There are a lot of new businesses that start up that I think are obvious failures, and a few that I think are offensive — but is rare for me to read about a startup that I find both so obviously doomed and so very very distasteful as this one.

Mass-producing paintings that are near-perfect copies of photographs is an intrinsically crass idea and shows you simply haven’t understood the point of painting at all.

And your moral vacuousness is shown by the fact that, even though we all know that Chinese workers are paid very badly and your whole business model involves hiring labor at a fraction of the price that you could get in the US, there’s no point in the article you discuss “fair wages” or making sure that your offshore workers are well-treated. Perhaps you are doing it behind the scenes — but it isn’t important enough for you to mention.

Of course, your company won’t last two years. Honestly, how big is the market for paintings that look exactly like photographs? And even if it were sizable, you’re in an area that’s not defensible — anyone in China can set up a company to compete with you and undercut your price, because they won’t have to be paying venture capitalists, nor six-figure wages to a bunch of San Francisco tech people. You’re also competing with anyone who just runs a Photoshop filter on a printer and prints it onto paper and frames it — which costs less and has basically the same effect for most people who don’t care about art, which is your target audience.

Crass, morally bankrupt, and economically unviable — quite the triumvirate of failure there.