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Show HN: I convert videos to printed flipbooks for living (videotoflip.com)

513 points by momciloo ↗ HN
I built this product back in 2018 as a small side project: a tool that turns short videos into physical flipbooks. After launching it, I didn't touch it for years. Life and work took over, and it sat idle. But it kept getting a few orders every month, which made it impossible to forget. So in December 2024, I decided to rebrand and revive it.

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.

127 comments

[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] thread
ChrisArchitect
Love it. There was a service a long time ago that used to make fun little greeting card type flipbooks (from their own content). They made great gifts, something different that were well-received by those I gifted them to. Neat behind-the-scenes details. The challenge of production with papers/printing and the whole process is real!
napolux
congrats on re-launching!
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crtez
Quick heads up, there’s a typo at “Create a uniqu flipbooke gift”.
pimlottc
They’re olde tyme flipbookes
AntiEgo
It almost looks like something I could make myself, but cutting those tiny pages while keeping them perfectly indexed would surely be where my diy would go wrong. Good work OP for working out that special sauce!

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.

momciloo
We’re thinking of adding a DIY version where you can buy a pattern made from your video, print it at home or a local print shop, cut it, and bind it with a clip binder. Would that be something you’d find interesting?
theraven
My kids would love that process. I’d likely only have the patience to do it once though
tooltechgeek
maybe one could die-cut sheets containing an array of cards that you first print onto and then are easily separated by hand and aligned with some sort of pegs. I once bought a type of printer paper to make business cards that comes pre scored/cut so you print it normally but then the cards come apart with a gentle pull.
ramses0
Highly recommend against it! Instead of 100 customers at $10 you're cannibalizing (let's say) to 80 customers at $10 + 40 at $5. So a +20% revenue "bump", but you lose all quality control of peoples perception of your product!

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?

momciloo
Thanks for this thoughtful perspective! Honestly, you’ve brought up a key point about quality control that we haven’t fully considered, and I completely agree. The last thing we want is our product ending up being judged unfairly due to subpar, home-printed alternatives. We’ll definitely rethink this feature and make sure any future decisions keep quality at the core.

As for the equipment, we currently use:

- 450VS/520E Electric Paper Cutter - BINDER K5 (Soft Binding Machine) - Ricoh MPC3003 (Color Laser Printer)

Thanks again for the insights!

gizajob
Pedantic observation - maybe you could get a woman to do the flip on your splash demo video? It seems like a wedding flip book like that would be better and more aesthetically congruous if demonstrated with female hands.
gizajob
You could also print double sided, in order to have a video on both sides of your “flip” - kind of a double whammy on the product for about the same amount of effort.
kristopolous
probably not worth the manufacturing effort, but if you could make a book that flips on both sides, with different clips, that would potentially be novel enough to pass virality coefficients.

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

kamens
Fun idea!

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

waltbosz
I love that magic trick, but wouldn't that significantly thicken the cardstock flipbook ?
kristopolous
would it? I assume the trick is the sheets are slightly trapezoidal. Shouldn't that be enough?

Of course you're doubling the page count regardless of the approach ... that's likely unavoidable.

apparent
This sounds like a Svengali deck, which just has every other card slightly shorter. Then when you flip from one direction it seems like all of the cards are different, and from the other direction, all of the cards appear the same. Would be easy to do, but in one direction your hand would tend to block the view of the cards.
subpixel
Really cool, I'd expect to see how much I would save when ordering 5, 10 etc (of the same video).

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.

momciloo
We rarely get 3-10 identical orders, so there’s no calculator for it. For 10+, people contact us directly, and we offer custom options like branding and photo covers. But maybe we could add a page specifically for bulk orders, with some pricing adjustment visualisations. thanks for suggesting it!
mhnthrow
Bulk orders would be great. I just sent you one of my kid starting to crawl, it'll be a birthday gift for my wife. These would make great gifts in general - if you end up doing any more personalization like names embossed on covers or something, you can probably double the price.
rectalogic
Interesting. Back in 2007 my company Motionbox partnered with flipclips.com to sell themed flipbooks very similar to these. Both companies are defunct now. Demo at a trade show: https://youtu.be/FIiLsyeAM_I?si=BQHt5Q4Q80y3Il5f
momciloo
wow!!!! true pioneer! amazing!!
DHPersonal
There's also lenticular cards: https://gifpop.io/
bazzargh
Is that not very dead? I remember trying to order some gifpop stuff back in 2021/22 and they were gone by then. I see the "make your own" page on the site is broken, the blog entries are from 2017 (hover over the bottom of each one). The copyright's updated but I think that's automatic.

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.

