How do you find your first paying customers? How do you come up with good ideas? And then
how do you pick the right one to work on? How do you create compelling content that
drives tens of thousands of customers to your website?
I'm Corlan Allen and this is the Indie Hackers Podcast, and today I'll be talking to Chris
Chan about all of these topics. Chris is the founder of Instapainting.com, where you can
upload a photo and in a few weeks you'll get a hand-painted canvas in the mail done
by a real artist. I did a text-based interview with Chris back when I launched Indie Hackers
in August and it was one of the first interviews to really explode in popularity on the site.
It was number one on Hacker News for a day or two in October and shortly afterwards Chris
and I sat down to record this episode. The reason Chris's interview was so popular
was that he was a great example of someone finding creative ways to overcome what are
some of the bigger challenges that Indie Hackers commonly struggle with. Chris is a super scrappy
guy and just to give you an example, he was in debt before he started Instapainting and
then he created his business as a means of getting himself out of debt. Two and a half
years later he's averaging $32,000 a month in revenue as a one-man operation.
I'm really excited to have him on for this episode of the Indie Hackers Podcast and
I hope you guys enjoy it.
Just wanted to give a quick shout out to Product Manager HQ. If you're an Indie Hacker who's
looking to build better products that people actually want to buy, go join the world's
largest product manager community on Slack over at productmanagerhq.com. The community
has thousands of product people around the world chatting daily about best practices
for building amazing products. Once again, that's Product Manager HQ.
What's up Chris? Welcome to the show.
Hi, yeah, thanks for having me here.
Yeah, no problem man. You and I go way back since we met in Y Combinator back in January
2011 and you also did one of the very first text-based interviews for Indie Hackers back
in August which has since accumulated I think more page views than any other interview that
I've ever done.
Yeah, I had no idea. My previous interview was the most popular. I don't think it's
not even the highest revenue one on there.
Yeah, you're right. It's not. I think you're averaging $32,000 in revenue per month which
is not the highest on the site but it's also not jump change. But part of the reason I
think your interview is so compelling is how you've handled growth. You've done a lot of
cool and creative content marketing projects that drive traffic and on top of that the
idea behind Instapainting is also super simple and I think that's inspiring to developers
and entrepreneurs. So can you tell us in your own words what Instapainting is and how it
works?
Well, for the average consumer it's a way to get oil painting or custom artwork done
by an actual artist in their home and stick to you and all you have to do is provide them
a photograph. It can be as easy as providing a photograph or sending multiple photographs
and asking for something slightly more complex like swapping heads or changing backgrounds.
But it allows you to get custom artwork from an artist.
And how does Instapainting work exactly? Like let's say I've got a photo of me and I want
to get it turned into a painting. What exactly do I need to do? Do I just upload it to your
site and you take care of the rest? Or is there any other responsibility on my end?
And what does the end-to-end process look like on your side of things? How do you coordinate
with the artist? And how do you make sure that my painting gets made and shipped to
me?
Alright, so what do you have to do? The easiest way for you to get a painting is to just upload
a photo that's exactly or a design or a picture that's exactly how you want it to look already.
And it can be a crude Photoshop if you have something customized. But the artist will
smooth it out. I just have the picture uploaded and then the painter or the artist will paint
or draw it exactly as depicted in the picture. And then you'll just get it at your shipping
address within about three weeks.
Wow, that's... And this goes back to what I was saying earlier about your idea being
just so simple and unique at the same time. Most of the companies that I've interviewed
for ND hackers are pure software companies, you know, but you've got artists and you have
shipping, photo uploads and so much going on behind the scenes. It's a lot more complex
than most of the companies that I talked to. And yet you managed to make it work as a solo
founder and you managed to do incredibly well for yourself. So how exactly did you come
to build this business? How do you handle the complexity and what have you built to
help you manage all of these artists?
When I first started, it was just manually brokering and managing the transactions. So
that's how I worked initially. And then just over time, more and more things became delegated
to a CPU. For example, at first, we... I think I always, if I remember correctly, I always
had some sort of basic interface that allowed the artists to check the orders online. But
initially, there was no messaging system or anything like that. So basically, customers
would have to email us to pass any messages and then we would have to tell the artists
and we would have to also try to make sure they're on schedule.
So that's interesting because it sounds like you're saying that customers can directly
message the artists. And I'm curious, what kind of messages do customers have to send
to artists?
It ranges from anything from, you know, what's the status to changes that they want to make
because we allow unlimited revisions.
Okay, so customers can see what the painting looks like before it shipped to them and then
they can request changes using your platform.
Yeah, yeah. From the get go, there was always some amount of web technology involved. It
was never completely manual. But from the start, there was at least a page that let
you see the picture once was completed from the artist. And then there was an administration
interface for the artist to read the orders that they have and then, you know, upload
a picture.
So that was always there from the beginning. But there was some manual overhead in facilitating
communication between the artists. And so a messaging system is introduced so that we
didn't have to go back and forth like that. There's no need because ultimately we just
be just we pass the message as is.
Okay, cool. So hopefully by now most people understand what Instapainting is and how it
works. And I want to go back now to kind of the beginning of how you started Instapainting
because today you're incredibly successful. You're on track to do $400,000 in revenue
as a single founder this year. But things weren't always so rosy for Instapainting.
If I believe correctly, when you first started, you were in dire straits financially. You
were at a point where your previous business hadn't been doing that well, and you were
in debt and you needed money and Instapainting was kind of your answer to that problem, which
is crazy because most people need money, they get a job, you know, they take out a loan.
