General thoughts and ideas about marketing, goals and open questions.

wallspace-thoughts.md

Wallspace Gist

This document contains ideas, goals, flows, modeling, marketing thoughts, etc.

• Marketing
• How It Works
• Goals
• Questions

Marketing

How do we describe the value add? How can we succinctly pitch this to venue owners, artists and buyers?

Venue Benefits

1. You get a new, low-impact revenue stream.
2. You get free art for your venue; delivered to you and mounted by the artist themselves. You get to select the specific pieces you want and they are rotated out on a timeframe that you decide.

Artist Benefits

1. You get a new distribution channel for you art in which the sole intent is to sell it.
2. You get increased exposure for your art/brand. It is live and in front of many more eyeballs than traditional means (art shows and galleries).

Buyer Benefits

1. Provides a natural, low impact way to discover new artists.
2. Streamlined purchasing process of art. Submit a bid; show a receipt and walk away with your new piece.

How It Works

1. An artist lists one of their pieces on an available wall space.
2. A buyer likes the art and decides to purchase it. They click a tinyurl next to the piece and make their purchase through our portal.
3. A cut goes to the venue; A cut goes to us; The rest goes to the artist.
4. The buyer is immediately shown a receipt w/ a photo of the piece and a passphrase unique to the venue.
5. The buyer takes that to the venue register, shows it to an employee and walks out with the piece.
   • The buyer can follow the artist and purchase more pieces through our service.
   • A notification is sent to the venue owner to inform them that they now have a free space and we recommend other available pieces that would be successful on their wall.
   • A notification is sent to the artist about their sale and prompts them to sell another one of their pieces on another wall.

Goals

Q1 - Proof of Concept

1. Venue registration should work.
2. Artist registration should work.
3. Buyer purchase flow should work.
   • Need a merchant account + payment portal.
4. Artist can request a space.
5. Venue can request a piece.
6. Marketing materials should be ready to go for us to go to market and start registering artists + venues.

Q2 - Rollout

1. Identify a market (SF, Marin, Oakland?).
2. We should be able to test this in a controlled production environment by listing a piece of art, seeing it on a wall, purchasing it and making sure that all money goes to the appropriate parties.
3. Register 100 venues.
   • Chicken and egg problem. How do we incentivize one venues to host pieces if there aren't any artists + pieces in the system?
     • Free service fee for the first 10 transactions.
     • A pct of transactions for recommending new artists/venues.
4. Register 50 artists.
5. Facilitate 10 sales?
6. Tune product as dictated by usage.
7. Analyze issues with the product, market and logistics.
8. Firefight.

Q3 - New Markets/New Mediums

1. Identify and rollout the same principles in another market (Portland, Asheville, Los Angeles).
2. Identify another medium (pottery, furniture, etc.) and roll out that medium in an established market in which we already have deep relationships.
3. Use analytics to answer questions like:
   • Why/where/under what circumstances do certain pieces sell?
   • What is the average time on shelf for certain zip codes?
   • Which price points sell the fastest?
   • Which artists sell the fastest?
   • Which venues sell at the highest price point? Why?
   • Are there any bottlenecks in the product we can tweak?
   • Use all of the above in marketing/PR materials.^^^

Questions

1. What is a reasonable split w/ the artists, venues and us?
2. How do we feel about the purchase flow? Could it be easier? Is it secure enough?
3. How do we handle theft?
4. How do we handle logistics such as:

• Artist doesn't want to physically go hang their piece?
• Artist doesn't want to pick up their piece after their alotted timeframe?
• Artist doesn't want to patch walls?
• Artist needs a piece for an upcoming show and wants to break their "lease" early?
• Buyer cancels payment after they've already walked away with a piece?

5. How much insurance would we need to carry?
6. What other mediums could this apply to? (ie: where else can we connect creators with physical locations with high foot traffic?)

• Pottery/sculpture
• Furniture
• Jewelry?
• Luggage/bags?
• Clothing?

7. What is success?