Congrats on the success. Thanks for sharing the business story too.
Disclaimer: this is not a paid endorsement. I don't know Chris. But I happen to be a customer - having bought a painting as a gift. It is framed on the wall at this moment.
My only feedback. Your prices felt too inexpensive. Knowing something was handmade I would have paid more than I did. I'm sure you have researched the market and margins and all that, just letting you know my experience.
Also the artist being from China aspect that other comments are mentioning, almost everything we own is made in China, and the location or nationality of an artist shouldn't be any different than other types of work. Also there are some darn good artists in China, check Youtube for examples.
In a similar vein, I really like this line from "Try this at home" by Frank Turner: "If you’re oh so fucking different then who cares what you have to say?"
The entire song, while nominally about making music, is pretty fun and inspiring and I feel applies very well to other kinds of entrepreneurialism as well.
All I can say is that the reason I don't charge more is it'd just be lining my pockets since the artists set their prices at a pretty consistent rate. I don't get lower rates from the artists than my competitors, so I just undercut them in final retail price instead.
I read it to mean that it would be excessively exploitative. "The artists set their prices at a pretty consistent rate" says to me that the artists generally hold to a price point, so OP milking the margins by raising prices on the retail end would benefit only OP and not the artist.
That is how business works. It's the definition of business. He is not running a charity. It is a for profit business.
Also, the intent of my question wasn't greedy-capitalism-gouge-the-customer...I meant if a business can charge more for their service and have better margins without pricing out would-be customers or losing them to lower priced competition (neither were his reasons) then why not charge more?
That extra money can be reinvested in this business or another business or used to retire early or go on vacation.
The guy runs a business, make a profit when you can. Every success is transitory here.
We're discussing how low his prices are, which is PHENOMENAL press for him. Taking a lower profit margin on a larger revenue stream is another way to get rich.
I don't think this deserves the down votes - in some markets he is correct. If you gouge on price, you encourage competitors to enter the market. If you keep your profits low, it can act as a barrier to entry. I'm not saying that you should always price low, but the OPs point is worth considering.
Unless you tie it into their feedback ratings. Presumably your system drops or deprioritizes artists with fewer than 2.5 out of 5 stars, for example. So you could set something like: 3+ stars as the default 1.0 multiplier, 4+ stars gets a 1.1 multiplier, and 4.75+ stars gets a 1.2 multiplier. This may create an incentive for the artist to put in more time and produce better quality, unless the artists are already putting in their absolute best effort rather than cranking out paintings as quickly as possible.
I was surprised at how relatively cheap the prices are. A 48"x72" oil painting for $279 base is at least half of what I would have expected. Pushes me to want to make a purchase before the prices inevitably have to climb as demand overtakes the scarcity on the production side.
> before the prices inevitably have to climb as demand overtakes the scarcity on the production side.
This definitely seems like an area where you might expect Baumol's cost disease to operate. China labor costs are increasing steadily and there's no obvious labor pool to replace them, and as far as hand painted paintings go, there's also no obvious productivity improvements which could keep costs constant - they already seem to be painted about as fast as possible. (So Instapainting's dabbling in robot painting can't fix Baumol's cost disease because the paintings will no longer be 'handmade'.)
> Your prices felt too inexpensive. Knowing something was handmade I would have paid more than I did.
Interesting if you read my comment elsewhere here that is a point that I made as well in a different way.
That said perhaps there is a way to tweak the pricing so that they have different perceptions of quality for the price paid. Don't lose the low end market but give an option for those that want to pay more.
I read your comment and agree. I also agree it's difficult to properly articulate those benefits/interests some people have for handmade things vs machine-made things. Still just things though.
Who knows when robots take over every job, maybe all that will be left is jobs where there is some demand preferences for handmade over machine made. Art, "home-style cooking" etc...
Of course there are multiple ways to tweak pricing to add more discrimination and differential pricing. Interestingly art sales happen to be one of the few examples where a business can reach ~perfect price discrimination, don't see that too often outside of econ textbooks. I'm not going to suggest it to a business owner or anything, looks like he knows what he is doing, just wanted to share my experience.
My wife tries to make me dinner most nights. Honestly I feel better most times if I make it myself. I find it relaxing. I also enjoy driving a 7 speed manual transmission in my car (a 911). Most of them sold are PDK's. To me that makes it to easy, even if (as they argue) the performance is better. Most times I enjoy driving, not all of the time but I wouldn't consider it a benefit to have a self driving car except in certain situations it would be helpful.
I'm with you. I often write longhand with a fountain pen ($20 pen nothing fancy). And not just thank you notes, long research papers that I will eventually type up, I write it out first when I have time.
Writing slows things down and alters the thought process vs. typing. One downside is fountain pen ink seems to end up on your fingers no matter how careful.
Funny you mention a 911. I'm not really a car guy but I sit next one at work who claims the only legit Porsches are manual and just bought some special Porsche that only comes in manual, so I have been hearing a lot about this. I'd love to test drive it but haven't driven manual in years and am nervous to do so in someone else's brand new car.
Any suggestions on how one can practice driving manual without ruining someone else's clutch?
A lesson with a good driving instructor will pay great dividends. Book one that will do you a lesson on finding the biting point and clutch control. Maybe it'll take 2 or 3 lessons. Very worth it in skill and future clutch and gearbox health.
Here's what you need to learn:
Find quiet flat road. Maybe a carpark. Some space ahead of you in case of error.
Handbrake on.
Find biting point of clutch. You'll need a little accelerator for this too, but not too much. Trial and error for both. Fun times. Keep handbrake on to start with.
The biting point is this: left foot up until you feel some bite, the car gently trying to pull forwards.
In fact, the biting point is where the clutch is half-engaged so precisely that if you released handbrake you'd stay still, but could make tiny movements forward by letting in (foot up) the clutch a tiny bit more. Then stopping by letting it out again a tiny bit back to biting point.
The more clutch (left foot) you have in, the more accelerator (right foot) you need. But not too much. It's subtle, but very learnable. You'll stall a lot. That's why the handbrake is important. You'll use too much right foot to start with, but that's ok. You'll improve with practice.
So, when you have an idea that you've got the biting point, let out the handbrake carefully. You'll likely go forwards. Feel free to pull handbrake back on gently. And then try to get less bite. You're looking for an equilibrium.
