Your 90's my personal startup

For those of you that haven't heard, I started a website, and frankly an entire brand, with the help of a couple other people. We are still fairly early on but we have had a fair amount of success so far, so I figured I would discuss what has worked well for us and maybe what hasn't worked quite as well.

It all started when me and my friend Dillon met and we were both really wanted to design a cool website, we started out thinking local, but then we considered going even bigger. After trying out some ideas, we decide there was a larger market for people who loved growing up in the 90's. So we decided to loosely base a site around that. Honestly we didn't have much of it planned out when designing it, we just kind of leaped right in and got at it. We then built our site based on community feedback and what other people thought were good ideas. This brings me to the greatest point imo, the old saying "the customer is always right" is definitely true. Because you aren't designing something for yourself, you are designing it for your market. Sure you want to enjoy it, but ultimately what the community wants will sell.

Every community member is important, so make sure you try and engage with all of them at some point, whether its through social media or just replying to their emails. Engagement no matter how big you are is key, and it keeps people sticking around and interested. People want to have that personal treatment, that what they say matters.

I think another important aspect to web startups, is don't invest more money than you are earning to an extent.. Obviously its hard to get going without a little advertising funding, but just don't invest the estate into your business before you are making money, it may sound stupid, but some people get ahead of themselves before they have a stable market and source of revenue. Since I am currently unemployed, I invest as little as I can to get by. The less you invest, the less you have to worry about the return on your investment.

For the people you have working with you especially if they are volunteering their time out of interest currently, just make sure you let them know how much you appreciate what they are doing, and give them props for doing a great job. Positive reinforcement is essential in getting the best out of everyone.

I will cover the different aspects of dominating social media and ranking high in search engines in other posts, this is more just about my learning experience of running a website/brand/company.

All in all, having faith in what you are doing is the most important aspect, if you don't believe in yourself and your company its hard for things to work. Just remember "Rome wasn't built in a day", things like this take time, especially for web startups. As I typically say "keep kickin!".

To see the current state of our website visit this link: Your 90s|90s toys,90s cartoons,90s music, and pure 90s nostalgia

Two Tone Black and White Image Tutorial

In this tutorial I will cover how you can create a vivid 2-tone black and white image, the result should look something like this.

First take a picture of yourself or find something from the web, just make sure its not a really low resolution. 

Import your photo into Photoshop and begin by clicking on the small black square icon over the white square to set your colors to default as shown here

Next go to Window -> Swatches and make sure this is checked, if not check it. When your swatches panel is visible hover over it and you should see a paint bucket icon, click on an empty place as seen in the picture below to drop the color white:

Repeat this process for the color black by clicking on the double arrow next to where you originally clicked the boxes to set the default colors, this will switch the places of the colors. 

Once you have both colors in the swatches panel go to edit -> preset manager and for preset type select 'swatches', hold down ctrl and left click on each of the colors then click the "save set..." button as seen in the picture below

Name it something relevant like "blackAndWhite", next go to Image -> Adjustments -> Brightness and Contrast, Turn contrast all the way up to get the biggest different between your colors as possible, and turn brightness up to something like a 100 and hit ok. Your image should look something like this:

Next to go to Image -> Adjustments -> Levels and adjust it as you see fit, just don't go too bright or too dark.

For the final step go to Image -> Mode -> Indexed Color you should see a dialog box pop up like this:

Select the pallete drop down box and go down to custom another dialog box should pop up, click "Load..." and navigate to your swatch, make sure for the "Files of type dropdown that you select "swatches" click load or double click and hit ok on the color table dialog box, make sure Matte and Dither are set to None and hit ok again. Now you should have your result looking something like this

Feel free to ctrl-alt-z if you want to experiment with the settings until you get it just the way you want it.

This is my first tutorial, I hope you enjoyed it, and check back for more soon!