Artists&Clients Deck, May 2013

Transcript

1. Artists&Clients A marketplace for art commissions
2. What are art commissions? • You pay an artist to paint an original artwork based on your request • Popular in animation-related communities of all sorts • Used by role players, game developers, story writers
3. Standard solutions • A combination of track-keeping in Excel, e-mail and blog/journal posts • Hotspots: – DeviantArt – Tumblr – Art-related forums
4. Problems with those solutions • The offers that artists make are free-form, not always clear, and most importantly they are everywhere • There is no way to search and sort them • E-mail doesn't offer a lot of security against fraudulent customers or artists • Equally, there are no deadline guarantees. Some work gets delivered years late.
5. Meet Artists&Clients I • A standardized approach to commissioning: – Customer makes request – Artist accepts/denies request – Customer pays – The payment is withheld by A&C – Artist delivers artwork – Artist receives payment • Conflict resolution and refunding systems
6. Meet Artists&Clients II • Search: – All offers by artists have a normalized structure – Sortable by various criteria – Filterable by keywords and price ranges – Visible, helpful feedback of past customers • Customer can leave a negative or positive feedback upon a completion of a commission • Response and completion times of the artist are publicly visible
7. Business model • A&C takes 10% of the final commission price on completed deals (capped at $10) • From that, the money is used: – To pay the payment processor fees – To pay for the hosting – The rest is margin
8. Numbers so far • From April 2012 to May 2013: – 1010 registered users – 219 completed commissions – 40 paying customers per month on average – $3,675.30 overall gross incoming – Accordingly, roughly $367 gross from fees – Median commission price is $10 (average: $16.27) – Average commission completion time is 1 week
9. Architecture I • The stack: – Nginx, php-fpm, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB • The code: – PHP using the Laravel 3 framework – Design via Twitter Bootstrap – Client-side JS with jQuery • The workflow: – Git-Workflow
10. Architecture II • PHP – Back-end code and serving the front-end • MySQL – Primary data storage • Redis – Sessions storage and short-lived cache • MongoDB – User-generated in-house analytics storage
11. Credits • The site: – https://artistsnclients.com – @artistsnclients • Presentation by: – Eugen Rochko • A&C Team: – Eugen Rochko, Jesse Hamilton, Keely Dorsey, Anthony Bellew