There's the bookmarklet and everything! I think people who do this, are going for the 'lets be all mysterious about this link' - because yeah, we've all got time to click on random links that we may or may not be interested in... :)
They should enable voting on alternative titles. The most upvoted alternative title would then be displayed, optionally, on the front page next to the original title.
I don't think we can rely on the author always choosing a descriptive title.
I'd love to see the design brief just to see if that was the goal from the start or they just wound up there after playing on a SNES emulator or something. It's a crazy aesthetic, but a very pleasing sort of crazy in an overpowering way.
"..without publishers or bloodsucking middlemen taking most of the money..."
Obviously publishers and bloodsucking middlemen are more or less synonymous in this sentence. I'm on the board of a publishing company and have also worked as an agent (a true bloodsucker).
Two things:
1. In a practical sense it is easy to see publishers and agents as bloodsucking middlemen. Once you've actually worked with lots of creators and artists what you learn is that there'a very good reason for the middlemen. Artists do not generally wish to have too much to be doing with their public - especially not in a commercial sense. In the end of the day Publishers and Agents give writers the thing they really need most: faith. It sounds like corny bull - hell it is corny bull...but it's also incredibly important.
2. I remember reading a great article about Fintech startups trying to "cut out the middleman" and it had a great observation in it: the middleman is there because the two parties don't trust each other - not because they're stupid. I always think of that when I hear people trying this approach.
#2 is soo spot on. As somewhat of a professional middleman (I'm an engineering manager) I find quite often I've maximized the value I can provide when I've negotiated away this distrust and effectively put myself out of a job. It sounds a bit silly if you say it that way, but connecting people who wouldn't have otherwise connected and getting them to play nice with one another when they may not have otherwise done so is really quite rewarding and definitely quite necessary.
I grew up with a mother who ran a bookshop and a one-woman publishing house. Publishers cop a lot of flack that they don't deserve, particularly if they're also distributors. From editing advice to negotiating with printers to storing your shit to packing it up for you and shipping it off, they take care of the 'boring business stuff' while the creators get to go off and be creative. Artist wants to fuck off for a month? Cool. Order fulfillment wants to fuck off for a month? Not cool.
Here's a great podcast on "The Middleman Economy". It expands on your points and brings up a few more use cases for value-added middlemen that you haven't listed here.
Aren't promotion and partnerships/deals also part of the process? I see that what Blackbox does accomplishes some of the scale factors — but it's all about the logistical layer and not really about the service layer (as you mentioned).
It seems like a cool company and much needed as well, but I'm a bit puzzled by the political rhetoric mixed into the marketing page. It's not even that there's politics involved at all (after all you could make the argument that Tesla/SpaceX are like that as well), it's just how short-sighted it is.
Ignoring for a moment that the "bloodsucking middleman" of today were the hot new shit in their time, what other than innocent looking gifs do we have in way of them not becoming bloodsuckers themselves, once or if they reach a position with that kind of pricing power? It's easy to act all nice when you don't have a choice anyway...
Also, the company shipping the product from the producer to the customer seems pretty "in the middle" to me, no matter their size or political ideas.
I think that line is pretty smart actually. It's funny, and more importantly, it echoes a worldview that many artists and creatives share -- business is slimy, middlemen are bloodsuckers, and "I just want to sell my thing and make a living doing what I love."
Not saying they all feel this way, but it looks to me like Blackbox knows their audience.
Comparing a company with a horrible homepage gif that helped out a fortune cookie company, to Tesla/SpaceX? So 2028. (No idea what that's supposed to mean).
If it didn't come across, there is no fortune cookie company. Blackbox created the site and product for the fortune cookie company to advertise their actual product: distribution.
I love Blackbox and still use it today, though I privately maintain my own fork with a few bug fixes and hacks for my personal preferences. Best WM I have ever used.
