A few months ago, I set a goal to launch 12 startups in 12 months. They’re all minimum viable products, built to test a hypothesis and see if they can get a market fit in a month.
几个月前，我设定了一个目标，在12个月内创办12家初创公司。它们都是最小可行性产品，旨在测试一个假设，看看它们是否能在一个月内适应市场。

They’ve all been doing relatively well. 1) PlayMyInbox got covered by MTV and Lifehacker, 2) Tubelytics was quickly adopted by some big media brands, 3) GoFuckingDoIt went completely viral and was featured all over the media including TheNextWeb, AppSumo and WIRED, 4) NomadList surpassed all of them hitting #1 on Product Hunt and Hacker News and getting covered by Business Insider, Inc.com and Tim Ferriss and 5) Nomad Jobs which is soft-launched and slowly receiving coverage now. I’m slightly delayed now as the success of Nomad List was a bit overwhelming. But I’m almost back on schedule now.
他们都做得相对较好。1)PlayMyThing得到了MTV和Lifehacker的报道，2）Tubelytics很快被一些大媒体品牌采用，3）GoFuckingDoIt完全病毒式传播，并在包括TheNextWeb，AppSumo和WIRED在内的所有媒体上都有报道，4）NomadList超过了所有这些媒体，在Product Hunt和Hacker News上排名第一，并被Business Insider，Inc.com和Tim Ferriss报道，5）Nomad Jobs正在软启动，现在正在慢慢接受报道。我现在稍微推迟了一下，因为《流浪者名单》的成功有点压倒性。不过，我现在差不多回到计划中了。

This month, I’m launching the 6th startup. It’s called GIFbook.io and it lets you order printed physical flipbooks from animated GIFs. If you like one too, you can go and order one now.
这个月，我将启动第六个创业公司。它GIFbook.io如果你也喜欢的话，现在就可以去订一个。

The problem 问题

If Product Hunt teaches us one thing, it’s that GIFs are huge.
如果Product Hunt教会我们一件事，那就是GIF是巨大的。

But there’s one tiny problem, they stop moving once you print them. It seems like a problem that we’ve put people on the moon but haven’t been able to put animated GIFs on paper.
但有一个小问题，一旦你打印它们，它们就停止移动了。这似乎是一个问题，我们已经把人送上月球，但还没有能够把动画GIF在纸上。

nyancat3

The infallible Yahoo! Answers obviously agrees:
绝对可靠的Yahoo！答案显然是一致的：

The solution 溶液

So even though this doesn’t seem like a world shattering problem, I thought, let’s fix this by letting people print animated GIFs as flipbooks.
所以尽管这看起来不像是一个世界性的问题，我想，让我们通过让人们打印动画GIF作为翻页书来解决这个问题。

I searched around and I couldn’t find anyone doing this yet. So there’s a space! Could this be a business though? I thought so. Printstagram started by simply printing Instagram photos as polaroids. Now they’ve grown into a real startup called Social Print Studio who offer a wide range of print products all connected to social networks. So it’s more serious than you think.
我找了一圈，还没找到人做这个。所以有一个空间！但这能成为一笔生意吗？我想也是Printstagram最初只是简单地将Instagram照片打印为宝丽来。现在，他们已经成长为一个真实的创业公司，名为社会打印工作室，提供广泛的打印产品，所有连接到社交网络。所以比你想象的要严重。

Finding a supplier 寻找供应商

It’d be a bit of hassle to print them myself though. So I jumped on Twitter and asked if anyone knew a printing company that did flipbooks. A few replies later I had a supplier who sent me a sample flipbook of Nyan Cat by post! Awesome.
不过，我自己打印会有点麻烦。所以我跳上推特，问是否有人知道一家做翻页书的印刷公司。几个答复后，我有一个供应商谁给我寄了一个样本翻页的年猫邮寄！棒了

The supplier’s minimum was 3 flipbooks. And it wasn’t very cheap either. So my margins are not very high right now. But if I get enough volume, I’m looking to push the cost down or otherwise switch suppliers. If you know anyone printing flip books, tweet me!
供应商的最低要求是3本翻页书。也不便宜。所以我现在的利润不是很高。但如果我有足够的产量，我希望降低成本，或者换个供应商。如果你知道谁在印刷翻页书，发推特给我！

Front-end 前端

Like with my previous projects, I tried to keep the interface of GIFbook.io as simple as possible. It features two colors, a video of the flipbook as a background (simply shot on my iPhone by my dad, while I held the flipbook).
与我以前的项目一样，我试图保持GIFbook.io的界面尽可能简单。它有两种颜色，一个作为背景的翻页书的视频（只是由我爸爸在我的iPhone上拍摄的，而我拿着翻页书）。