Then iterate. Right foot nuance as well as left foot is good. Be able to creep forwards at will. Then get back to biting point, which will stop the car (from a slow creep).
After a while you'll be able to control the car with your left foot, start stop (with appropriate right foot). That's how to control the car to park too!
Brakes will be needed when you overdo it. Keep a hand on the handbrake while learning.
It's also the way hill starts work. With a hill start you just need proportionately more right foot. But learning it on the flat gives you space to learn your car's clutch characteristics and feel it.
As you get used to all this you will likely find you can make these alterations easily. But you might well stall in places. That's ok. Just don't panic. You'll be fine! I still stall sometimes, especially with unfamiliar cars. Everyone does. Better to be being near the right place than gunning things and ruining your clutch with a leaden right foot.
Basically, gentle in for clutches. They are more replaceable than gearboxes, and you'll not do harm to them learning this.
Not sure if I'm missing something or why nobody else has asked this -- the things you've done "for SEO purposes" all seem like full time jobs on their own! Like:
- Building a robot
- Neural algorithm AI
- Multiplayer 2048 clone
Is there any secret to all of these, like outsourcing or anything, or are you just an insane genius? (which I don't doubt actually..)
I have a question! (Even though I could've just asked you this during the interview itself.)
You say that you've automated most of the process of running the business: "I've gradually adapted the software over time to automate every process, and generally I only have to step in in rare instances of high-level disputes."
How much time do you spend working nowadays? And on what? What's your typical day look like?
It's passive income in the sense that if I just dropped everything and played video games all day, the income would sustain itself.
However that's far from what I actually do :). It simply means I can free myself up to work on new features or increase revenue. So I'm still working about on average 5-8 hours per day, 6-7 days a week.
I like to travel a bit, and work while traveling. Since I have no employees, this makes it easier to have this lifestyle. Whenever I get a chance to sit down in a coffee shop I'll usually stay a few hours and do work.
I think passive is more to do with something "making money while you sleep" or, at least, "making money even if you quit." Thus, continuing to work to increase your business' revenue doesn't mean the money it already makes isn't passive. At least not to me :)
It is passive. The revnue quoted is not sustained by the regular work. That I put into the service. As I stated, if I stopped working then that income would stay, and be considered passive.
Presumably though, if you put full time hours in now and obtain a certain amount of revenue/ growth, cutting out those hours would likely see revenue fall off over time, at least from where you would be working full time.
There can be middle ground. I have a very similar situation to the OPs.
If I stopped working for over a year, eventually there would be complaints, competitors, etc
But within a one year timeframe, there's very little I have to do. And I could get away with working a couple months of the year only + maybe three hours a week maintenance, and the business would grow, slowly.
But, I work consistently, adding new things, because I want it to grow faster. I also know that the environment changes and eventually the current model may stop working or need adaptation.
What do you call that? It's not 100% passive. But, it's not particularly active either.
Actually, having written all this, I remembered someone did come up with a better term: residual revenue.
Meaning that I did a bunch of work in the past that continues to pay off. It will eventually decay, but not very fast. So I can devote most of my energy to new growth, or leisure, over the short to medium run anyway.
Do you think residual revenue (or income) is a better term for this case?
That might work, yes. I like the term much better than passive.
If you need to [edit regularly] respond to SEO changes, or payment provider issues, or maintain your relationships somehow it just isn't passive. It's not a lot of work, hopefully, but it is not passive. You need to stay engaged enough to know how to do it.
Reacting to the environment changes and modeling absolutely is not passive, and I wish people would stop calling it that. I also suspect people underestimate the amount of time they actually spend on this stuff.
If you need to respond to SEO changes, or payment provider issues, or maintain your relationships somehow it just isn't passive.
I'm not sure that's a terribly useful definition. Since any business must have some means of accepting revenues, and almost any means of accepting revenues is subject to dispute, by your argument there is probably no business in the world with a truly passive income. Likewise, in many places you are at minimum going to have to file some sort of annual statements and tax returns for any commercial business.
If a business is generating revenues that don't require anyone to do routine/regular work to keep the money coming in, it seems reasonable to call it passive, even if someone needs to step in under rare or exceptional circumstances.
Ok, I should have added "regularly" respond, that would have been clearer.
What I'm getting at is: If I adjust SEO targets, mailing lists, app or interface code say monthly to keep things moving along, it really isn't passive.
I'm not thinking about annual taxes, or one time problems (DNS issues, certs, payment provider changed) etc.
But routine, regular work absolutely includes any regular updates to website code, transaction providers (add/remove vendors etc.), SEO techniques, etc. If you are tweaking the business weekly/or monthly it is just silly to call it passive.
It seems fairly reasonable to me that he could walk away for a year with no noteworthy effect. Google tweaking their algorithm obviously would not count.
Do you ever take several days off? Like a two-three week vacation without being online at all. This is what I find most difficult to do for a 1-employee operation that offers a 24/7 service.
I have a question about the concept of hiring artists and sourcing from factories in China.
What does Instapainting do—in terms of due diligence—to ensure safe working conditions and fair labor practices for workers in the factories that make the product?
We're just a marketplace, like Etsy or Ebay behind the scenes.
That being said, I have personally visited many of the sellers and for advanced products such as highly detailed portrait paintings (the ones sold on Instapainting.com), the artists always work from their home and are independent contractors. It's only for large quantity mass replica work that are actually done in factories, and I've visited those factories as well, however they do not provide the detailed portraits type of work.
I'm interested in your thoughts on how you came about the idea. I don't want to be disparaging but do you consider it "lucky" that you had a friend point you towards selling art reproductions online? Were you already thinking of similar ideas? There's that gulf between ideas and execution, and you clearly executed well. Given that you had previous ideas that you weren't able to successfully execute on (relative to Instapainting), I'm also curious of your thoughts comparing those experiences? Also, congrats on the success and thanks for sharing some of the inside details.
The short answer is I tested hundreds of ideas. At that point, you could tell I was cutting all the bullshit. The original Instapainting.com page was just a single page with some pictures and a Stripe Checkout form after all.
Can I ask how old you are ? You seem to have amazing determination and knowledge. Thanks for sharing! It's refreshing to see you doing "old school" public relations instead of relying solely on SEO witch is very risky.
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 on?
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.
