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Instapainting – From $4k in debt to $32k/mo in passive revenue with no employees

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Re: Instapainting – From $4k in debt to $32k/mo in passive revenue with no employees

#51

Post by googletazer »

hiou wrote: post #46
googletazer wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems quite the opposite to me - he provided these artists with work and an income. The value was in creating the portal that connected consumers with producers (the artists), and taking a cut for this service. Everybody wins.

He literally listed SEO as the most important part of the business. Which means he seized control of a location(Google ranking) and then sold it back to those who could not compete with his Google rank. No sure where "Everybody wins" in that situation.

Wait a second, so how do you imagine it working? Millions of artists each with their own individual pages connected to Stripe?

Out of these, some will still be top 10, the rest will be behind.

Every artist who uses his platform wins since thats what connects them to consumers and work orders.

Re: Instapainting – From $4k in debt to $32k/mo in passive revenue with no employees

#52

Post by dbancajas »

hiou wrote: post #46
googletazer wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems quite the opposite to me - he provided these artists with work and an income. The value was in creating the portal that connected consumers with producers (the artists), and taking a cut for this service. Everybody wins.

He literally listed SEO as the most important part of the business. Which means he seized control of a location(Google ranking) and then sold it back to those who could not compete with his Google rank. No sure where "Everybody wins" in that situation.

how did he sell it back? elaborate? For me the world is zero sum game. at least most of it. My gain is your loss when we are competing in the same space. It's not like he forced someone to work for him at pennies on the dollar. He created a portal to drive additional revenue (people who can go to instapainting.com but not buy on etsy/ebay).

Re: Instapainting – From $4k in debt to $32k/mo in passive revenue with no employees

#53

Post by n0us »

TekMol wrote: post #38
chrischen wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fairly certain it worked. It's more like the page gets lots of link, thus lots of clout, and I link to Instapainting from that page, which means I transfer some of that clout. And Google can't classify Instapainting.com as a "photo to painting" site. It just knows it's a site that contains some content. Since Yahoo.com would get better rankings even with disparate topics under the domain.

What makes you certain? I am fairly certain that the world's best search engine is not falling for that. How can we decide who is right?

What makes you certain that the world's best search engine is not falling for that?

Re: Instapainting – From $4k in debt to $32k/mo in passive revenue with no employees

#54

Post by swalsh »

redleggedfrog wrote: post #4

Ug, is it just me, or does that he took money before actually having anyone to paint the pictures seem unethical? Would people have ordered if they had of known there were no artists as yet, or for that matter the artist were going to be friends of the website owner?

Unethical is advertising a service you don't plan on fulfilling. He made a promise in good faith (and delivered). Seems pretty clean in my book.

Re: Instapainting – From $4k in debt to $32k/mo in passive revenue with no employees

#55

Post by themagician »

Do you think people know they are paying for cheap Chinese labor when they purchase? If not, do you think they would care?

When I read something like,"100% free-hand painted onto a canvas by a master artist," my impression isn't, "we outsource the painting to cheap Chinese labor." My impression is clearly wrong. I suspect others have this impression though.

I think the concept is cool, but I'm not sure people would be so willing to pay if they knew some desperate artist in China was getting paid below minimum wage to create the artwork. I guess what I'm saying is you are selling the idea of a premium service at a great price—too good to be true—and it is, because it's not true.

Or maybe it just doesn't matter. I don't know.

Also, reading this over my tone sounds a little condescending. I don't mean to be. Generally curious what others think about this.

Re: Instapainting – From $4k in debt to $32k/mo in passive revenue with no employees

#56

Post by chrischen »

franciscop wrote: post #50
chrischen wrote: post #2

I can answer any questions, whether about how to get a great Christmas present, or questions about the article!

How do you learn the business part of what you are doing? I can and do program fancy websites quickly, but I fail to see how I could monetize it. I mean about things that scale well, are kind of low-work and mostly an experiment. So, how do you pick which experiments to try? Do you have like many ideas constantly like that? Do you try few of them until one sticks? How do you know you will be able to pull it off later…

I learned everything I know how to do through practice and execution.

Yes I've had many ideas. Many terrible, most inconsequential. You'll of course only read about the 1 or 2 successful ones on HN ;). After trying hundreds of ideas, you get lazy and get faster at pushing out ideas. Then just keep at the ones that stick.

Re: Instapainting – From $4k in debt to $32k/mo in passive revenue with no employees

#57

Post by beejiu »

hiou wrote: post #14

Nothing like exploiting people to make a living. Maybe the people doing the actual paintings should get that $32/mo? Gross US imperialism at its finest. So embarrassed to be from this country. FYI: Exploiting artists isn't some kind of disruptive innovation. Ever wonder why the arts are much less likely to adopt open source licensing? People like this jerk. Oh wait, I forgot. They aren't real artists because they hap…

So you are saying the jobs should be taken away from developing economies and into the United States? That sounds very liberal and socially minded of you.

Re: Instapainting – From $4k in debt to $32k/mo in passive revenue with no employees

#58

Post by chrischen »

thang wrote: post #30
chrischen wrote: post #2

I can answer any questions, whether about how to get a great Christmas present, or questions about the article!

How much customer support (for either artists or buyers) did you have to do as this grew before you managed to automate everything? How long did it take to define/implement/automate these processes?

I'm primarily a coder. So it doesn't take long to identify something that I have to repeatedly do manually, and then automate a solution that would reduce the incidences of it.

A feature can be pushed out as fast as a day or sometimes take a week, if it's a complex problem.

Re: Instapainting – From $4k in debt to $32k/mo in passive revenue with no employees

#59

Post by chrischen »

countryqt30 wrote: post #41
chrischen wrote: post #2

I can answer any questions, whether about how to get a great Christmas present, or questions about the article!

What keywords / search terms did you optimize for?

The keyword discovery at first was mostly accidental. Basically after the techcrunch article was pushed out, I eventually noticed that certain keywords were ranking based on that article, and certain ones were converting to sales. Then it was a matter of pushing out more publicity to rank higher, and then later on identify other keywords.

Re: Instapainting – From $4k in debt to $32k/mo in passive revenue with no employees

#60

Post by danso »

TekMol wrote: post #38
chrischen wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fairly certain it worked. It's more like the page gets lots of link, thus lots of clout, and I link to Instapainting from that page, which means I transfer some of that clout. And Google can't classify Instapainting.com as a "photo to painting" site. It just knows it's a site that contains some content. Since Yahoo.com would get better rankings even with disparate topics under the domain.

What makes you certain? I am fairly certain that the world's best search engine is not falling for that. How can we decide who is right?

Uh, what experiences have you had that make you think otherwise? Google is the greatest information-finding service invented but it can still surface poor results.

But in this case, I don't think Google was necessarily "fooled". The developer happened to be multitalented enough to create a game that was popular. Assuming that the traffic it receives was legitimate (which I imagine Google can know based on Google Analytics), how is that not a signal that the domain belongs to someone of more notability than just some random domain? The problem would be if Google used that signal as the sole determiner of whether Instapainting.com was a place to find good paintings. But there's no indication that that is the case, just that clout gained from the popular game may have helped Instapainting overall be seen as a legit domain, generally.

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