Matthew Inman - Marketing and Design

My New Site: TheOatmeal.com

Matthew Inman — 2009-07-06T14:12:49+01:00

All done! Today I launched The Oatmeal, my new website which I mentioned in a previous post..

The site currently has 3 comics and a couple of quizzes. I've got 17 more comics drawn and ready to publish, I'm just launching them in batches rather than all at once. Here's a few comics and quizzes that are currently up:

As mentioned previously, I've also got a book for sale which I've published myself. It contains nearly 20 comics, including reasons on why you should keep dinosaurs away from crack cocaine, and combat techniques for fighting crack whores.

I quit my job and I'm fleeing the country

Matthew Inman — 2009-04-09T14:46:25+01:00

I started working at NextC about a year and a half ago after they bought Mingle² from me. Since then, the site has grown to massive proportions and I'm happy to be leaving knowing it's doing well. I wanted to write this post to provide some clarity on my job situation, because it's a bit confusing.

Why'd I quit?

I can design, develop, and market websites entirely on my own. The return I can get on building my own properties is much greater if I work for myself instead of a larger company. In other words: NextC has been great, but I want to go back to building my own stuff again. If I have the skills take a website from concept to profitability entirely on my own, there's no need for me to work for anyone.

What about RecipeStar?

RecipeStar was a website I'd designed for NextC in the spring of 2008. Due to limited resources, I decided to code it myself rather than having our programming staff handle it. I figured I could code a quick prototype in a few weeks rather than waiting 8-12 months for our programmers to build it. About halfway into development is when I decided I didn't want to be full-time with NextC anymore, so I decided to finish it out, do a few viral linkbait pieces for it, and then make my exit. In the week I spent doing viral marketing for the site, I drove 400,000 page views and 150,000 unique visitors - a great start for a brand new domain. I know there's been some confusion from people who thought RecipeStar was my next big project, so just to be clear - it's not mine anymore. NextC is still going to retain me as a contractor to work on the site as needed, but it's no longer my baby. The same goes for Mingle², although I still have equity in that website.

What am I going to do now?

In the interim, I'm doing some light consulting to keep myself busy, but the long term goal is going to create what I can only describe as an "entertainment website." I no longer want to create linkbait for the sake of building links. I want the linkbait itself to be the product. When I create a comic, quiz, or whatever else, millions of people are drawn to it, and I feel like that itself can be monetized. I am also tired of building businesses that rely on SEO. It's a brittle business model to create an entity that relies entirely on the whims of another company, in this case Google. My plan is to create an entire website chock full of 100% Matthew Inman viral creations, and to monetize it through merchandise. I figured I'd start with a coffee table book full of comics, which will be similar to the format I used in some of my previous successes. The "How to tell if your cat is plotting to kill you" comic got close to six million page views upon launch. If I'd paired that with some kind of book, poster, or other tangible item, I think it would have done really well. The site will be called "The Oatmeal," and the timetable for launch is sometime in late may. This type of business is new for me, but I've got the time and money right now to take risks.

The logo for my new site has meat in it, because I think meat is delicious:

Am I really fleeing the country?

Not exactly. My brother is finishing med school and will officially be Dr. Bryce Inman, MD, so we're gonna go on vacation to Thailand together. I'm leaving on monday, April 13th, and I'll be back just before May.

Now that I've quit, can I be hired?

Regarding full-time employment, see the above paragraph: "why'd I quit?." Regarding consulting, I'm doing a little bit of that right now, but my current contract minimum is $8,000 and I'm picky about what kind of projects I take on. If you have something super interesting feel free to send me an email:

How to Tell if a Movie is Going to Suck

Matthew Inman — 2009-04-03T09:26:00+01:00

Case in point:

War movies are often the exception to this rule (Apocalypse Now or Black Hawk Down, for instance).

Broken Arrow - 9 helicopters (1 exploding)

Shooter - 8 Helicopters

Ultraviolet - 4 helicopters

Die Hard With a Vengeance - 1 Helicopter (exploding)

Batman Forever - 1 Helicopter (explodes twice)

Bad Boys II - 3 Helicopters

Dante's Peak - 3 Helicopters

Fantastic Four - Rise of the Silver Surfer - 2 helicopters (one is about to explode)

Movies that are likely to suck

(based on the amount of helicopters in them)

Wolverine - 3 Helicopters (1 exploding)

Terminator Salvation - 3 Helicopters (1 exploding)

Wedding Favors

If I built this SEO software, would you use it?

Matthew Inman — 2009-03-27T15:48:32+01:00

My SEO needs are surprisingly modest. Although I have a lot of keywords I track, I have a need for a tool that would be particularly useful to beginner or mid-range SEOs. I mocked up this tool idea in an hour or so. If I coded it, would you use it? Would you pay for it?

This is a tool I need, built exactly with the features I want. It's not intended for massive SEO campaigns, and I'm sure there's a huge list of potential features you could come up with. If I were to build it, I'd keep it dead simple and create it just like this mockup. It wouldn't require an account, either, so you'd just visit it, set up your keywords, and be on your merry way.

I'm probably going to build this SEO tool whether the SEO community needs it or not. I'm just debating whether I should make it public or keep it for myself.

