It's supplemental, but it's enough to make living where we live. When I first started, I worried about creating competition by sharing too much. But after 6 years of refining production, I've realized this product isn't easy to replicate at all

It's almost always the case that anyone who thinks something is easy to replicate will realize the product is the marketing, sales, creating/building, delivery, billing, and not just any tech.

Happy for you having a family activity.

Binding is a good skill to have, remember it from my school days.

I used to think tech was a small part of a startup. Now I think it’s a _very_ small part.

Small part of successful startups.

Those that focus more on technology instead of the product often fails, unless technology is the actual startup (database companies, PaaS etc.). Even then it is often a good choice just to select something "boring" that everyone knows.

How does your product differ from the Flipbook Photobooths that people have at their weddings? They're able to create flipbooks on demand that are very high quality.

I haven’t held a flipbook like that in my hands, but the main benefit of ours is that you can upload any video from your phone anytime - you don’t need to be at a wedding. The downside, of course, is the delivery time

We thought weddings would be big too, but we've only had one wedding order so far haha. Most orders are gifts for various family occasions

Bizarre, my first thought was wedding also.

We evenly sample 72 frames from any video length. No required frame rate, but 12-24fps works best. Most people flip at around 10fps, so short, clear-motion clips work best. When you upload your video on the order page, you'll get an accurate preview of how it'll look in hand!

We’re thinking of adding a DIY version where you can buy a pattern made from your video, print it at home or a local print shop, cut it, and bind it with a clip binder. Would that be something you’d find interesting?

maybe one could die-cut sheets containing an array of cards that you first print onto and then are easily separated by hand and aligned with some sort of pegs. I once bought a type of printer paper to make business cards that comes pre scored/cut so you print it normally but then the cards come apart with a gentle pull.

My kids would love that process. I’d likely only have the patience to do it once though

Highly recommend against it! Instead of 100 customers at $10 you're cannibalizing (let's say) to 80 customers at $10 + 40 at $5. So a +20% revenue "bump", but you lose all quality control of peoples perception of your product!

Prefer: 80 customers at $12, which is approximately revenue neutral, but increases your effective ROI / hourly wage... AND you keep the high quality, word-of-mouth advertising.

Basically, you'd prefer to have people walking around with _your_ printed and bound product with nice QR code on the back rather than some hackintosh, ink-jet + scissors on 19lb copy paper and saying: "i PaId moNeY FoR ThiS!!" ;-)

...as I'm in the "home printing and binding biz" (gbc-proclick, hand/kettle stitch, carl rolling paper slicer, hp-laserjet, all for personal/hobby use)... What's the equipment you had to end up getting? I'm sorely tempted to chase a (manual) hydraulic paper cutter, but absolutely can't justify the cost / space. Are you still on color laser or are you doing something else for printing? Jigs for slicing? What's the story?

Thanks for this thoughtful perspective! Honestly, you’ve brought up a key point about quality control that we haven’t fully considered, and I completely agree. The last thing we want is our product ending up being judged unfairly due to subpar, home-printed alternatives. We’ll definitely rethink this feature and make sure any future decisions keep quality at the core.

As for the equipment, we currently use:

- 450VS/520E Electric Paper Cutter - BINDER K5 (Soft Binding Machine) - Ricoh MPC3003 (Color Laser Printer)

Thanks again for the insights!

Thanks!

We rarely get 3-10 identical orders, so there’s no calculator for it. For 10+, people contact us directly, and we offer custom options like branding and photo covers. But maybe we could add a page specifically for bulk orders, with some pricing adjustment visualisations. thanks for suggesting it!

Bulk orders would be great. I just sent you one of my kid starting to crawl, it'll be a birthday gift for my wife. These would make great gifts in general - if you end up doing any more personalization like names embossed on covers or something, you can probably double the price.

Not really. I’m probably overthinking it like most developers do and holding back more than I should

wow!!!! true pioneer! amazing!!

This is my response to this Reddit thread that blew up recently. After 15 years of building web apps at scale, here's my take

My small dev team and I recently finished creating yet another job board from the ground up .

So, we put some improvements into the code and decided to outsource it as a free code starter for Nuxt.js, Tailwind, and BCMS. Next.js is available too!

As I believe some of you have had/will have an opportunity to build something similar, I decided to share it here as someone else might also like it. Or at least have fun exploring the codebase.

It's free to use for whatever you might find useful, so make sure to save it for when you need it.

To be straight, it's connected with BCMS (again, yet another) open source headless cms we are maintaining, but you can totally disconnect the codebase from BCMS and use it any way you want.

Hope you'll find it useful