MakePoster.Art

This morning me and a few friends shared wordle scores, as we've been doing every morning for the last couple weeks

I suddenly thought that those yellow, green and grey boxes have a real elegance to them, and they'd make a nice poster.

So, I spent the day coding https://www.makeposter.art/wordle-poster - where you can turn your wordle score into a poster.

I posted it on twitter and reddit, and managed to get about 100 hits. Not bad, but not the success I'd been hoping for. It was a pretty half hearted attempt on my part to be honest.

And in retrospect it's pretty obvious that no one ever has wanted to turn their wordle score into a poster. Oops.

But, I had fun doing it and it forced me to think a little bit about generalising the code that generates the .pdfs.

Onwards

Having launched dictionarytemplate.com, I quickly realised that the clearest path to growth is to have templates for lots of different posters - so I've decided to relaunch as makeposter.art with the definition template as the first of potentially many posters.

If I can generalise the code that's doing the .pdf generation, then it should be pretty straight forward to launch new templates. And more importantly, that's the fun bit for me.

Spent a while debating whether it's better to go for a .com domain - but I ended up really liking makeposter.art and it's v cheap, which made the decision for me.

After about a day and a half's work, I've launched an MVP.

It's the product of a paused project I was working on last year.
Long story short, I bit off way more than I could chew (I know, I know, a very obvious mistake...).

I sat down two days ago to continue work and realised I just wasn't enjoying it anymore. I kept coming up against tricky problems I've never tackled before (as a designer turned coder), and it was wearing me down.

Just then my friend forwarded a thank you message for a gift - over Christmas I had helped her design a 'definition poster' for her godchild.

Inspiration struck, and I realised that I could use lots of what I've coded to create a dictionary definition poster generator. Now, this is the kind of idea I'd have passed up as being too small / silly / not cool enough - but I felt really energised knowing it was something I could achieve.

I've spent yesterday and this morning coding, and have a very minimal MVP ready. It's a bit buggy, and I'm still figuring out a lot of stuff. But feeling good to have shipped something tangible!

The most obvious problem with this idea is the market is absolutely tiny. But I've done a little bit of keyword research and I think there are some people looking for this kind of thing. Honestly, I'd be thrilled to earn back the £12.24 I spent on the domain name! Let's see how it goes.