And your answer to needing money was let me start this business that's immediately profitable.
So can you tell us a little bit about that process and how you started Instapainting?
Well, I raised money from Y Combinator after Y Combinator. But it was pretty soon after,
maybe like three months after YC, that was pretty clear that I needed to pivot to something
new. So from the funds I was raised, I just spent an absurdly long time, maybe about two
years or so, just pivoting and trying out new ideas. And in hindsight, it was probably
a waste of time. But as I ran lower and lower on cash, my ideas would start focusing less
and less on social music and more on how to generate revenue immediately. And then eventually
I ran out of all the cash and also had credit card debt. And that's when one of the potentially
cash generating ideas, Instapainting was launched and it wasn't a complete failure. And that
being said, it wasn't like, oh, holy shit, it's bringing in so much money on day one.
It was in the first three months or in the first year, it was probably only if I took
all the profits for myself as salary, it would have only been like a 40 or $50,000 per year
salary in the first year.
That's funny that you say only 40 to $50,000 salary the first year, because I've talked
to a lot of founders of businesses and a lot of entrepreneurs who are aspiring to create
something like this. And most people can only dream about having that kind of success in
their first year. It's really a huge accomplishment. It's amazing that you were able to do it.
I guess, but I was focusing full time on it, which meant that there was no other salary
that I had. And also this is in the Bay Area. So we're comparing this to a 140k starting
salary program. It's like, yeah, it's like, you know, if I'm only making 40k a year, I
could just get a job as a software engineer. And right, but I didn't want to do that. So
I just I just hope for the best and kept going.
Yeah, I have kind of the same mindset as you I suspect like I, I personally have never
had a full time job at any tech startup or company or otherwise, like I've always been
self employed or working on my own startup. Is that the case for you?
Yes, I've never had a I've never had a job actually. Yeah, I mean, I when I was in YC,
I had just quit college. So I hadn't even gone into the job market and had had the opportunity
to go in the job market. This is how it happened. I mean, obviously, if this is instipating
it failed and I ran out of money, it would probably I would have had had gotten a job.
And speaking of money, let's go back a little bit and talk about the period after YC.
Because you had done YC and then you spent years just coming up with idea after idea
trying them out and moving on to the next one. But eventually you started running low
on money. And would you say that revenue pressure was what allowed you to come up with better
and better ideas over time?
I would think better. But it is that would be less, you know, idealistic and more focusing
on revenue.
Do you think having that revenue pressure like that absolute need to make money is what
made it possible? Like, do you think you never would have come up with the idea for and depending
if you weren't under that situation? Or were there other motivating factors?
Yeah, I would say never have come up with that idea. I guess they're just probably taken
a lot, lot longer. You know, when you have other people's or when you have enough money
to cushion you, you don't really have to think about problems like revenue.
Yeah, that's very apparent when you look at some of these more well funded companies.
You see them branching out in every direction because they have so much money in the bank
that they're not constrained. They're not under any pressure to make money.
Yes. Because it insulates you from signals that would otherwise prevent you from, you
know, doing what's necessary. It's like pain. Without pain, you would just hurt yourself,
hold yourself constantly.
Without a lack of money, you don't feel any pressure to make money. So you just stumble
around doing things that don't make any money.
Don't make money and probably hurt you in ways you don't know because you have enough
money to not care.
Exactly. And not to bash on companies that raise money. I mean, raising money gives you
a lot of breathing room, and it gives you the capital to grow a lot faster than if you're
trying to bootstrap. But at the same time, like, boot shepherds do have this unique advantage
in that they're pressured to make money immediately. And if you're trying to be an indie hacker
and your goal is not necessarily to become a billion dollar company, but to make enough
money to provide for you and yours, then focusing on making money is crucial. And on that note,
with Instapainting, because you were so low on money, you had to do a lot of things from
the get go to make money immediately. How did you set up your initial product? How did
you make money right out of the gate with Instapainting?
It was just a basic page, said what it would do will get you a painting. And the first
type of painting we saw was called mixed media, which is actually a new product in the market.
So there was already a bunch of old sites, like at least 10 years old, doing, brokering
oil paintings from particular Chinese companies. And they do these 100% painted oil paintings.
So when we started, we actually introduced a new product that wasn't really in the market.
It's called mixed media. It's printed and then painted. And we made that clear. It was
called mixed media. And so because of that, it was half the price of an oil painting.
And it was, you know, it would still look like an oil painting. And so it in that that
took off, I don't know if the effect would have been the same if I had introduced the
same product as they do some competitors, which is oil painting, and then charge the
same price.
Right. So what is your first customers come from?
I posted on Reddit subreddit called r slash startups. And it's pretty small subreddit,
but I'd probably still follow people that tried to try new things. But yeah, it was
a small subreddit. And generally, I never have any success posting on Reddit. But especially
with something we're trying to sell something, but that worked. I would recommend r slash
startups. You have to frame your thing, your post is a startup.
Yeah, yeah. And the hackers is on r slash startups, I think the weekend that I launched
back in early August. And it someone some random person I didn't know submitted it there.
And it was it was a really good source of feedback and stuff. So I can see how it
Yeah, it's not very highly trafficked, I believe. But at least it wasn't at the time. Definitely
much smaller than Hacker News. But that's when it first started. That's when I first
posted and I figured if this this will, you know, it'll work. This wall here. I, I got
a technical article later, and then I got, you know, on Hacker News later, three months
later.
