a carpark. Some space ahead of you in case of error.
Handbrake on.
Find biting point of clutch. You'll need a little accelerator for this too, but not too much. Trial and error for both. Fun times. Keep handbrake on to start with.
The biting point is this: left foot up until you feel some bite, the car gently trying to pull forwards.
In fact, the biting point is where the clutch is half-engaged so precisely that if you released handbrake you'd stay still, but could make tiny movements forward by letting in (foot up) the clutch a tiny bit more. Then stopping by letting it out again a tiny bit back to biting point.
The more clutch (left foot) you have in, the more accelerator (right foot) you need. But not too much. It's subtle, but very learnable. You'll stall a lot. That's why the handbrake is important. You'll use too much right foot to start with, but that's ok. You'll improve with practice.
So, when you have an idea that you've got the biting point, let out the handbrake carefully. You'll likely go forwards. Feel free to pull handbrake back on gently. And then try to get less bite. You're looking for an equilibrium.
Then iterate. Right foot nuance as well as left foot is good. Be able to creep forwards at will. Then get back to biting point, which will stop the car (from a slow creep).
After a while you'll be able to control the car with your left foot, start stop (with appropriate right foot). That's how to control the car to park too!
Brakes will be needed when you overdo it. Keep a hand on the handbrake while learning.
It's also the way hill starts work. With a hill start you just need proportionately more right foot. But learning it on the flat gives you space to learn your car's clutch characteristics and feel it.
As you get used to all this you will likely find you can make these alterations easily. But you might well stall in places. That's ok. Just don't panic. You'll be fine! I still stall sometimes, especially with unfamiliar cars. Everyone does. Better to be being near the right place than gunning things and ruining your clutch with a leaden right foot.
Basically, gentle in for clutches. They are more replaceable than gearboxes, and you'll not do harm to them learning this.
A) Probably not do it
B) seek out artists myself
As it is I will be ordering two for Christmas presents now
- 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..)
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.
The other thing is to start with shortcuts. The robot's hardware I used mainly from a kit, and that left only the software.
> Standard delivery (approx 3 weeks)
> Guaranteed (+$15)
> Within 25 days (+$20)
> Within 15 days (+$20)
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)
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):
Do you know what tool did he used for the text? (I know this sounds weird, I'm trying not to spoil here ;)
However selecting a shorter turnaround time reduces the pool of interested artists, so it shouldn't be used unless necessary.
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?
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.
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.
If you can walk away for say a year without touching it at all and the revenue remains basically steady, I'll agree it is passive.
Anyway, it doesn't really matter - it sounds like you are working at growing a business you enjoy and that's great.
If I stopped working for over a year, eventually there would be complaints, competitors, etc
But within a one year timeframe, there's very little I have to do. And I could get away with working a couple months of the year only + maybe three hours a week maintenance, and the business would grow, slowly.
But, I work consistently, adding new things, because I want it to grow faster. I also know that the environment changes and eventually the current model may stop working or need adaptation.
What do you call that? It's not 100% passive. But, it's not particularly active either.
Actually, having written all this, I remembered someone did come up with a better term: residual revenue.
Meaning that I did a bunch of work in the past that continues to pay off. It will eventually decay, but not very fast. So I can devote most of my energy to new growth, or leisure, over the short to medium run anyway.
Do you think residual revenue (or income) is a better term for this case?
If you need to [edit regularly] respond to SEO changes, or payment provider issues, or maintain your relationships somehow it just isn't passive. It's not a lot of work, hopefully, but it is not passive. You need to stay engaged enough to know how to do it.
Reacting to the environment changes and modeling absolutely is not passive, and I wish people would stop calling it that. I also suspect people underestimate the amount of time they actually spend on this stuff.
I'm not sure that's a terribly useful definition. Since any business must have some means of accepting revenues, and almost any means of accepting revenues is subject to dispute, by your argument there is probably no business in the world with a truly passive income. Likewise, in many places you are at minimum going to have to file some sort of annual statements and tax returns for any commercial business.
If a business is generating revenues that don't require anyone to do routine/regular work to keep the money coming in, it seems reasonable to call it passive, even if someone needs to step in under rare or exceptional circumstances.
What I'm getting at is: If I adjust SEO targets, mailing lists, app or interface code say monthly to keep things moving along, it really isn't passive.
I'm not thinking about annual taxes, or one time problems (DNS issues, certs, payment provider changed) etc.
But routine, regular work absolutely includes any regular updates to website code, transaction providers (add/remove vendors etc.), SEO techniques, etc. If you are tweaking the business weekly/or monthly it is just silly to call it passive.
The SEO and email system more or less runs itself. But, y'know, if I completely ignore it for two years something might change.
Mind you, I have some components that have run since 2013/2014 with no change at all. Most of my system is like that actually.
There are website updates required, but a contractor does that. I just monitor reports.
