Projekt30

2003 - 2017 

​

Projekt30 was the first company I founded with James Kafader. We started the company with $300 and a server assembled from parts we fished out of a dumpster. The site went live two weeks before my 23rd birthday, and 11 years later its still online and making money.

 

The business was originally conceived as a one-off project: hold a juried art competition then spam art galleries with the results until artwork sold. As an added value the site would archive the results so the winners would always have a URL to point to if someone wanted to see their work. We quickly hit upon the idea of crowd-sourcing the show results. We called it a "public jury", as the term "crowd sourcing" hadn't been invented yet. This dramatically increased the amount of traffic to the site. Viewers enjoyed having their say in the curation of the shows.

 

While antiquated by todays standards, Projekt30 was fairly advanced when it was created. In 2003 most of the world was still on dial-up which is why there are no images on the home page. There were no cheap, easily available CMS at the time, which is why Projekt30 was written from scratch, in PHP, by hand (that's also why we opted to start over with EraGallery rather than upgrade Projekt30). 

 

In 2005 we decided to expand into web hosting. We created a program to automatically generate websites for fine artists. There were only two templates, both with a few options like the ability to change the menu placement and color pallet. Development took roughly six month to get to market, than an additional 12 months tying up loose ends and adding new features. In 2007 development ceased when James left for San Francisco to pursue other projects.

 

After James left I took over the day to day operation of the business, which included customer service and technical support, web and offline advertising, email marketing, and curating the monthly exhibitions. I began to devote more time into creating and displaying my own artwork, beginning the VS. series. I also expanded Projekt30's range of exhibitions to include shows with creative themes such as: The Sex Issue (1-10),  FEAR (1-9), A Glass Darkly, Melancholy: At the Bottom of Everything (1-4), The End of the World, and many others.

 

I also began thinking about way to improve Projekt30. It was around 2008 I began shaping the ideas that would evolve into EraGallery's Lightbox and Exposure features, a better way to jury a show and provide feedback to artists and a better way to do image search, respectively.