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Re:Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd no... by mattkevan on Sunday June 07, 2020 @03:33AM (#23445502)
I’ve been doing it for around 4 years now. Growth has been slow initially because you need a lot of listings to be noticed - the bigger sellers all have over 1000.

I knew I wanted to do something with public domain art prints, so I researched other sellers to find the types of things that were popular. Lots of places like the Library of Congress, NYPL and the Rijksmuseum have open access policies, so I regularly hunt through their collections to find interesting stuff. The problem is always finding something in the public domain that’s also very high resolution.

For a long time I produced the pieces myself as buying top quality paper and a decent printer worked out cheaper than using a print company - and I quite enjoyed it. However I’ve decided now that the convenience is worth the extra cost.

I’ve also automated creating listing images by using Cloudinary and a few shell scripts. This has been a massive time-saver.

As for print companies, it’s a balance between cost, quality and price. The big ones like Printful or Gooten are cheaper and do everything from t-shirts to phone cases, but have a limited range of paper and sizes. Specialist fine art places have a huge range of paper and produce better prints but are much more expensive.

Re:Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd no... by giarc on Sunday June 07, 2020 @10:44AM (#23447683)
Does etsy have add-ons/integrations like Shopify does? For example on Shopify you can integration with printful and the orders automatically get set to printful for fulfillment.

Edit Never mind, I see your response to another question.

Re:Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd no... by yonig on Monday June 08, 2020 @08:38AM (#23455969)
Growth has been slow initially because you need a lot of listings to be noticed - the bigger sellers all have over 1000.

Have you thought about padding your collection for the sake of exposure?