Vancouver Tattoo Booking Website
About tato.ink
You should read this if you want to learn more about my work with the Vancouver startup for tattoo bookings, tato.ink.
What is tato.ink?
First of all, tato.ink is SAAS offering to Tattoo Artists. It solves the problems of having to use multiple applications to schedule tattoo bookings, reduces communication overhead with scheduling and rescheduling, and removes the social barrier from asking for, and collecting a deposit from a client. In the more simple possible terms, it's a calendar with a payment form. The business uses a service-fee model when taking deposits, and is completely free for Artists to use.
Brief tato.ink History
Tato.ink is a startup I founded with some friends in 2022. Unsurprisingly, my duties entailed the construction and support of the underlying product, the website itself. Bootstrapped from three people with laptops in a room, tato has grown to over 100 users (and certainly beyond past the time of writing this.) We've drawn attention from a high-profile competitor from Toronto! Tato was founded as a better way to do business as a tattoo artist, without relying upon and being gouged by mega corporations. Tato reflects my beliefs in business and software; a grassroots project, built with a personal touch and intended to help people instead of replacing them with soulless robots/A.I. hell. The authentic approach has resonated with artists who hold a very personal relationship with their clients and still conduct business with handshakes and cash.
Lessons Learned
Tato is a highly available website with non-trivial traffic and users from a wide variety of backgrounds - mostly non-technical. Having a concise user experience in this case was a journey as we added new features and then got feedback from the userbase. Non-technical users can ask questions that surprise you.
A careful combination of rapid prototyping and test-driven development (yes, I wrote the tests first in a lot of cases) can be a superpower. Having solid tests on critical, foundational business rules allowed iteration and confidence in the implementation I've almost never had previously. This is a complete shift in how I work on projects moving forward. I have also come to love returning boolean values on functions that I would previously have as void typed (ie: update a value in the database.)
At a certain point, you must cache values - not too aggressively. Data mocking is a brilliant tool that everyone should embrace. Tests are even more critical if you're a solo developer and you don't want to be hunting bugs (real or otherwise) all day.
Finally, major features need your full attention, and you need to really consider the long term impact. We started localization for french audiences alongside other features, and it's an evergreen project. As a very small project, this is something we want to offer to Canadian users - but could be something we put on the schedule for later as we served the local Vancouver audience first.
The Homepage Landing
The first thing you see is the landing page of the project. This is a critical element for any website, business, something where you want to tell users who you are, why they should care, and finally what action they should take next. Project evolve, so I've taken a screenshot of the state it was in when I built it. It tells you exactly what the website does, who should be interested, and how it works. Directly below (and not pictured) are the three main benefits followed by a gallery of artists that looks exactly the same as this websites project gallery. I guess I do have a style at this point, even if it is spartan by web 2.5/3.0 standards. There is room for improvement, but it's a pretty solid initial landing page as we discover more about the product and audience.
BIZ.BIZ Page Navigation
Your official Call To Action is to wander. Please refer to the navigation links below to continue your journey.
