Finally, my first real productized service is live AND have first paying clients signed up
I finally made https://paintedreality.io live last night. No ultra launch with tens of thousands on a list... very quiet. But I have gotten my first paying clients through the door. 😎
It’s a rollercoaster of emotions. The “is this good enough?” or “am I good enough?” questions creeping in. It’s exhilarating and scary at the same time.
Now it’s time to stop dwelling and switch to spending a lot more time biz devving.
Congrats to everyone who has recently launched. I wish you luck to follow your hard work.
Nice. Congrats on the launch.
I'm struggling to understand why you make new customers go through the signup process first (ie before showing prices etc) though...
I'd bet $$$ that you would have much better conversion rates if your customers could 1-click order direct from the landing page. After ordering/paying, it's much easier to get people to fill out the necessary information - after all they've already paid for it!
Good luck
I added a price hint to the landing page and also added an entire pricing page describing how it’s priced in detail.
Anything seem unclear, or missing?
I think that's an improvement over the original. You might want to give a rough indication of the turnaround time (are we talking hours, days, weeks?)
Also, you might consider including more 'create your first piece' buttons further down the page. It should be really easy for your customers to convert, and right now they have to scroll all the way back up to the top and 'work' to find the
buybutton. Make it easy for them and watch your conversion rates jump :)Another small nitpick - it's quite hard to read some of your landing page copy because it is almost full-screen width. The eye has a hard time following lines of text which are more than about 60-75 characters long.
(For example @csallen has the Indie Hackers forum right at the upper bounds of what's comfortable for me)
Good luck!
I hear ya. I was thinking about shrinking the width of the site a bit to contain the text a bit more.
I’m assuming you’re referring to the desktop experience. :)
And you’re right, I’ll add some more “create a piece” buttons throughout the length of the page.
Thank you!
Oh, forgot to mention. I have two turnaround times. It's mentioned on the pricing page.
Standard photos are 3-5 business days. VIP members get "first in line" service, 1-3 business day turnaround.
I'd change the offerings if I were you. My cynicometer just buzzed me.
At the moment, I can pay the standard charge and possibly receive my print in 3 business days.
At the moment, I can pay the premium charge and also possibly receive my print in 3 business days. Same service but for a premium price.
Either the preimium service needs to be 1 - 2 days or the standard service needs to be 4 - 5 days even if, in reality, you have to delay the despatch of work finished in 3 days.
Good catch. I'll tweak those.
But... if you look closely, the VIP is the same price as standard if the client only purchases one piece. :)
Essentially VIP adds a recurring component, it's designed for clients who will be ordering more than one per month (these are my photographer clients who are offering painted reality pieces to their clients after photo shoots).
I won't be the only one who doesn't "look closely" though so it's worth working all the potential ambiguities out from your sales pitches.
My experience of dealing with the public (of which I, in this instance am a prime proof) is that they don't generally like to look too deeply into things and are very quick to make assumptions.
You'll just have to work with a Mark I human being. We still have some evolving to do!
:)
Definitely. I’ve already made changes to reflect fulfillment expectations.
Thanks Thomas.
I shored up the width a bit and sprinkled from "create a piece" buttons throughout the length of the page.
Thanks!
Hi Louis. Thanks.
The real deep down reason for not being able to do 1-click order is that I use FastSpring for payment processing.
I use them because they completely handle global sales tax and VAT matters, plus handle most of the major currencies (and a bunch of other back office stuff).
All that so I can focus on the work.
But my site is WordPress based and the integrations to get FastSpring and WordPress working well together aren't very mature. So I had to do some hocus-pocus. :)
It was either A) let people order directly and a user account gets generated for them, or B) let people register on their terms then order.
I chose B... but there's no reason I can't explore improving this. :)
Technically, I built PaintedReality as a service designed to augment photographer's businesses. Giving them the opportunity to add exclusive artwork options to their photo shoot packages.
The slightly more manual process to get them into the system isn't bad. Once they're in they are placing multiple orders.
But I definitely see your point. It's absolutely on the list to improve.
Thank you!
Congrats, Chad! Getting the first paying customer is huge. Keep up the focus and tenacity. 💪
Thank you! 🙏
Congrats on the launch Chad!
Thank you!
I like it! Just a couple of questions that I think should be addressed in your landing page:
I cannot find anywhere the price, do I have to login to know?
Will I see a preview before making the order?
A price "hint" was added to the home page and I added a "Pricing" page to explain pricing in more details.
Does this work for you? Something missing? :)
I really appreciate the feedback. It's almost 3:00am here in Japan and I'm crazy sleepy but making these changes because you're right -- I should have had these in there from the beginning.
How the heck did I get any paying customers without a pricing page? lol!
Yep, I just updated the refund policy. Up to three days after the piece has been delivered, clients may request a refund.
We'll see how that works out. :)
Great questions.
I've been struggling with how to show price on the homepage without it stealing the show -- so to speak.
It's $49/photo "normal" and $29/photo for VIP members. VIP membership is $19/mo.
The price does currently hide behind a free account. There is a "good" reason for this -- to overcome a limitation of integrating FastSpring with WordPress (FastSpring to cover global tax and VAT laws).
As for the preview before order... no. The process looks like this:
Place order
Upload your photo
We transform it and return it
Right now we don't offer refunds once the piece has been returned to the client. But I am considering just making the refund possible for up to three days after returning the piece.
I honestly haven't had any unhappy clients, but I was worried it would be easy to take advantage of the refund -- since it is digital. They could pay, get the artwork, and request refund, even if they were happy with it.