Cool. So I've got a wide variety of topics that I want to talk to you about today. And
one of them we already kind of touched on. But I want to go back and get a few more details,
because I'm sure a lot of people myself included, are curious about how ends the painting works
behind the scenes and aren't quite sure how it works. So if you go to the site, it's actually
a marketplace, you're connecting the people doing the paintings with customers like my
self, who are going to look for a painting. But as a customer, it doesn't seem like a
traditional marketplace. From my point of view, as a customer, it seems like a store.
So I just go in, upload my photo and poof, some magic happens. And I get a painting back
in the mail. But behind the scenes, you've actually got this entire user interface for
painters to take requests and communicate with customers and do all sorts of all sorts
of stuff. So I'm curious, like, how did you build that? And how does insta painting work?
Right. So like I explained earlier, when it first started, it was some degree of technology
and automation just because of my background. And so one of the first things I did was create
pages for the artists to set the status of the order, upload pictures and view the orders
that we have assigned them.
And who were these artists at first?
It was just one supplier at when we first started. Okay. Well, you know, zero suppliers
when I first started. And then then I found one after the sales were made. But we're actually
the very first artists were my roommates. So they were painted in a USA. That was one
of our selling points. So they they painted the first few orders at basically at cost.
And I even pitched in some work. And we managed to barely ship those on time.
You were painting? Yeah, well, we were doing these are mixed media. And we were doing them
on the floor and our apartment and I was painting. I was hoping to paint parts of it. Oh, cool.
Because of mixed media, it was mostly about adding in texture. And right. It's like tracing,
right?
Yeah, kind of like tracing. Okay. And those are still the hard part. But they would mix
everything for me. And then I would just help apply the paint. Because we were under tight
deadlines. I made some crazy promises in the beginning.
Right. You sold something like $2,000 worth of paintings and had like a two week delivery
deadline, right?
Yeah, I think it was I think it was like two weeks at the time. Now it's now we say three
weeks. But the time I said two weeks, but that that was, yeah, so it was really expensive
because printing it in San Francisco on canvas was extremely expensive. It costs more than
it. It costs more to print on canvas in San Francisco now than it does from our marketplace
of artists.
Wow. Okay, so your first artists were roommates. And basically, that was just so you could
fulfill this two week deadline. But then eventually you went out and you found a supplier and
China. And you've got the software that you made that you were talking about earlier for
the artist. What does this software do? And how did you train the artist to use it?
Well, what? Just to clarify, we, after launching that, when it was made by the artists, artists,
some artists are trying to contact us. And we started using them instead.
Oh, cool. So you didn't even have to find them.
No, the only time I had to find them was when Christmas hit on the second year, on the second
year operation, and we didn't have enough the Piers to fulfill Christmas orders. Because
the second year was, was one of the biggest Christmas years. But yeah, so what was the
question again?
Yeah, you were talking earlier about the different types of software involved in running Instapainting.
And specifically, you mentioned that there's some kind of behind the scenes software that
you wrote for the artist to use. So I'm just kind of curious, what does that software do
and what's it look like?
Oh, it was just banding. It was just expanding the current website. Yeah, and the the scope
and functionality of it eventually added messaging system. At some point, we also had a translation
system. But it was easier to just restrict artists because so many artists just restrict
artists the ones that could speak English for the time being. So this messaging system
and then we added, you know, just more features, automatic email notifications. We added a
bidding system that takes into account to their customer rating, the price and the turnaround
time, so that it can be optimized for the best artists based on those factors.
The artists have all sorts of features, this entire behind the scenes ecosystem going on
where they're messaging customers and bidding on the most promising customers. But from
your customer's perspective, all of this is invisible, right? You never talk about this
to any of them.
Oh, yeah, I mean, it's completely irrelevant to the customer. Well, technology is behind
it, right. And you know, that's probably, probably a common mistake by startups is to
consumer start for consumer startups, at least to try to pitch how they're different by going
into their technology. But what's really important is the end result for the customer. That's
why it isn't, you know, wasn't important to make it known that it's a marketplace or
whatever, and everyone's trying to build a platform in the marketplace. And, and, but
it doesn't matter to the, to the customer, really what it is, in the end, it's just,
all right, you know, can I get this product that I want? And how easily can I get it?
And you know, it's quality. Those are the things that are important to the customer.
Right. And what's important to you as a founder? Do you spend a lot of time focusing on automating
things so you can spend less time dealing automation? Yeah. Automation is important.
And it's, it'll get you there 90% of the way. And because there's always room for improving
automation. But so for the 10% of the people that aren't served by the automation or doesn't
work for them, we fill that in with customer service, where it would have previously, you
know, for in the case of Google, those 10% are just forgotten. They provide a cheap product
and absolutely no customer service. But I like to take Apple's ethos, which is to provide
the best customer service. And I don't know what level of automation they have behind
the scenes. But automation is to provide, you know, if we have to manually fulfill the
experience of helping you get a painting, at the very least, and then use automation
on our end to lower the cost for ourselves. Right. But then, you know, you can't just
stick automation in and then just just let it run by itself. And just be happy with the
90% of the cases it works for. So anytime anyone has an issue with anything, we always
respond within 24 hours. Any issue that may be covered by our website, for example, a
lot of people get confused by some UI occasionally, right? We always help them and we just, we
just doesn't matter how they use the website, they aren't the customer is never using the
website wrong.
