Apps Without Code Blog

Imagine this….It’s Monday. You want some art for your new apartment, but you’re overwhelmed by the options.

So you sign up for Kollecto & answer a few questions about your taste & your budget (imagine you want to spend no more than $500-$1000)

On Tuesday, you get an email from your own personal Art Advisor who is ready to help you find an awesome piece of art for your apartment. 

But your Art Advisor isn’t working alone. She has a team of Art Advisors all over the world. Each Advisor knows about different artists & has relationships with different galleries.

Your Art Advisor sends a ‘shoutout’ to her team & instantly, people all over the world are searching high & low for art for you. It takes a few days, but over the weekend, your Advisor reviews all the art that’s been found especially for you & picks the best submissions to show you.

That’s the new user experience we’re building at Kollecto. We’re ‘crowdsourcing’ art recommendations for our clients. But we stumbled along the way.

We scaled

Last month, we were doing pretty well. We had a tiny project where one Art Advisor managed 10-15 clients at a time.  We moved slowly & ended up with a massive waiting list of hundreds of people who were interested in our service.

 So we scaled. We brought on 5 more Art Advisors  & took on lots more clients.

We failed

About 2 weeks in, it was clear that we had problems: 

1. As is true with any online product/service, NOT EVERYONE who signs up, converts to a customer.  As a founder, that seemed fine. But as an Art Advisor, it felt like something was wrong when you were introduced to 10 clients & only 6 or 7 responded.  I hadn’t set expectations & it was decreasing morale.
2. All the Art Advisors were communicating with clients via FrontApp (a collaborative email tool). But it was incredibly difficult to monitor so many conversations happening at once. Each Art Advisor has a radically different communication style & not all styles were aligned with the Kollecto brand/ vision. It was clear that this wasn’t going to scale with dozens of Advisors.
3. Finally, it was too much work & too little pay.  Most Art Advisors in the industry make 10% on sales. So they require a $10,000 minimum budget, making the pay is worth the effort. That’s WHY we built Kollecto. We wanted to help people buy art under $3000 when no one else would. The theory was that we could help 10 people buy inexpensive pieces in the time it took to help 1 person buy an expensive investment piece.  But developing strong relationships with clients, finding art, curating the pieces, emailing galleries, negotiating prices… it wasn’t worth the $50 or $100 commission. We were asking too much.

So we built something cooler

We changed the Art Advisor role to ONLY include finding art & writing a few sentences about each piece.

Each week, our Art Advisory team will get access to anonymous client profiles. Their job is to find & submit art suggestions for each client. 

Our Chief Art Advisor will select the best 5-6 pieces to present to each client. 

When clients buy, the Art Advisor that found the piece, wins the 10% commission. We’re keeping the team small so that everyone can make money.

What we’re doing, for lack of better words, is crowdsourcing art recommendations for our clients. 

We’ve done small ‘art crowdsourcing’ experiments & it works very well. We’re always surprised that NO ONE submits the same piece of art. 

We’re pairing clients with one central Art Advisor who functions like an Account Manager.

This person will be a more trained/ full-time member of the Kollecto team. Our best sales come from people who develop a relationship with their Advisor & can ask questions about art/ chat back & forth.

The new structure is better for our Art Advisors (less work & same pay). And it’s better for our customers (better service & dozens of people working for them).

If you know someone who’d like to join our Art Advisory, have them request an application at join.artkollecto.com.

 

I’ve worked in marketing departments at several great tech companies, so I’ve seen this first-hand… 

People in tech are always talking about scaling & growth. It’s kind of like we’re all scurrying around thinking “ready, aim, scale!!!”

A focus on scaling isn’t a bad thing. But patience isn’t bad either! (See Alex Turnbull’s post on how he became a better founder by practicing patience.)

At Kollecto, we’ve been helping some awesome people buy their first pieces of art.

However, we have lots of people on the waiting list and it’s tempting us to go full-throttle into ‘scaling mode’.

We’re resisting the urge.

Why? 

Because in order to scale, you have to spend time ‘getting ready’ & ‘aiming’ first! 

