The initial version relied on various local printing offices. I kept switching from one to another, but the results were never quite right. Either the quality wasn't good enough, or the turnaround times were too long. Eventually, me and my wife bought all the necessary machines and moved production in-house.
Now, it's a family business. My wife and I handle everything: printing, binding, cutting, addressing, and shipping each flipbook. On the technical side, it’s powered by Next.js, with FFmpeg extracting frames and handling overlays, and ImageMagick used for adding trim marks and creating the final PDFs.
After many years of working in IT, working on something tangible feels refreshing. It's satisfying to create something that brings people joy. And that is not hard to sell (like dev tools, for example haha). There are still challenges: we're experimenting with different cover papers, improving production, and testing new ideas without making things confusing. But that’s part of what keeps us moving forward.
I only wanted a couple of images. From what I remember of gifpop, they originally did this using a machine that was intended as a wedding entertainment, guests take a moving selfie and it's printed for you, they repurposed it for selling art gifs - seemed like a great idea.
The fallback - IIRC you could buy preglued lenticular sheets in packs of 50 off amazon, and there was a site explaining how to preprocess your images (but it's not hard)...but it was going to take a bit of effort, I don't even own a printer - so I lost interest.
Isn't it a bit of a risk to tout the success of this idea among a tech crowd capable of going off and creating competitors?
Happy for you having a family activity.
Binding is a good skill to have, remember it from my school days.
Yes, this feels like perfect bait for people thinking they can do it better and stuffing a video into ffmpeg shouldn’t be that hard. It’s actually starting to make me want to try it myself too.
Also, your title is missing an "a" before "living". Love the idea and execution!
You'd need some radically different zig-zag binding process ... sounds like a lot of effort but might pay off.
Just to be clear I'm not saying duplex print, I'm saying flip right and flip left, same side up
Building on that: there's a common children's magic trick involving a flip book that magically "colors" its pages (https://www.magicinc.net/products/fun-magic-coloring-book?va...)
It works by moving your thumb to a different position while flipping the pages -- every Xth page is cut at slightly different lengths, so when you move your thumb to the next position, different pages become visible during the flip
Using this trick you could show multiple different video clips in the flipbook just by moving your thumb to a different spot
I think it's clear that groups are the winning use case, but if I want all parties from a vacation (picking one example of many) to get a flipbook, I need to pay less than $25 per.
I currently have an incredibly small ebay business doing fairly specific motorsports vinyl emblems. The profit margin per order is great but I'm lucky to get a handful of orders a month and have no idea how to scale it. There are thousands of other people doing vinyl stuff on ebay for absolutely peanuts and I don't know how to compete with that.
Are you selling only online or are you setting up vendor booths at events?
The Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, NY has, among many cool interactive exhibits about animation, a little stage and camera where you can record a short video and then go buy a flipboard version from the gift shop. They print it out and construct it right there for you (and it really does look like a pain). We’ve bought a couple and they’re really fun.
The length is fixed at 72 pages/frames, but you support uploading up to 30s of video. How does this work? You sample 72 frames from a video of any length? Is there a recommended frame rate (and therefore duration) that is somehow optimal? What's the natural frame rate range of humans flipping flipbooks? So many questions!
It's a clever idea, and it's encouraging to see that there are still clever ideas at the small-business scale still waiting to be invented.
Prefer: 80 customers at $12, which is approximately revenue neutral, but increases your effective ROI / hourly wage... AND you keep the high quality, word-of-mouth advertising.
Basically, you'd prefer to have people walking around with _your_ printed and bound product with nice QR code on the back rather than some hackintosh, ink-jet + scissors on 19lb copy paper and saying: "i PaId moNeY FoR ThiS!!" ;-)
...as I'm in the "home printing and binding biz" (gbc-proclick, hand/kettle stitch, carl rolling paper slicer, hp-laserjet, all for personal/hobby use)... What's the equipment you had to end up getting? I'm sorely tempted to chase a (manual) hydraulic paper cutter, but absolutely can't justify the cost / space. Are you still on color laser or are you doing something else for printing? Jigs for slicing? What's the story?
Unfortunately, i failed at the physical part of this. I couldn't figure out that quickly how to print it nicely & make a usable flipbook.
So my gift ended up being a crappy mvp of a flipbook. It was appreciated, but it's embarrassing considering how many hours i've put into it, for a shitty result.
I would order, but i know, the minute i pay, i will fall down the rabbit hole again and get obsessed trying to create the physical flipbook myself. But i really don't have the time for that at the moment. When i do, i will place an order!
All the best to you!
I used ImageMagik to make some stills. I bulk uploaded them to Walgreens photos. Thankfully they were all printed in order! I jankily bound them together somehow and it worked!
I always thought it would be neat to have this as a service. I will be ordering some of these for sure!
Are you doing anything special to leverage TikTok or Instagram Reels? I notice you had a few sample posts. I'd go hard on that if you're not already: post yourself, hire micro influencers, etc.
It’s used by Studio Ghibli for making Anime and I know for sure that it supports tweening. And it’s free and open source.
OP, great site, btw! I'd be glad test any settings on my phone and report back, if that'd help.
Seems great for grandparents. Have you tested with older people with frail or arthritic hands? I'm curious how much dexterity and force is required.
Some headings are capitalised while others aren't, doesn't seem to follow any specific reasoning -- might want to take a look at that.
Scale is the problem of someone who wants to convince the world that they need it done as a service.
There is scale in that hordes of people can independently pull this off. Like gluing beads to paper is being done at scale, if we consider all the kindergartens in the world as an aggregate producer.
