Custorian

I need a web presence, even though I’m staying with parents for a week I don’t want to stop the momentum. Getting anything productive done is pretty difficult anyways so it’s forced me to accept the most limited of constraints. I made the majority of the website in the passenger seat of the car on my mobile phone while on the move.
Hoorah! You can now visit:
http://www.custorian.com

Using square space templates it was really easy to repurpose the copy I’d already created. I used some holding stock photos from unsplash. I don’t have any logo to use across channels and I’ve had to register twitter / insta accounts. I’ll start pulling together a mood board for a logo.

I mentioned before that it was a problem to get anyone excited without something concrete to speak about. I’ve avoided setting a name but it’s getting a bit ridiculous. I’m going to have to refer to it as something other than ‘tours’, even if it means changing it in future. As a result of months of research and interviews, I have plenty of terms and sentiments from which I can start getting creative in searching for names. I used a business model generator to spit out lots of names to get my creative juices going. It actually helped a bit to see them presented as logos. In parallel I used google domains to test their availability. Holey moley domains are expensive. How can you score something as subjective as a name? I settled with the following system marking each name out of three on a scale of Intuitive, visual, sound, emotion and uniqueness. Then I correlated that against it’s availability of domains. I’m blurring it out here because I might still switch depending on A/B testing responses. Settling on a name likely took around two weeks, every day I’d spend the time saying it out loud and introducing myself (to myself) as the “Director of …”

I boiled it down to three and then just settled with what felt most right after spending days saying it out loud. I settled on something close to a ‘custodian’ which typically is someone looking after something of value. It also has most of the word story within it. Gauging the spread of stories is important to me and my perceived success of the platform. I am now creating a company called ‘Custorian’.

Speaking with real people and conducting customer interviews, it's hard to get anyone excited without a concrete something. Trying to explain, "I'm using lean techniques to build a customer orientated business, all from the results of testing hypothesizes" is not very compelling. Instead, I need to point at, just get something, anything up online.

I spent a few days with Grammarly and put into words my initial intentions for the business. It's good to get some solid copy settled, which I can continue to reuse. Good to also get it out of my head and on paper. Speaking the business's aims aloud has helped it change already.

Here is the result:
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Our purpose is to amplify and enrich our worlds through art.

Custorian tours are unique adventures into the worlds of artists and their creations. Custorians encourage in-depth and exciting explorations of artworks, assisted through our tools. Curators and creators are both fairly compensated through our profit-sharing model in exchange for exclusive access and experiences.

Our vision is to be a reimagination engine for people, places, art, and it's evolving audience. Through continually challenging our methods of communicating art, we hope to spread it's contemplative benefits into a universal appreciation while engaging future generations of artists and patrons.

I've long wanted to develop a business within the realms of contemporary art. As vacuous as that may sound, to me, it's made sense. I've mentioned this to experienced investors, and they've thought me mad. Conventional wisdom would warn any ambitious entrepreneur away from the volatile personalities and infrequent customers of art's existing industry. But Entrepreneurship is about creating new, unexpected value. There are many flip sides to this state of affairs. When a customer eventually becomes a 'patron' of art, they are exceedingly passionate. Besides, entrepreneurship needn't be about hockey stick profit alone. There is nothing that motivates me more than really enjoying my challenge. My challenge is to open up the world of contemporary art to a greater audience. 


I've got to have to start somewhere. To develop an initial business model, I spoke to the most likely existing customers: galleries, artists, and collectors. Apart from the exclusivity attitude problem, which is sadly prevalent, most people were very willing to answer questions and sacrifice 40minutes, which is a good sign of how engaged they are already. I've been methodically detailing their pains and gains, and slowly I'm documenting their journeys. Through four months, six collector conversations, eight artist conversations, and many galleries, I've arrived at my first customer personas. I've used what I've learned to develop initial value propositions and a lean business canvas. Leading on from this research, I've developed a whole slew of hypothesizes that I will now test with some super-duper primary offerings.