Show HN: Pantastic

Hey, great work. We're adding panoramas at http://cheergram.com very soon. I like the niche printing business and I think there's definitely demand.

3 Things:

My biggest issue with the site is that you don't show the final product anywhere. It should really be the hero of your home page (where that little dude with the chalkboard is). Even if you don't have one printed yet, make a fake print+frame in Photoshop (not hard) and throw it on an istock living room image [1].

Second, your "Buy Now" button should be other places besides the top-right corner. Took me a while to find it. Look at our site or others that sell just 1 thing. You need a big CTA button middle-left. A/B Test it for sure.

Third, consider offering a frame as an add-on. I don't think you can walk in to Target and get a frame that fits an 8x36 print and most people won't go through the additional step of finding one or having it made. You want repeat customers and the best way to get them is to make sure they use/see the product the first time they buy. At the very least, tell them where they can find frames to fit your prints and put that on your site and email receipts.

That's all I got for now. Good job.

[1] http://www.istockphoto.com/search/text/blank%20living%20room...

Your site makes it look like you keep your Epson printer[1] at Magnolia Editions' studio[2,3] in Oakland, CA.

That's a long way from St. Louis, and a long way from your basement.

1. Your pic: http://i.imgur.com/Ub3FVCy.jpg

2. Studio: http://www.magnoliaeditions.com/exhibitions/magnolia-edition...

3. Same pic: http://www.artltdmag.com/index.php?subaction=showfull&id...;

The photo of the "studio" at the bottom looks like a large industrial space, not the "founder's basement". If that's not really a picture of this company, it's a bit misleading to have it on the web site.

Also, a single-person operation isn't usually called a "team". And while it's impressive that a college student can run a successful business, it's possible that emphasizing this on the web site might scare away potential customers who are businesses with deadlines to meet. Why limit your market unnecessarily?

Great start here, I like what you've done.

Some feedback for improvement:

1) I would break the page up into multiple pages. Keep the homepage simple and let the user click ancillary links if they need to.

2) It says the printing is done in the founders basement, but shows a picture of a printing warehouse. Is your basement a printing warehouse? Honestly not sure here.

3) The textures are distracting, I'd tone them down.

4) A blurred picture of the Golden Gate Bridge is cliche, I'd try something else.

5) The 'What is Pantastic' doesn't really say anything. Statements like "Delivered to your doorstep" (assumed), and #1 quality around (a relative statement with no comparison) don't progress the sale.

The actual page has several conspicuous issues. First, the typeface is consistently too thin. You really ought to be using more robust type weights. Second, there are too many textures that are too profligate. They distract from the actual content and the variations in texture from block to block create a somewhat grating reading experience. Moreover, the texture feels sort of perfunctory: it seems as though you just pulled five gaudy textures from Subtle Patterns.

The actual idea is novel, but I'm not sure how large the demand will be: panorama software (especially on mobile phones) tends to be inconsistant and produces rendering errors, and most everything my iPhone produces isn't fit for large-format display. Moreover, the price is somewhat high. I acknowledge that printing large images is expensive, but this is a non-essential service and is somewhat of a gimmick. It will be hard to convince prospective customers to drop $25 on something like this.

However, the idea is novel and the name is great.

I put two together in photoshop and print them at Costco. The Fuji crystal archive paper is fantastic and works out at $4.50 each panorama. They are also more durable, more archival and have the best color matching due to the profiles being downloadable.

Amazing: a landing page full of information but not one single picture of the final product.

1) I'm in the UK and can't view the video.

2) Do you ship internationally? You should answer this in the FAQ.

3) Show me an example of the finished product.

It took a while to find the price. You should probably make it stand out more so people feel more comfortable when they click "Buy Now"

Interesting concept, unfortunate design.. Sorry. In this day and age of web design, you need to be at a different level than this.

Looks nice but uh oh it's sloooow. You probably want to hook into a CDN if you stay on the frontpage for more than a few minutes.

Looks great! One thing I did notice is the background image (http://www.pantastic.co/ggb.png) loads really slow for me and the design feels a little broken without it. Overall love the look though :)

Good product. Has potential in the right markets. This is something I've touched before, and it makes a fair amount of money. Which market are you aiming for?

Also, publish an API for this. You can get a lot of business with a photo printing API. Don't ask how I know... ;)

You are selling. Pricing should be the biggest thing someone wants to look at. I had to revisit the page to find it at the very bottom in FAQ. For a second I thought I had to register my name, email and photo to get the pricing. Definitely something you don't want a user to think.

All in all, like the images and like the fact that you show how it all really works down to the printer and toner.

A lot of people are complaining about the speed of the site.

They'd be complaining less if they could read the texts before the images were loaded.

A simple way to do this, is to give the areas containing background-images a background-color that's close to the color of the image. This way, if there's text on top (white text for example) it'll be readable BEFORE the image loads.

They'll notice the wait time less.

Great idea! One suggestion in terms of design--the FAQs are difficult to quickly scan/read because the line heights are the same for questions and answers. Consider adding additional spacing between Q/A groups for better hinting at where an answer ends and a question begins. Great idea though, and best of luck!

Clean. Very clean and easy.

Quick Bug: (Chrome on OS X, haven't checked elsewhere)for your modal (specifically modal.fade.in in bootstrap.css line 5004) you have "top:50%", which causes the very top of the modal to be cut off. Simply bumping it to 60% fixed it. Don't know if anybody else is having this same problem.

Best of luck to you!

The "What is Pantastic?" section doesn't really answer the question. Those three points could be applied to almost any decorative item sold online; they don't tell me that you print panoramas that I upload.

I'd also really like some pictures of the finished product.

Congratulations. The photo of your physical printing space is a big plus, it shows that you're for real. You could look for ways to highlight that more, and have real people with the final printed product to show its scale and quality.

Awesome idea! Maybe have a section on your site to show some of your printed canvas?

Hey great job,

the images load quite slowly, so I'd compress them, but it looks great nevertheless!

"The uploader did not make this video available in your country" - Way to go!

Awesome. I see you're from Houston, which makes me smile. In a world of high speed Internet and amazing cloud options, it's funny that there's a handful of "startup epicenters".

There's nothing wrong with being the only employee - if it's just you, say so. Talking in the third person and using 'us' and 'we' is irritating.

Looks great! A little issue with the menu hovering over other text when zoomed @ around 200%. Nicely done though.

Congratulations, looks nice! :)

P.S.On a completely unrelated note.. Is Mr. David Veselka Lithuanian?

I spot Comic Sans (probably a fallback font for @font-face styling?)

I like that you have a picture of your studio. great work my man.

Why would you not make this video viewable outside of US?

tsk tsk...

The body text font looks really bad in Chrome.

Thanks for blocking the video on my zone ...

optimize your background images