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.