The State of the Web - Winter 2009

Matthew Inman — 2009-02-02T15:01:48+01:00

Winter would be a terrible thing if it weren't for snowboarding and coffee. The snow in the pacific northwest hasn't been particularly great this year, so I've opted to drink more coffee. More coffee means more frantic mouse clicking, which in turn means more motivation to work on side projects. After one snowy, two sunny, and five rainy afternoons, I finished the winter version of the State of the Web:

This one took a lot longer than the summer version, mostly because I'm slow at Adobe Illustrator and there doesn't seem to be as much interesting stuff happening on the web right now as there was in June.

If you haven't seen it already, check out the Summer 2008 version of this:

Lastly, I finally took some time and created a page that has everything I've created on it. Most of my comics and microsites have been spread out across various domains, so I got them all together in one central location. You can view it here: Everything.

Vectorizing Barack Obama

Matthew Inman — 2009-01-29T11:42:53+01:00

Yes we can (use the pen tool). I've been busy drawing a follow to the Summer 2008 State of the Web, and for the Winter 2009 version I'm going to have a slide featuring Barack Obama. I just finished turning him into a vector illustration and I'm really pleased with how it turned out. still feel very clunky using Adobe Illustrator, but it's getting much easier.

Click for a larger version

Download (just the vectors)

PNG: barack_obama_vector.png
Adobe Illustrator File: barack.ai
JPEG: barack_obama_vector.jpg

One last thing: like I said I'm drawing the followup to the State of the Web, so I'm looking for any ideas on what to draw. I've already got a pretty good list going, including adultfriendfinder filing for IPO, sad [something] is sad, and a bunch of zunes crashing when the clock rolled over to 2009. If you have any additional items, feel free to let me know. I'm looking for popular memes (such as rickrolling), but stuff that's a bit more recent.

Switching to Adobe Illustrator (and Santa Claus)

Matthew Inman — 2008-12-19T12:43:11+01:00

Fireworks is a web design program created by Macromedia about 11 years ago. I started using it right around that time, so I'm very comfortable with how it works. The pen tool, slicing abilities, and ease-of-use are all great reasons to use Fireworks for web design, and I've used it exclusively for the past 10 years. Unfortunately, as a vector illustration tool I've kind of hit the limit of what Fireworks can do. I have projects that I have to split into multiple files because fireworks can't handle the number of anchor points I have defined. Also, drawing in Fireworks can be incredibly time-consuming because it's not meant as a cartooning or illustration tool, it's more intended for web design. I'd seen a lot of what Illustrator could do, so I decided to take the plunge and buy a copy.

The first thing I drew was a walrus. I needed practice with AI and it seemed like a good subject to start with:

Next up was something a bit more involved. I created another comic called "What Santa REALLY Does While You Sleep." (Kudos to Rebecca Kelley for the idea).

I'm happy with how it turned out, but I didn't really save much time by using it. This isn't any fault of AI, it's going to take time for me to get good with it. I get the impression that I'm just skimming the surface of what AI can do, and it'll take years to really master the software.

Also, the santa comic got a few thousand diggs. Ho ho ho.

My 404 Page

Matthew Inman — 2008-12-04T17:30:59+01:00

404, it's the new 200. I drew a cartoon bat a few months ago that was originally supposed to be part of a wallpaper collection called "bat eats spider." I was going to have a bat biting the head off a spider, as sort of a shot at how well the Dark Knight did against Spiderman in terms of commercial success. Unfortunately the bat kept coming out too cute, and the spider too lame, so I just bagged it and it's been sitting on my hard drive ever since. I figured I'd get with the program and make a custom 404 error page.

My 404 page

Also, I launched a website today called Stop Saying Fail. It's doing really well - nearly 10,000 page views in the first hour. I'm actually not that against using the word "fail," but it's been parroted rather excessively lately, so I figured what the hell. Also, thanks to Rebecca Kelley. I can't remember if it was her idea or mine, but she definitely was a motivator behind making it.

Dear Twitter: Please Make Three Minor Changes

Matthew Inman — 2008-11-19T12:05:34+01:00

Don't get me wrong: I like Twitter. I'm not a slobbering obsessive who wants to marry Twitter and give birth to a bunch of little matt-inman-tweetlet-bird-babies, but generally speaking I like it. I've used a few Twitter clients for both the iPhone and desktop, but most of the time my interaction with the community occurs on the twitter.com website. These are 3 minor fixes that I believe would make the website substantially less painful to use.

1. If I receive a new reply or direct message, show it in the sidebar - don't require me to click through and refresh that entire page. This wastes my time and requires another hefty page load from your server. Also, showing the total number of direct messages in the sidebar is useless, instead show the number of new messages.

2. Highlight replies to me in the list of tweets.

3. Autocomplete twitter usernames when I'm replying. Sometimes when I want to tweet @someone I can't recall their exact twitter username. I either have to google them or scroll through all my followers to figure it out. You should add an auto-completing search box similar to facebook.

Click to zoom

Simple, right? I'm not asking for a massive overhaul of the site, just a few minor tweaks. Rails is agile, and I know you guys at twitter are super clever, so get to it!

I'm not one to ask for free work, however, so in exchange for these fixes I'm offering you something priceless: a new mascot. The little bird isn't cutting it anymore, so I've taken the liberty of drawing you a new character to represent your website. What better animal to embody the spirit of Twitter than a pterodactyl with chainsaws for feet?

Click for high-res