I see, so it's basically the same as releasing Open Source software only that you need a plausible selling thing, possibly with a physical product. I'll start trying to sell some of them, thanks (:
To real artists, perhaps, but we currently only offer direct photo to painting services, which mean the only services offered by artists on our site are directly copying photos and turning them into physical artworks.
So unless deepart.io is combined with a painting robot, we don't feel threatened.
And in fact we already released both a painting robot and the first free-to-use neural network style transfer demo.
You keep saying 'we' whereas my impression is that this is a solo project, is the lady you mention in the article your partner in the business (since you mention no employees)?
Hi Chris, question about a very minor part of your sales funnel.
The question about sharing the customers photo & painting on your site defaults to YES (which is 'free') and offers a NO option at +$3 extra charge.
Pricing theory, I'm particularly thinking of loss aversion, would suggest you'd get more customers selecting your preferred option of YES if you offer a discount for making this selection (-$3) and leave the rate unchanged for those declining to share.
I'm curious if you A/B tested this pricing option and found the +$3 charge more successful (assuming you are trying to maximise customers opting to share their photos)? Anecdotally I'd be more inclined to pick the option that gives me a discount, if it existed.
> I've used PHP, Node.js, Mongo, and React.js. The stack consists largely of micro-services, which is crucial in allowing me (the only developer) to migrate the site to new technologies.
Could you elaborate on the marketplace backing Instapainting? You've mentioned sellers and painters - if I understood correctly, does that mean Instapainting immediately delegates to 3rd party sellers once a sale is done through the website, and it's the sellers who handle hiring the painters, shipping and (some of) customer service? If so, that's amazing and quite surprising. It really is a marketplace/bidding portal wholly abstracted for the end user.
Congrats on the website and success, very inspiring story!
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.
- Have you experimented with painters from areas other than China?
- What's the onboarding process like for a painter?
- I read on the reddit soft-launch post that one way the business handled scaling was by printing out the photos and then painting over them. Did it turn out to be a successful strategy?
I'm a somewhat vain individual. Any of your talented artists capable of making me one of those Dorian Gray type portraits[1]? Kidding aside, I compliment you on the innovation and using technology to streamline the relationship between customer and producer.
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.
The hardest part was actually conveying that it wasn't just some print or photo filter, and this is something I still have difficulty with today.
Curious about whether people care about this. As somebody who takes a lot of pictures, if somebody could produce one of my photos as a painting using Photoshop that was indistinguishable (or close to it) from a person, I really don't think I'd care. From a business perspective, this seems like it would also carry the benefits of scaling better and having better quality control. You could also give the person multiple options (watercolor, oil, impressionist, etc.).
I'm sure the OP knows the market much better than I do, I'm just curious whether going with simulated paintings was ever considered and whether customers really do care about having a person paint it?
No, never. I just asked about it because I heard the term once a long time ago, but to be honest I'm note even sure what an oil painting is. Is it like the same thing they put in engines to make them run smoothly?
This was actually a question for the OP, since he has experience in it, but I'll bite.
If you use high quality paper and printing, you can make extremely high quality prints that imitate all kinds of effects like oil, watercolor, colored pencil, and sketching. I actually have quite a bit of experience in producing them, which is why I asked this question in the first place.
There are many other factors besides texture to consider. Cost, color, consistency, etc.
Painting is applying pigment to a page using a liquid which then dries after it has been applied. This liquid could be water (for watercolours), an acrylic polymer compound (for acrylic paints) or linseed oil (for oil paints).
The liquid used has its own properties which mean you can achieve different styles and textures. For instance, water colours absorb into the paper and spread out.
Oil paints are very thick and slow drying. You can layer up the paint, and even crave back through it revealing different layers. It is common to use pallet knives and spatulas to work in oil aswell as brushes.
Some artists even create work where the paint is centimetres thick on the canvas - creating work which is more of a relief than a painting.
Because you have this texture, the light interacts with the paint differently to a printed photoshop filter. There will be highlights and shadows as the light hits the painting from an angle, as you move your perspective these will change too. You can even mix paint so that pigment is more dilute and the paint ends up slightly translucent or pearlescent, this can make parts of the canvas almost glow under the right light.
There is a lot more to oil paintings than just a photoshop filter.
And there's really no comparison between the leather in a Rolls Royce Phantom and the leather in a Honda Accord, and yet somehow Honda moves hundreds of thousands of vehicles a year.
My question was not a refutation of the claim that original oil paintings are superior to prints. It was rather an honest attempt to understand the market opportunity of a business and whether the OP believes that a market for prints exists. However that attempt seemingly gave way to a forum for people here to show how much they know about art.
Let me be clear- I have been to many, many world class art galleries. I actually live less than a half mile from one. I do not dispute that there is a difference between a Francis Bacon and a Photoshop reproduction of a vacation photo from my phone. My question was how the OP figured out that making clear that the picture was not a filter and was produced by a real person was an important feature of the service. I give up.
One reason people buy paintings is because they're hand-made - and obviously so.
A print is machine-made - and obviously so. It's reproducible, so it has no obvious uniqueness.
Some people have tried making one-off prints. That never really works out, because one of the important elements in art objects is visible proof of unique human labour. A print can't supply that, even if it's a digital one-off. The labour may still be there, but it isn't visible in the way that the effort needed to cover a canvas is.
Art is a social signal of disposable capital, aspiration to social status, and ability to command effort. Having an art object legitimises an image and a buyer in a way that a print can't. It also adds a sense of permanence, which some people like when they want to make memories more tangible.
Instapainting capitalises on that by selling to people who want a painting but don't know much about art. I'd guess some of them like the idea of having a painting of a memory, while others like the idea of telling visitors that they had something painted specially.
The bell curve wins again. This turns out to be a much bigger market than the one for people who want a painting and know something about art, and very much bigger [1] than the market for people who buy expensive paintings and know a lot about art.
The idea isn't actually new, but it's possibly the first time it's been done on an industrial scale. Back in the 00s there were services in the UK selling stylised portraits for similar money. They were fairly successful, but limited by having a small pool of artists to draw from. Chinese labour has changed that and made a mass market possible.
Why are you so openly hostile to everyone being confused by your inability to differentiate between the output of a 2D printer and the 3D texture of an oil painting?