So there's somewhat more work than I think you're thinking of, but not much.
(It can be done, but it's more limiting and exhausting in general. Just back from three weeks in Europe with two kids under five.)
(Also, I cannot overemphasized how much I like Indiehackers. It's become my new must-read newsletter.)
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?
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.
I've worked in a studio/factory in China and visited plenty; from what I've read, they're far better than SpaceX.
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.
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.
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.
Can you pls elaborate on this?
Really, could you go into some more detail on how you structure, build, and deploy your microservices? Monitor them? Scale? Do migrations?
Congrats on the website and success, very inspiring story!
It evolved into this way over time, and I didn't set out planning to build it this way.
How long did it take to define/implement/automate these processes?
A feature can be pushed out as fast as a day or sometimes take a week, if it's a complex problem.
- 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?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Picture_of_Dorian_Gray
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?
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-identic...
Until Photoshop filters output STL files and color 3d printers come down in price, humans win.
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.
Painting is applying pigment to a page using a liquid which then dries after it has been applied. This liquid could be water (for watercolours), an acrylic polymer compound (for acrylic paints) or linseed oil (for oil paints).
The liquid used has its own properties which mean you can achieve different styles and textures. For instance, water colours absorb into the paper and spread out.
Oil paints are very thick and slow drying. You can layer up the paint, and even crave back through it revealing different layers. It is common to use pallet knives and spatulas to work in oil aswell as brushes.
Some artists even create work where the paint is centimetres thick on the canvas - creating work which is more of a relief than a painting.
Because you have this texture, the light interacts with the paint differently to a printed photoshop filter. There will be highlights and shadows as the light hits the painting from an angle, as you move your perspective these will change too. You can even mix paint so that pigment is more dilute and the paint ends up slightly translucent or pearlescent, this can make parts of the canvas almost glow under the right light.
There is a lot more to oil paintings than just a photoshop filter.
My question was not a refutation of the claim that original oil paintings are superior to prints. It was rather an honest attempt to understand the market opportunity of a business and whether the OP believes that a market for prints exists. However that attempt seemingly gave way to a forum for people here to show how much they know about art.
Let me be clear- I have been to many, many world class art galleries. I actually live less than a half mile from one. I do not dispute that there is a difference between a Francis Bacon and a Photoshop reproduction of a vacation photo from my phone. My question was how the OP figured out that making clear that the picture was not a filter and was produced by a real person was an important feature of the service. I give up.
A print is machine-made - and obviously so. It's reproducible, so it has no obvious uniqueness.
Some people have tried making one-off prints. That never really works out, because one of the important elements in art objects is visible proof of unique human labour. A print can't supply that, even if it's a digital one-off. The labour may still be there, but it isn't visible in the way that the effort needed to cover a canvas is.
Art is a social signal of disposable capital, aspiration to social status, and ability to command effort. Having an art object legitimises an image and a buyer in a way that a print can't. It also adds a sense of permanence, which some people like when they want to make memories more tangible.
Instapainting capitalises on that by selling to people who want a painting but don't know much about art. I'd guess some of them like the idea of having a painting of a memory, while others like the idea of telling visitors that they had something painted specially.
The bell curve wins again. This turns out to be a much bigger market than the one for people who want a painting and know something about art, and very much bigger [1] than the market for people who buy expensive paintings and know a lot about art.
The idea isn't actually new, but it's possibly the first time it's been done on an industrial scale. Back in the 00s there were services in the UK selling stylised portraits for similar money. They were fairly successful, but limited by having a small pool of artists to draw from. Chinese labour has changed that and made a mass market possible.
[1] But not necessarily more profitable.
The market you seem to think doesn't exist absolutely does. It has been well served for well over a decade, in regional malls and more recently online.
What the OP is offering is a service above and beyond what can be achieved with a quick photoshop filter and a large format printer. They are trying to communicate that his product is qualitatively different from this - a unique, handmade piece of art. That is their entire value proposition.
This isn't about trying to produce a knock-off of a photoshop filter with cheap Chinese labour.
> Let me be clear- I have been to many, many world class art galleries.
Yet you claimed:
>No, 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.
and asked:
>Is it like the same thing they put in engines to make them run smoothly?
Src: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12800067
How does claim to one visit "many, many world class art galleries" yet not know what an oil painting is?
I think you're just trolling now.
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.
In fact, the existence of products like, say this: http://www.artinstituteshop.org/item.aspx?productId=931
would seem to indicate that there actually is a pretty decent market for oil painting reproductions that are [GASP] the product of a high quality printer and that you are wrong.
In other words, don't assume that just because you are an art snob who was educated at the Sorbonne and obsesses over the textures that you can run your fingers over that the entire market (or even a majority of it) is like you.
No need to be rude.