I'm sure your contributions would be welcome in the community. I too run it for my daily driver with my own code tweaks as well. The only thing I did was remove the top bar that had the desktop switcher and clock, and left a 1px space to activate the menu with the mouse (or kb combo) :D
Not really. I made a github thing for it but I don't push often and a lot of my changes have hard coded hacks for things I like but prolly wouldn't apply to others (like I use an xrandr setup but rarely actually use the second monitor except for youtubes etc., so I hacked "full screen" and "switch monitor" to use those coordinates based on my setup.)
Oh, it's a fulfillment house. There are lots of companies which do that, including Amazon and UPS. The site seems to be addressed to people who don't know that. Nice art, though.
Not to be confused with "blackbox.com", which sells networking accessories.
It may be that they are functionally identical to other fulfilment companies, but if they do a better job of convincing their indie seller target market to use them and respond better to their needs, it probably doesn't matter.
> Oh, it's team chat. There are lots of companies which do that, including HipChat and Campfire. The site seems to be addressed to people who don't know that. Nice UI, though.
> Not to be confused with "slackware.com", which is a Linux distribution.
Exactly. And if people are curious about the type of pain that might drive people to a service like this, they can read about episodes like:
>"After fighting through FedEx's rigorous claim process they declared that the package is not valuable beyond the cost of the paper it took to create this handcrafted, original artwork," Scofield and Shuey wrote. "Even though the package was insured, they aren't willing to pay the full $6,000 it cost to create the intricate set and are only covering the cost of the materials."
I side with FedEx on this and it makes perfect sense. I doubt blackbox would handle it any differently.
The problem is that $6000 is just an arbitrary price made up by a single person. There's nothing stopping me from drawing a stick figure, saying I charge $1 million for the labor that goes into this drawing, shipping+insuring it for a ton of money, then attempting to convince FedEx it was damaged during shipping to claim my money.
Additionally, FedEx did tremendously more than just pay for the materials. A piece of Tyvek like that costs a few dollars, they paid out $1000 for it.
Tried to give this a go (It sounds cool and shipping that scales is a massive pain) but the $5 press kit has $33 shipping to the UK!
Guess this won't be solving my shipping problems after all.
I would have been happy with just that, but the explanations of how many boxes they had shipped where just as good: "If you stacked them all on top of each other they would be taller than the tallest man!"
Slightly disappointingly it's just a big 1.4MB file with 32 frames in it...
I wonder if if could be done two orders of magnitude smaller with old-school 8-bit demoscene colour palette cycling? That's clearly the aesthetic they're referencing... I bet some early '90's graphics hacker could have made that in 4096 bytes ;-) (probably not - certainly not at the full 700+ x 500+ resolution...)
I have seen that before, but I don't think the level of complexity in the BlackBox gif would be achievable with that technique (assuming the technical constraints did also apply)
EasyPost aren't a "3PL" (third party logistics provider) though, just a layer on top of shipping companies. Warehouse space and people's time is expensive, that's what you're paying for. Even then, if you're just fulfilling a kickstarter campaign, the tools that the shipping companies provide for small-scale dispatch are plenty.
This seems like an interesting service, but I want too toss out a suggestion for those looking to disseminate info about a product or service:
Tell me a story.
More specifically, use a hypothetical story to provide context and an example of why the hell I'm reading your page. This is the explanatory copy on this page:
Our mission is to help you sell and ship stuff directly to your fans for a
fraction of the cost and effort of doing it yourself. Blackbox works like a
co-op: if we all go in together, we get the cheapest pricing, the fastest
shipping, and the best service. The shipping is fast. We pay your sales tax.
You can customize the packaging and the inserts. It’s pretty great.