I honestly can't tell when you're being sarcastic, when you're trolling and when you honestly aren't getting something.
The market you seem to think doesn't exist absolutely does. It has been well served for well over a decade, in regional malls and more recently online.
What the OP is offering is a service above and beyond what can be achieved with a quick photoshop filter and a large format printer. They are trying to communicate that his product is qualitatively different from this - a unique, handmade piece of art. That is their entire value proposition.
This isn't about trying to produce a knock-off of a photoshop filter with cheap Chinese labour.
Oil [0] (and acrylic) paintings aren't just flat things like you get off of your high quality printer. They have a 3D texture which you can visibly discern and run your fingers over (but probably shouldn't) and feel the brush or palette knife strokes laid by the artist.
You really should get yourself to some decent art galleries; you'll then, I hope, discover there's no comparison between a hand painted or drawn picture to that produced by printer. Once you've viewed artwork produced by the human hand, prints produced by all those fancy effects and fancy papers become pale imitations.
would seem to indicate that there actually is a pretty decent market for oil painting reproductions that are [GASP] the product of a high quality printer and that you are wrong.
In other words, don't assume that just because you are an art snob who was educated at the Sorbonne and obsesses over the textures that you can run your fingers over that the entire market (or even a majority of it) is like you.
> In other words, don't assume that just because you are an art snob who was educated at the Sorbonne and obsesses over the textures that you can run your fingers over that the entire market (or even a majority of it) is like you.
No need to be rude.
I'm certainly not an "art snob", though I did study art and art history in high school over thirty years ago. And only then to escape playing football (soccer) in PE because I took A&AH as an extra subject. To be honest I was largely bored rigid, but I was, at least, clean, warm and dry and not getting tackled and kicked in the shins. However when I went to college I bumped into numerous artists and through hanging out with them the subject grew on me as a passing interest, but certainly not a snobbish obsession as you so impudently assume.
Anyway, I am just pointing out that, should you wish to inform and educate yourself a little better, if you visit an art gallery and see real works of painted and drawn art (regardless of era), you'll discover they're massively different from $18 poster prints.
I don't know what art galleries you have in Chicago so can't comment. I'm sure google and wikipedia research can help you there (and if it's a half decent gallery then it'll have a wikipedia entry).
The Art Institute of Chicago is great. Not sure if OP is from Chicago, though—the other museum they named is the Met Museum in New York. I visited both this summer (and also the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.), and they're all truly fascinating. I could spend several days in each ;)
Given that he already has the robot which can paint, wouldn't it be easy (well, doable at least :) to really paint the picture instead of printing it? There is no reason why this kind of painting should be any different from the manually produced.
There is a missing piece of automation here still.
The robot can replicate recorded movements - brush angle, pressure, timing etc.
An photoshop filter can shift pixels around to make a photo look like an oil painting.
What nobody has come up with yet (and would likely be hard to develop, or at least costly) is a way to translate a photograph, or a photoshop filter into the set of movements required to render it in physical oil paint.
Until we get 3D printers with an atom-level precision, you can't really reproduce a brush stroke with a vertical nozzle, so you'd need to somehow identify those strokes from the depth scan.
Software already exists to decompose a painting or drawing into a series of strokes (drawings are obviously easier). The examples I've seen were all 2D, but I am given to understand that 3D equivalents exist as well.
Getting a robot to actally lay down each stroke with paint is left as an exercise for the reader. ;-)
All the software I've seen (and I'd be fascinated to see anything I've missed) does not work in a way (afaik) that would be useful for a robot painter.
Photoshop filters and more advanced converters like DeepArt produce something which look like strokes, but have no concept of strokes. Illustrator convert to vector/stroke/outline uses a concept of stroke which makes no accounting for the drag and physics of a brush, and may not even by physically possible to produce.
There are, of course, some conversions which we can achieve already. We have pen-based plotters and could write simple contrast/cross hatching converters etc. But these are qualitatively different from scanning an image and converting it into the strokes for a robot arm.
Additionally, in terms of desktop graphics editors such as Photoshop and Illustrator, rest assured that Fractal Design Painter definitely had a model that incorporated (well, approximated anyway) medium, angle, brush size, pressure, direction changes, the color you were painting over, etc. 20 years ago, and the latest version of Corel Painter has added features such as particle systems and modeling individual bristles (and other features have been added in the interim).
The intent in Painter is to enable the creation of new works in a way that feels natural to artists used to traditional media (not to mention reproducing the appearance of those media), which isn't quite what we're talking about here, but hopefully this demonstrates that such models do actually exist.
> As somebody who takes a lot of pictures, if somebody could produce one of my photos as a painting using Photoshop that was indistinguishable (or close to it) from a person, I really don't think I'd care.
I think this varies per person. It's like saying that having a real luxury product is no different than a imitation. There is a certain psychic benefit you get from knowing that you have something that is real (specifically that you paid more money for) vs. machine created (or cheaper). This ironically would even extend to having a good local artist produce the painting vs. having it sent off to China (at a discount rate through a service like instapainting). Hard to put into words this concept but I am sure there is an official name for it. That doesn't mean that there isn't a huge market for knockoffs but it's a different market.
That's why I made the Thomas Kinkade reference above - basically Kinkade charged a high premium for "hand painted" works that were for the most part mass produced but touched up by a human in some places. Thus it wasn't really a true painting, but not a simple print either.
From an artistic market standpoint, both the Kinkade "hand painted" works and any work from Instapaint will have an inherent value of barely anything. Maybe $5, $2.50 at a garage sale. Thus this business opportunity, Instapaint, is a very intelligent way to take nothing of intrinsic artistic value - a family portrait - and create a demand whereby there is a worthwhile profit margin.
Art is a high "perception value" type of gambit. Instapaint is successful in its avenue, I can see that and appreciate it for what it's worth. Customers feel like they're getting a good deal, so hey, who am I to tell them what they're paying for is really worthless in the long run? That's sort of the lesson within Thomas Kinkade's success though. That dude cleaned up before his less-appealing business practices and habits eventually caught up with him. There's a line between satisfying a market and kind of becoming a shady operation. Kinkade's model absolutely proved demand for a "hand painted" type of thing.
Photos on canvas, sure. But to actually transform a photo into a picture that looks like an oil or watercolor or comic strip or what have you requires some manual use of software like Photoshop.
