Toonclip

I created these 2 animations in the last week. They are going to be integrated with a chat app called HaiPals. The integrations is via an API that receives any sentence as an input and returns an animation with the character saying that sentence.

Below are the two animations.

The website was released on Product Hunt. We got about 1500 visitors over a week as a result of this. It also got posted by other people on Facebook, tumblr and a Polish blog.

The number of registered users increased from 17 to 50. I changed the registration at a good "Aha" point. For our software that point occurs when the user creates an animation and is ready to export. The percentage of conversions is very high at this point.

Below is an animation created by one of the users.

I have never used twitter before.

But its good exposure my friends said.

So, I registered. What to tweet?

Then I remembered. 3 days ago I had had a funny conversation with my 3 year old daughter Maya. I had posted in my office slack and everyone thought it was funny. Why not tweet that, I thought. So I created a toonclip and tweeted.

Its my first twitter account, so have 0 followers so far. Who will be the follower number 1? :-)

Here it is https://twitter.com/toonclip/status/1232876355110334464

Now that I had confirmation that there was demand for the idea, I explored domains and settled on toonclip.com. Then moved the editor to this domain.

I participated in startupschool and received many suggestions which I implemented. Soon I realized that I was focusing too much on technicals (which has always been my weakness). I switched to focusing on marketing. I created short animations and posted it on different forums.

This was a major rewrite of the editor. In the earlier version if the user wanted to use different images, the only way to do it was by uploading the file. I realized this was creating friction. So I created a library of images and sprites that the user could click to use.

I decided to use the Dilbert cartoon as the example on the editor. I created the relevant sprites for Dilbert and the boss. As Christmas was approaching I also added a Santa Claus sprite that I found from another site. I took one of the Dilbert cartoons and animated it. And also worked in the Santa clause sprite. I was expecting slightly more traffic than the second release.

Things started slow, but within a couple of hours, traffic gushed in. It was a unique visitor every few seconds. It was late night and I went to sleep. I woke up at 2 am to check and found that the server had crashed. It was so unexpected that I forgot even simple commands to connect to the server.

I fixed the problems, answered some questions on HN and fell asleep again. At about 6 am the server had crashed again due to the heavy load. This time I disabled internal logging that I use. This made the server stable and it did not crash again.

Overall I had 15000 unique visitors from that launch. 60000 animations had been created. Previously, I had only heard about servers crashing due to load. Now I had experienced it. Unfortunately my registration and email subscription was not set up and the only sign ups were those who wrote to me directly.

I made some more changes to the MVP based on comments that I had obtained from the first one. This used a different graphics package from the first version. I showed a graphics of a car moving from one end of the screen to the other. Then a train would move from one end to the other. The background was the city of Bangkok. I had developed the scene with my 3 year old daughter on my lap, so I remember it quite clearly.

I expected the number of unique visitors to be lower than the first release as visually it was only a minor changed. However, I got more unique visitors - about 250. This was a surprise for me and for the first time it occurred to me that there was possibly something here.

Following the LEAN methodology, I did the minimum possible to get an MVP. I just created another page in an existing site that I had and modified it to be an animation editor. I explored the various options - using raw SVG, using other graphic packages, doing the animations myself, not doing it myself but let the packages do it.

It was a simple editor that just showed a car moving from one end of the canvas to the other. I posted it on HN and got about 200 unique visitors.

I am a regular HN reader. There were a few threads with the theme "Flash is dead." An accompanying theme was there was a gap in the market for a web based easy to use animation editor.

Being an artist and a techie it was intriguing. I asked if anyone was interested in collaborating in making such a software but got no response.

After the third such thread, I decided to proceed on my own.