I'm certainly not an "art snob", though I did study art and art history in high school over thirty years ago. And only then to escape playing football (soccer) in PE because I took A&AH as an extra subject. To be honest I was largely bored rigid, but I was, at least, clean, warm and dry and not getting tackled and kicked in the shins. However when I went to college I bumped into numerous artists and through hanging out with them the subject grew on me as a passing interest, but certainly not a snobbish obsession as you so impudently assume.
Anyway, I am just pointing out that, should you wish to inform and educate yourself a little better, if you visit an art gallery and see real works of painted and drawn art (regardless of era), you'll discover they're massively different from $18 poster prints.
I don't know what art galleries you have in Chicago so can't comment. I'm sure google and wikipedia research can help you there (and if it's a half decent gallery then it'll have a wikipedia entry).
It does not scale at all for one-off pieces of artwork.
The robot can replicate recorded movements - brush angle, pressure, timing etc.
An photoshop filter can shift pixels around to make a photo look like an oil painting.
What nobody has come up with yet (and would likely be hard to develop, or at least costly) is a way to translate a photograph, or a photoshop filter into the set of movements required to render it in physical oil paint.
Getting a robot to actally lay down each stroke with paint is left as an exercise for the reader. ;-)
Photoshop filters and more advanced converters like DeepArt produce something which look like strokes, but have no concept of strokes. Illustrator convert to vector/stroke/outline uses a concept of stroke which makes no accounting for the drag and physics of a brush, and may not even by physically possible to produce.
There are, of course, some conversions which we can achieve already. We have pen-based plotters and could write simple contrast/cross hatching converters etc. But these are qualitatively different from scanning an image and converting it into the strokes for a robot arm.
http://jivp.eurasipjournals.springeropen.com/articles/10.118...
And there is a lot of work available on brushstroke analysis for authentication purposes. Here is a pop-sci example from about 8 years ago:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/art-authentication.html
Additionally, in terms of desktop graphics editors such as Photoshop and Illustrator, rest assured that Fractal Design Painter definitely had a model that incorporated (well, approximated anyway) medium, angle, brush size, pressure, direction changes, the color you were painting over, etc. 20 years ago, and the latest version of Corel Painter has added features such as particle systems and modeling individual bristles (and other features have been added in the interim).
The intent in Painter is to enable the creation of new works in a way that feels natural to artists used to traditional media (not to mention reproducing the appearance of those media), which isn't quite what we're talking about here, but hopefully this demonstrates that such models do actually exist.
I think this varies per person. It's like saying that having a real luxury product is no different than a imitation. There is a certain psychic benefit you get from knowing that you have something that is real (specifically that you paid more money for) vs. machine created (or cheaper). This ironically would even extend to having a good local artist produce the painting vs. having it sent off to China (at a discount rate through a service like instapainting). Hard to put into words this concept but I am sure there is an official name for it. That doesn't mean that there isn't a huge market for knockoffs but it's a different market.
From an artistic market standpoint, both the Kinkade "hand painted" works and any work from Instapaint will have an inherent value of barely anything. Maybe $5, $2.50 at a garage sale. Thus this business opportunity, Instapaint, is a very intelligent way to take nothing of intrinsic artistic value - a family portrait - and create a demand whereby there is a worthwhile profit margin.
Art is a high "perception value" type of gambit. Instapaint is successful in its avenue, I can see that and appreciate it for what it's worth. Customers feel like they're getting a good deal, so hey, who am I to tell them what they're paying for is really worthless in the long run? That's sort of the lesson within Thomas Kinkade's success though. That dude cleaned up before his less-appealing business practices and habits eventually caught up with him. There's a line between satisfying a market and kind of becoming a shady operation. Kinkade's model absolutely proved demand for a "hand painted" type of thing.
The hand-made one-of-a-kind aspect is pretty much the sole distinguishing feature and selling point of instapainter.
I'll just address the real reason- printing a high-quality print (like what you'd see on sale at an art fair) is far more expensive than exploiting cheap overseas labor. If you could produce a high quality digital print for less than $160, there would be a larger market.
There is definitely a market for posters or even high quality reproductions of artworks. There is a market for oil-paint style digital artwork, whether printed or digital. I don't believe that instapainting is trying to compete with those options. It is entirely likely that the same person would have one of each on different walls of their house, each medium has different strengths, weaknesses and roles.
i.e., asking Apple circa 2006 why they only make desktop and laptop computers and not phones would not imply that there was not a market for desktop and laptop computers.
I don't think anyone is saying that this market doesn't exist, just that this site services a completely different market.
I thought the same thing, maybe because it's called "instapainting"
When the 2048 game came out, I quickly hacked
up a 2 player version and placed it under the
Instapainting.com domain for SEO purposes.
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.
I was at a talk yesterday where the speaker from Google was saying that while pagerank is the number one input they use for search results, AI style machine learning algorithms are now number 3 so don't be so sure they don't pick up on that.
