GlazeLab: The Studio Potter's Digital Lab

The Idea

GlazeLab is a cloud-based glaze recipe manager, test tile photo library, and firing log for studio potters — with a community layer where potters share and sell their recipes directly to each other. It replaces paper lab notebooks, messy spreadsheets, and a 20-year-old desktop app called Insight Glaze Calc that currently dominates the space by default.

The Problem You Solve

Serious potters accumulate hundreds of glaze recipes over years of studio practice. Today they live in:

• Paper notebooks that get wet, lost, or destroyed
• Excel spreadsheets with no photo support
• Insight Glaze Calc: a Windows desktop app from 2003 with no mobile access, no sharing, no cloud sync, and a deeply unfriendly UI

There is no modern, beautiful, shareable digital tool built for how potters actually work. When a potter wants to recreate a glaze they saw on Instagram, or share a recipe with a fellow student, or scale a batch from 100g to 5kg, they do it manually. Every time.

Core Features (MVP)

Recipe Manager

• Create/edit glaze recipes with ingredient percentages, colorant additions, and notes
• Auto-calculate batch weights from a target dry-weight input (the thing every potter does manually today)
• Tag by firing temperature, atmosphere (reduction/oxidation), clay body compatibility

Test Tile Library

• Upload photos of fired test tiles linked directly to the recipe
• Track multiple firings of the same recipe to see variation over time
• Notes per firing: kiln, cone, atmosphere, outcome

Firing Log

• Log each kiln firing: date, kiln, program/cone, pieces loaded, outcome notes
• Link glaze recipes to specific firings
• Simple dashboard: "What did I fire last month? What worked?"

Community + Sharing (Phase 2 / Month 2)

• Public recipe profiles: share your recipes with the community
• Follow other potters, browse public recipe libraries
• Recipe marketplace: sell proprietary recipes as digital downloads ($3–$15 each); platform takes 15%

Import/Export

• Import from Insight Glaze Calc's .glz file format (huge unlock for existing users)
• Export recipes to PDF for printing or sharing offline

Pricing

• Free: 15 recipes, public sharing only, no photo upload — enough to experience value
• Studio Pro — $15/month: Unlimited recipes, private recipes, photo library (500MB), firing log, batch calculator
• Studio Max — $25/month: Everything + multi-device sync, Insight import/export, unlimited photo storage, priority support
• Recipe Marketplace: 15% platform fee on recipe sales (no subscription required to buy)

Annual billing at 20% discount offered from launch.

Tech Stack

• Frontend: Next.js + TypeScript (your existing strength)
• Backend: Supabase (auth, Postgres, storage for photos)
• Payments: Stripe (subscriptions + Stripe Connect for recipe marketplace payouts)
• Hosting: Vercel
• File parsing: Node.js parser for Insight .glz format (XML-based, reverse-engineerable)

How to Build MVP

Week 1–2: Foundation

• Supabase schema: users, recipes, ingredients, firings, test_tiles
• Auth (magic link or Google OAuth)
• Recipe CRUD: create, edit, delete, list
• Batch calculator: input target weight → output ingredient weights

Week 3–4: Polish + Photos

• Photo upload for test tiles (Supabase Storage)
• Tagging system (cone, atmosphere, clay body)
• Basic firing log
• Landing page with waitlist signup

Month 2: Community + Launch

• Public recipe profiles and sharing
• Insight .glz file import
• Stripe billing (Free + Studio Pro tier)
• Launch: r/Pottery, r/Ceramics, Ceramic Arts Network, YouTube pottery community DMs

Month 3: Marketplace

• Recipe sales via Stripe Connect
• Curated "Staff Picks" recipes to seed marketplace quality
• Email digest: "New recipes this week from the community"

How to Get First Customers

Where potters actually live online:

• Reddit: r/Pottery (280k members), r/Ceramics
• Facebook: dozens of glaze chemistry groups with 10k–50k members each
• Instagram: active pottery community, glaze-specific hashtags (#glazechemistry, #ceramics)
• YouTube: pottery channels with 100k–500k subscribers who regularly field "how do you manage your recipes?" comments
• Ceramic Arts Network (ceramicartsnetwork.org): established editorial community for working ceramic artists

