Comment by chaosmachine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chaosmachine | Hacker News Reader

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...

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.

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.

Let us check out the other websites. Links!

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