Check out yazoomills.com. They make amazing tubes, and have fantastic customer service. I'm guessing you can get your tube price down to $0.40/tube or less with an order of 2,000 or so tubes.
I started learning to code last year, and Litographs is the first project I've launched.
I've sold over 8,000 posters at an average of ~$20 each since I opened the store in September 2011 . I left my job in August to focus on Litographs full-time.
I wrote python scripts to create the posters and t-shirts and to automate most tasks around updating and keeping up my Shopify storefront (www.litographs.com). Releasing two designs each week means that automating what I can is key.
Before I started, I'd gotten about halfway through the introductory MIT OCW course. Through working on Litographs, I've used PIL, reportlab, numpy, and Scrapy, and I'm gearing up to release a customization tool using picloud and Flask. It's been a crash course in finding the right tools for the job, and learning just enough to get done what I need.
Some of the interesting challenges have been outside of software: rolling and shipping hundreds of posters a week (this was especially tricky for the 6 months I was living in Chile), sourcing artists and artwork, licensing contemporary books, comparing and choosing between printing processes, building up a large mailing list (1,500+ members) with no marketing budget.
I've mainly been a lurker on HN, but I owe a great deal of gratitude to everyone here for helping me take the leap. I'll be blogging about some of these challenges in more detail over the course of the Kickstarter campaign, and I'm happy to answer any questions here.
I always find it awkward to ask for money when I petsit, and my friends who petsit for me often feel the same way.
I do like to give something back, and usually end up buying a bottle of wine or a gift card in return. There could be some interesting opportunities for selling gifts (pet-related or not) in addition to processing cash payments.
Haha, yes! We've actually seen some trades for beer, wine or even dinner. So definitely some fun opportunities to integrate gifts. We've also talked to BarkBox about the potential for something pet related in the future, and are looking at some similar pet and non-pet-related gifts. :)
As much as I'm sure it improves the listings, I'd recommend not making the photo required. First of all, other non-required info (such as pet type) seems more important, and second of all it requires digging through my photos. I'd be likely to add a photo when I'm looking for someone to catsit, but it was a deterrent for me to add the cat in the first place.
Thanks so much for the feedback, that is a great point. We wanted to make the signup easy, covering just the basics, but you're right that digging for photos is not always the easiest task. We've adjusted this a little in the redesign we're working on, but I think we could always do more to simplify.
Good feedback. We've heard this before as well. I'm just stubborn and like looking at the photos. When we roll out the redesign, we'll add a silhouette and not make it required.
Definitely, we're thinking about small nudges to help people through the process, both in completing the profile and in setting your first request or remembering us the next time you do need help.
Second the photo thing. I was on a machine where I didn't have access to any of my dog photos (work) and I got stuck in the process because I couldn't upload a photo.
I'm not sure if my being born in the late 1980s would make me more or less likely to choose 1973 over 2011. On the one hand it would take some getting used to a world without computers and the like, having never experienced that before. On the other, it would be more like travelling to a new place than going back in time, which at least sounds more exciting.
If seriously confronted with this proposition, I would probably not take the risk. My father died of cancer, as did one of my aunts (from my mother's family), so, I would be weary of being too far from more modern treatments and/or diagnostics. It would be tempting, of course, to be able to witness some key events in our industry first hand (maybe even nudge them in a better direction). I would, certainly, be at the homebrew computer club meeting when Woz presented his Apple I. About a year later I would talk Woz into (or help him with - I still remember 6502 well enough) integrating floating point into Apple's BASIC. Then, I would try to persuade the IBM execs not to ditch CP/M-86 for PC-DOS. And then I would call it a day and head back to a much nicer 2011.
I could also lobby for Thorium reactors in the 50's...
Awesome idea. I've been saving recipes to a google doc for a while and have been looking for a product to make it worthwhile to go through and import all of them.
I've had a few issues with images (both URL and upload), but other than that this is by far the least buggy online recipe box I've used.
One suggestion - enable some sort of tagging/categorization system to help with planning meals.
Thanks. I'm investigating the image issues (seems you bumped into it right off the bat).
There is tagging & tag/ingredient-based searching, though it's not integrated with the planner per se. I'll think about that. EDIT: FYI, tags are in the Your Notes section if you didn't notice
Not sure how common it will be for a user to add dozens of recipes at once, but I'm finding it tiring to go back and copy in all of the instructions. For a user like me, the awesome thing about YumTab is having all of my recipes in one place, so copying over the instructions is essential.
Is there any way to make it easier to add info manually, at least while you work on scraping the instructions? For now, I'm having to run the bookmarklet, refresh My Recipes on YumTab, click on the newly added recipe, click edit, go back to the original recipe, copy the instructions, go back to YumTab, and paste it.
For now, allowing manual input within the bookmarklet could help.
I originally envisioned this as a replacement for delicious, and have been thinking about instructions as nice-to-have but not essential (I don't bother adding them myself, I just open the original recipe). However, your goal is probably common, so I'll see about catering to it. Thanks again.
