Carter Cleveland's profile on Product Hunt

Carter Cleveland

#65307@carteracArtsy.net

Activity 1 Made 192 Following 1,208 Followers

Upvotes (3)

Joined on September 11th, 2014

46 points

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💬

Hi all, Artsy founder/CEO here. Thanks for all the love. Happy to answer questions if folks have any. Will start out with @eriktorenberg's question below about what were some of the toughest challenges we've faced so far. I'd say there were 2 main challenges: 1. Convincing galleries to change mindset from a scarcity-based culture of opacity and exclusion to an abundance-based culture of openly sharing their art online for more people to see. Even today it's a careful balancing act between showing galleries enough value (leads from collectors and SaaS offerings) that they feel comfortable sharing more online, while not pushing them to share too much (e.g. we don't force them to publish prices) such that they feel uncomfortable. We solved this challenge with an acquisition strategy similar to Facebook's, where we started with the very top, most exclusive, galleries e.g. Gagosian and Pace–and focused on providing them with value before expanding. Our earliest galleries aren't 100% happy about the fact that we're expanding, but at the same time our churn rate is very low because we won't expand until we're confident that we're adding a certain degree of value to our current partners. This is similar to how Facebook started at Harvard before expanding to more schools and eventually everyone–every step of the way there were complaints, but fundamentally the same infrastructure that helps Harvard students connect applies equally well to every single person in the world. Likewise we believe that the same infrastructure that helps the high end of the art world, will also eventually help every single human being become more engaged with art. After years of work, we're now seeing a positive trend of more galleries sharing more inventory and more pricing data as they've gotten to see the benefits of being more open. But going back to the Facebook analogy, we still consider Artsy to be in its Harvard phase i.e. right at the very beginning. 2. The second challenge was that even after we got our initial group of galleries onboard and had their inventory, it was very hard to attract collectors before we had a critical mass. And without collectors, it was hard to get more inventory. A classic chicken and egg problem. Also, because the art market is inherently global (average distance between buyer and seller on Artsy is over 2,700 miles) you can't hack critical mass by focusing on a local market–the standard growth hack playbook for nascent startups these days. So how did we solve it? There's no easy answer here. All credit goes to the most amazing group of people I've ever known. While I'm often inspired by companies that see success in a matter of months, in our case it literally took years of hustling, convincing galleries to believe in the longterm vision before we provided value, and constant product iteration + improvement. I'd also say that this is an example where the Lean Startup mindset doesn't apply as well. Of course we want to be as efficient as possible about forming and testing hypotheses when it comes to product development. But Artsy was fundamentally an idea that was very big, but we also knew would be very hard to pull off. So we raised a lot of money. Maybe there was a way to bootstrap Artsy to success, but if so I wasn't smart enough to see how to do it. But now, as Erik got to see in Vegas a couple of weeks ago, in the last year supply and demand have started to create a feedback loop and have grown 1,000% year over year. So while it took many years and tens of millions of dollars, we're finally starting to see those hockey stick curves that everyone blogs about. That said we're still in the very early days of trying to make art as popular a part of culture as music. If you'd like to help us, we're hiring for pretty much everything under the sun, product, design, engineering, sales, marketing, art genome project–yes, we're hiring art history majors! You can read more about our culture and see a full list of jobs here: https://artsy.net/about/

on Artsy

6yr ago

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@iwearyourshirt @alexisohanian Thanks guys. That was a pretty unique interview for sure. Alexis definitely knows how to ask the right questions to make you open up... and it probably didn't hurt that it was recorded right after burning man :)

on Artsy

6yr ago

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