6 months building a tattoo artist discovery platform. Soft launching this week, asking for funnel feedback.
Been working on InkSight since December. It's tattoo artist discovery driven by a personality quiz and a style vector matching engine. Soft launching this week.
The premise: finding a tattoo artist mostly means scrolling Instagram or keyword-searching by city. Both flatten style into broad categories that don't help. I wanted something that could distinguish bold-line American traditional from neo-trad, or micro-realism from ignorant style, and route users to artists whose actual portfolios fit.
Approach: built a style-tagging pipeline and ran it across a 59k-piece library spanning 10k artists' portfolios in 47 countries, about 22k pieces tagged so far. Each work becomes a weighted tag vector; matching is cosine similarity between the user's reading vector and each artist's aggregated style vector. Vision tagging is GPT-4o-mini through OpenRouter, which kept costs reasonable.
Consumer side monetizes through a $5.99 one-time unlock that opens the full reading and matched artist list. Artist side is on the roadmap. The sequencing matters: I need consumer traction before I can pitch artists with real engagement data, so this week's launch is about validating the consumer funnel.
A few things I'm worried about heading into launch:
The artist reception. I have a sourcing policy and removal flow in progress, but I expect some friction here that I haven't fully figured out how to handle.
The paywall placement. Right now it lands after two match previews, immediately following the archetype reveal when desire is at its peak. I'm not sure if that's too early or too late. Hard to A/B test without traffic.
The TAM question. People get tattoos infrequently. Repeat revenue per user is structurally limited on the consumer side. The real LTV is in the artist side, which doesn't exist yet. I have a path there but it's not proven.
What I'd value from this community:
Funnel feedback if you go through the flow. Specifically the paywall placement and whether the archetype reading feels earned.
If anyone has rolled out a marketplace or directory where the supply side hadn't pre-opted-in (BuiltWith, Crunchbase-style aggregators, similar), I'd love to hear how you handled the supply-side rollout.
Anyone who's built a marketplace where the supply side comes online after the demand side, I'd take advice on the bootstrap sequence.
https://www.theinksight.com/
https://www.theinksight.com/
Happy to share more about the tagging pipeline, costs, or the build journey in the comments
This is a strong niche because tattoo discovery is still mostly trapped inside Instagram search, hashtags, and city-based browsing. The style-vector angle is the real product insight here. People are not just looking for “a tattoo artist near me.” They are trying to find someone whose portfolio matches a very specific visual identity they may not know how to describe.
The funnel problem and the naming problem are connected here. InkSight explains the tattoo/discovery angle, but it still feels more like a directory or search tool. Your actual product is closer to taste-matching, identity, and confidence before a permanent decision. That is a more premium emotional category than “artist discovery.”
Auryxa .com would fit that direction better if this becomes a polished consumer brand around personal style matching, not just a tattoo database. The paywall will probably convert better if the brand feels like it is giving someone a high-confidence style reading, not just unlocking a list.