(this post is cross-posted from the Yallery Blog)
Late last week, I sent our active membership an email notifying them that Michael and I were unable to continue working on Yallery.com full time and there would be a major change to the service.
Yallery is almost two years old and has been my and Michael’s full-time focus since it began. We had planned on attracting more developers and some funding to pursue the execution of our plans, but at this point it is still just Michael and I.
I can’t blame the investors I met with, who’s reactions to our plan were universally “it looks really cool, but I’m not sure there’s a large enough market to make an investment”. We don’t know the size of our market well enough to answer that question. We have a good idea, but there are a number of variables that make any attempts to guess meaningless while our service is hidden away from the world.
The Web 2.0 ethic has encouraged developers to “Release early and release often” — to get your product out the door and into the world as quickly as possible. Yallery was my first web-based service since the early 1990s, and it’s probably unfortunate that I was somewhat stuck on the Web 1.0 “Push it when it’s polished” approach.
We had hoped to have a certain amount of features and functionality implemented, tested and “polished” before we threw open our doors to the public. But, two years on and meagerly self-funded, we’re looking at diminishing returns if we continue to hide a ton of work behind a sign-in screen.
Therefore, we’re removing the “Invite Wall” and will soon allow any visitor — artist, collector or gallery — to create a free, unlimited account on Yallery. With the removal of the Invite Wall, we will also be creating a new home page that will welcome all visitors to view and interact with the the art created, owned and sold by our members.
As bummed out as we should be right now, it’s a very encouraging and exciting time for us — we are about to introduce our two year old baby to the world. Quite a few of my friends have thought we were crazy for hiding such a great site and not opening it up earlier.
There will be problems — the fact that it doesn’t work right on IE is probably the largest right now (but it does work on FireFox and Safari). We also have a bunch of bugs identified and there are a lot of partially implemented features that we will resolve as time allows us — but we are not giving up.
Things may take a little longer to accomplish, but we still have a long, feature-filled roadmap for the site. We’re going to be working part-time until we can maybe return full-time some time in the future. In the meantime, we hope to find some people who like Yallery and feel at home enough to share their art with us.