I'll just address the real reason- printing a high-quality print (like what you'd see on sale at an art fair) is far more expensive than exploiting cheap overseas labor. If you could produce a high quality digital print for less than $160, there would be a larger market.
Applying photoshop filters doesn't actually require any manual intervention. The process can be entirely automated and Adobe will even sell you a licence to run a fully scripted version of photoshop on a server.
There is definitely a market for posters or even high quality reproductions of artworks. There is a market for oil-paint style digital artwork, whether printed or digital. I don't believe that instapainting is trying to compete with those options. It is entirely likely that the same person would have one of each on different walls of their house, each medium has different strengths, weaknesses and roles.
The market would seem to be confirmed by the existence of the startup. Also as others may have mentioned the difference between an oil painting and a digital reproduction is quite large.
For some reason people who have responded can't grasp that a question of why an alternative service doesn't exist does not necessarily attempt to imply that there is not a market for the existing service.
i.e., asking Apple circa 2006 why they only make desktop and laptop computers and not phones would not imply that there was not a market for desktop and laptop computers.
The thing is, this market does exist, and is very well served. I've seen stalls in malls offering this for over a decade, I've seen website offering this for years.
I don't think anyone is saying that this market doesn't exist, just that this site services a completely different market.
One big aspect to painting is what happens when multiple coats of different colored paint is layered on top of each other. You could reproduce that mechanically but you would need more than a flat source image file.
When the 2048 game came out, I quickly hacked
up a 2 player version and placed it under the
Instapainting.com domain for SEO purposes.
Does this really work? Does Google think you are a better site for ordering paintings because you host a game? I tend to think Google is smarter by now. In fact, I would expect that Google almost exclusively relies on real user behaviour these days.
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.
>Google can't classify Instapainting.com as a "photo to painting" site
I was at a talk yesterday where the speaker from Google was saying that while pagerank is the number one input they use for search results, AI style machine learning algorithms are now number 3 so don't be so sure they don't pick up on that.
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.
>Ideally, Google wouldn't credit one part of the site that is lower quality than the other part. //
Site authority presumably wouldn't be a thing if it didn't produce good results. Sites that allow crappy content will tend to have more crappy content and so a page on such a site is less likely to be what someone is searching for; as long as that stands then site authority will still be useful and shouldn't - IMO - be discounted completely.
They may temporarily bump a site up based on new "authoritative" incoming links and then make judgements from a combination of user time on site/bounces back to search results and clicking on more results and additional pages. Longer term there is definitely manual human review looking for "spam."
I don't think it's necessarily tricking google. Again, the page has clout, and not everyone can simply make a popular page. By associating Instapainting with that page, it's saying Instapainting knows that guy who made that popular game, so Instapainting should have more visibility too.
I mean, there's a lot more to ranking than that... but yeah, that helps to raise your domain authority. It's just one part of the equation, though, and generally speaking, Google does a decent job of detecting black hat techniques and penalizing for them.
Probably 3/4 of the blog articles out there are written for SEO purposes.
I came here to ask about that too. From what I've heard elsewhere, it sounds like Google is smart enough to figure out if you are posting unrelated content just for SEO purposes, and that engaging in such practices is a good way to get Google-smacked.
... the author was saying the opposite. "far from the hardest" = "not the hardest" and you can see it in context:
> Shortly after the launch I was contacted by many artists, mostly from China (they already saturate other marketplaces like eBay, Alibaba, and Etsy). The initial batch of orders were break even, but once the market-rate artists contacted us, I knew it was going to be profitable.
Sounds like the difficulty wasn't in finding artists
That's true, the difficulty wasn't finding the artists. It was finding customers, and growing the customer base, if any thing.
That being said, the OP is correct also in that the tech wasn't the hardest part either. The tech was always something I had to worry about after the fact of acquiring more customers. You can always find customers first and support them manually, and then revise the tech later to reduce costs.
It lets me upgrade the application piecewise. For example I have pages that are just PHP/HTML, and some that are rendered with Node/React, and the site works seamlessly together (seamless sessions and everything).
Out of curiosity, why do you usually not like these kinds of pieces? I have enjoyed all of the IndieHackers interviews and find them pretty inspirational.
Are you saying I either have to pay $3 to opt out or save $3 to opt in?
Or are you saying the base price remains the same if I opt out, but I would get a $3 discount if I opt in?
I would find scenario #2 a more suitable option. Meaning I'd happily pay the standard price in exchange for opting out, but people who choose to opt in receive a small discount in exchange for their willingness to be used as marketing collateral.
Explicitly charging people to opt out just leaves a bad taste in mouth. And it just makes me thing you are going to nickel and dime me every chance you get.
To be honest, if all the standard painting prices were increased by $3 to roll in the opt out cost, I probably wouldn't care. It's the explicit charging for opting out that rubs me the wrong way and I don't think I've ever encountered it before on any other online transaction I've completed.
I get why it seems distasteful, but I personally thought it was pretty clever. This site thrives on good, real world examples in the home page, so it would make sense to incentivize people to agree to let the site use their examples. If it were a larger company I would probably not like it either, but I'm willing to give a pass to a very small business.
Maybe there is a lot of value in having lots of samples. People are more likely to give permission to get out of the fee than to get a discount.
Personally I'd increase the discount to around 10% (raising the base price to compensate) and have "Allow us to use this as a sample" checked by default; but I wonder what % of people have a strong reaction like the OP here.
I saw Instapainting when it was launched and casually wondered how well it would do. Years later, I have my answer. Congratulations man, this is awesome to read and I'm really happy for your success!
Also interested in this. Revenue is solid but I imagine a lot of that is pass-thru to the artists? Middle-man platforms can usually only do about 10% margin before opex.
Congrats on your success! Would you mind outlining how you made it on techcrunch? Also, which subreddits did you find most valuable to generate feedback/promote your site?
Congrats on the success. Do you have concerns that posting details publicly, including showing internal financial numbers, for a business that has virtually no barrier to entry will invite competition? From the other comments I'm seeing here it looks as though people are already making their plans and running back of the envelope calculations. I would expect at least 5 new competitors to pop up as a result of this post.
