Today I’m going to be talking about Foliotwist.com, my other website for artists. For those of you who aren’t interested, no worries, just skip this post. :)
Earlier this year in April, on the one-year anniversary of Foliotwist.com, my business partner and I sent a survey to over 100 Foliotwist artists and asked for feedback.
It wasn’t a standard survey with little bubbles to fill in—instead, there were 10 questions that each required a full answer.
Naturally, the feedback we got was fascinatingly varied. For example, when we asked what we could do to improve foliotwist, nearly every artist responded with a different idea—if not more than one! That was great, because it gave us a long list of suggestions to chip away at.
But there was one question which got the same response from nearly everybody. When we asked what the most difficult or “frustrating” thing about selling art online was, the majority of responders said:
Getting more visitors—traffic—to their websites.
No other response was anywhere NEAR as close. . . it was like a sign from the heavens, and it was just what we needed.
You see, we’d sent out that survey because we were looking for the next big thing to work on. And there it was, plain as day. What our artists wanted—and what we needed to give them—was MORE TRAFFIC.
Yes, there were also a lot of individual requests for new features, but it was clear those had to take second place. The majority had spoken. The only question we had, was, “How are we going to do it?”
And that’s when it got really interesting. :)
While we were brainstorming ideas, Zac (that’s my business partner) and I came up with a real humdinger. It was the kind of idea that makes you scratch your head and ask, “Waitaminute. . . is that even realistically possible?”
In fact, this idea was so far out in left field that we couldn’t get it out of our heads. And the more it nagged at us, the more we wanted to figure out a way to make it work.
So for the last few months, that’s what we’ve been doing: making it work.
And now it’s ready. Well, almost. Our current Foliotwist artists will have access to the new Foliotwist in September of 2010. We’ll fix any last minute bugs as they test it out, and then have a grand re-launching this Fall, probably in October.
If you’re getting a sinking feeling that I’m not going to tell you exactly what this new idea IS, or how we’re changing Foliotwist, you’re right. :) I’m sorry; I’ve just got to keep some secrets for the re-launch.
But at the very least, I DID want you to know that something big is coming soon, and once we get closer to October I promise I’ll tell you exactly what it is that we’ve built.
So until then, if you have any questions about Foliotwist (that I can answer) please don’t hesitate to contact me. I promise I’ll do my best to get back to you as quickly as possible.
UPDATE: The new Foliotwist is going live. Read all about it right here.