Every year I make portraits for my friends and family, and this year I decided to create a Shopify store surrounding this practice, and then share the opportunity to pick up a commission via this shopify store around the internet.
I got a printer and a fresh set of inks, and I secured a line on some solid paper from a local art store as well as a box worth of shipping materials.
I also reached out to instagram influencers within the #relationshipgoals niche looking for cute couple and young families who wanted to get their portrait done.
I also configured Shopify to accept ETH BTC LTC and BCH through Coinbase Commerce.
There are a few things that I ought to have done differently , and I see that now -- however, it was a good experiment for what it was during the moment.
Here are some things I ought to have done differently:
Integrate Steemit and Woocommerce to provide these services directly to people on the Steem platform, using the native currency. That would have been number one.
I ought to have had multiple examples of portraits.
I ought to have had a permanent site, and done a multiple month campaign where I collected target audience data over a longer period of time.
I ought to have targeted a couple of r/drawme reddit communities for the examples.
.:.
Some things that worked out well:
- I ended up picking up a couple commission a few weeks after the experiment concluded.
- My initial portrait of some friend of mine and his family helped pay for some inks.
- I ended up getting a NSFW painting commission from one of my patrons because I had opened up commissions, and that person was interested.
I'd say the long term experiments are probably more valuable than the short term ones -- but I do like the idea of single product focus experiments, and will most definitely try again in the future.