Artists: Let’s Start a Challenge Based Art DAO.

You want to be an artist or a designer.
- Develop Skills
- Complete Personal Projects
- Get Commissions
- Earn a Living
- Grow a Following
- Share your Skills

You know that some of the greatest creative groups have taken place within collective environments of people that share similar levels of competence and investment.

- Warhol’s Factory
- The Beatniks from San Franciscio, CA
- The French Impressionists / Intellectuals
- The No Wave Movement in Brooklyn, NY.
- Famous English Novelists.
- The Ethereum Community and various cryptocurrency project DAOs

But it’s difficult, and you’re busy, you don’t have enough money to get started, and you’re not sure how to make all of the pieces fit together.

.:.

Several Discord Servers have made an attempt to create this sort of creative community, and several projects have a vested interest in cultivating this level of collaboration among artists.

CypherCthonic
Dirty Business — Invite Only NSFW Server
Rebrand
The Patreon Server
http://minnowpond.org [PALNET]
Creative Coin

The projects involved are:
Steemit.com
Memefactory.io
Colony.io
Golem Project
SuperRare.co
KnownOrigin.io
Opensea
MakersPlace

I’m sure there are others that would work within this outline.

.:.

The following is a proposal for a leveling system that is designed to fund the base level of an Art DAO, and cultivate skill development.

I’m sharing this format with you in the hopes that you’ll organize a similar experiment in your own community using this information, or perhaps that you’ll be interested in joining mine.

I have created my own Server on Discord, where I will be elaborating the following challenges in greater detail, and then going through them in a step by step process so that others can follow along.

Sort of like a Trial By Fire Experiment, where you and I both get to be test Rats — working to build the skills needed to be independent creators.

My server is called Hierophant DAO.

Here’s how I structured the first 7 Levels of my Challenge Based Artist Collective:

Challenge №1:
Create a Steemit Account, and make one high value post consecutively for 30 days, sharing your artwork, design process, current educational efforts.

Steemit has loads of communities and while there are mixed reviews as to how people respond to content there, I’ve had a positive response with my art education work, process videos, and more thoughtful blog posts.

Beautiful photos, Paintings, Financial Advice, Lifestyle, Travel and Food — code development projects.

It seems to me that Steemit people are chasing beauty and information, and rewarding those who provide it with upvotes, which translate to income via the Steem Blockchain.

When completed, you will be inducted into Level 2.

Challenge №2:
Create a MemeFactory Account and submit one original, and well designed Meme into MemeFactory each day for 30 Days.

In order to pass this level, you must get at least 15 Memes accepted into the District Registry, place them on the Marketplace, and promote those memes on Steemit and Cent.co.

When completed, you will be inducted into Level 3.

Challenge №3:
Launch a Quickstarter Project. [or other viable short term kickstarter challenge.]

Take 30 Days to plan, launch execute and fulfill your first Kickstarter project. The actual campaign ought to be somewhere between 7 and 21 days.

[By this time, you ought to know whether or not you’d like to share educational / promotional posts about your campaign on Steemit, or if you’d like to integrate NFTs from MemeFactory as backer rewards.]

Your campaign must meet its goal, and fulfill rewards to a minimum of 15 Backers.

If you do not meet your goal, or reach the minimum number of Backers for your campaign, you need to try again.

If you have successfully met your goal, you must create a Newsletter on Mailchimp [or another equal service] where you take the email addresses of those backers who are invested in your project, and share relevant updates for your work in future projects.

When completed, you will be inducted into Level 4.

Challenge №4:

Start a Patreon and get 10 Patrons.

When completed, you will be inducted into Level 5.

Challenge №5:

Create a Youtube Channel and post one quality ~5 to 10 minute video a day for 30 days.

You will want to experiment with different types of videos that pertain to your specific trajectory as an artist.

You will want to share these videos to your audience base, post them on Steemit, and link your Patreon account at the end of each video segment.

When completed, you will be inducted into Level 6.

Challenge №6:

Create a Skillshare Account, and make one Premium Course per week for 1 Month.
Promote your account on your Youtube channel, and upload what courses you can to the Skillshare Free network based on your Youtube work in the previous month.

When completed, you will be inducted into Level 7.

Challenge №7:

Create a Teespring store and design and promote one shirt a day for 30 days.

Promotion ought to be paid, and targeted toward instagram infuencers in a niche that you have decided.

Aim for accounts with 20k to 60k followers. Each of these promotional outreach experiments will cost you between $15 and $25. This will be your first major loss potential investment, and an expensive part of your journey.

Each experiment you do ought to be limited to $25 in budget, and you ought to test and see if your product is successful or not prior to continuing. Then make adjustments, and try again.

These 30 days do not have to be consecutive, but it will likely help if you take a block of time and focus on making this your priority experiment.

Utilize a Facebook Pixel, share the T-shirts with your own audience, as well as the audiences you’ve selected via instagram influencers.

All of that posting you’ve been doing on Steemit ought to be sufficient to cover these advertisement costs.

When completed, you will be inducted into Level 8.

.:.

By this time, you ought to have built a small audience, and perhaps even raised enough income to pay your bills from month to month. You’ve made it farther than most — pat yourself on the back.

Following this, there are other challenges that could be explored:

• Run a Non-Profit Charity Fundraiser event on Indiegogo.
• Crowdsource a DAO Challenge to support your favorite Crypto Project. [That’s a discussion link that I initiated on r/GolemProject that you might find interesting.]
• Collaborate with another competent and mutually invested creator on a project you both want to explore.
• Explore the Amazon Ecosystem [Self-Publishing, Affiliate Link Marketing]
• Creative Applications for the Shopify Platform [Commission Work. Dropshipping with Private Label Branding]
• … and more sophisticated iterations of ideas already explored, now that you have picked up some skills by testing them out.

These exercises are designed to get you to think outside of the sort of commission work where you are simply fulfilling a client’s requests, and competing for the lowest price.

If you do all of this work, you will likely get more commission clients as a byproduct of demonstrating your competence, but you’ll also gain some level of creative independence which will allow you to experiment with more projects that you feel passionate about.

An integral step throughout this process would be contributing financially to an Art DAO via Colony.

A small percentage of earnings per successfully completed project can deposited within a transparent and collectively governed Guild Bank, which can then be treated as a Community Investment Fund.

Think of this money as seed capital for community voted collaborative projects, or a Guild Bank that can be used to provide further education in the form of contest rewards.

Funds could be used as emergency support for members who are in a tight spot, but have demonstrated the capacity to follow through on their commitments, or simply treated as a collectively governed investment fund for promising projects.

In developing a DAO for your community on Colony, you are creating the sort of power and resilience that well established companies [or VC backed Startups] enjoy.

Too often, artists appear to be archipelagos of tiny islands, while design studios dominate the financial landscape. Art Collectives / DAOs are an interconnection solution that help overcome this obstacle.
.:.

Consider your community, and what sorts of things they might need to learn, and what you’re able to provide. Once you’ve got those pinned down, come up with a few challenges that serve them — or just start with the ones listed above.

If you’d like to see an example of this Challenge Structure in action, please join my Server and look around:

Hierophant DAO

Thanks for Reading.