Making plans and running back of the envelope calculations is easy and fun; businesses actually require violent execution. I spent almost 10 years doing an objectively easier business. I wrote a million words about it, including substantially all of the non-obvious secret sauce about e.g. our SEO strategy. I got a variant of your comment more than monthly: the competitors are coming, the competitors are coming! And the competitors did, in fact, come... with C grade execution that had minimal impact on me.
I will note that the conversion rate between "I will totes clone your business in a weekend" and actually cloning the business was far, far below 1%.
"The hardest part was actually conveying that it wasn't just some print or photo filter, and this is something I still have difficulty with today."
I can see how you'd have that problem with the name "Instapainting". If someone didn't describe to me exactly how this works, I would think it was just another photo filter app.
Risking to be downvoted, what do SF artists (if you know any) think about this?
I suspect if the founder had a background in art (as me) he would never launch something like this. I would feel ashamed by exploiting already a struggling market (art) and yet being 'painted' as an hero. Despite believing in capitalism, limits should exist.
I can't find a good argument in favor of SF artists somehow being more worthy of that income than Chinese artists. You could use the same premise to segment in any other arbitrary manner and eg claim that older struggling artists are more worthy of that income than younger newer artists, and so on. How is it anything but a strictly subjective argument that will inherently vary from person to person as to what criteria is most important?
Fortunately what he's doing isn't exploiting, he's providing a valuable service in which the artists set their pricing and choose whether to accept the work. SF artists have no right to anything over an artist from an other city or country.
Try to read your comment changing the word artist by developer. Is your opinion still so strong? And don't forget that IT is one of the most abundant markets not a perpetually struggling one.
What sort of ethical boundary do you perceive as being crossed? He appears to be providing work to Chinese painters looking for work. Do the painters self-identify as "artists"?
Art is a weak market that lives already of crumbs from society and this scheme vacuums most of them without adding any value to society in the long term. You could argue that Instapainting doesn't hurt relevant american artists once they live from a diferent market (patrons and benefactors), but by reducing the artists pool, the chances of having important ones reduces also. Why doesn't Instapainting hire american artists?
A developed society needs a developed culture. Adopting European artists and scientists during early XX century helped US affirming themselves.
So American artists (I'm assuming you mean creative people who paint things) want to be paid a lot of money to make something beautiful, and so art made by American artists is expensive and pushed even further to the fringes of society by the economics of it. Thus, it seems to be that people who are buy art are at the intersection of the set of people who can afford it (few) and those that appreciate it (a lot).
This scheme as you so vehemently put it, is really aimed at getting more pretty things on people's walls. To do that, you need cheap and hopefully somewhat unique. Instapainting allows people to have both because they employ non-creative people who paint. I simply can't entertain the idea that the Chinese artists are being exploited by Instapainting by the very notion that they are being paid less than an artist would be in the US.
> Why doesn't Instapainting hire american artists?
Give me one argument why they should. You speak like it's an axiom but I don't see any reason to be a protectionist in this matter. Especially when the customer base is as global as it is (I'm a customer and I'm much closer to China than the US).
Could you elaborate on how your shipping pipeline works from China to US/worldwide? Also if there were any problems shipping works of art, e.g. if I upload a picture of Starry Night, an artist paints that and it is shipped to me, would that cause a problem at the border?
In the early days, we used a startup called BoxC (now defunct I think) and took a more hands-on approach to shipping. They would drop off at or ship their their completed products to BoxC shipping locations which then handles fulfillment.
The site actually functions as a marketplace now, and the independent sellers handle their own shipping methods.
I'm interested in this as well. I'm not wholly familiar with the shipping process, but does the business rely on taking advantage of any shipping cost discrepancies?
I had actually been to your site for the 2x2048 campaign, but never went to the homepage. Seeing this and having just been on vacation with the family made me decide to order a painting for my wife of our children in front of a water fountain that we took last week. Good timing.
I actually met Chris a couple of years ago when I was in San Francisco for an internship. We got lunch with a mutual friend. He was excited about the success he was experiencing and inspired me with his confidence about the future.
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?
They ordered under the promise that I would deliver the product, somehow, and I did. I hired my friends who were artists in San Francisco to do them—at a loss too.
That being said, worse case scenario would have been a refund, and most people paid via credit card which is interest free for 30 days anyways.
For me it's the difference between purchasing a product and investing in your business. If presented as an investment, where my money is going to enable you to produce the item for me, then I'd be fine with it, because I would know the current state of your business. Now, if I knew you had no artists and were just floating an idea I would most likely refrain.
The worst case scenario also assumes that the value of the product purchased is only the cost. What if it was purchased as a gift, with a specific timeline?
I do understand that this is a tried and true business practice, just one that I am not comfortable with when the customer is not aware of it.
well, worst-case scenario the customer wanted the painting as, e.g., a graduation gift for their kid, and suddenly got told at the last minute "we couldn't do it, here's a refund"
TBH there's many cases where people sell things before actually having the capability to deliver them, as long as the customer gets the goods at the end of the day, I don't really see the problem.
Heck if you look at the idea of Kickstarter and Indiegogo they're a whole market predicated on the idea of buying things that don't exist yet (and in many cases those things are harder to deliver than the creators suggest in their pitches)
You pay a company to have a service or product rendered.
It's not my job to investigate Amazon's supply-chain to make sure that can actually deliver my toilet paper in 2 days. They are promising me this service and now it's their responsibility to deliver on that.
If those services/product aren't rendered, then a refund should/can be demanded.
I think this was completely within ethical bounds, assuming a promise was also made to return money if services weren't rendered.
Just had Sears cancel an online order that was 'in stock' when we purchased because they can't fulfill it. Did they ever have it in stock? Did they just run out and have poor inventory control? Who knows, but they couldn't fill it when they implied they could. Not sure I'd call that unethical.
Many people are offering to paint a picture from a photo, initially he could have just gone to someone like that and get the product. If you resell a service that is reliably available it is ok in my mind. There was no real risk of the product being impossible to deliver, only of him loosing even more money on it.
It's a common hustle/business tactic. Read up on how Microsoft was made into the giant it is today[1], similar trick. You are basically validating your idea, if you have a lot of orders coming in you have what I call a positive problem, a way to make money.
I recently switched internet/tv providers. The new service had me sign a 2 year contract up front. The guy who did the install didn't know about it until 20 minutes before its scheduled. He's working a queue. Same as the artists I'm sure. Just saying, other companies lock you in much more deeper before knowing exactly how they'll deliver. Not weird at all.
