summary
Check out The After Image blog.
here I've copied the about page:
This blog is a sort of prototype for a website I want to build. The website, assuming I create it, will allow people to hire an artist by providing a "before" image, as well as some "extra instructions". The user can then choose which artist they want by viewing each applicant's before-and-after image pairs, e.g.:
before
after
The grand vision is to demonstrate that online work is not just something for entrepreneurs to take advantage of, but something that regular people can benefit from as well. Hence, I wanted to pick a domain that regular people might be interested in hiring for. Art came to mind, because I have hired artists myself for some personal projects, including my Facebook avatar (which appears as the first before-and-after post in the blog).
The design is meant to overcome two challenges: it can be hard to come up with something to hire an artist to do; and it's hard to pick an artist. The strategy for overcoming both challenges is the same: makes everyone's input and output public -- at least at first. This will allow people to be inspired by what other people have done. It should also make it easier to pick and artist, since it will be obvious from the before-and-after images what each artist is capable of.
My strategy in the past has been to just build a website, but these attempts usually die due to lack of liquidity. Hence, I decided to test and bootstrap the idea with this blog where I would manually go through the hiring process myself. This was meant to help me gauge interest as well as discover a price point.