Say, What's the Big Idea?

I suppose I could draw out my navel-gazing on the rather banal topic of subscription numbers for another post (or maybe two!), but I think it's time to let everyone in on my secret idea.

And that idea is...[drumroll - the military style one accompanied by a fife in the distance - please]

A simple interactive website populated by content from art history and/or virtual museum exhibits.

You may be underwhelmed by this idea, but there are a lot of reasons why I love it.

Reason 1

It's a labor of love.  From the art history standpoint at least, it's something that I've already created a very basic prototype for and something that I want to construct regardless of the business outcome.  I'd always wanted to learn more about what makes a piece of art great (or important to history), but never really had the motivation until the pandemic hit.  At that point, I signed up for some Khan Academy classes and started delving into their content (predominantly powered by Smarthistory).  I quickly learned that art history was like wine (well, like everything really, but I said wine, so let's go with wine) - it's something that many people are intimidated by, something that you can actually learn a lot about in a shorter amount of time than you expected, something that is primarily driven by taste, and something that takes years to master.

Reason 2

For the concept I have in mind, it scales well technically.  My first diligent attempt will likely involve me posting an image of the Mona Lisa (Yes, I know.  Of course.  It's always the Mona Lisa.) and highlighting a few areas on the image to call out why it was such an important painting at the time.  This means it doesn't involve anything other than HTML, CSS, and some client-side JavaScript.  This also means that the page is static (i.e., there's no backing database that requires a server somewhere to preserve state, which adds complexity), so I can serve up the site for free on GitHub (or some other provider).  This also means that it's easily scalable, because it's very easy for the provider to copy the content without maintaining the intricacies of a database and several services that begin to behave differently when you throw more traffic at them.

Reason 3

It scales well economically.  Because serving the site is effectively free, the cost is dependent on my (and eventually others') labor.  That isn't to say that labor is cheap, but if I'm willing to put the time in regardless, anything I receive in return is essentially profit.  One of you donates one dollar?  Great.  It only took me the time to build out the relevant pages and do the research (which, again, I've already written off as a sunk cost).  1,000 of you donate $5?  Even better.  The effort is still the same, and the cost is negligible (see Reason 2).  It also doesn't degrade your experience.  If a million people are willing to donate $5?  Again, the effort is the same, and the experience for you as a consumer isn't degraded.

Reason 4

It's a viable business model that doesn't rely on an ick factor for revenue.  Is it a billion-dollar, tech bro darling of an idea?  No.  But enough people are curious about art or history now - and are happy to serve as patrons of more than one source - that I don't need to go in search of a market.  Though I will admit that I need to connect with that market, and that does take effort.  But I'm willing to be patient and learn.  It's also a model that doesn't require any duplicitous actions on my part to make money.  I anticipate that I'll start with a donation-based model (and may end with a donation-based model depending on how well things work out), but, even if I move to an eventual subscription model, the overhead costs are so low, and the potential audience is large enough, that $5 per year seems more than reasonable.  

There are several great resources out there already.  In addition to the aforementioned Smarthistory,  The Annotated Mona Lisa has also served as a valuable reference for me.  But my model isn't intended to compete with more comprehensive resources.  Instead, I want to serve as a more concise companion to those sites, and, eventually, I'd like to add content not found on those sites.

Reason 5

I have access to experts in the virtual museum exhibit space.  After I cut myself loose from my corporate job last year, I met with a friend of mine in the neighborhood the first week I was set adrift on the sea of self-employment, and we discussed the possibility of creating software for designing museum exhibits.  In addition, we discussed the possibility of designing a virtual exhibit without the aid of the software (which apparently is pretty common - most virtual exhibits are bespoke JavaScript), but, as often happens, the idea got waylaid by other priorities.  I had a fake travel site to create, after all.

Given that, at least for now, my friend would entertain the same flexibility on revenue, I could leverage her expertise to provide original content.  If the experiment proves successful, then it's all the more encouragement to continue.  If it doesn't work, past the time we're willing to put in, the cost is still negligible, and the site could still generate residuals even if further content creation were effectively abandoned.

Reason 6

Even a more complex model scales well.  If I move to a subscription-based model, I'll need a database to allow subscribers to log in securely.  This will add a bit of overhead, but this is a generally solved problem and doesn't cause the kind of headaches that plague other sites when they scale up.  It's hard to put into words concisely here for those who aren't professional software engineers, but a lot of the code and data design for a site that's written at the beginning of a company's lifecycle doesn't scale well for lots of technical reasons as the user base grows.  

That problem is minimized here, because I'm simply adding a sign-in layer on top of otherwise very performant systems serving up the aforementioned static content.  In addition, if I do choose to add features, it won't be in a mad scramble to meet the scalability limits of the site because the site, as written, can't handle the demand.

And, those, in (not so) short,  are my reasons.  Are there flaws in my logic?  Yeah.  The biggest being that others are motivated to contribute any content whatsoever without any promise of financial gain.  

Assuming that's true, then I'm left to compose content that I can reasonably create, which leads to the next potential flaw - that I'll be able to create content that enough people will want to consume at even a minimum price.  But I'm willing to bet that there are at least a few folks who are interested and would be willing to lay down a latte's worth of money.  And, since my ante is fairly low, I don't need to worry much if my bet doesn't pan out.

I was originally going to close with the statement "this isn't the type of business plan that I'd put forth for funding (loan, grant, or otherwise)," but then, while writing those words, I realized it wasn't true.  I'm not going to ask for funding, but I could certainly do the research to determine a target market if I wanted to go the traditional business route and present my case to the Gods of Finance.  I may do it as a learning exercise and further blog fodder.  If I can teach myself to create a marketing strategy, then it's something I can teach others.

But, for now, I'm happy to let this start as the most basic of lifestyle businesses and see where it goes from there.

Until next time, my human and robot friends.