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Comment by memset | Hacker News Reader

I make and sell staff paper notebooks for musicians: https://www.themusiciansnotebook.com/

I'm an avid saxophone player and am taking evening classes in theory, so I made this to solve a problem that I myself had. Nothing else like it on the market!

Every part of this notebook is automatically generated with a bunch of python scripts: the cover design, the interior, the line placement, the margins. The program basically spits out a PDF which I can then send to print shops (which is the hardest part of the whole thing!)

The product is good, people like it, and the hardest part for me right now is sales - trying to get stores to carry it, or get traffic to the site to drive sales! If you know anyone who might be interested...

edit: Okay I've opportunistically created a coupon code THANKSHN for 10% off.

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First, great job! Second, I'm confused. When I used to play music, I remember buying staff music pads at a low cost. A quick check of Amazon shows a bunch of staff pads for sale. What am I missing? Is it the combination of staff and notebook pages in the same book? Or do you use higher quality paper (e.g. are you the moleskin of music staff paper?) Just curious.

Elevator pitch:

- combination of staff paper and college-ruled lines

- perforated to easily tear out pages

- three-hole punched

- decent quality paper, binding, cover material

You'll find that there's surprisingly nothing like it on Amazon! My inspiration was those cheap Mead spiral notebooks - incredibly functional.

Hey, taking a look at the picture on the site I saw that you only offer a format of 8.5" x 11". If you'd like to grow to Europe, other formats like A4 would be very interesting and probably needed. I'd also be happy about one in A5! :)

I actually really really want to do this! It's a chicken and egg thing: do I try to get this 1 product profitable, and then use those profits to invest in new product lines? Or do I try to do multiple versions of the product at first (which comes at higher cost, since I'd start with a small production first?)

Also need to figure out how to ship to Europe more cheaply, since right now I'm sending everything from my little apartment in Brooklyn!

Maybe printing in Europe might already help? – See www.wir-machen-druck.de, probably the most inexpensive German printery (try Google Translator). I can imagine using Amazon and its FBA service might be an option here – not sure if that's something you'd like to consider.

if you're looking for printing services in germany: https://www.druckpreis.de/

and it appears they have at least some info for some other european countries :-)

disclaimer: not affiliated with them, though i did some work for them a few years ago

Very cool! I'm the CXO of TrueFire (leading music education software company with the largest library of online guitar lessons in the world) and would love to find a way to work together to get your notebooks in the hands of our 1+ million students :-) Let's jam on some ideas!

Would love that! Lots of folks have been asking for a guitar tab version, so if you think there's opportunity then I have a few ideas myself. What's the best way to reach you? jay@themusiciansnotebook.com

Thanks for posting. I have always wanted this. Just ordered 6 (accidentally, meant to order 3) and I’m hoping it’s as awesome as I’m imagining.

Nice! I just got your order (thank you!) and just emailed you too.

>automatically generated with a bunch of python scripts

Can you expand on what you mean by this? Seems like straightforward design(s) that you can just keep printing over and over..

Please find a way to ship these to Europe! It would become my new notebook of choice in a heartbeat but I run through them like (insert some kind of simile here). I would also happily share this with all my musician friends.

Totally! Do you mind sharing your contact info with me, so I can keep you updated when I figure out a way to charge less than $20 to ship to Europe?

I think most users went digital, like iPad or kindle. There're apps where you can type notes or search and buy existing sheets. Of course paper is better for kids or beginners, so you could push your product in that niche.

BTW those digital sheets are pricey, so I wrote some scripts to generate PDF for my kindle, the output looked quite neat. I used LaTeX, Lilypond and perl to comb out unsupported stave notation from songs I ripped from public sources.

This sounds awesome! I've been looking around at printing specialized notebooks (for various worldbuilding tasks) lately. Do you use local print shops and/or have any you'd particularly recommend?

I feel like the hardest part to get into would be finding a way to keep costs and shipping times down without maintaining a large floating inventory. Have you found that is a problem at all?

The three biggest challenges for me have been:

- Marketing

- Finding a shop which produces at acceptable quality

- Finding the balance between order volume and cost

If you're not fussy about physical characteristics (eg, rounded corners) then I'd prototype at the local office max - pretty affordable and fast.

If you email me I can maybe give some more details! Maybe I should start a business doing print shop consulting...

If you don't mind me asking, how did you find print shops? I've had random ideas for notebooks that might be useful to someone else before, and getting something printed has always been kind of interesting to me.

Lots of googling,and then emailing stores with my specifications until I found a place that responded and could do it within my budget and with quality.

If you're not fussy about some of the notebook features (eg, the specific kind of binding, or rounded corners) then you can do custom books at your local UPS Store, office max, etc. You'd save money and time by prototyping that way, wish I'd done more of that.

Can you help me understand why you need to use a bunch of python scripts to generate the PDF?

Couldn’t you just make it in Adobe InDesign? Cool item, btw. I used to play saxophone years back.

Oh, sure. I mean, the first reason is because I am a backend engineer and all I know is python! The second reason is that it made it easy for me to iterate - you have no idea how painstakingly I adjusted the line thickensss, spacing, margins, etc. So being able to just update a little config file was super useful. And, finally, for future product lines (different sizes, for example) using code made it easy for me to, essentially, provide the dimensions of the book and have the code make the "right" design choices to generate a new PDF.

I've used to do these myself for my students! Amazing job!

That’s brilliant!

Thanks! Okay I've created a coupon code THANKSHN for 10% off to make it easier for you to try it out for yourself :)

How do you handle production?

1. Email 50 print shops from searching google about the project and specifications 2. Wait for 5 of them to respond to you 3. Work with them on the specifications and obtain physical proofs 4. Choose 1 which prints the books with an acceptable quality-to-price ratio

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