KnownOrigin: End of year review
As the KnownOrigin team looks forward to 2019 — here’s a look back at both the highlights and learnings from 2018!
What went well in 2018
2018 was KnownOrigin’s first year (well 10 months) of existence. The year started with the inception and launch of KO followed by many long months of hard-work, experimentation, prototypes and learning…and thankfully lots of purchases.
GROWTH & SCALE
We began the year with a launch event & 11 artists showcasing their artwork (both physical & digital) at the POP-up gallery & rare digital arts festival. We used this event to prove the initial concept and test the appetite for a new primarily digital art platform on the Ethereum blockchain.
We had a simple hypothesis:
“Can we use the power of Ethereum blockchain and the integrity of digital assets in the art world to improve the proof of ownership, provenance, authenticity and reducing forgery of artwork?”
The event was a great way to set a deadline and to drive the team to deliver a MVP for the event. In April 2018 KnownOrigin was born and deployed to Ethereum main-net.
2018 Q1 — Q2 Milestones
- First KnownOrigin artworks added and sold on the blockchain.
- Successful launch event. A perfect spring board for further growth.
- Establishing KnownOrigin as one of the leading Ethereum brands with full Web 3.0 architecture
- High-resolutions downloads available to the owner of a digital asset
Analytics & Stats
- 7,597 active users (to-date) dapp.knownOrigin.io
- 37,598 page views (to-date) dapp.knownOrigin.io
- 6,753 unique visitors (to-date) www.knownOrigin.io
We have spent the past 10 months focusing on growing our artists community and educating new art collectors about the power of the blockchain, digital assets, and smart-contracts.
As part of our growth initiatives we have also done several partnerships over the past 10 months. We saw these opportunities as a great way to building the brand awareness and increasing the exposure for all our artists.
Q3 — Q4 Milestones;
- Collaboration with 0xCert at the largest NIFTY conference and hack-a-thon
(5 artists designed 7 unique NFTs for this collaboration and designs were printed on official 0xCert merchandise)
- Cross promotional campaign with EveryDapp.com
- One of the fastest selling rare digital artwork on the blockchain ‘Genesis Block’ by HEX0x6C
- KnownOrigin accepted on ERC721.org
- Winner of the Dapp.com reward for ‘community engagement’
- Collaboration with DEV con4. at the DevCon 4 UX awards
(7 artists designed 12 DevCon themed NFTs for this collaboration. One design was chosen as the UX awards trophy.)
- 0xCert spotlight interview with Co-founder James Morgan
- We became members of the Non Fungible Alliance
- Creative collaboration with Creative_Crypto Magazine
We have expanded out team throughout 2018 with the introduction of Oliver Carding as Media consultant & Franky Aguilar as an adviser.
We finished 2018 with 47 artists,196 digital artworks, 2112 available assets to purchase, over 550 purchases, 1174 twitter followers and 145 members on our Telegram channel.
PRODUCT & SERVICE UPDATES
We improved the product in numerous ways. Here’re some of the important ones:
Lauch, alpha & beta
The KnownOrigin has gone from a proof of concept, to alpha, and now beta at a break neck speed. One of our main product principles is to deliver, learn and improve, we have active user base and this is perfect for gather insights and rapid feedback loops.
Ux and Ui Improvements
One of the early calls we made after the launch was to focus solely on digital artwork and to re-design the gallery experience. We implement a ‘cards Ui model’, this helps improve the mobile experience and add greater consistency to the layout.
Make the artists the focus
We truly feel that the artists are one of the strongest assets around the KnownOrigin platform. We started to look at new and better ways to dial up the artists and making the creators a primary focus of the platform.
More control to the artist
The team built 2 new features to give the artists more control over their profile, the artists now have the ability to update their bio, profile pic and pricing of each piece.
Building the community
The artists community has grown very quickly over the past 10 months and we value their feedback. We have a very active telegram community which has a great mix of artists, collectors and tech members. We often share our prototypes and test new features with our user base before we push these new things live.
Activity streams
We built an internal tool that would allowed the team to see which assets had be sold. The team found this super useful so we decided to implement this feature for all.
Placing a Bid
As we on-boarded more artists the appetite for selling artwork via ‘auction’ grew. We are keen to only invest in new features that add real value. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive so we set to work to deliver the MVP version. We rolled this out to a controlled set of artists to test before applying it to the rest of the site.
Gifting and Giveaways
Feedback from the artist shed light on the subject of NFTs as gifts. Therefore we built the ability to gift their artwork via the artist control panel.
‘Feed’ and improved landing page experience
The new feed layout helps people discover more artwork. We have split the landing page up in to clear sections. This new design now gives a better overview of what is happening across the KO platform, from ‘trending’ to ‘Recently added.
Standards and contracts
From day one the team have been dedicated to ERC721 standards and IPFS implementation. From the very early MVP we have built and designed with the future in mind.
NEW VENTURES & PARTNERSHIPS
We continued to develop KnownOrigin during 2018 and as the platform gained more transition this led to other venture opportunities.
In early 2018 we built Banddad.net (The Blockchain & Digital Associates Directory) This online directory is a place to discover all the artist, designers, and UX practitioners that building awesome stuff on Web 3.0
We partner with Oliver Carding founder for CryptoKaiju.io . This collaboration saw the birth of the one of the worlds first vinyl toy powered by the blockchain.
We were approached by the Ethereum community to help build and deliver a not-of-profit project called RadiCards . The vision is to lets you send e-cards to your friends and family using crypto! All funds raised are donated to activists and charities supporting the fight for freedom around the world.
What’s next for KnownOrigin in 2019
2018 has been a whirlwind of learning and discovery.
We recently had the final planning meeting for 2019, these are the key take aways
- Further improve our listing process — this has been a sticking point on our platform and we will carry on making minor changes to the workflow behind the scenes. Our target is to present a self service style portal for our artists.
- Increasing user engagement on the platform — allowing users to interact with artists feels like a good step forward, hopefully this year we will build the tools to enable this.
- Dive deeper into areas such as onchain identity — we’d like to including support for things like uPort or Civic at some point.
- Improved API access — we’d like to give other sites and tools API access into the NFTs we list — although things are public and we do verify our source code — having programmatic API access is still a requirement to ease and encourage others to build on.
- Increase the number of artists we have on board — internally we’d like to get 100 of the best and more innovative artists in the space onboard KnownOrigin, hopefully we can attract more of the amazing talent we already listed.
- Increased number of partnerships — there are a few others doing similar things to KnownOrigin compared to when we first set out—the space is small and growing so working collaboratively with others to grow feels like the obvious solution to us.
- We are investing new way to Educate new user about web 3.0, rare digital art and blockchain.
- 2019 will bring more partnerships and collaborations, events with organisations and artists.
2018 has been an amazing year for KnownOrigin & we have loved every minute. Through all the highs and lows the team has remained fully committed to making KnownOrigin one of the must respected ethereum arts platforms on web 3.0
Start your digital art collection now, head to KnownOrigin.io
Also remember to say “hello” on our telegram channel or twitter @knownorigin_io account.
Big love… KO Team
