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spring.art
spring.art was a B2C startup working to improve access to art by providing easier pathways for artists to share their work and art buyers to discover art they love. We were working to build an application that would leverage artificial intelligence to connect artists and art buyers and reduce the overhead necessary to get involved in the art world.
My Role
Platforms & Tools
Outcomes
Project Overview
spring.art was a social art marketplace and fandom platform that would have used social networking, gamification, and algorithmic art recommendation to effectively connect the artist and consumer sides of the art market at scale.
Problem
The art world is outdated, opaque, and exclusionary. As a result most people remain disconnected from art and most artists starve. Traditional galleries are elitist and geographically bounded while existing online art marketplaces aren't effective in cultivating new buyers or driving deeper engagement.
Solution
We envisioned spring.art as a social marketplace application that would leverage gamified art discovery experiences and social interactions to drive user engagement. Data from that engagement could then be used to fuel machine learning models for art recommendation and personal customization that could then drive more interaction.
The ultimate goal was to facilitate the development of large scale communities centered on visual artists, which could serve to both incentivize and develop buyers. Monetization would begin with fan interactions, similar to Twitch or Patreon, and extend up to the sale of high-price original artwork. It was our assessment that this model would allow us to capture paying users at a much earlier point in their art experience and then walk them up the pricing ladder to larger transactions over time.
Go To Market Strategy
Our initial go-to-market strategy was intended to engage the vibrant Southern California art community through a blend of digital marketing and local events. We focused on leveraging digital platforms and outreach to create buzz, driving attendance for a series events at art institutions throughout Los Angeles.
By positioning ourselves within these community spaces, we aimed to foster organic growth and connectivity among art enthusiasts, setting the stage for community-driven growth. This also allowed allowed us to establish an early audience that naturally sought interaction within their existing communities and thus could be used as a viral testbed for network effects and social features.
The Platform
We had an early version of our web app running with basic gamification and social features, and were in the process of developing our mobile application. These are some of the core mechanics behind the platform.
Play games to explore and connect
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Get rewards and track your journey
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Be a true believer or find your audience
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Conclusion
I coded an MVP web application which implemented the first versions of our social networking and gamification features, and we were in development for the first version of our mobile application. Using our web app MVP we validated assumptions about user generated content and the benefits of gamification across both general testing and on-site testing at the series of events we ran throughout Los Angeles.
In December of 2023, we made the difficult decision to close the company after we determined that the remaining development to achieve a serviceable product was outside the scope of what could be achieved with our remaining funding.
Work Samples
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The Art Market
Altogether the art market drove roughly $68B in revenue last year. This was spread across the primary market (artist to buyer) and secondary market (reseller to buyer). Though it is a sizable market it is also extremely fragmented with more than 19,000 institutions spread across over 3500 cities. Most art institutions are small scale, traditional, technologically regressive, and struggling to survive.