Photo-to-Painting Service

"I had a friend who was re-selling replica paintings of classical artwork in the US. She gave me the idea to build a site that allowed people to order replica paintings by specifying the painting. Instead of doing that, I created a simple landing page that could take any photo and send back an actual hand-made artwork from the picture since the painters were making the replicas off random images of the replica paintings in the first place.

While I was super excited about the idea at the time, I was super excited about most of my other ideas too, and they mostly failed. I had already learned to spend as little effort as possible testing new ideas. I set up a single plain HTML page with a Stripe Checkout form and worried about fulfillment later.

After launch, it made the most money relative to past ideas, granted it was low by absolute standards (a few thousand dollars in a few weeks). That was enough to keep me focused on the project longer than expected. I needed more alternative revenue streams and dwindling funds to stay focused on the business.

With enough persistence, I slowly bumped up sales year after year. It was not an overnight success, but having done so many ideas made it easier to identify the one that I should stick with. The business grew with time and effort, and continuing down a path wasn't always evident except the belief that constantly improving the product will generally pay off."