How exactly do you think he could have actually hired the artist to do the work if he didn't take orders? Don't constrain yourself unnecessarily. It only would have been unethical if he held the money beyond the promised time to do the work or never delivered the work.
Shoes of Prey have done a similar thing here in Australia with shoes. Last year they raised a solid amount of capital to expand into the U.S as well.
I wonder, what other industries would the ability to produce unique products in China at scale apply to?
I find it amusing how HN readers just believe anything they read about how much people are making. For all we know this might be a guy who's making very little and wanted coverage on indiehackers.com.
This is a telling sentence. "Shortly after the launch I was contacted by many artists, mostly from China (they already saturate other marketplaces like eBay, Alibaba, and Etsy)."
He opened a new market with new demand supplying the artists in China with more work.
We operate almost exactly like Etsy or Ebay in this regard, we just don't expose the marketplace to the front end because we offer only a single product type (photo to painting) at the moment. Many of our sellers are listed on Ebay or Etsy too (at higher prices).
I currently put out a fixed price, and then the artists dynamically price based on the actual piece. It ranges from 5%-40% depending on the actual picture and subject matter.
The plan is to fix to a fixed commission once the new marketplace is rolled out to the user facing portion of the site.
I wonder if your view would be shared by those artists in china. Do you think they would like to lose their job? Are they actually being exploited, or do they also have a far lower cost of living? Are their wages on par with the other opportunities that they have access to? Do you feel that they'd be able to demand US wages if they went at it on their own?
It's not like there is one artist who is doing all the work and is in the dark about how much their talents are worth. Painting is a skill, but it's not a super valuable one unless you're one in a million and create original pieces. Making a photo into a painting is valuable, but only to the person who has memories wrapped up in the photo.
What's your point? Everyone knows that very talented artists who produce original work are sometimes very richly rewarded (Jeff Koons comes to mind). But like football, most everyone else is not. This is not exploitation.
FWIW the world is also full of studio musicians who have more musical talent than big name stars but get paid modestly.
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.
The connected economy does have aspects that can be concerning:
* Many see bartering as a grey business. Profiting from a disparity in pricing between buyers and sellers is always a touchy subject. The usual justification is the service of connecting sellers and buyers. One can honestly wonders if buyers and sellers really would not have found each other otherwise.
* How much is the match-making worth. One person does the actual work, one is doing the referal. How much is referal worth? 1%, 5%, 20%, 50%? Most people value referral pretty low, right or not.
* Driving prices down. By making markets more efficient, it creates a race to the bottom. It's almost inevitable. What starts as a nice service connecting sellers to buyers becomes a force that impoverishes the workers. The wal-martisation of the work-force only profits the few. It's unfortunate that to collectively save pennies on disparate items, we transform once-confortable workers to lower and lower standard of living. The author admits this on HN when he comments that artists asks for higher prices on Etsy than they get on his site.
* The automation makes all this less palatable. Now the profit seems to be un-earned. What is the ethic of making X00k$ per years for what is admitted as requiring little actual labor? This is even more explicit when he claims that SEO is the driving factor. How does SEO prvides a service to the artists? It doesn't. It only profits instapainting. So most of his work is now spent on labor that is solely profits him.
* SEO is itself a touchy subject.
* How does writing a game that is a clone of a ripoff (2048 being a ripoff of threes) helps artists?
The interesting thing is that all of these are white sins. The author, the provider of the service is not doing it out of malice and is providing, at least initially, a great service to some the workers who had trouble acquiring buyers. But as the service grows, becomes more efficient and dominant, the adverse effect of this very efficency drives the quality of life of the workers down. The more success instapainting gets, the more artist are tied to it, the more the closed competition drives prices down. The theory is that it leads to an equilibrium, and economically it does, but nothing, nothing prevents that equilibrium from being low. Economic efficiency drives quality of life right out.
Middlemen exist because it is not obvious to middle-class Americans that they need to know what the relevance of Dafen is to getting a painting done and because most middle-class Americans do not speak excellent Chinese, and most Chinese painters presumably do not dream at night of putting down their brushes and opening up an SEO consultancy.
Instapainting captures customer demand and transforms it into a servicable and fully-paid series of work orders, to painters (and firms employing them), for the thing they want to sell. This has value. Media depictions to the contrary, artists do not enjoy starving.
If you feel strongly that this model is exploitative, you can apply corrective capitalism by making your own website, doing your own SEO, selling your own paintings with fulfillment by your own outsourced team of painters, and compressing the margins. I wish you the best of luck and skill in this endeavor, but if you model your business as being viable at 1% or 5% above COGS [+], I will warn you that your first year in business is going to be a very educational experience.
[ + ] Cost of Goods Sold; an accounting term for the expenses of the business which directly represent fulfillment as opposed to e.g. marketing, engineering (this company sells paintings, not software, so software isn't COGS for them even thought it might conceivably be for SaaS), or business overhead.
Cost over COGS is exactly my point and why this is exploitation. What do you think the cost over COGS are for the artists actually doing the work? I'll give you a hint, it's often in the negative.
The ability to make profit off of investment is fundamental to capitalism. Do you think that it's unethical for your 401k to accumulate compound interest? Should you have to do some work for the companies your 401k holds shares in, in order for your fund to make a trade?
So far Chris Chen has put in a ton of work and only now is realizing the gains from it. His risk and work are only now paying off. This is equally as egregious as your employer hiring you to write C++ code, and reaping the benefits of your code long after you have written it.
I don't see how competition is closed. The only competition I see suppressed is that of the "order a painting from a website" category, because Instapainting has the superior network. In time, this could potentially get so huge as to be a violation of anti-trust laws, but I don't see that happening. Competition between painters is untouched. Other applications remain. If one wants a higher or lower quality painting, the buyer would want to use existing networks instead of this service. If someone wants an abstract painting, or a sculpture, they have to use a service that is less commoditized, such as word-of-mouth or an art company (interesting aside, North Korea fulfills many sculpture orders for national monuments internationally).
Within the realm of medium-quality portraits, if Instapainting secures a monopoly, then yes, competition will be closed. However, this applies to almost anything that can be commoditized. In American/Canadian history, 19th century painters decried a commoditization of their work; they couldn't get commissions for impressionist or surreal work. Just portraits.
