
Instapainting – From $4k in debt to $32k/mo in passive revenue with no employees - chrischen
https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/instapainting
======
qwrusz
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.

Congrats again.

~~~
chrischen
Hi! Thanks for the comment!

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.

~~~
qwrusz
> the reason I don't charge more is it'd just be lining my pockets

What's wrong with lining your pockets? This is a business no?

~~~
b2600
That's not how business works. Unless you want transitory success.

~~~
qwrusz
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.

~~~
totalZero
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.

------
godot
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..)

~~~
k__
Sounds like he is a rather intelligent person.

I mean 4k in dept are hard, but all that he did (Microservices, Robotics, AI,
Games) seems like way over the top of your average person.

~~~
chrischen
I think the key is to leverage your existing skill sets. I'm primarily a coder
so many of these hacks were technical, and their audience was HN.

The other thing is to start with shortcuts. The robot's hardware I used mainly
from a kit, and that left only the software.

------
OJFord
What's going on with the shipping pricing?

    
    
        > Standard delivery (approx 3 weeks)
        > Guaranteed (+$15)
        > Within 25 days (+$20)
        > Within 15 days (+$20)
    

3 weeks is 21 days, so assuming "guaranteed" just removes the "approx", why
would I ever pay more for "within 25"?

Further, why would I ever pay for "within 25" when "within 15" is the same
price?

Surely this can be condensed to:

    
    
        > Standard delivery (approx 3 weeks)
        > Guaranteed within 3 weeks (+$15)
        > Guaranteed within 15 days (+$20)
    

without changing the effective pricing; while making the options clearer.

~~~
oDot
Here's a great bit by Dan Ariely (behavioral economics) that might answer your
question:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOhb4LwAaJk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOhb4LwAaJk)

And while I'm sharing Dan Ariely links, here's another one (but I can't tell
you what it's about, just watch and wait for it):

[https://vimeo.com/63062967](https://vimeo.com/63062967)

~~~
singold
Wow the second video is really great, can't recommend it enough.

Do you know what tool did he used for the text? (I know this sounds weird, I'm
trying not to spoil here ;)

~~~
oDot
No idea, sorry :(

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

~~~
csallen
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?

~~~
chrischen
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.

~~~
ska
So it is not passive. That's ok, almost all "passive income" isn't, and the
term has been abused into near uselessness.

Sounds like the term you are actually looking for is "lifestyle business"

Nothing wrong than that, and it's a more sensible (i.e. well defined) goal
that passive income.

~~~
chrischen
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.

~~~
ska
Would it? Or would it slowly decrease? Nearly all businesses have some
momentum, after all.

If you can walk away for say a year without touching it at all and the revenue
remains basically steady, I'll agree it is passive.

Anyway, it doesn't really matter - it sounds like you are working at growing a
business you enjoy and that's great.

~~~
graeme
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?

~~~
ska
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.

~~~
Silhouette
_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.

~~~
ska
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.

~~~
graeme
Oh, I don't need to do any of that regularly. Doing those things fall under
growth activities.

The SEO and email system more or less runs itself. But, y'know, if I
completely ignore it for two years something might change.

Mind you, I have some components that have run since 2013/2014 with no change
at all. Most of my system is like that actually.

There are website updates required, but a contractor does that. I just monitor
reports.

So there's somewhat more work than I think you're thinking of, but not much.

------
6stringmerc
How enterprising. It's like the internet's very own Thomas Kinkade as a
service. Clever arbitrage of artistic labor markets, that's for sure.

------
dkrich
_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?

~~~
gm-conspiracy
Have you ever seen an oil painting up close?

There was an article awhile ago about using a 3d printer and scanner to make a
"copy" of an oil painting.

[http://www.designboom.com/art/oce-3d-printer-creates-
identic...](http://www.designboom.com/art/oce-3d-printer-creates-identical-
reproductions-of-fine-art-paintings-09-30-2013/)

Until Photoshop filters output STL files and color 3d printers come down in
price, humans win.

~~~
amenod
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.

~~~
angus-prune
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.

~~~
hilop
For copying a painting, you could fake it with a 3-D printer that reproduces a
depth+scanned painting and a topcoat of paint

~~~
icebraining
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.

------
sampl
> 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 thought the same thing, maybe because it's called "instapainting"

------
TekMol

        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.

~~~
chrischen
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.

~~~
TekMol
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?

~~~
danso
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.

~~~
hilop
The problem is thst people use infographics that get a lot of links, to get
SEO juice for the rest of their site thst is utter garbage.

Ideally, Google wouldn't credit one part of the site that is lower quality
than the other part.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>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.

------
avitzurel
"acquiring artists turned out to be far from the hardest part of the
business."

This.

I consulted many businesses as an engineer and often times technology can get
you so far. You have to "get your hands dirty" and do the work.

Tech is rarely the bottleneck, it's often sales, understanding needs,
contracting work to 3rd parties etc...

Kudos to the owner, great job

~~~
TAForObvReasons
... 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

~~~
chrischen
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.

