Comment by mguerville | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mguerville | Hacker News Reader

I and a few classmates in business school built a service to print people's top 5 instagram pics (top = #comments + #likes) every month and mail it to them as a nice physical keepsake. I was really flabbergasted that we couldn't get even 10 customers, we spend nearly $1,000 on ads before calling it quits (if we had had 10 customers we may have kept iterating but the setback was big enough to decide to just stop, and it only took a few weeks to build). Part of what was happening at the same time was the move towards stories, videos, and posts with multiples images, so it would have become way more complex than initially planned anyway and none of us were engineers. The year before that I "invented" a mouthwash that was all powder based so you could travel with it despite travel liquid restrictions, the kickstarter campaign raised a decent amount but about a 1/3 shy of what it would have cost to place the minimum order with the packaging company (the power would be in tea bags), so I also nixed that but that was a fun side project

I’m currently subscribed to a service that allows me to select 8 pictures every month and have them printed and sent to me. They supply new albums at extra cost when the current one is full (have 3 so far, over about 1.5 years).

Apparently there is a market for this kind of thing. Mine is targeted at young parents though, maybe that makes a difference?

My family uses famileo.com (Europe only I think) which is basically that, selecting recent photos and add texts to make "articles" and they send your "family newspaper" to your older relatives each month.

My grand-parents love it, so yeah there's a market for this kind of things (at least as long as this generation lives).

We use famileo too, it's great. Our idea with that side hustle was total automation so people don't have to even choose the pictures, and perhaps that's where the product market fit was lacking. The hypothesis was that 1. most people think they'll choose pics but in reality they rarely do and rarely print any, and 2. in the "choose and print" market there was too much competition to begin with, from printing for pennies at walgreens or online via shutterfly, to recurring services like famileo

Here's the video I made, for what it's worth: https://youtu.be/93XUnsrG18g

curious, have you had any successes ? (respectfully)

I have, I built a subscription coloring book business when they became a huge fad. It was profitable (between $500 and $1,000 a month in net profit) and I sold it after 10 months when I needed to relocate outside of the country for work so the burden of managing it would no longer be worth it. I also joined somebody else's side hustle in the employee engagement space (tips for managers and a simple tool to keep track of staff info like birthdays, favorite food, etc.) that was acquired by a larger but still very small company in that space. Both "exits" were not in the low 5 digits so nothing notable but a nice feeling

What did you sell it for if you don’t mind my asking?

Chroma Club (the coloring book one) was just $3k, I had about 2 weeks to unload it because I didn’t want to have to handle closing and refunding subscriptions (some people prepaid for 6 months etc.) and it was faster/easier to sell than unwind, so a bit of a fire sale. The other one was about 10x that amount.

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