wips.art — Grant Report #1

Project Update

We have the minimum viable product of the webapp. It still needs some polishing but it is at a useable state. We don't think it's quite ready for the public though. There's a lot of bugs that need to be fixed before it's good enough for the world to see.

The most challenging part of the project for us is to come up with features that would be different from other social/art platforms.

features

post

We came up with an interesting post structure where artists can post incremental updates. A post is where they log the progress of their art and they can make as many updates as they want, for now. We need to assess if that's sustainable for the platform.

monetization

Artists could monetize a post. When a post is monetized, viewers will need to have webmonetization enabled to be able to view the whole post. If not, they could only see the initial update.

(revenue share)

We also plan to add a feature where the post author could select a few comment authors to share the revenue of the post. We think this feature could encourage a friendly and helpful comment section.

Progress on objectives

Notion doc with relevant files

We are on track with our objectives. The core features are built, and the next step is to get feedback from a handful of users. We plan to do this in October, periodically try to get feedback as we build and polish features.

Key activities

We have a lot of back and forth feedback on the main features of the platform and how it should feel like. We use figma to create a mockup of our ideas before it gets built.

After building a feature, we test it among us and see if it feels good. etc.

Communications and marketing

We are not actively talking about the project publicly yet. Since we don't have anything to show yet. But for the next half of the grant period, we might be writing about it publicly.

We say 'might' because we think it's better to share it with our artist friends first. We want to make sure that it is good enough for release, and catch bugs we missed during the first 3 months of development.

What’s next?

In the second half of the grant period, we will start to share the project privately with art friends for feedback. We might also commission some of them to create art to exclusively post on the project to see how they like it if they are FORCED use it lol. Everything will be documented.

What community support would benefit your project?

One of the goals of this project is to know whether or not webmonetization could be a good income stream for artists (visual artists in our case). If anyone in the community has written about its profitability, we would like to read it.

If you have art friends who would be interested in this project, let them know!

At the development side, we would like to run our own receipt verifier. If somebody is successful at running this repo we would like some pointers xD

Additional comments

thanks for reading our lil update. like and subscribe xD