I am fairly certain that the world's best search engine is not falling for that. How can we decide who is right?
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.
Ideally, Google wouldn't credit one part of the site that is lower quality than the other part.
Site authority presumably wouldn't be a thing if it didn't produce good results. Sites that allow crappy content will tend to have more crappy content and so a page on such a site is less likely to be what someone is searching for; as long as that stands then site authority will still be useful and shouldn't - IMO - be discounted completely.
Probably 3/4 of the blog articles out there are written for SEO purposes.
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
> 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
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.
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.
Also every interview I've read on indiehackers always has this one advice as the most important one: build quickly, iterate later.
> micro-services, which is crucial in allowing me (the
> only developer) to migrate the site to new technologies.
It's less a fault of choosing the wrong tech stack to begin with and more a virtue of prototyping quickly.
Passive income without initial effort is called a trust fund.
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.
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.
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!
A. Keep the Big Mac. I'm going to get a Whopper from Burger King.
(Burger King costs $9.99 with no offer.)
And now you buy the Big Mac without making a scene.
Personally I'd increase the discount to around 10% (raising the base price to compensate) and have "Allow us to use this as a sample" checked by default; but I wonder what % of people have a strong reaction like the OP here.
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%.
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.
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.
Fortunately what he's doing isn't exploiting, he's providing a valuable service in which the artists set their pricing and choose whether to accept the work. SF artists have no right to anything over an artist from an other city or country.
A developed society needs a developed culture. Adopting European artists and scientists during early XX century helped US affirming themselves.
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.
Give me one argument why they should. You speak like it's an axiom but I don't see any reason to be a protectionist in this matter. Especially when the customer base is as global as it is (I'm a customer and I'm much closer to China than the US).
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?
The site actually functions as a marketplace now, and the independent sellers handle their own shipping methods.
Lynn Boggess, paints on large canvases (some over 4 ft x 4 ft) using cement trowels:
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:
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.
I'm sure glad to know that he's actually made it.
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.
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.
Heck if you look at the idea of Kickstarter and Indiegogo they're a whole market predicated on the idea of buying things that don't exist yet (and in many cases those things are harder to deliver than the creators suggest in their pitches)
It's not my job to investigate Amazon's supply-chain to make sure that can actually deliver my toilet paper in 2 days. They are promising me this service and now it's their responsibility to deliver on that.
If those services/product aren't rendered, then a refund should/can be demanded.
I think this was completely within ethical bounds, assuming a promise was also made to return money if services weren't rendered.
What in the world is wrong with that part?
[1] http://gizmodo.com/5825184/bill-gates-spent-the-best-money-o...
It's literally a cornerstone of many/most businesses.
However, I wasn't to pleased with your monochrome samples however. Some of the samples look like they were made with an EZ-Tracer.
What are your primary keywords?
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.
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.
Still, do you think people would care if they knew? I ask because I would have totally bought this had I stumbled onto it yesterday not knowing what I know now. I would have bought this for a friend and never thought twice about it. After reading this post I definitely would not purchase. Irrational? Maybe.
Edit: I see your response above. Thanks. I may actually purchase. Just want to think about it. :)
You probably take issue with it because you think you are exploiting the workers, when in reality they want you to buy from them and witholding your purchase hurts them economically. The bulk of the money you spend goes to the artists, after all. Otherwise China wouldn't enact such protectionist trade policies that encourage mass exports.
If you take issue with it because you want to encourage domestic economy growth, then avoiding imported Chinese paintings would be proper, however not all our sellers are Chinese. We will soon be adding filters to discriminate by country of origin.
Well, not that wrong. Western businessmen have a very accurate notion of Chinese labor, and opportunities from lower wages / mass production there.
The idea that he's running a virtual sweatshop has more to do with your own biases and preconceived notions than reality.
Could this question (Are you really paying them enough or just exploiting them?) be asked of anything like Uber?
It sounds like location arbitrage: China has a lower cost of living than the US. Not to mention that even a master Chinese artist would have a tough time getting a green card.
But it looks like instapainting is basically a middle-man which could easily be replaced by a Chinese website (so long as they hire a good translator).
Actually, Instapainting's rise is due to my replacing the Chinese middlemen with software (disclaimer: not all artists on our site are Chinese), which is even cheaper!
Until I expand the market further, I wouldn't really even give myself that much credit. I think most of my business comes from replacing the established middle men with my software solution. Although it is my ultimate goal to give more artists (everywhere in the world) more business!
I would award him a medal.
Doesn't matter. This service is for the bourgeoisie, today's young professionals who want to emulate the painted family portraits they have seen in rich homes. The fact that it comes from a "startup" probably adds to the coolness. These customers wouldn't know how to find a local portrait artist if they wanted to, nor would they be able to afford it.
But I'm not sure that's a fair representation