At the end of this, I still am confused about what you do. What would help is a hypothetical use case and narative, and to demonstrate that, I'll invent one:
Let's say you're running a Kickstarter. You're a domain expert who's built
something awesome, and you've even successfully kickstarted a project to
build what you love. Now though, after having built all these gizmos you
need to ship those to your backers, and this is something you're NOT an
expert in. Looking in to shipping, you see it's going to involve
complicated contracts and procedures to ship your gizmo at any scale, and
at a cost that FAR exceeds your back of the envelope calculation of price
and effort. You wish there where some simple shipping service where you only worry about the packaging, and they handle picking up from the manufacturer, storage, and shipping; a service with
straightforward pricing, and customer service oriented at helping someone
with your needs and your scale.
That's where BlackBox comes in. Our mission is to help you sell and ship
stuff directly to your fans for a fraction of the cost and effort of doing
it yourself. Blackbox works like a co-op: if we all go in together, we get
the cheapest pricing, the fastest shipping, and the best service. The
shipping is fast. We pay your sales tax. You can customize the packaging
and the inserts. It’s pretty great.
I don't know if the above story accurately represents what it is that BlackBox provides, but I hope you can see that having a story helps a reader answer the question of "is this helpful or relevant to my situation or goals?".
Personally I think it's fairly obvious from the first sentence what it does. It's blunt and to the point, kinda like how the service seems to operate. I enjoyed how efficiently and clearly the whole thing came across.
According to their FAQ, they sell merchandise on consignment. I think the source of your confusion is that they refer to themselves as a shipping company when that's not what they are.
Forming it into a narrative like that makes me want to run out of the room as fast as possible. Tell me what you do, great. The story you propose doesn't say anything more about what they do than the simpler version. Don't tell me I screwed up calculating shipping costs or what I wish for. That's hostile and putting words in my mouth.
Sounds to me like yet another fulfillment service but maybe they take care of more? Anyone know how it compares to fulfilled by Amazon or what comparable services exist? I'm curious to know if it's cheaper or just easier. (Or both, or neither!)
That's what I got from the info provided.. essentially bulk ship all of the stock you have now and then get back to producing content until you've got another worth-while batch to ship.. interesting. That's a bold move cotton, let's see how it plays out.
That sounds like an... interesting accounting challenge. Are they actually paying sales tax on behalf of the vendor, or are they paying sales tax in their own name and acting as the legal retail seller?
They're handling the CC processing and the whole checkout flow, too. It's not so much a shipping company as a "sell stuff online" company. I don't get why they're presenting themselves that way.
As a person who needs this kind of thing, I immediately understood what they do and the value they provide. I think the messaging is quite well directed at their target while staying within the CAH brand.
Depends on the item. Looks like the press kit's kinda large, because buying a cool little pin from Max Temkin (http://maxistentialism.com) says $10 for shipping.
This needs an NSFW tag, like, when you open this page and your monitor starts psychedelically flashing, everyone turns around and stares at you to shame.
Shipping the promotional material package to Brazil is quite expensive and deliver date format is a bit confusing. Looks great for orders placed within the US, though.
I always wonder about the conversion metrics when I see an artistic website like that. I think the website would perform better without that huge header.
More like 1 big massdrop for specifically seller's shipping & fulfillment costs (vs paying full price for shipping, negotiating fulfillment deals yourself, or paying amazong to do it).
Even if that's the awesomest tech available, the "realtime update" is so fake and so immediately identifiable as such and so immediately confirmable as such (and the most eye-drawing component of their homepage!) that the company loses all credibility. Without knowing anything else about them, it's a pretty bad indicator.
"Quality and simplicity are more important than saving a few pennies on shipping. Our price includes the beautiful Blackbox checkout button, our real-time dashboard, and our dedicated customer support team."
"Artists own the relationship with their customers and can talk to them whenever and however they want. That relationship works best without bloodsucking businessmen in the middle."
I agree its a bit in your face but it does a good job of getting your attention instead of making it look like another garden variety slap-stick startup web template.
"BlackBox: a new shipping company from the creators of Cards Against Humanity"
Isn't that just a bit more descriptive?