Tattoolizator, the pre-story.

Okay, as I promised in my first post I will explain now how I came up with an idea of tattoolizator. :-)

My wife have a tattoo for many years and I wanted to make a tattoo too, but never had a moment go to the tattoo salon. A couple of months ago I saw Miami Ink show and a friend of mine told me that this is an actual tattoo salon in Miami. I decided to go there one day and finally to make a tattoo.

Well, later I forgot about it until I was eating sushi a couple of months ago in some place on South Beach very close to Miami Ink (I didn't even know that, I just saw Miami Ink salon there when I was waiting for the valet to bring my car). So I went in with my friend and one of the sales manager asked me "what are you looking for?" and I said "a tattoo", then he replied back to me - "oh, no shit!". Well.. You know I got used to a better service, like uhm.. shopping in Bal Harbour Shops, where everybody is really willing to help you.

I understand it was stupid to say "I want a tattoo" in a tattoo salon, but I really didn't know what tattoo I really want, so I expected to be in the best tattoo place in the US and I thought they will consult me, will give an advise, show some examples, etc. So I've tried to talk to this guy, but it looks like they think they're celebrities because they're on the tv, etc., so he was not friendly with me at all and just I left.

I wrote about it in my russian blog and asked people to give me an idea for my tattoo, so I got many interesting concepts, but
sometimes it's even more difficult for me to choose when I have too many options, so I decided to let my readers to choose a
tattoo for me, but to get more professional art done I promised to give $1,000 prize for the author of the tattoo that will get more votes.

I got a lot of tattoos, but nothing nice and I raised the bid to $16,000 for the author of the best tattoo that will get the majority of the votes. I got more tattoos and more professional concepts. 

While doing this I was thinking how to avoid a possibility of flashmob. One of the arts were submitted by Art Lebedev, famous russian design, author of the first OLED keybaord, he have over 100,000 very loyal readers daily in his blog and if he would ask his readers to support his design any design he will offer would win. So I came up with an idea to vote by SMS and PayPal donations.

Later I decided that I can rise more funds than $16,000 like this, but to get significantly more I decided to lift the rule about the ban on commercial and humiliating tattoos. And this is how the idea of making a tattoo became an idea to open tattoolizator.com website. I have now three developers working on this site, still have a couple of issues, but it's working and little by little gets more popular. In the first 3 days we got about $400 and about 160,000 visitors.

Well, maybe the story is stupid and idea is not the most brilliant, but I already promised all that to my readers and even if I get only $1,000, I will still have to give $16,000 for the winner and $16,000 for the charity and get maybe the dumbest tattoo on my hand, but I feel like it may work out and the site will be famous.

So now I challenge myself and hope that I will manage to make it famous, so if dumb tattoo wins at least I will have a financial explanation to it...