Right. And I think is interesting about customer service. It's one of those mantras you hear
in the startup world that delivering good customer service is important. But until you've
been there and tried it, you don't realize just how hard it is. You get emails at all
times of the day and night. And part of good customer service is being able to respond
to these emails in a timely fashion. I think you said you do yours in under an hour. That's
tough, especially if you're a maker, and these emails are interrupting, you know, you're
kind of uninterruptible time that you're coding or working on some project. And also to go
back to what you're saying, pretty much no matter what the problem is, the customer is
never at fault. It's always supposed to be your fault. And at least you need to treat
it that way. And psychologically, for a lot of people, that's much easier said than done.
So between these two issues, I think most people end up sucking at customer support,
which is why being good at it is such a big differentiating factor.
Yeah. And I had the I had the same attitude. I had that attitude before to where it's like,
all right, well, I built all this automatic technologies, you know, you should be able
to use it, or that, you know, the customer should should be able to use the technology
that's there. Like, for example, there's, there's a way to upload and talk to your artists.
Occasionally, some people will still email us and ask us to forward a message for them.
And we'll forward the message for them. Because somehow the customer doesn't realize, right,
you they can just type a message on the page. So we do that for them. And then, you know,
as far as automation goes, we have to figure out, well, how, how do we make it more easy
to use? Because apparently some people are still getting confused.
Oh, yeah. And you can't you can't do 100% of automation, because there's always going
to be someone who, you know, some who you didn't account for, you know, maybe someone
who's blind, for example, or someone who is dyslexic. There's a lot of cases where people
there's a lot of, there's a lot of people that you won't account for, when using set
or just randomly, someone would just not see something, right? You can never account for
one interest in the computer, you fully know until you have like some sort of general intelligence
about your customer support.
Yeah, exactly. And that's a gap that automation can't fix, because that sort of becomes, I
mean, I guess that's where it becomes absolutely crucial to outsource things and to delegate
tasks to other real people. So you can spend less of your own time on sort of mundane processes
and spend more time doing things that matter, like focusing on growth or learning from customers
improving your product, etc. So what I'm curious about hearing is about how the automated parts
of Instapainting have changed over time, because I know at the beginning, it was probably a
lot more manual effort for you to run the site than it is nowadays, probably a lot of
processes that were just wrote repetition or that a machine could have done for you,
or that you could have outsourced to somebody else. You've been now able to automate away.
So what are some of the processes that you smoothed out over time to be able to give
yourself more free time to work on what really matters?
Most of the most of the most of it is just providing a way to communicate with your artists
directly with things like revisions for things like shipping information, because artists
all ship their paintings, and just providing the information that the artist would normally
provide someone who orders, and then making that automatically surfaced on the website.
So there's less emails asking about the status or whatever. Because we're in a small niche,
we only do paintings. It's a fairly standard procedure. And to find out what to automate,
it's really simple, right? If you're doing your business, you will know what to automate.
Because if you're doing the business, as I said, where let's say you're doing oil paintings,
then your primary goal is to provide oil paintings as ordered and provide services that you promised
to provide to the customers. And that should be your primary goal. And you should be doing
that manually if you have no automation, right? So if you're doing that manually, you will
know what takes up most of your time, and then just provide some sort of automation
for the things that take up time, right software to handle things or to reduce the task load
for that specific sub task, you'll see if you do that manually, and eventually you approach
90% automation and a 90% automation, you'll still see 10% of the stuff that people are
confused about. And then you just keep iterating and keep identifying what's taking up that
remaining 10% of the time, what's the thing that's, you know, coming in 10% of the time,
maybe people keep emailing about, you know, tracking number. And so, even if your technology
goes there, and has this laser tracking number, it could only be 90% of the way it could have
only covering 90% of people who see the page, for some reason, right? So you would have
to think, how can I fix that issue now? So you would have to go in action, identify and
look at it and advise and try to see why people 10% of the people are not getting the tracking,
not understanding it in the UI. So it's an iterative process. But as long as, and that's
another reason why it's important to fill in that 10% with manual customer service.
Because then you would actually, it becomes your problem. And you really feel, you really
feel it, right? Like, I'm a very lazy person. I don't like, I don't like doing things manually.
And yeah, I was dreaded when I have to do something manually and I have to do some work.
So when I funnel those customers back to me, it makes it really, really pressing for me
to automate it away. Right, right. So, so like today, for example, let's say you wanted
to stop working on Instapainting and you wanted to hand it off for you to sell it to someone
else. Who would you have to hire to keep the business running? Would it just be a customer
support person who knows the app inside out? Would you need to hire developers? Like what
parts of the business require attention from you and your day to day?
Yeah, you would only need a customer support person to basically handle high level customer
support, like issuing refunds or arbitrating disputes between artists and customers.
That's awesome to have gotten things so far. So I want to switch gears a little bit and
talk about another topic. Specifically, I want to talk about how you've grown Instapainting
because I think finding customers is a very important and obviously challenging problem.
But you've been very diligent and identifying different ways to bring traffic to your site
and grow your business and grow your revenue. And one of the things that you've talked about
in your text based interview was SEO. You mentioned that for the first six months or
I think maybe a year of Instapainting's life, your growth is pretty stagnant. And you weren't
really doing anything on the SEO front until a friend kind of showed you the ropes. And
eventually you were able to get Instapainting to rank number two or number one on Google
for your desired keywords. So searches like photo to painting and stuff like that. Can
you let us know what that process was like of learning about SEO and improving your ranking?