The upload bar is a nyan cat flying through space with its awesome rainbow cloud ^___^
上传栏是一只带着令人敬畏的彩虹云在太空中飞行的nyan猫^_^

It lets you upload a GIF or paste a URL, lets you position it by dragging the GIF, crop its size right for the flip book, and then in the same page moves you through the ordering process and processes your payment via the always awesome Stripe.
它可以让你上传一个GIF或粘贴一个URL，让你通过拖动GIF来定位它，裁剪它的大小适合翻页书，然后在同一个页面上移动你通过订购过程，并通过总是很棒的条纹处理你的付款。

It took awhile to get everything working on mobile, but with 50% of my traffic mobile now, that’s mega important. People need to be able to upload a GIF, enter their CC details and order, all from a phone.
我花了一段时间才让所有的东西都在移动的上工作，但是现在我50%的流量都在移动的上，这是非常重要的。人们需要能够上传GIF，输入他们的CC详细信息和订单，所有这些都来自手机。

Back-end 后端

The back-end required some not-so-trivial stuff. I needed to be able to resize/crop the GIF from the user’s input, cut up the animated GIF frames, and since the flip book was set at 50 frames by my supplier, I had to somehow make sure the image sequence I sent them was exactly 50 frames.
后端需要一些不那么琐碎的东西。我需要能够从用户的输入中调整/裁剪GIF，剪切GIF动画帧，由于供应商将翻页书设置为50帧，我必须以某种方式确保我发送给他们的图像序列正好是50帧。

If you have a GIF with 25 frames, that’s easy. You show 1 frame for 2 pages and you have 50 pages filled. If you have 36 frames, what do you do though? Interpolating frames makes stuff look blurry and that’s sub-optimal. Another option would be to cut frames. Instead I opted to try and half or double the frame rate so it’d fit inside the 50 frames. Then if it was too many frames, I’d simply repeat the GIF until it was 50 frames long.
如果你有一个25帧的GIF，那很容易。您显示2页的1个框架，您有50页填充。如果你有36帧，你会怎么做？插值帧使东西看起来模糊，这是次优的。另一个选择是切割框架。相反，我选择尝试一半或两倍的帧速率，使它适合内的50帧。然后，如果它是太多的帧，我只是重复的GIF，直到它是50帧长。

After cutting it up, the final image sequence is then sent to my supplier with the customer’s shipping address.
切割后，最后的图像序列，然后发送到我的供应商与客户的送货地址。

For now, I’ll be doing the payments to my supplier manually, but later, if there’s enough sales, I’ll automate that too. Right now it sums up the credit of each order’s costs and then at the end of the month I PayPal that amount.
现在，我将手动向我的供应商付款，但以后，如果有足够的销售，我也会自动化。现在它总结了每个订单的成本信用，然后在月底我贝宝的金额。

Conclusion 结论

My first physical product startup! I’m super excited and wonder how the internets will respond to this. It seems to me like a fun product to give to someone. I’ve shown my friends the sample flip books I got, and they liked it. I don’t know if liking it will be enough to buy it, but we’ll see in a month when I’ll update you on how this went! Fingers crossed 🙂
我的第一个实体产品启动！我非常兴奋，想知道互联网对此会有什么反应。在我看来，这是一个有趣的产品给予给某人。我已经给我的朋友们看了我得到的翻页书样本，他们很喜欢。我不知道喜欢它是否足以购买它，但我们会在一个月内看到，当我告诉你这是如何进行的！手指交叉

If it works, I can adapt this to print Vines, videos of Ryan Hoover’s face, YouTube/Facebook videos etc. That sounds like a fun market 🙂
如果它的工作，我可以适应这个打印藤蔓，视频瑞安胡佛的脸，YouTube/Facebook的视频等，这听起来像一个有趣的市场

Try it out 试用看看

It’s live now, so go try it out, upload your own GIF and get your own animated GIF flipbook! Let me know if you have any feedback or ideas to improve it. I’d love to hear from you on Twitter or at hello at levels.io. If you’d like to write about it, please do so, I need any press I can get!
它现在是活的，所以去尝试一下，上传你自己的GIF，并获得你自己的动画GIF翻页书！如果你有任何反馈或想法来改进它，请告诉我。我很乐意在Twitter上或在levels.io的hello上听到你的意见。如果你想写的话，请写吧，我需要任何我能得到的媒体！

P.S. I’m on Twitter too if you’d like to follow more of my stories. And I wrote a book called MAKE about building startups without funding. See a list of my stories or contact me. To get an alert when I write a new blog post, you can subscribe below:
P.S.我也在Twitter上，如果你想关注我的更多故事。我写了一本书叫MAKE，是关于在没有资金的情况下建立初创公司的。查看我的故事列表或联系我。要在我写新博客文章时获得提醒，您可以在下面订阅：