Bad Art Studio

My next goal is promotion to make my first sale (Stripe is already integrated). I’d also like to freshen up the UI / UX.

I’m hoping this validation (or lack thereof) can help inform my decision to focus on the market side or the community side.

The community side might benefit from a slight re-branding to “bristle.app” to help attract users who don’t necessarily want to classify their art as “bad”.

However, the sales side might benefit from an edgier feel (like Cards Against Humanity) focused primarily on the “bad” art.

I’m leaning toward the rename, and slight rebrand, but with tagging features to differentiate the art. The purpose is community more so than sales, but revenue is important as well.

Either way, it’s been a great journey so far, and I’ve received a lot of thoughtful feedback on Reddit.

Feel free to check it out, and a portion of each sale will go to Artistic charity (if I ever get one!)

this is my first time building a marketplace, and it came with some legal challenges. My biggest fear was unknowingly breaking a law or facing infringement lawsuits.

Well, I didn’t get any formal legal advice, I did interact with several attorneys on Reddit's legal subs and by observing competitors like RedBubble and Society6.

Both of these platforms (and many others) rely on the "Safe Harbor" provision in the DMCA to protect against unlawful copyright infringement. With this provision, service providers are not liable for infringing material if they meet certain criteria (like removing it promptly once notified).

I had to explain these terms in my site user agreement and allow copyright holders to report infringements. But I also need to be careful not to profit directly from the content, which could be tricky for marketplaces.

For now, I'm going with a commission-based model, like Society6. However, I may switch to a fee-based model, like RedBubble, if moderation becomes too difficult.

Apart from that, all of the material in the user agreement, and the privacy policy is relatively standard, and a modified templates I found online.

Of course, I’m not a lawyer, and this isn’t legal advice!

I developed the application in react native, so I’m planning to release in iOS version soon. The back-end is written in Nest.js with authentication provided by Amazon Cognito.

I built the Shop sub-module with custom react native components and the Stripe API. At this point, I only have a handful of users, but I’ve already several submissions.

At this point, I manually convert the uploaded art into a PNG format and pipe that through an automated tool-chain to generate various products (Shirts, Sweaters, Phone Cases, Mugs, Stickers, etc)

The products are generated using the Printful API and the images are created with their mockup generator.

The application is hosted on a Dokku PAAS instance running on a T2 EC2 machine (along with my other apps).

About a year ago, I fell in love with the r/badart sub on Reddit, and I noticed a lot of users asking for products related to the “bad” art:

https://www.reddit.com/r/BadArt

Turns out, this “bad” art is actually pretty awesome… A lot of it is incomplete, meme-focused, random ideas, incomplete art, and a whole variety of artistic expression, which is not particularly celebrated on mainstream art platforms.

So, I decided to build a community and marketplace for people can share their misfit art in a more accepting environment.