Show HN: My first project, Litographs. 8,000 posters sold this year.

I started learning to code last year, and Litographs is the first project I've launched.

I've sold over 8,000 posters at an average of ~$20 each since I opened the store in September 2011 . I left my job in August to focus on Litographs full-time.

I wrote python scripts to create the posters and t-shirts and to automate most tasks around updating and keeping up my Shopify storefront (www.litographs.com). Releasing two designs each week means that automating what I can is key.

Before I started, I'd gotten about halfway through the introductory MIT OCW course. Through working on Litographs, I've used PIL, reportlab, numpy, and Scrapy, and I'm gearing up to release a customization tool using picloud and Flask. It's been a crash course in finding the right tools for the job, and learning just enough to get done what I need.

Some of the interesting challenges have been outside of software: rolling and shipping hundreds of posters a week (this was especially tricky for the 6 months I was living in Chile), sourcing artists and artwork, licensing contemporary books, comparing and choosing between printing processes, building up a large mailing list (1,500+ members) with no marketing budget.

I've mainly been a lurker on HN, but I owe a great deal of gratitude to everyone here for helping me take the leap. I'll be blogging about some of these challenges in more detail over the course of the Kickstarter campaign, and I'm happy to answer any questions here.