My 7th attempt at a startup: Selling layer styles to Photoshop users. | Hacker News Reader

My 7th attempt at a startup: Selling layer styles to Photoshop users.

photoshoplayerstyles.com

65 pointschaosmachine44 comments

I quit my job in tech support about 4 years ago. Since then, I've made at least 7 attempts at starting a bootstrapped business.

My original idea was to build "a live-video youtube" but Justin.tv and uStream showed up just a few months after I got started, and the dream died. Since then, I've launched four search engines (two of which are keeping me ramen-profitable), a twitter app (wasted time), and a "viral" site based on comparing movies (didn't go viral).

With income from my two main sites dwindling, I decided I would try moving away from web apps, and focus on building a product. Patio11's success with the bingo card niche has been my main inspiration. After a few weeks of iterating through various ideas, I decided to put my skills with the camera to use, and started building a collection of layer styles.

My goal is to corner the high end of the layer styles market. Launching this site is the first step, but it will probably take a few more iterations to get where I want. Based on my research, there's at least 250k in yearly revenue up for grabs, and room for growth.

I finally launched the site yesterday, and now I'm looking for feedback. Please check it out and let me know what you think. Thanks.

PS: If you have a design related blog/forum/etc, and you want a review copy or a free copy to give away to your readers, just send me an email (john.at.blamcast.net)

I've made about 5 attempts at starting bootstrapped businesses, in the end i've realised that i'm not giving each business long enough to mature and to turn it into something that can perform real value creation.

I've also learned, that if allow myself to believe, then there's no such thing as competition, even if google enters the same market, in fact, that might even be a bonus, since that validates the market for me.

Not trying to dampen your spirits in any way, just wanted to share from a fellow serial bootstrapper ;-)

my bootstrapped company wasn't profitable for the first three years.

Amazon stomped on me not once, but twice, first with storage, then with compute nodes. The thing is, amazon didn't follow up with a kill. They have let up on the price pressure to the point where I can field compute nodes at a significantly lower price point... and I'm eying the storage market.

The s3 service was the first time they trounced me. My initial idea was to sell storage, rsync.net style, before rsync.net. s3 killed any possibility of price competition at the time. But, while if you can afford five petabytes of data, their prices are still really, really competitive, I'm considering heading back into the market because they've left the couple hundred gigabyte market wide open.

my feedback is that if you want to target a high-end market you need a high-end website of your own.

The design of the current site + cart solution doesn't reflect the elegance I assume your main clientele would be accustomed to.

I'm a huge fan of Shopify for simple, pretty online stores.. you might want to check it out.. many of their free themes would be an improvement over the current design.

GOOD LUCK!

+1 on that, current design is kinda fugly, which won't impress designers.

You might want to get in touch with some of the various design blogs, like Smashing Magazine and some of the blogs they commonly link to if you're interested in getting some reviews. They also sometimes do prizes and whatnot.

I'm not affiliated with them, just a regular guy who follows them on twitter to try to keep on top of whats 'cool' in the design world.

Out of interest what are the domains for the other sites you still have running ?

Playing devil's advocate, what differentiates this from the huge library of free stuff on Deviant Art?

http://browse.deviantart.com/resources/textures/?qh=&sec...

They're not free, a random click on your link - http://browse.deviantart.com/resources/textures/?qh=&sec... shows that the copyright owner allows non-commercial use only and then with attribution and informing him of the use. Onerous.

"If you want to use it for Profitable goals contact me."

I've tried contacting people on DA before about using imagery in semi-commerical settings. It's cheaper to buy stock art than waste time chasing them unless it's a one-off image.

This exchange highlights the problem - http://comments.deviantart.com/1/76929399/904383280 - someone requests permission from the "artist" who assumes that as it's a texture that people are allowed to copy it:

"It was put up as a texture hopefully you know what a texture is and what it means. LOL!"

But just because it is a texture doesn't mean rights are automatically granted (though it is unlikely to be distinctive enough to warrant copyright protection only a court can really decide that).

If people used PD or CC-BY or other free to use licenses clearly then such problems wouldn't arise.