~~~
throwaway1892
Reminds me of "Do things that don't scale"
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6041765](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6041765))
by Paul Graham.

------
supersan
Love reading such stories.

Also every interview I've read on indiehackers always has this one advice as
the most important one: build quickly, iterate later.

------
OJFord

        > micro-services, which is crucial in allowing me (the
        > only developer) to migrate the site to new technologies.
    

I know it's 5 years old, but I still don't see why it's been so crucial to
have kept migrating to "new technologies"?

~~~
chrischen
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).

~~~
phodo
Are there any perspectives you can share with respect to SEO and client-side
React?

------
baccredited
Nonsense. Creating a startup is the opposite of 'passive'. Also the word
passive doesn't appear in the article title or text.

~~~
Cpoll
If you don't have to full-time manage the startup after it's created, and it
still makes you money, that money IS 'passive'.

Passive income without initial effort is called a trust fund.

------
alistproducer2
Usually I don't like these kinds of pieces, but this one had lots of good
examples that anyone could apply. Congrats on your success!

~~~
asenna
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.

------
rockdiesel
I was pretty close to ordering a gift for the holidays until I saw the charge
of $3.00 to NOT appear as a sample on your website. [1]

Why are you making people pay $3.00 to NOT appear in your gallery of samples?

Sorry, but that seems absolutely ridiculous and is a deal breaker for me.

[1] [http://imgur.com/a/RMcvV](http://imgur.com/a/RMcvV)

~~~
TheGRS
Would you have agreed if it were a discount instead of an added charge? i.e.
Yes is -$3?

~~~
rockdiesel
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.

~~~
benlambert
Q. Price $120. Can we use this as a sample? (Yes: -$3)

A. Happy to pay the full price!

\--

Q. Price $117. Can we use this as a sample? (No: +$3)

A. No fucking way I'm paying $3 NOT appear in your gallery of samples!

~~~
rockdiesel
Q. Big Mac meal $6.99. Can we put a picture of you eating it in our next
commercial? (No: +$3)

A. Keep the Big Mac. I'm going to get a Whopper from Burger King.

~~~
TheGRS
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.

~~~
mistermann
I'm surprised he didn't use the second, less-offensive wording though, it does
feel weird as is.

~~~
benlambert
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.

------
panorama
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!

------
harrisreynolds
What are the profit margins?

~~~
meritt
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.

------
reubano
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?

------
meerkats1
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.

~~~
patio11
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%.

------
overcast
"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.

------
galfarragem
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.

~~~
adventured
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.

~~~
galfarragem
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.

------
googletazer
Great business, congratulations!

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?

~~~
chrischen
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.

~~~
gm-conspiracy
What is the largest size possible (that can be shipped without an ordeal)?

Lynn Boggess, paints on large canvases (some over 4 ft x 4 ft) using cement
trowels:

[http://www.lynnboggess.com/](http://www.lynnboggess.com/)

Obviously, that is probably unrealistic for shipping from China.

Also, I was interested in having some abstract paintings "copied", using some
of the images from:

[https://open_nsfw.gitlab.io/](https://open_nsfw.gitlab.io/)

The images are only 224pxx224px.

Would that be possible? The image resolution is not that big, but I would like
something like 2 or 3 feet in length/width.

------
chromaton
Do you have a list of the failed ideas? How many actually did you get to the
stage of having a web page for?

------
jeremybeckham
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.

------
chairmanwow
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.

I'm sure glad to know that he's actually made it.

------
redleggedfrog
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?

~~~
raesene6
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)

~~~
dbancajas
Yeah. Not only that, the money you give on KS has a risk of not being refunded
if a clusterf*ck happens. In OPs story, he can just send a refund.

------
jimmijazz
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?

------
antarrah
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.

~~~
csallen
Chris is a personal friend of mine I've known since 2011 when we went through
Y Combinator together. I can vouch for his integrity.

------
orbitingpluto
I think the oil and mixed media paintings are a great value from the samples.

However, I wasn't to pleased with your monochrome samples however. Some of the
samples look like they were made with an EZ-Tracer.

------
caf
I like the way that this article itself is an example of its own main subject
(using articles like this to drive SEO for instapainting).

------
neotek
Well it worked, I just bought a painting.

------
renafowler
Thanks for sharing your story.It's inspiring!

------
supergirl
I wonder why many of the sites on indiehackers have that chat box popup.

------
tuananh
HackerNews loves stories like this :D

------
countryqt30
"Majority of traffic is coming from SEO"

What are your primary keywords?

------
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.

~~~
GarrisonPrime
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.

~~~
chrischen
> He's creating work for Chinese workers.

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!

~~~
hiou
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.

