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Comment by stevesearer | Hacker News Reader

I created Office Snapshots 13 years ago and naturally like these sorts of sites.

One of the hardest parts will be getting content over the long term. 99% of ours is submitted at this point, but it took years of emailing people to get enough new stuff coming in on it’s own. At this point we publish ~15-20 projects per week.

If you could get people to give a quick synopsis aBout why they selected 2-3 items on their desk it would probably help people know why they might want to buy as why as SEO.

Good idea and will keep an eye out for you in the future!

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Wow Office Snapshots looks incredible. Yeah UGC seems to be the big bottleneck initially, as I'm finding out right now.

Do you mind sharing why you initially started Office Snapshots?

I ask because I suspect there was something far significant than "I thought it would be cool." This project is showing me how important it is to really love what you do - otherwise the amount of effort it takes to get something off the ground and self-sustainable is just truly back-breaking. I've probably spent a month on this project and I'm already getting exhausted. Starting to think its mainly because I just don't care enough about desks and desk setups in the first place.

It was definitely an “I think that would be cool” type of thing.

Office design wasn’t my passion by any means, and I don’t think it is now in the specific sense, but I do have a passion for curating and organizing the largest selection of office design imagery and information.

13 years! That's pretty incredible longevity! It looks like it's grown into something of an architecture meets interior design magazine, from what started as a peek into lavish startup dig(g)s.

Cheers, man. Amazing work!

I was just thinking about you the other day!

Thanks for posting OS to twitter back then because if you hadn’t I probably would not have kept it up. But seeing how viral it went showed how much general interest there was. Took a while to find the right audience though I’m the architecture and design community. Funny how you had the most followers back then!

Was it the anniversary of this tweet?

Aug 7, 2007: My buddy Steve Searer is keeping things rolling over at http://officesnapshots.com/ He is already up to 26 companies!

I think if you had stuck with only "Web 2.0 Startups" your initial audience's interest would have fizzled out eventually. It's brilliant you were able to pivot to an audience with a more professional interest, an endless stream of content, and better advertising opportunities.

Yeah!

I think from that tweet it ended up on Digg and then passed around a bunch of blogs.

The move to other content was a mostly due to submissions being more widely varied which seemed to indicate broader interest. Once architects started submitting that seemed like the best option and we’ve been doing that angle for maybe 8 years.

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