In between raising a newborn and coping with start-up life, I found myself acquiring a business I found on Product Hunt a month ago.

Slavatar was a side project by a pair of startup guys from Las Vegas. Driven by a need to generate some cashflow for their real-estate tech startup, they hacked their way to a simple landing page and secured the services of a freelance artist. After getting featured on Product Hunt and getting more than 200 orders over a short period, it proved to be more of a distraction.

I was one of those people who saw the Product Hunt listing and thought it was pretty cool. I was falling in love with Slack at around this time and was looking for app that played well with the service. This is by no means a Slack app. By standardizing the look and feel of avatars within a company,  it becomes a cheap and effective vehicle to promote culture.

People don’t typically go to Product Hunt to buy businesses. But Slavatar, in its minimalist glory, mentioned that the business was for sale at the bottom of the page. This business seemed small enough to be an interesting addition to my portfolio so why not reach out to them?

So I did.

After a series of emails and arriving at a reasonable sale price, I ended up taking control of the business. This included the domain name, the codebase and an introduction to the artist.

Up to this day, Slavatar is still untouched. It’s just there now, getting a couple of orders a week. It has a simple get-a-discount-if-you-tweet-about-this-button so I guess that also helped. The site is still thriving because of the Product Hunt effect.

I’ve always liked the idea of “Gravanity”, a term coined by Trendwatching a couple of years ago. There are a couple of startups serving this need right now (and pretty good ones at that) and most of them venture funded. Yet, there’s still room for a business that can compete based on decent art direction and keeping things simple.

Slavatar will make apps that startups use everyday a little bit better. Whether it’s Slack, Basecamp, Asana, Trello, or their own company team pages, Slavatar will make it look good.

The current site is minimal and I intend to keep it that way. It’s only expanding a bit with choices for portrait styles (up to 3) but everything stays the same.