Yeah, we rose in the search results gradually over the period of... Well, actually, it mostly
happened in the second year, over the second year. And that's because that's when I shifted
the focus to SEO. It started with some basic HTML changes, but then it grew into link building
and content marketing. Yeah, I'm still not an expert on it and I still don't consider
myself an expert on it. My friend Ryan Bednar, who now does a startup called Rank Science.
He gave me some simple tips and then he's been following his tips. And the most important
thing is just trying to get links in. That's the meat of SEO. It's hard because nobody
knows how Google's algorithm works, but link building should be the main thing. You get
more people to link to your site about what your site is about and it'll boost your rankings.
Yeah, I should really know more about SEO, given that I run a content site. But in addition
to SEO, and maybe it's tight end, is your content marketing strategy. You've done all
sorts of cool, effective things to get people writing about Instapainting and linking back
to your site. For example, you made a painter robot that can autonomously replicate an artist
painting. You made a two player version of the popular video game in 2048 and got it
to the top of Hacker News. And you even toured art factories in China and then wrote about
your experiences. So you've done an incredible amount of really interesting stuff and turned
them into awesome blog posts that have been linked to tens of thousands of times all over
the web. So I'm curious, how did you find the time to do all this stuff and what's your
day to day like? Generally, those things don't take up too much time. It'll be like maybe
one week or two weeks of full time work. The longest was the robot was which was about
two weeks of full time work. And yeah, I spend I spend time thinking about obviously what
to do next. Yeah, I mean, the business is streamlined except for growth, right? And
so the content marketing initiatives is growth. So it's not necessarily taking time off business.
The things that I can spend my time on besides customer service, which doesn't take up that
much time, but is developing new features that automate more of the business or, you
know, make it otherwise some somehow better, or, you know, marketing, right? Those are
the two really those are the two things that take up my time marketing new features. And
so I just happened to spend that time, you know, a week or two weeks on marketing. Yeah,
I'm jealous because I'm nowhere near that point at indie hackers. And I spend hours
and hours every week probably finding people to interview editing and annotating interviews,
handling social media and answering emails, posting on the indie hackers forum, working
on the podcast, etc. And so really, almost all of my time is consumed by just doing the
minimum necessary things to keep my business running. So it's hard to find time to spend
on things like growth and new features. But I think that's one of the big challenges for
being a solo founder. And I want to ask you, what's your experience been as a solo founder?
Because I know you did YC as a solo founder, and you've been on your own since then. And
in fact, that was, you're one of the rare solo founders to even get into YC. So what
do you think are the unique challenges or advantages to being on your own as a founder?
I mean, I can do anything I want. I've seen companies, you know, dissolve because, because
of founder disputes. I mean, a lot of a lot of companies are structured in that there
was like two equal founders, right? 5050 split or two founders that really wanted to take
the companies in their own directions. And there were a lot of company breakups. And
I would just destroy the companies, right? And so being a single founder, I don't have
to worry about those things. I can make any product decision that I want to my detriment
or to my benefit. Do you find that it's challenging not having a co founder to bounce your ideas
off us?
Bounce ideas off anybody doesn't have to be co founder. As long as you have friends, perfectly
fine. Yeah, even then I wouldn't focus too much on bouncing ideas off people that aren't
going to pay you. You'll probably mostly a waste of time you should just spend that time
and I think that's another benefit of a single founder, you can just spend more time and
focus on just getting it something out there. You can ask the real world, the real audience
that you're going to potentially have for feedback by letting them use your thing. And
you can work a lot faster. There's less time spent making decisions. I'd imagine I don't
know. I never made decisions collaboratively with another person.
So was this part of your would you say this is like a philosophy that you subscribe to
that you should never have a co founder? Or is there a situation? You know, maybe with
events depending on where to fail, you started another company where you would consider working
with somebody else and bringing on a co founder?
No, yeah, I would try a co founder and but it would definitely be in the non equal. There
is the second person would have less equity or would have less stay. In fact, the co founder
would be like, cheap labor. There's just an invested, early, cheap labor.
Yeah, I think that's an interesting take. Because the conventional wisdom is to just
split the equity down the middle 5050 every time, no questions asked. And that is supposedly,
you know, a helpful way to do things to avoid co founder disputes. But at the same time,
there's there's something to be said for people who recognize that like, hey, maybe I'm in
a situation where I'm contributing to the business full time, and my co founder is in
school or has a different job or came on late, you know, in those situations, people aren't
going to be happy for very long with a perfectly equal split. So I think it's worth considering
doing things in this kind of unconventional way.
But I want to move on to talk about user growth and marketing, I want to change topics and
kind of get back to what we were discussing earlier, because I think it's something that
a lot of people struggle with. And a lot of people would love to hear your thoughts on
specifically, how do you avoid this this trough of sorrow period, right? And so for those
who are listening, you don't understand what the trough of sorrow is. The trough of sorrow
is this phenomenon where after you launch, you might get a lot of press on TechCrunch
or Hacker News or product on or maybe you don't. But after you launch, you end up with
this long sustained period of very little growth and very few users coming to your product
or app that you built. And I'm curious what you did at Instapainting to deal with that
period and what your advice is for other people.
