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Comment by nickelcitymario | Hacker News Reader

For what it's worth, I'd do it as a SaaS. 100%. Free to generate PDFs. Pay to print. Take a cut from each printing job, but outsource the printing and distribution.

I suspect you won't find a single mass market for this. The mass market is well served by generically designed notebooks.

Instead, you'll find a number of highly profitable niche markets. (Like the D&D crowd, the design crowd, the hacker crowd, STEM teachers, etc.) Judging by your homepage, it seems you're already on this track.

Because of this, your best bet (once developed or at least in early testing) might be to find a few brand ambassadors from each of those niches: a dedicated gamer, a well-known designer, etc. People who can introduce your product into their respective niches.

I'd also make sure the print quality is on par with Field Notes or Moleskin, to make sure you can command a good price.

Apologies for the unsolicited advice... just really into this idea.

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Great advice!

The printing quality & shipping will be a problem and I was thinking to offer the print on demand just as a 'secondary' option, not a feature.

Probably it would be more profitable to create custom widgets and designs for companies or exporting the layouts as standalone, mini-apps - something like an UI/app editor (what you see is what you get) - that are also printable :)

> Probably it would be more profitable to create custom widgets and designs for companies or exporting the layouts as standalone, mini-apps - something like an UI/app editor (what you see is what you get) - that are also printable :)

So under this model, you'd be banking on printers to pay for the software? I could be wrong but I think that would be a mistake. I've worked with a lot of printers and I've never met one that felt like they needed innovation. Printing is an industry that begrudgingly accepts innovation when it's forced upon them.

On the consumer end of things, I suspect you'll struggle to get people to pay much for the use of the software itself. Many people might simply take inspiration from your work, then do it themselves if they're going to print it themselves anyway. But they would likely pay a premium for on-demand printing.

All that being said, I could be projecting. The aspect of this product that I would personally pay for is the ability to have my custom designed notebook printed and shipped to me. That's very valuable to me as a notebook lover. If I print it myself, the quality will suck. If I design it myself, it'll suck.

But if I can use your app to drag and drop beautifully-designed components and then have it magically appear at my door? Take my money, please.

That's my 2 cents, anyway. Good luck! I hope you find wild success with this no matter what direction you take, because the idea is that good IMHO.

I'm not targeting printers and I don't want to depend on them. If a user wants to print on demand his notebook, there will be that option (if possible).

Also, I'm not targeting consumers. Since the engine is already opensource, I don't have a problem making the whole app open.

"I would personally pay for is the ability to have my custom designed notebook printed and shipped to me" -> I think the core feature is how easily you can design your custom notebook. There are already p-o-d services and you can just use Photoshop or Word for editing. But they are too complex.

What I was trying to say is that, maybe, some companies would pay for custom widgets that hook to a db and display nice graphs & tables to quickly create business reports. But I don't think those companies care about p-o-d because they already have their own providers.

So far, the business model is: free everything except for the cloud storage (if any) and premium widgets & layouts. I would not add a premium over the p-o-d price since I have no control over the quality and I would offer it as a 'bonus', like an option to link the app to a 3rd party printer of your choice.

Anyway, thanks for the input, it really helped me! If you want to keep in touch, let me know.

> maybe, some companies would pay for custom widgets that hook to a db and display nice graphs & tables to quickly create business reports.

That's an interesting angle. I have no sense whatsoever about the demand for it, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's a sizeable market for that idea.

> If you want to keep in touch, let me know.

I'd love to be kept in the loop for any updates. If the email list on your site isn't the best list, please add me. My email is my HN username @ google's email platform.

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