DHPersonal
Oh, I think you’re right; I remember it back then and I think it did die. :(
niceice
A case of being too early? Like the grocery delivery companies that went defunct before the era of Instacart.
manugarri
I still have one from a conference I went! Very awesome swag.
tombot
Neat, how did you build the live preview? Green screen with numbered pages?
shawabawa3
The live preview is literally just the uploaded video dropped to like 10fps
jsat
The flip demonstration video needs to be redone. Very poor execution by the person flipping.
cwmoore
True, makes me question the paperstock and dimensions.
stronglikedan
Right? It reminds me of those game ads where they intentionally fuck up in an attempt to get you riled up.
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gus_massa
If it's too perfect, it would look fake. Perhaps make a first poor run and then another nice run, as if the person learned how to flip in the middle.
jkkramer
Great little product! Seems like this could actually make good money with the right marketing.

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.

momciloo
Not really. I’m probably overthinking it like most developers do and holding back more than I should
suyash
Nicely done, what are the most popular use cases for this service? I guess weddings?
momciloo
We thought weddings would be big too, but we've only had one wedding order so far haha. Most orders are gifts for various family occasions
Pixelious
Bizarre, my first thought was wedding also.
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ggambetta
This looks pretty great, seriously considering ordering one!

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!

momciloo
We evenly sample 72 frames from any video length. No required frame rate, but 12-24fps works best. Most people flip at around 10fps, so short, clear-motion clips work best. When you upload your video on the order page, you'll get an accurate preview of how it'll look in hand!
escapecharacter
What if you converted video essays to flipbooks, by only taking the frames that a new subtitle appeared on?
HarHarVeryFunny
Is this just supplemental income, or are you actually making a living from it?

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?

momciloo
It's supplemental, but it's enough to make living where we live. When I first started, I worried about creating competition by sharing too much. But after 6 years of refining production, I've realized this product isn't easy to replicate at all
j45
It's almost always the case that anyone who thinks something is easy to replicate will realize the product is the marketing, sales, creating/building, delivery, billing, and not just any tech.

Happy for you having a family activity.

Binding is a good skill to have, remember it from my school days.

rhubarbtree
I used to think tech was a small part of a startup. Now I think it’s a _very_ small part.
throw_away32
Small part of successful startups.

Those that focus more on technology instead of the product often fails, unless technology is the actual startup (database companies, PaaS etc.). Even then it is often a good choice just to select something "boring" that everyone knows.

cptskippy
How does your product differ from the Flipbook Photobooths that people have at their weddings? They're able to create flipbooks on demand that are very high quality.
momciloo
I haven’t held a flipbook like that in my hands, but the main benefit of ours is that you can upload any video from your phone anytime - you don’t need to be at a wedding. The downside, of course, is the delivery time
SoftTalker
Ideas are a dime a dozen. Guaranteed that others have thought of this. Execution is where you succeed or fail.
anticorporate
It strikes me as odd that so many people think a business has to be unique to succeed. 99% of businesses do something that another business already does. For that matter, almost by definition, most businesses are not the leader in their niche. That doesn't make them unprofitable.
turnsout
But what about moats??? My business guru told me I need an ironclad irreproducible moat! /s
HarHarVeryFunny
I understand you're joking, but I guess that depends if you are trying to monopolize a market, retain first-mover advantage, etc. I guess ability to execute is itself a type of moat, perhaps especially so when the potential competition would be other startups that are statistically highly likely to fail.

Still, I wonder how many head-on competing businesses of a particular category the market can bear before they start feeling it via competitive pricing pressure, lower sales and/or slower growth, etc. What if there were 2 more video-flipbook companies, or 10 more ?

echoangle
> 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?

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.

kirso
Think the majority of the technical crowd overestimates the value of the idea, building something and actually getting and talking to customers. 99% of folks will do nothing about this.
cwmoore
Print and bind a few copies of YouTube for a serious carbon sequestration opportunity.
davewasthere
And limited run it. So it there are XX orders already, then the youtube video is delisted, so only exists in paper form.
mynjin
It would be nifty if, when you squeeze the spine to flip it, that it played audio from the clip and maybe an audio message.
momciloo
haha! actually yes, like musical greeting cards! would be a nice experiment to try it out
mcsniff
The site has a weird mixture of case.

Some headings are capitalised while others aren't, doesn't seem to follow any specific reasoning -- might want to take a look at that.

phmagic
How do your customers find out about your business?
momciloo
seo and a little bit of meta eds. still a lot opportunities to explore
benuuu
I uploaded a vertical video and it was a little unclear to me where the binding would be. I'm assuming it's on the left. It might be helpful to have a ui element to the side of the video container that looked like the binding so it was clear that would be the end product.
gus_massa
If they ship internationaly or to manga fans, they may want to add the option to bind on the other side
talkingtab
A very long time ago there was a program on the Mac. You drew one picture (macdraw maybe), just lines, then a second picture. You could then watch as pix 1 morphed into pix 2. Anyone know where something like that is. A flip book for that would be great.
latexr
That is an animation technique called “tweening”. Using that term you should be able to find some software to do it.
apparent
How long of videos do you recommend this for? How many flips are the books good for? Any tips on keeping them in good flipping condition, in your experience?

Also, your title is missing an "a" before "living". Love the idea and execution!