Yeah, you have to look at when you're doing a server, you have to think, oh, well, I can
use the press as one of my tools, but the press gives you some traffic, but it's temporary,
right? And you have to look at your tools that you can use to market. So there's one
time press, which will give you a boost of traffic. That doesn't really help much because
that's one time, right? But the only thing press does is it also helps with SEO, right?
Because it's a reputable site that links to you. Another thing that helps is one time
traffic could potentially get other people to share and become viral, right? And then
almost 99.999% time never happens. And even if something goes viral, it's also temporary,
you know, like Pokemon Go.
Yeah, that's a really interesting point you made about the SEO because I think a lot of
people underestimate the SEO benefits they get from their initial launch and they just
have no idea why they're getting an increased amount of traffic after their launch. But
with ND hackers, I launched on Hacker News, which as far as I can tell, doesn't have that
many SEO benefits. And people aren't really searching ND hackers and Google anyway. But
since launching, then I've continued to use Hacker News as like a major source of traffic.
I try to get one or two interviews to the top of Hacker News every month, and I'm usually
pretty successful. And it accounts for about half of all my traffic in total. But in between
those spikes of traffic from Hacker News, I spent a lot of time looking at Google Analytics
and trying to understand exactly where my traffic is coming from because those sources
are a lot more organic and they're a lot more under control. It's sources like my newsletter,
there's sources like social media, Twitter, Facebook, people directly coming to the site,
etc. So they're a little bit more of like a barometer of like how healthy the traffic
is to ND hackers.
Well, what's your breakdown from, you know, social links in or versus Google? Yeah, I
get about 50% more traffic from social sources like Twitter and Facebook and Reddit, not
counting Hacker News, than I do from organic Google searches, although organic Google search
traffic has been growing pretty steadily since I launched. Yeah, I'd say even social links
in will die down. Oh, yeah, yeah, definitely. People sharing articles on Facebook and Twitter,
those things don't last very long, at least they haven't for me. But the good thing about
ND hackers is that it's a content website. So effectively, I'm constantly adding new
fuel to the fire every week, I have three or four different interviews and I'm putting
out there and more people are sharing them, as opposed to Instapainting where you've got
a product or service, right? People are googling you because they actually want your service,
but they're probably not constantly sharing articles about Instapainting.
Yeah, I've never found the case where, you know, people sharing, allowing people to share
on Facebook, having it go viral, or having it sort of snowball. So the thing is, like,
one of the main things that people over rely on, that I saw in our batch, and when I come
here was that do the launch and then magically things will work out after launch. Once you
just get enough critical mass, there was a word that was used, critical mass, which is
once you get enough people to use your product, it'll start growing by itself. I've never
seen that happen before.
Yeah, it's not a very common thing and I think it's just something that people should not
rely on.
Yeah, you shouldn't rely on that. You should be able to rely on some way to get consistent
traffic in. In those ways are SEO, paying for advertising, which you can do, but you
shouldn't do. Not for something that's a free product, at least. If you do advertising,
you really have to spend a lot of time to optimize the ads so that it actually comes
out positive for you because when you first start out doing advertising on AdWords or
anywhere, you're blowing a lot of money just to see what works and what doesn't. You won't
see immediate results with that. That's for a paid product. If you don't have a paid product,
you probably shouldn't be advertising.
I think you've done a lot of advertising for Instapainting?
No, I've learned a lot about advertising. I don't think any ads are currently running
now. In the beginning, I tried out ads and I noticed that if you put in a few hundred
dollars that it's not enough to really optimize for what keywords actually convert and come
out positive for you. We stopped doing that. In any case, we use content marketing as alternatives
to traditional advertising. It's much cheaper.
It's certainly a lot cheaper. I think the textbook story that I hear when people talk
about ads, at least in the context of fledgling startups, is I poured 500 or $1,000 into Google
or Facebook and nothing came of it. My money just evaporated. I think people just need
to put more time into it and do more analysis.
Yeah, it requires ongoing. You really have to spend time and look at it and optimize
it. You have to see which keywords are actually converted. Not all keywords may convert to
well for you. Some might be too expensive. The CPC cost, the cost per click, might be
too expensive to actually make a profit, so you have to disable those depending on how
other people are bidding.
With Instapainting, I know that you don't look at it as any sort of overnight success story,
but I'm curious if it was consistent, steady, smooth sailing from the beginning or if there
was ever a point where you looked at how things were going and there was some sort of insurmountable
challenge in front of you and you thought that there was a real possibility of you failing.
I think in the first year, before I focused on SEO, after TechCrunch, traffic obviously
died down after TechCrunch, but I noticed that people were still coming in to mount
finding us. Eventually, a long time later, I realized it was because the TechCrunch article
had, it was ranking for search terms related to getting a photo turned into a painting.
TechCrunch article was, and people were finding the TechCrunch article.
Then coming to you and directly through the TechCrunch article.
Before that, I was struggling to grow in any way. That was when I had doubts. That was
when it was making about $40,000, $30,000 or $40,000 per year for me in profit. I was
thinking why I can't keep doing this. I was struggling to find a way to grow. That was
the first year before I had figured out any growth strategy like SEO or content marketing.
It sounds like things were actually kind of bleak until you head on your SEO strategy,
but I'm curious what your goals are for the future, what your approach will be because
right now, you've got SEO kind of figured out. Your content marketing is working wonders.
It's just hit after hit. I'm going to talk about that a little bit more because it's
pretty cool what you've been doing with content marketing, but I'm curious what your goals
are for the future. You're just going to double down on those two strategies or?