What I've noticed "Professional" software like Photoshop is that a vast quantity of copies are pirated. In corporate settings and among very successful practitioners, not so much, but among any other category of people I've met that use Photoshop/Final Cut/AutoCad/etc, a very large portion of the copies are pirated.

From that, I really wouldn't be surprised if they grabbed stuff such as these textures from Deviant Art without any regard to the rights. I've certainly seen it happen.

I suppose what I'm saying is that I'd be interested to see how many people among the users of Photoshop who aren't such kung-fu masters of it to have tons of their own such things worked out are going to pay for this stuff instead of looking for it on torrents.

Resolution and quality, I hope. Most of these textures are 1024px or larger, and they're seamless/tileable, which makes them useful for repeating backgrounds or 3D modeling.

Also, the royalty-free license. A lot of DeviantArt users require you to link to them, or don't allow commercial usage of their art.

Let us check out the other websites. Links!

HUGELY SEO-able (I search for stuff like this all the time). What are your plans here? How are you going to scale out content generation?

The first link I see on your page is:

http://photoshoplayerstyles.com/styles/wood/woodworks-volume...

wordworks-volume-2 doesn't mean anything.

On that very page are cedar and oak and maple and distressed pine? and 4 other styles of wood. And yet you have no link that says:

http://photoshoplayerstyles.com/maple-wood-texture-layer

that has a meta description of:

Royalty-free high-resolution maple wood textures for photoshop, easy to buy

even though I bet 10 people search every day for one of

[maple texture] [distressed wood texture] [photoshop pine texture]

etc.

I don't know much about selling things to graphic designers (maybe it sucks) but I'm almost jealous at how easily your content scales out to Google.

Thanks, you make some good suggestions. SEO is very much a part of the game plan, and I've still got some work to do, but you've struck on the main idea :)

Go over to iStockPhoto, note what they charge for a picture of a smiling woman wearing a headset, then raise your prices. $12 is below the care threshold for employed professionals, which describes 100% of the people who will actually pay for this product rather than torrenting it.

If you feel bad about raising your prices and don't think people will pay them, raise your prices to $X and then announce a special grand opening sale.

Yup. Everywhere I've worked can basically be split into two categories, pirate everything you use no matter what the price, or pay for everything you use no matter what the price. A company that will pay $12 will also pay $30, a company that won't pay $30 won't pay $12.

Also consider offering a bundle of all the styles at a small discount over buying them individually. Many people wanting only one or two styles may grab this instead to save them potentially having to go through the hassle of make a second purchase, especially if they're using company money.

Your top navigation looks like a slyly placed Google Adsense link type unit

~ I would go back and freshen up the other two money makers cause they will need to last for this one to get the steam I think it needs...

I noticed that as well. I almost avoided clicking on it for a few seconds before I realized that it was legitimate. I think it is the underlined text. Good navigation links these days are often not underlined.

You're right, I hadn't considered that, but I definitely see it now. I just removed the underline on the links.

Interesting. Google have become so good at making their ads look like ordinary site text, that now ordinary site text looks like Google ads.

I read the url as "photo sho player styles". I see the word "photo" and then my eyes tend to jump to the next visible word: "player". Perhaps it is just my eyes but I find the domain name is hard to parse.

With regard to the site itself, I like the idea. However, most of your layer styles look like they are just plain image and emboss styles which can be created for free if you have a decent stock image collection.

One layer style set that I would definitely buy would be layer styles to easily make transparent water, good looking glass, fire effects and other advanced effects. Basic stone and wood isn't hard, its the advanced layer style effects that I would be willing to buy.

Good work though, and I hope this seventh try finds success.

There was a time when I wouldn't pay for this sort of thing. Nowadays I actually prefer to pay as I feel there is less chance that someone will recognize its use elsewhere. In other words, I think you're smart to go after the premium, "no, it's not free" market.

Looks cool, my question though is where are the free styles or a demo?

http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/freebies/best-free-photoshop-l...

Even if you don't want to give away your styles you may want to compose a list of free styles others have produced so you have something they can try.

You may want to create some free ones just to post on sites like that.

I have to say thanks though because I had no idea such a thing even existed until I saw your start up and when I googled I found some free layer styles that can really help me.

Please don't take this the wrong way, but where do you get $250K revenue from?

