Hi, Sebastien here, creator of this side project :)<p>A little context about the creation of the app:<p>It all started in July when, for the book I just started writing, I created a web app that generates the HTML and CSS to embed a 3D book cover on a website. I posted it here on HackerNews, and, big surprise, it was a huge success! It stayed #1 for the whole day and brought me a lot of useful feedback: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23896856" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23896856</a><p>From that day, I kept in my mind to create an application to enable people to create a 3D Cover and embed it without caring about the HTML and CSS, just by copying and pasting a small code snippet wherever they want.<p>I developed it using tools I already knew, using cloud services when possible, because my goal was to release as soon as possible.<p>A small overview of the tech stack:<p>- Node.js/Express for the webserver<p>- Heroku to host the webserver<p>- MongoDB Atlas for the database<p>- React, only for the 3D cover editor<p>- Auth0 for the authentication<p>- Cloudinary to host images<p>- Stripe to handle premium account purchase<p>What do you think?
Nice job! This is really slick. Have you considered other pricing models? One approach that comes to mind:<p>- Allow the user to use the full tool without ever having to sign-up.
- Charge $3-5 for them to download it. Sign-up optional.
- To prevent them from screenshotting it without paying, add a watermark that only gets removed once they've paid for the download.<p>I remember seeing a resume generator on HN many years ago that used this model (i.e. no sign up required/pay upon download), and I thought it was clever: 1) it breaks down the barrier to use that the sign up causes; 2) it gets people bought-in/proud of their beautiful cover and thus more likely to pay; 3) allows you to monetize one-time users. Meanwhile, you could also keep the monthly subscription for people who expect to use it a lot (designers, agencies, etc).
A few months ago, the author posted the initial Show HN which was discussed here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23896856" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23896856</a>
It's an impressive animation, and I hope you make some money on it. I personally would just steal your style tag and the book div/img tag and call it a day if I wanted to use it, so I hope your customer base doesn't have front-end web experience. You should try reaching out to book publishers with eCommerce sites. That would be great on some product detail pages.
This is fucking awesome!<p>As an author I can tell you, it’s annoying to try to get 3D mockups of your books. I usually hire someone on Fiverr, but the results are inconsistent.<p>So glad this exists now. I’ll use it for the book I launched this week!
It reminds me of an app in the 90's that did exactly the same but with software boxes (at the time, software came in very fancy book-size boxes).
I think the name was Alexa, actually.
Am I the only one remembering this?