Yeah, constantly looking at new growth channels. That's probably going to be the main thing.
Now, the business is mostly automated. You can really focus on growth, right? The point
of a technology company is the ability to scale it up to meet any demand or to just
scale it up, right? We have the ability to scale it up. We can make 10,000 paintings
a month. We can make a million paintings a month, probably.
That's a lot.
Well, I don't know about a million.
On that note, one of your content marketing articles is actually about the back end of
Instapainting. Specifically, you went to Dauphin, China, and also Yuwu. I believe in one of
those cities was where you said 60% of the world's oil paintings are made. What was that
trip like?
Yeah. At some point, I guess, Dauphin, China, which is next to Shenzhen, which is next to
Hong Kong, is where, according to Wired magazine, 60% of the world's oil paintings are made.
It's not so much the back end is that a lot of our suppliers, a lot of our artists are
Chinese or from China. Not all of them, but most of them are. Most of them that dominate
industry that are on Etsy or that are on eBay are Chinese suppliers. We wanted to go and
visit and see what it was like, these people that are doing this.
We also visited some factories as a side. The people doing photo paintings now work
in factories because this is much more expensive work. The stuff that goes in the factories
can sell or is generally abstract artwork and done by just a factory worker that applies
a brush, kind of like how I just painted the initial orders. I went to visit some of these
factories just to see. Some of these factories can do thousands or 100,000 pieces of the
same painting.
Yeah. I saw a photo on your blog that was just a row of canvases in this warehouse with
the same guy going down hundreds of paintings with the same brush and just doing the same
stroke on painting after painting after painting. Then when it was finished, you would turn
around and do a new stroke on painting after painting after painting.
Yeah. That was just something interesting that we saw there. Those are not actually
insta-painting painters, but some people think that, of course, after reading the title or
just looking at the picture, a lot of people don't read the whole article.
Who is doing the insta-painting paintings nowadays?
Just artists in China, literally just artists in China from their home. There's also other
artists that paint from their home, but most of them are just artists in China that paint
from their home.
For the ones that are in China, generally some middlemen is involved and they manage,
they sub-manage orders across hundreds of artists. They basically use the website for
them. Artists can also directly sign up. We have artists outside of China that are directly
signed up because English, so they can directly use the website.
We made it so that onboarding artists is a really simple process. They just register
and then they can receive orders immediately. We have checks and balances to make sure they
are just, right? We don't pay them until they finish the painting, so if you're planning
to take an order and then complete crap, you're not going to get paid if it's obviously way
below quality.
Are those checks and balances something you guys have always had or was there a time in
the past where you actually got burned by artists?
I don't think we've ever been burned by artists. Generally, they're all legitimate and they
all actually produce work to the best of their ability, at least. We didn't initially have
the money-back guarantee, but now we have that as an additional check and balance against
bad artists. Even after you've gotten the painting, you don't like it. You can return
it for a refund.
Cool. That piece on you going to Daf in China was super interesting and it drove a lot of
traffic to your site. Another thing that you've done in the content marketing arena was to
and I mentioned this earlier, you built a robot that could autonomously replicate an
artist painting and then you blogged about that too. You can tell us about how you built
that robot.
I already had some experience working with Arduino and other hardware stuff, so it wasn't
a cold start. That's why it only took two weeks, but I just decided to reapply some
knowledge I already had, which is working with motors and Arduinos and stuff like that.
I just decided to reapply that to my current business. How can I take that and build something
that's related to paintings? It's really just like I had a cool idea and I really wanted
to try it out. I had the idea, I can connect a Wacom tablet with this 10D plotting device,
get some software for it to control it and it should in theory be able to let you paint
on the Wacom tablet and then replicate it. I really wanted to see if that would actually
work and it worked pretty much.
The fact that you created this robot and the fact that you went to China and wrote about
it, do you just sit around all day coming up with ideas like this? Do you have a list
that you've brainstormed that you're working off of?
Generally, when inspiration strikes me and I'm also in the background constantly thinking
about, well, basically anytime inspiration strikes me or opportunity comes up, I would
try to jump on it.
I think coming up with ideas, actively coming up with ideas is very difficult to do.
It's not difficult if you are not trying to come up with ideas, but rather you'd be open
to ideas when they come. You're going to be opportunistic. You should open your eyes to
all possible ideas and not just ones that you want to think about.
I was going to ask you almost that exact question because one of the things I hear a lot from
founders is that they really want to get into entrepreneurship and they really want to create
something but they just can't come up with an idea. There's so much advice online for
what you should do. There's this whole mantra of solve your own problem and then there's
what you're saying which is that you can't actively come up with an idea. You have to
let inspiration strike you. I think it's all frustrating for a lot of people because they're
not sure exactly when inspiration is going to strike or because they think to themselves,
hey, I don't have any unique problems we're solving, so what do I do? Do you have a process?
When you were going through your period of developing new products and then trying to
work on those before you came up with instant painting, what was your process like for coming
up with ideas?
Well, I definitely wasn't solving my own problem. It wasn't because I was trying to get a painting
and I wasn't an artist that was trying to get orders either. I mean, my strategy was
just to try a lot of ideas and be open to ideas that other people propose or be open
to ideas that come that may not be equipped to do necessarily. So I was working on something
completely different from selling paintings before.
What was that?