But... I think in writing this I've convinced myself to change the refund policy. :)
Can you not send the client a watermarked version of the final product for acceptance purposes?
The client confirms he likes the product and you send him the "clean" version. That way, he has explicitly stated he likes the product and there is no need for a refund policy.
Yep, I certainly could.
This is an area I will be reviewing soon. Thanks Thomas!
I would start adding it in the FAQ. It's not the best place to put it (you should have a section with price and conditions) but better than not showing it at all, IMHO
Regarding the preview/refund, I would just simply send a low resolution picture (with the watermark ), if the client accept proceed with the order, if not you trash everything. This is doable if the process to create the preview is fast, or if you are confident that the number of clients cancelling the order it's very low.
I think the idea is good, and if the quality of your product is good also, it can work, you just need to lower the friction as much as possible
I’m wondering how to logistically handle a process where anyone can upload photos, I do the work, send preview, and then if they like it they pay.
There are a few problems that come to mind:
If anyone could upload without paying first, how to meter this to prevent a mini denial of service attack if someone decides to upload a lot?
Bandwidth and storage fees for uploaded photos. I host on Closte for fantastic performance...but it’s pay as you go for resources used - scary opening that up to the public
Loads of work with no guarantee of order - which I’d see happening more often as people just test it out as a quick check
— and it takes as much work to create the low-res preview as it does the final resolution (could maybe shave off a little bit of time, but not much... or else the preview would look quite different than the final).
I love where your thinking is... just wonder if I could possibly create that process safely.
Thanks!
Do you need a service with open-ended charges? What sort of hammering are your servers getting that you couldn't deal with on a standard webhosting service?
For example, I use a 1&1 webhosting package for some small stuff I am doing. I can store just over 240,000 files with unlimited storage size, I can create 10,000 databases. I have unlimited traffic. There is no bandwidth throttling.
When I launch, I will be upgrading to a private server of some description but that is a personal case. It is going to take me a year or two to exceed what I am getting now.
I can install a self-hosted WordPress instance and other software if I want (I mention this because WordPress is what you use. I've done it for my partner but we abandoned it as we don't get on well with WordPress).
So I'm wondering:
How big are your files?
How many do you process in a particular day / week?
How much would you realistically need to be doing before you need to scale up?
Do you download client files and work on them offline?
I wouldn't worry too much about point 1, limit 1 upload per person and put a limit on the file size.
If you have the problem of having too many users, you will have the resources to scale.
point 2 is the same as point 1, I wouldn't overthink about what can happen if you have too many users, is nice problem to have! :)
Point 3 I think is the real problem, you can try or reducing the risk , maybe asking credit cards details before submitting the work order or reducing the effort required to do the job. But if you think it's not doable, just skip the idea of the preview :)
For the low resolution and watermark I'm pretty sure you can do it automatically
Maybe I'm wrong but seems you are trying to protect yourself for problems you don't have yet, the problem you have (I imagine) is more users and possibly clients, so I would focus on that and fix new problems when they appear :)
Good luck!
I like where you’re thinking is on this. Flip the model to reduce friction and likely more customers.
I’m trying to imagine how I could bend and tweak the payment processor/WordPress stack to create a sort of private store experience.
Where customers would register, upload their photos, and then in their private store they could see a gallery of the pieces created and have X number of days to purchase each piece.
Hmmm...
Congratulations! I'm missing prices though. And one question: Do you transform the pictures manually? Does that scale?
Yep, as I mentioned above to @clagio, I'm still figuring out how to show pricing on the home page. :)
And yes, these pieces are manually transformed -- using a variety of tools: Adobe Lightroom/Photoshop, an in-house developed app, and sometimes jump over to an iPad Pro with Procreate. :)
Does it scale? Hmm... to a degree. My technique is something people adept with Photoshop could follow with some training -- so it wouldn't scale with technology so-to-speak, but with hiring additional help. : )
I do not outsource anything in this business.
Congratz. The pictures look great man. Best of luck.
Thank you so much!
I like what I see..
Thank you!
These are beautiful! You'll have a customer in me soon!
Thank you Zee. I appreciate that very much. 🙏
Wow what an awesome service!
Thanks Lee! 🙏
Well done!
Your site is barely recognisable from the good old days when I first saw it! Good to see the puntes are beginning to find you. Beth sounds positively orgasmic!
Haha, yep... the good old days.
Beth definitely enjoys the service. 😎
For me, if a customer-first service does not display price right away, then they will lose me as a potential customer... You might add clear pricing on your landing page. Even if it is like "prices starting from $29/photo".
Thanks Bart. Working on it. I just added "As low as $29/photo" on the landing page -- and added a pricing page to show more pricing details.
Does that work for you? Or is something unclear or missing still?
Thanks again!
Much, much better. More transparent for sure! Good luck with this!
Thank you. I really appreciate the feedback. 🙏
The photo effects are beautiful! I could see myself being a customer in the near future, great job!
Thank you Tim! 🙏
Interesting product (and a nice landing page), congrats. My first thought was "wow, how is he scaling this with painters", but I understand now this is a digital product. Btw I read an article once about a similar service - they started hooking up real machines to literally draw the paintings (after a couple of painters couldn't keep up). Fun times :) Good luck!
Yep, it's digital. I actually made the choice early on to not outsource the work. If/when it comes time I need help to get the work done, I'll hire and start having employees "in-house."
I vaguely recall that article too! Very cool stuff. :)
hey @Chaddeus, drop me a DM on twitter, I think there is something seriously wrong with the site
Seriously wrong?