That’s what we’re doing this week (and next).

Here’s how we’re getting ready:

 

1) We started tracking our clients using StrideApp’s super simple CRM tool. 

2) We started using FrontApp so Advisors now have a simple shared inbox for coordination & collaboration. 

3) We opened applications for Art Advisors & are developing awesome onboarding & training classes for them via Udemy

All of this is helping us get ready before we scale. If you’re on the waiting list, hold tight- we’re almost ready for you!

I’ve been working on Kollecto for 11 weeks. 

During these 11 weeks, I probably edited 1-2 lines of HTML, but in general, I built Kollecto without an ounce of code.

Instead, I’ve built my business using:

• 30% Strikingly– my favorite website builder. I use it for artkollecto.com & galleries.artkollecto.com

•  30% Typeform– a free online survey & form builder (that looks pretty damn good). I use it to 1) build taste profiles for each of my clients, 2) to onboard artists & galleries & 3) to show art to clients in an innovative way

#1

#2

#3

• 30% Email– My Advisors communicate with clients & galleries via email. I created a myadvisor@artkollecto.com email address, which gets cc’d on all advisor-client interactions. This allows me to gather qualitative feedback from clients, cull best-practices from Advisors, & schedule war-rooms with Advisors when something in the customer experience is not right.

• 4% Plasso + Stripe– I use Plasso to create customized monthly payment plan pages for each of my clients.

• 3% Paypal– to send money to artists & galleries.

• 3% VLine– A video chat solution where neither party has to download a plug-in. I started Kollecto assuming most people would want to chat with their Advisor, but I was wrong about that. Most people want to communicate via email so I’m phasing out my use of VLine.

When I started Kollecto, I envisioned a tech-heavy platform for matching first-time collectors with an art advisor. I’m so glad I didn’t start writing code for that… (turns out that first-time collectors don’t really care who their art advisor is as long as he/she can find them cool stuff).

Spending 0% time on coding and 100% of time learning what my customers want has been really rewarding & successful.

What I’ve built thus far is pretty cool…A network of people motivated to buy their first or second piece of art.

Each has told me about the kind of art they like. And with this information, I think I can create a pretty powerful advertising mechanism for artists (think AdWords for Art)

So this week, I launched Kollecto for Galleries

I got the word out by emailing a handful of affordable galleries & posting galleries.artkollecto.com on Product Hunt

I immediately realized I had mispositioned the service.  Shout out to the artists who figured out they could use the service as well.

There will be lots more leanings as I iteratively experiment with this side of my business.

But learning #1 is that Kollecto for Galleries should actually be Kollecto for Artists or Kollecto for Art Sellers. Which is fine with me. The friction in the art world is that so many artists are bad at marketing, but only a handful of them can get representation from a gallery who’ll do the marketing for them. Thus, the market of independent artists who’ll pay for a cool marketing solution is much bigger than the market of galleries who’ll do so. I love it when I’m wrong because I stumble into cool learnings like this.

But how much will people pay?

I’m currently offering Kollecto to art-sellers for free, but here’s what people said when I asked them how much they would pay given what they knew about Kollecto from reading the website:

• The average answer was $30 per month
• Answers ranged from $0 to $100 per month

• The average answer from Artists was $15 per month
• The average answer from galleries was $61 per month
• Only one person expressed concern about paying monthly for access to the client list vs. commission-based model that’s typical in the industry

So here’s what I know so far.

1. This is a potential way to monetize Kollecto (currently the Advisory fees are going straight to Kollecto advisors so I need to monetize elsewhere)
2. I need a tiered pricing model for art-sellers with an option for student/emerging artists & another for professional artists/galleries

Thing’s I’m excited to start exploring

1. Does ‘sponsored art’ help or burden my Advisors?
2. What percent of art submitted by art-sellers do we have to reject b/c Advisors think its not a good fit for the client?
3. Can drive sales for artists & keep them engaged on a monthly basis?
4. Should the tiered pricing model pivot on # of pieces art-sellers can submit?
5. Can we do all this and maintain our 70% success rate of getting clients to buy art?

I’ll keep you posted.