Tell us about yourself and what you’re working on. Hi, I’m Chris Chen. I created Instapainting.com, a website that lets you turn a photo into a painting hand-made by an artist in real life.
For the first two years I was operating purely from earned income, making about $30-$50k of profit to support both myself and the business (in expensive San Francisco, no less). Now the business is in its third year and doing over $400,000 in annual revenue. I’m still bootstrapped.
How did you get started with Instapainting?
I did YC in Winter 2011 as a solo founder working on a social music site that was a clone of Last.fm. I was fresh out of a 6 month hiatus from college, which I’ve yet to go back and finish. (I’d only completed 3 semesters of a physics major.) I survived on the money I raised from YC and my various ideas and pivots for about 3 years.
Then I ran out of money.
Luckily, by this point I had already been testing more and more random ideas that deviated from "social music", and I had gotten pretty good at throwing up MVPs. I had a friend who bought paintings from China and sold them in the US, and she wanted me to build a website for her to sell art reproductions. Instead,
Source: https://managewp.org/articles/13718/instapainting-from-4k-in-debt-to-32k-mo-in-passive-revenue-with-no-employees
source https://williechiu40.wordpress.com/2016/10/28/instapainting-from-4k-in-debt-to-32kmo-in-passive-revenue-with-no-employees/
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