I’ve been a fan of the web design blog thinkvitamin.com for a long time, it has some of the best content and is typically one of the top places on the web to stay up to date with what’s going on in our industry. The man and company behind that is Ryan Carson (@ryancarson) founder of Carsonified. I tracked him down recently on Skype to find out some more about the membership.thinkvitamin.com business he’s been building.

Membership.ThinkVitamin.com

The history behind Carsonified begins with the events/conferences. The Future of Web Design and Future of Web Apps conferences being the flagship events for the company. But the desire to create a recurring revenue model for the company is what drove the creation of the video tutorial business.

Starting with Dropsend a few years back as a product that gave the company a source of recurring revenue, which he successfully sold, Carsonified needed something new. After talking it through with his wife and co-founder Gill, they hit on the idea of video tutorials – honestly who better to attempt something like that than the folks behind FOWA/FOWD and thinkvitamin.com?

They picked up two talented individuals who were currently producing their own video podcast Doctype and paired that up with their industry reputation and connections. The timing was just perfect for a venture like membership.thinkvitamin.com!

Redesign/Rebrand

I talked a little about the initial launch/design of the site for membership.thinkvitamin.com. I asked how they approached the design of what he called a minimally viable product launch and how that effected the eventual, and not too long after launch, redesign of the website. They did that intentionally, to get the product out o the community quickly with the plan all along to revisit the design of the website. Revisiting it with knowledge of how it was being used and referenced – knowledge they didn’t have before giving it a first shot. That’s invaluable advice for all of us designers out there, who want to spend so much time in making something perfect before unveiling it to the world. Launch as quickly as you can and refine, iteration is your friend.

They are even rebranding the service. Which they recently released the news on their Facebook page. It’s going to be called Treehouse (@treehouse). Ryan called it ‘level up’ in the chat session, since we’d recorded this a week or so ago.

So you see, iteration is your friend!

Orlando/Brickify

Recently opening an office in Orlando Florida, Carsonified is now in two countries. Ryan recently spent a week in the Orlando office with the US team and they created a web app they called Brickify.

After a trip to a Lego store, they wanted to make the Carsonified logo out of Legos. The search for a helpful way to do just that lead to a product idea. Brickify will turn your uploaded image into a Lego based graphic and also provide a schematic for how to make one for real. This fun little team building project has lead to a potential contract with the Black Eyed Peas after a pick up article on TechCrunch. Super great example of creativity leading the way.

We here at unmatchedstyle.com are subscribers to to Carsonified’s membership.thinkvitamin.com video training service, it’s a really great resource for our team. We believe in it and encourage you to check it out. We’ve worked it out with Ryan to give away a membership to one lucky winner! Just leave a comment on this post about something you’d really like to learn next and we’ll hook up one of you lucky commenters.