I wrote this blob of text because I naturally want to defend developers who expose details about their businesses to HN. I don't want stories of how they built their businesses to be suppressed or discouraged. Especially since I see nothing unethical in this product; on the contrary, Chris Chen is giving these artists opportunity. They don't have to spend unpaid hours on Etsy or eBay, they can just focus on their work. Customers also get the opportunity to get a hand-painted portrait.
THIS
"I wrote this blob of text because I naturally want to defend developers who expose details about their businesses to HN. I don't want stories of how they built their businesses to be suppressed or discouraged. Especially since I see nothing unethical in this product; on the contrary, Chris Chen is giving these artists opportunity. They don't have to spend unpaid hours on Etsy or eBay, they can just focus on their work. Customers also get the opportunity to get a hand-painted portrait."
It seems like the main beef you have with the guys startup is that its automated, so he doesn't have to continuously work on the same thing, it attempts to "game" google's algorithm, and that in your eyes it extracts too much money for providing too little of value (connecting the consumer and the producer). I don't see it this way at all, I see it a business that helps both sides and takes a cut. If the cut is too large, eventually it will fail.
We'll probably see if thats the case in around ... 3 to 6 months when somebody who reads this thread and has the skills and the drive to improve on it will make an attempt at a clone.
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).
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.
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.
I think you're coming to this with preconceived notions. Not all artists registered are "cheap Chinese labor," and that label is also disparaging to the artists that do happen to be in China, and are Chinese, including myself, as I was born in China. I wouldn't like it if you called Instapainting a piece of work produced by cheap Chinese labor (which it could very well be described since I only made about 36k salary in the first year).
That being said, for this product category (photo to painting), nearly all sellers on Etsy, Ebay, or other sites, are dominated by Chinese sellers. We don't produce the product, rather these sellers are selling through us.
> 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.
I can't guarantee all the wages the artists are paid, as many sellers on the site are simply reselling or doling orders out to subcontractors (the artists). However from the ones I've visited, they are paid well above minimum wage, and in fact above the average salary in China.
Most people do know that the paintings come from China, and I'm actually one of the only sites that publicly reveals this (I released an article about the painters in China on the company blog). But as you can also understand, putting big text on our home page that says "Get paintings from cheap Chinese labor" would sound condescending, not be 100% true (since we're a marketplace behind the scenes), and probably negatively affect sales as well.
You are totally correct. The Western notion of China and Chinese labor is totally wrong.
Still, do you think people would care if they knew? I ask because I would have totally bought this had I stumbled onto it yesterday not knowing what I know now. I would have bought this for a friend and never thought twice about it. After reading this post I definitely would not purchase. Irrational? Maybe.
Edit: I see your response above. Thanks. I may actually purchase. Just want to think about it. :)
I got a lot of publicity from an article about the Chinese painters that I published on Medium, so I think many people do know. Some people take issue with it, understandably, but also for the wrong reasons. The article is also linked at the bottom of the homepage, albeit it is a bit hidden.
You probably take issue with it because you think you are exploiting the workers, when in reality they want you to buy from them and witholding your purchase hurts them economically. The bulk of the money you spend goes to the artists, after all. Otherwise China wouldn't enact such protectionist trade policies that encourage mass exports.
If you take issue with it because you want to encourage domestic economy growth, then avoiding imported Chinese paintings would be proper, however not all our sellers are Chinese. We will soon be adding filters to discriminate by country of origin.
This is crazy. The GDP per capita in China is totally different than the US and Europe. You're accusing Chen of exploiting these people, but it's more plausible he's providing them with opportunities they're grateful for.
The idea that he's running a virtual sweatshop has more to do with your own biases and preconceived notions than reality.
I have a more general question, but is this what the "gig" economy looks like in China? Would Instapainting and the work it produces for the folks doing the paintings count as "gigs"?
Could this question (Are you really paying them enough or just exploiting them?) be asked of anything like Uber?
Being a master artist and being cheap aren't mutually exclusive.
It sounds like location arbitrage: China has a lower cost of living than the US. Not to mention that even a master Chinese artist would have a tough time getting a green card.
But it looks like instapainting is basically a middle-man which could easily be replaced by a Chinese website (so long as they hire a good translator).
It's also protectionist Chinese policies, weak manipulated Chinese RMB. China promotes exports, and buys USD to weaken the RMB, which is why so much manual labor funnels through China and why it's cheaper to buy from China. You'll see that that the whole product category of photo replica paintings are dominated by mostly Chinese sellers on Ebay, etsy, and among our other competitors.
Actually, Instapainting's rise is due to my replacing the Chinese middlemen with software (disclaimer: not all artists on our site are Chinese), which is even cheaper!
He's creating work for Chinese workers. Who are we to say what kind of pay the Chinese "should" be requesting? It's rather elitist of us to be telling them they are being taken advantage of. This is a job they've sought out and want to keep! It's the best option available to them.
Until I expand the market further, I wouldn't really even give myself that much credit. I think most of my business comes from replacing the established middle men with my software solution. Although it is my ultimate goal to give more artists (everywhere in the world) more business!
You really don't think the middlemen are the ones doing business on your platform? You've simply squeezed the margins so that the artists get even less.
>Do you think people know they are paying for cheap Chinese labor when they purchase? If not, do you think they would care?
Doesn't matter. This service is for the bourgeoisie, today's young professionals who want to emulate the painted family portraits they have seen in rich homes. The fact that it comes from a "startup" probably adds to the coolness. These customers wouldn't know how to find a local portrait artist if they wanted to, nor would they be able to afford it.
If what you're asking is true - that desperate Chinese painters are being exploited to hand paint pictures of happy memories for wealthy foreigners, this is quite dystopian.
Disclaimer: this is not a paid endorsement. I don't know Chris. But I happen to be a customer - having bought a painting as a gift. It is framed on the wall at this moment.
My only feedback. Your prices felt too inexpensive. Knowing something was handmade I would have paid more than I did. I'm sure you have researched the market and margins and all that, just letting you know my experience.
Also the artist being from China aspect that other comments are mentioning, almost everything we own is made in China, and the location or nationality of an artist shouldn't be any different than other types of work. Also there are some darn good artists in China, check Youtube for examples.
Congrats again.