A year ago, I posted here about how my wife and I convert videos into printed flipbooks for a living. It unexpectedly did well and brought a lot of attention, orders, and motivation. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42918902
I figured it might be useful to share what happened after the spike - specifically, the parts that didn't work, things we failed at, broke, or turned out very differently than we expected. The whole year felt like putting out one fire after another, to the point where we'd just start laughing.
Here are some of those fires:
- Vercel shut down our website
A few hours after the HN post went viral, we hit the free plan limits and the site went down. It took me about 30 minutes to notice and upgrade to a $20/month plan. Fair enough.
- People are nasty
Some visitors uploaded NSFW videos, which caused Cloudinary to block our account several times in the first 48 hours. We were on the free plan, so I upgraded ($90/month), after which moderation stopped being an issue. Flipbooks are personal, intimate gifts, so as long as everything is consensual, we don't mind.
- We spent ~$20k on paid channels. Almost all of it failed.
Paid ads didn't work for our product (skill issue is possible), and I'm not a fan of pouring money into Meta's or Google's black-box algorithms. After about four months of testing, we stopped. The total return was under $1,000.
- Most "product" and "vendor" directories are borderline scams.
We assumed flipbooks could work well as wedding favors.. so we listed on several wedding vendor marketplaces. This resulted in dozens of automated or suspicious inquiries per week, almost none of which led to real customers. We paid around $500/month for several months and got nothing measurable back.
- Social media wasn't the growth channel we expected.
We saw well-produced videos flop and low-effort videos go viral. At some point, it stopped feeling like quality was strongly correlated with outcomes. We thought this might be the kind of product that sells itself on social media. It isn't.
- Bringing production fully in-house gave us control and new problems.
Owning the process improved quality, but also meant printers breaking, technicians not showing up, and production halting at the worst moments. We eventually bought two additional printers so we could run multiple machines in parallel and keep one as a backup. Reliability came from redundancy, not optimization - which still hurts my IT brain.
- SEO worked, just not how we expected.
Organic search (and even ChatGPT and Perplexity) has been one of the few consistently positive channels. Wedding related keywords didn't move the needle much, but "paper anniversary" did. We're not based in the US and didn't even know this was a thing. Now, roughly 90% of our orders are for paper anniversaries - and such a cool use case.
- Shipping and customs to the US
When the US removed the minimum order value threshold for international shipments this August, some customers learned about customs duties only after ordering from us, when DHL contacted them for additional payment. We're still improving how we communicate this.
None of this killed the business, but most of it contradicted our assumptions and hurt our wallet. A lot of the year was spent paying for lessons rather than making the progress we expected. Strangely, after 15+ years in IT, dealing with physical problems like these still feels easier and more satisfying than debugging production systems.
That said, a few basic decisions helped the business survive:
- As order volume increased, we negotiated DHL shipping from $90+ USD for 4-day delivery down to $15.
- Don't want to brag but... technically, we had zero production issues over the year: no downtime, no critical bugs.
- We found a reliable paper vendor with consistent quality.
- Our binding and cutting machines didn't break once, which feels like a small miracle.
Happy to answer questions or go deeper on any of this.
I figured it might be useful to share what happened after the spike - specifically, the parts that didn't work, things we failed at, broke, or turned out very differently than we expected. The whole year felt like putting out one fire after another, to the point where we'd just start laughing.
Here are some of those fires:
- Vercel shut down our website A few hours after the HN post went viral, we hit the free plan limits and the site went down. It took me about 30 minutes to notice and upgrade to a $20/month plan. Fair enough.
- People are nasty Some visitors uploaded NSFW videos, which caused Cloudinary to block our account several times in the first 48 hours. We were on the free plan, so I upgraded ($90/month), after which moderation stopped being an issue. Flipbooks are personal, intimate gifts, so as long as everything is consensual, we don't mind.
- We spent ~$20k on paid channels. Almost all of it failed. Paid ads didn't work for our product (skill issue is possible), and I'm not a fan of pouring money into Meta's or Google's black-box algorithms. After about four months of testing, we stopped. The total return was under $1,000.
- Most "product" and "vendor" directories are borderline scams. We assumed flipbooks could work well as wedding favors.. so we listed on several wedding vendor marketplaces. This resulted in dozens of automated or suspicious inquiries per week, almost none of which led to real customers. We paid around $500/month for several months and got nothing measurable back.
- Social media wasn't the growth channel we expected. We saw well-produced videos flop and low-effort videos go viral. At some point, it stopped feeling like quality was strongly correlated with outcomes. We thought this might be the kind of product that sells itself on social media. It isn't.
- Bringing production fully in-house gave us control and new problems. Owning the process improved quality, but also meant printers breaking, technicians not showing up, and production halting at the worst moments. We eventually bought two additional printers so we could run multiple machines in parallel and keep one as a backup. Reliability came from redundancy, not optimization - which still hurts my IT brain.
- SEO worked, just not how we expected. Organic search (and even ChatGPT and Perplexity) has been one of the few consistently positive channels. Wedding related keywords didn't move the needle much, but "paper anniversary" did. We're not based in the US and didn't even know this was a thing. Now, roughly 90% of our orders are for paper anniversaries - and such a cool use case.
- Shipping and customs to the US When the US removed the minimum order value threshold for international shipments this August, some customers learned about customs duties only after ordering from us, when DHL contacted them for additional payment. We're still improving how we communicate this.
None of this killed the business, but most of it contradicted our assumptions and hurt our wallet. A lot of the year was spent paying for lessons rather than making the progress we expected. Strangely, after 15+ years in IT, dealing with physical problems like these still feels easier and more satisfying than debugging production systems.
That said, a few basic decisions helped the business survive:
- As order volume increased, we negotiated DHL shipping from $90+ USD for 4-day delivery down to $15. - Don't want to brag but... technically, we had zero production issues over the year: no downtime, no critical bugs. - We found a reliable paper vendor with consistent quality. - Our binding and cutting machines didn't break once, which feels like a small miracle.
Happy to answer questions or go deeper on any of this.