Launch HN: Art in Res (YC W20) – Buy art directly from artists

# The Artix Phase

We should have expected this. It's very common for a group of founders to go through one lame idea before realizing that a startup has to make something people will pay for. In fact, we ourselves did.

Viaweb wasn't the first startup Robert Morris and I started. In January 1995, we and a couple friends started a company called Artix. The plan was to put art galleries on the Web. In retrospect, I wonder how we could have wasted our time on anything so stupid. Galleries are not especially excited about being on the Web even now, ten years later. They don't want to have their stock visible to any random visitor, like an antique store. [2]

Besides which, art dealers are the most technophobic people on earth. They didn't become art dealers after a difficult choice between that and a career in the hard sciences. Most of them had never seen the Web before we came to tell them why they should be on it. Some didn't even have computers. It doesn't do justice to the situation to describe it as a hard sell; we soon sank to building sites for free, and it was hard to convince galleries even to do that.

Gradually it dawned on us that instead of trying to make Web sites for people who didn't want them, we could make sites for people who did. In fact, software that would let people who wanted sites make their own. So we ditched Artix and started a new company, Viaweb, to make software for building online stores. That one succeeded.

We're in good company here. Microsoft was not the first company Paul Allen and Bill Gates started either. The first was called Traf-o-data. It does not seem to have done as well as Micro-soft.

In Robert's defense, he was skeptical about Artix. I dragged him into it. [3] But there were moments when he was optimistic. And if we, who were 29 and 30 at the time, could get excited about such a thoroughly boneheaded idea, we should not be surprised that hackers aged 21 or 22 are pitching us ideas with little hope of making money.

There are outliers, but it's not unusual to see art being churned out by factories, or shops full of stuff from AliExpress.

For now, we charge a flat price for domestic shipping (with two tiers based on parcel size.) A near/medium-term goal is to integrate with shipping APIs for more nuanced shipping prices.

We love sculpture and we're really excited to have it on the site. Sculpture is tricky, though, because shipping is usually more expensive and it's trickier to pack sculptures in a way that keeps them safe. That said, we're gradually rolling it out. We have a tiny number of sculptures on the site right now and we're going to add more as we get more confident in shipping them.

We're so used to the paying-in-installments piece that we must have gotten blind to the fact that people seeing it for the first time would think it's the total price.

Same thing with the delta – it's always 1 / 24 of the final price (you pay the artwork off over two years), with a minimum monthly price of $30 (for the artist's sake.) Put differently,

  if ( fullPrice / 24 ) > 30
    monthlyPrice = fullPrice / 24
  else
    monthlyPrice = 30
  end

It's hard to replace seeing something in-person but we would love to bring some of that experience to our site. We are currently working on ways to display this better and give more context for the art.

Is a Gazelle-style site for art a thing, that's not eBay? I don't know that you'd want to get rid of art you bought very often, but if you move and it doesn't fit with the new aesthetic, you might want to swap it for something more on point.

1. About art normal people can’t afford

2. A full time speculation job

Unfortunately neither of those worked for me. I don’t know if things have changed in the last years, it seems that there are a couple more platforms around nowadays. I can go into detail about all that stuff but my personal takeaway was to completely ignore investment value in art until the price tags get close to seven figures. And yes, I still am a couple orders of magnitude away from that last price tag. I also don’t care, whatever art I own I am happy with and if I fall out of love with one piece I usually just gift it somewhere. On that last part, there are also usually some good opportunities to give art away for a good cause. Such auctions happen from time to time. I can imagine though that other people have had considerably different experiences with affordable art than mine :-)

Note: art in the above is meant to be paintings and sculptures, never bought anything else.

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This is super helpful, thank you! The last thing we want to do is to deceive people.

There's a lot of information we want to convey in those little artwork thumbnails and we've been struggling with how to cram it all in. We thought that two prices in that small space would be confusing –– but I think you're right that it was a mistake and we need to find a way to work it in.

This seems like kind of a nitpick when lots of expensive things (not just cell phone plans) are priced this way. Apartment leases, car leases, internet/cable service, and insurance all come to mind. Saas subscriptions also commonly frame pricing in per month/per user terms (even for annual plans) and leave it to the buyer to figure out the total cost that entails. As long as it's clear that the price is a monthly installment and not a total, which does seem to be the case for Art in Res, I don't see a problem.

IMO, bad curation is something that is very apparent on sites like Etsy and Redbubble. So I do believe it’s worth it to try to find a good system for it.

That a login page is tacked onto this is a new twist though, I'll hand them that.

The difference is software on Google's store has infinite leverage and takes almost 0 to scale sales. Every piece of art takes lots of work and cannot scale in the same way. Art works do not scale like software.

With this cut, I feel your platform is taking advantage of artists (they do not know where to sell) rather than helping them.

Even auction commission is only between 12 & 25%.

We're considering adding more options like that. The only reason we haven't so far is that we're weighing it against overwhelming people with too many options and also other features we want to implement.

> - why are there so few pictures of the work? If I buy a piece of art I want to look at it from all angles, get up close, see the structure, see it from far, see the frame etc.

I totally agree with you on this. This is actually one of the features we want to add before adding additional installment options.

> - since you got excited from seeing artists' workspace, why not show them to us? Why not show those cool warehouses/storage containers/houses where the art is piled floor to ceiling? > - When I click on an artist's bio, the last thing I want to see is a full-bleed picture of his face. I want to see where he works, how he is inspired or how this piece was formed.

Again, I couldn't agree more. For the time being, we've been getting our photos from the artists themselves and they tend to have better portraits of themselves than shots of them visible in their studios.

- out of curiosity: how did you come up with the 30/70 split between fees/artist's check? How do the artists respond? Have you had anyone say the fees are too high?

Traditional brick-and-mortar galleries take a 50% cut so we're taking significantly less than that. We also 'insure' the art ourselves: if someone stops paying and the artwork can't be reclaimed, we pay the artist their full cut anyway, even if it's a loss to us.

This feels right. The site name seems to promise something it doesn't deliver: the process of production as education / entertainment. This could be a major differentiator vs bricks and mortar galleries. Lots of streams of the work in development.