Launch strategy:

1. Post genuine "I built this for myself" story on r/Pottery — potters love founder-practitioners
2. DM 5 mid-size pottery YouTubers (50k–300k subs) offering free Pro accounts for honest feedback/mention
3. Offer free migration: "send me your Insight export, I'll get you set up" for first 50 users
4. Write a blog post: "Why I stopped using Insight Glaze Calc" — targets the exact search query frustrated potters already make

Revenue Math

Month 6 (conservative):

• 150 Pro subscribers × $15 = $2,250/month
• 50 Max subscribers × $25 = $1,250/month
• Marketplace GMV: $2,000/month × 15% = $300/month
• Total: ~$3,800/month

Month 12:

• 400 Pro + 150 Max subscribers = $9,750/month
• Marketplace GMV: $8,000/month × 15% = $1,200/month
• Total: ~$11,000/month

Month 18:

• 500 Pro + 200 Max = $12,500/month
• Marketplace GMV: $15,000/month × 15% = $2,250/month
• Total: ~$14,750/month

The global ceramics community is larger than most people assume: millions of active hobbyists and students. Reaching 700 paying subscribers in 18 months in a global niche is conservative.

Why This Is Different

Insight Glaze Calc is the incumbent. It is a 20-year-old Windows desktop application with a UI that looks like Windows 98. It has no mobile app, no cloud sync, no photo support, no community features, and no recipe sharing. It charges a one-time fee of $60 and has not meaningfully updated in years. It wins purely by being the only option.

No modern SaaS competitor exists in this space. There are a few recipe-sharing websites (Digitalfire's database, some forums) but nothing with a full recipe management + photo library + firing log + marketplace in one modern tool.

The moat is data and community: every recipe, photo, and firing log a potter adds to GlazeLab makes it harder to leave. A recipe library built over years has real switching costs.

Path to Quitting Day Job

• Months 1–6: Build and launch, hit $3–4k/month MRR
• Months 6–12: Community flywheel kicks in (more shared recipes = more reason to join), hit $8–10k/month
• Month 12–18: Marketplace GMV growing, explore partnership with ceramic supply companies (sponsored placements, affiliate links on ingredients), hit $12–15k/month
• Year 2+: Studio/school tier ($79/month for 10-seat accounts at ceramic art schools and community clay centers) as an enterprise expansion

At $12k+/month this covers most day job replacements. The ceramics niche is sticky — potters don't churn; they deepen their practice and add recipes indefinitely.

Risks & Mitigations

Risk: Niche is too small Mitigation: The addressable market is larger than it appears — millions of active potters worldwide. Even 0.1% conversion at $20/month = meaningful revenue. If the niche maxes out, expand to other craft chemistry (candle making, soap making, textile dyeing — all have similar recipe management needs).

Risk: Insight releases a modern version Mitigation: A 20-year-old desktop software company is extremely unlikely to modernize quickly. Even if they tried, the community trust and data lock-in GlazeLab builds over 12–18 months would be hard to displace.

Risk: Low willingness to pay Mitigation: Hobbyists pay for niche tools when they're genuinely better than the alternative. Ravelry (knitting patterns), Untappd (beer logging), and Discogs (record collecting) all prove that passionate niche hobbyists pay. $15/month is less than a bag of clay.

Risk: Hard to find potters Mitigation: The communities are well-mapped and active. A genuine founder story ("I'm a potter who built this") resonates deeply in craft communities — they actively prefer buying from practitioners.

Why This Works for You Specifically

You are not an outsider building software for potters — you are a potter who happens to be a software engineer. That is the rarest possible combination in this space, and the ceramics community will trust you immediately because of it. You understand the workflow: the frustration of scaling a recipe by hand, the pain of not knowing which firing produced that beautiful surface, the desire to see what a recipe looks like before you make a 2kg batch. You can write the copy, design the UX, and participate authentically in the communities where your customers live. No competitor can fake that credibility.

First Action

Post in r/Pottery this week: "Do you use Insight Glaze Calc? What frustrates you most about it?" — gather 20–30 real responses to validate the pain, collect email addresses from anyone who says "I'd try something better," and start the landing page before writing a single line of app code.