
Why we shut down our Monograph service - moeamaya
https://medium.com/@moeamaya/why-we-shut-down-the-monograph-service-f12ff0149d2d#.jn51aujes
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daveguy
If you are wondering what the "Monograph service" was:
[http://archive.monograph.io/about](http://archive.monograph.io/about)

The entire site is still available at
[http://archive.monograph.io/](http://archive.monograph.io/)

However, they aren't adding new projects.

Their first year lessons learned from about a month ago :
[https://medium.com/@moeamaya/agency-year-1-make-all-the-
mist...](https://medium.com/@moeamaya/agency-year-1-make-all-the-mistakes-
dde0abbe27b7#.8h7cfvdsm)

They are pivoting to an architecture rather than maker/engineering focus:
[http://beta.monograph.io](http://beta.monograph.io)

EDIT: _Questions for Moe_ \-- You said that Monograph is a side project and
was difficult for two to support at $2500 / yr.

1) That seems like a fairly low yearly cost. What was your backend, and are
you pursuing lower costs with the new beta or is it just a better / more
appropriate market focusing on architecture that should be sustainable?

2) How much of that was advertising?

3) What is the main-project of which this was a side project?

~~~
moeamaya
Thanks for adding the links daveguy!

1) The stack is Rails and Postgres on Heroku, static assets (video/images) on
S3/Cloudfront, and transloadit for video processing. $2500 isn't a crazy sum
but the project doesn't make any money and the value for us is mostly the fact
we created the website. Like any public project, the other non-intuitive costs
are maintenance and customer support. We love that it's become a resource so
we're moving everything to a static site and keeping the work archived.

The new beta is focused on B2B (with a need) and a lot of the manual processes
of uploading and formatting projects has been automated, which is how we can
offer the "human" element.

2) We had zero spend on advertising since the content is so damn compelling. A
couple of projects hit the top of reddit/fb/HN.

3) The "main" project is our digital consultancy in SF which a small part came
as a result of Monograph exposure. The business is growing, but we really
enjoy building products so the beta is a primary focus for us this year.

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AlexMuir
Thanks for this write-up.

I was a somewhat inspired by Monograph when I started on Car Projects (a space
for people to share their garage projects). I had seen Monograph somewhere a
while back, and then when I wanted to find it again I'd forgotten the name and
it was REALLY hard to find. Googling things like 'website for sharing physical
projects' took forever.

I'll email you when I get closer to launch with Car Projects because I'd love
to get your thoughts Moe.

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tommoor
Great to see you learnt so much, and new the new product website is beautiful.