Also, who is using these layer styles now and are your layer styles protected by IP?

The styles look a little like those I would find on Word's word art function.

These were the thoughts that popped into my head.

Good luck!

You could alsos try to create an open marketplace for styles so anyone can submit/buy.

Looks like envato already has this: http://graphicriver.net/category/add-ons/photoshop/styles

IMO this is probably the only way to win in this area. Get other people doing the marketing for you ("buy my layer styles at ...") and take a portion of revenue from a lot of other peoples transactions.

Wow, that's unexpectedly neat. I don't know if there's a market, but I think, probably, it should be there for such a thing.

Consider adding a contact page. I was going to compliment you on the site but couldn't find a way to reach you. Your customers might want it to tell you about issues or give you suggestions.

Nice work.

Whoops. I had put a contact email on the license page, but forgot to include one in "about". Thanks Andrew.

Definitely going to need to get all of the typical gloss/apple styles in there. Look to the open source Aristo (Cappucino's UI) for inspiration -- http://github.com/280north/aristo

Not sure how well your idea will take off, but good luck. Similar sites (you probably already know of these):

http://www.brusheezy.com/ http://www.vecteezy.com/

Yes, a GlassWorks style pack is in the works, should be ready in a couple days.

Nice idea, although your site looks very plain on wide monitors, I'd consider doing something that tiles across wider backgrounds.

Also, are you any good with gradients? I find these to be a real lifesaver, and would pay for something similar: http://www.dezinerfolio.com/2007/03/14/ultimate-web-20-gradi...

After reading quite a lot of your homepage, I think I've figured out that Photoshop layer styles are textures you apply to vector shapes. Is this right? If so, I'd suggest a sentence that states this near the top of the page.

I misread the url and immediately saw "player styles." Perhaps a more succinct brand name or url could help? EDIT: I see "Style Works" on the page now.

I think you'll also want to include before/after images in the galleries showing what can be done with each layer.

Suggestion: you could put up a subtle fading slideshow of your styles (as soon as you have more than 4, I guess).

you really really need to be attacking your organic search rankings to get yourself some traffic -> sales. Contact me privately through my blog in my profile, I run something that can help you.

I run something that can help you

A spam bot? A link exchange network? Just curious... most of the techniques for "attacking the organic search rankings" are frowned upon by Google.

> most of the techniques for "attacking the organic search rankings" are frowned upon by Google

I'd be pretty sure he means whitehat SEO, on-page optimisations, link-building (eg linkbait, social networks) .. not frowned on by Google.

Edit: or maybe not!

ha, very few things can be considered "whitehat" seo, everything is a shade of gray

I don't know about that, Google has a defined set of rules, if you build your site to take advantage of that defined set of rules then good for you. It is no different than apples UI guidelines. When you start to device the system to get ranking that you do not deserve then it becomes a grey area but just optimizing your site and taking advantage of available resources to promote your site is indeed squarely in the realm of white-hat.

Going back to the UI analogy, it is one thing to provide an optimized UI that has been A/B tested to sell anti-virus software. It is another thing entirely to provide a UI pop-up that says your computer is infected when it is not in the hopes of scarring someone into buying anti-virus software. Optimizing to sell is white-hat. Deceiving to sell is not.

But when you own a website that does "deserve" to rank and Google's algorithm allows for spammers to get to the top, then you have no recourse but to fight fire with fire.

If I had a great site about my acai berry product, but stuck only to white hat seo techniques, I would literally never rank for that keyword. I would never get that traffic, never get the exposure, because there are people out there who are taking advantage of the holes in Google's algo while I am "sticking to the rules".

You have to remember that Google publishes rules for 2 reasons: 1) so that you don't participate in shady tactics that polute the internet (for the greater good) and 2) because their job is to clean up search results so the less "spam" that is produced, the easier their job is.

EDIT: left out a key word

1) The very nature of Google's algorithm encourages using techniques that will increase your rankings, or else you will drown in a mess of competitors in most niches. Also, just because it's frowned upon by Google doesn't necessarily make it bad. They're in the business to make money just as much as the rest of us are

2) Not spam, not a link exchange network. Contact me and we can discuss it if you'd like.

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