It was an online ordering system for restaurants. I built all this software so that restaurants
can pay me something like $50 per month so they get their own online ordering system.
So they can put their money online and take payment and then get an order that gets sent
to an iPad. And it was really hard for me to sell. I went manually walking door to door
in San Francisco, even tried to do it in China. And I'm pitching restaurants and it was difficult
but I actually got some sales, right? So I was going to continue doing that. But then
I got an idea. Someone inspired me for this instant painting idea, custom wall painting
photos idea. And I thought, well, this sounds like a great idea. I should try it. It's just
to be open to ideas when they come in.
Yeah. And it's interesting because neither one of those were problems that you were solving
for yourself, right? You didn't need to turn photos into paintings and you didn't especially
need a restaurant ordering system. So you were kind of violating the pattern that I've
seen so many times.
Yeah. Well, the restaurant or system to be fair, it's probably didn't work out as well.
It was may have been completely as well. So we don't can't really say if that was actually
a good strategy. But I think the main thing is to be open to good ideas when they come
and don't be afraid to actually spend the time to actually that's the hardest part finding
time to actually jump on every one of these cool ideas that will come your way.
Yeah, another thing that's really interesting to me in this whole idea space is this article
I read that was written by as Isaac Asimov, like 50 or 60 years ago. And I keep tweeting
about it and trying to get someone to engage me on it, because I think it's fun to talk
about. And it's just so interesting. But he puts forth this idea that in order to come
up with an idea, what you're really doing is combining multiple inputs, say, two experiences
or two otherwise unrelated ideas. And he gives an example. He talks about Charles Darwin
and this other guy, I forget the name, who both traveled the world studying the differences
between species. And they also both read this guy Malthus essay on overpopulation and humans.
And as a result, they both independently combine these two ideas and independently came up
with a theory of evolution at around the same time. And other people when they saw the theory
of evolution were like, wow, this is so obvious, how can I not have thought about this, but
no one had done these two things that Darwin and this other guy had done. And so no one
else came up with that idea.
Yeah, that's that's a that's that is a very good way to come up with ideas. I agree. Yeah,
you should synthesize, you know, especially expertise in two different areas, you'll have
a lot easier time finding new ideas. Even if you are a programmer, and then you learn
how to do hardware stuff, you'll have a whole, a whole world of new ideas and no one's ever
done before regarding hardware stuff. Yeah, that's the other ideas, like the robot, for
example, it's not that hard to make. But if you've just spent, I don't know, one hour
or two hours looking into how to do stuff with an Arduino, you'll see that like a whole
universe of new ideas is possible. And that's how the painting robot came about. It's not
that hard, right? It's not that hard, because it's just some software in the end. I didn't
actually have to do much hardware.
Yeah, totally. And I think what's interesting is if you look at people who live in the Bay
Area or Silicon Valley, for example, they're reading the same books and living in the same
places and doing the same things and following the same Twitter accounts. And consequently,
they have ideas that aren't all that creative, right? Like people need to branch out a little
bit more and try doing something that other people aren't.
Yeah, exactly. That's mostly you got to think outside box, even just a little bit, you find
that it's really easy, you know, to learn some new thing like programming on our Arduino.
And then and then the cross section between the hardware and the software now will will
create a whole new space that's not been filled by other people, because everyone doesn't
want to the cognitive cognitive overhead of having to learn a new thing like, like hardware,
they think it's hard, but it's not right. And then if you just take an hour to do that,
you'll be one mile ahead of everyone else because they all be stuck in software world,
building the next restaurant, start up.
So I want to wrap up by talking about your goals for ends to paintings future. And specifically,
what I'm interested in is, is ends depending something that you want to work on forever?
Could you ever see yourself selling the business and moving on to something new?
Not at the current point, current point, there's just too much stuff to do that I think can
grow the business significantly, focusing on partnerships, we can try exploring partnerships
and then try explaining retail experiments. And also we're expanding the platform to include
more artists who can do creative work. So we want it to be more of a place where you
can just get any type of artists and not just a photo to painting. And so been slowly onboarding
more and more artists and about to sort of make it open enrollment at some point. It's
already a platform so it doesn't require this huge opportunity. And another thing I want
to say is, if the idea that you're testing takes too long, it's probably not worth it
because you're probably wrong about the idea. Within painting, it started out with something
that was simple to do. And then once that succeeded, everything that I've added on mostly
simple improvements, small undertakings, right? Just over a long time, right? But this allows
you to sort of not waste your time. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think my personal
philosophy is that I will not do an idea if it's going to take me more than two or three
weeks to implement the prototype. But that's sad. I think this is a great point to actually
end the interview on. And I've had really a lot of fun talking to you because I think
Instapainting is one of those unique businesses. It's very inspiring to hear about. And the
idea behind it is cool. And the fact that you've been able to automate so much of it
really is my dream for indie hackers. So I've had fun talking to you and hopefully people
who are listening have had fun too. So Chris, can you tell them where they can go to read
more about Instapainting and learn more about what you're doing?
You can always see our blog posts at instapainting.com slash blog, or the bottom of our homepage
just links to some blog posts. Yeah, or go to indiehackers.com or just Google Instapainting.
If anyone has any questions, feel free to email me at chris at instapainting.com. I'm
not trying to answer the questions.
If you enjoyed listening to this conversation, I recommend joining myself, Chris, and other
indie hackers in discussing this episode on the indiehackers.com forum. Thanks so much
for listening and I'll see you next time.