Launch HN: Art in Res (YC W20) – Buy art directly from artists

I really appreciate it! And I appreciate the thoughtfulness of your questions.

One aspect is that we're not business people looking at this problem in a cold, analytic light: we care about the wellbeing of artists and the joy that people get from having art in their homes. I know from my experience as an artist that most artists are suspicious of new businesses – but we've found a way to work with artists where they really trust us. We do more for our artists than just provide a self-service tool for them to list commodities and get some sales – we coach them on selling; we help them build community with other artists; we're building new features to fit their workflows; and we'll even hop on the phone with them and let them vent to us about life as an artist, haha.

Artsy seems like a great platform, but we're mostly targeting a different type of buyer than they seem to be. We're also working with artists directly, rather than through their galleries. So, despite both being online art marketplaces, I think it's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison between us and them.

Regarding the rest of the startup graveyard, when we talk to our users on the buyer side of our marketplace, they haven't heard of things like Saatchi, or even Artsy, in many cases. So I think that, to a significant degree, the mental category of "place to buy art online" is still open, at least for people who aren't already experienced art collectors.

So I think in our case the answer is timing + obsessive attention to our users.

This is something we've been trying to figure out! If you have an account, you can view this: https://artinres.com/recommendations -- you're randomly shown one work at a time and you can like, dislike or skip. We use the data to recommend you additional artworks, and soon we're going to roll out a digest / news feed of new recommendations for users.

> I don't really know what I'm looking for in art. I just know some things I like, but probably not all. I love Monet and other impressionist painters, but I also love old Japanese woodblock prints like the great wave. I'm also a huge fan of cubism and I can't get enough of art nouveau. I'm not a huge fan of abstract art, but I like some. I love evocative photography, especially in black and white. I feel like maybe my taste profile fits a multi-spoke radar chart, where each data point is a relative preference rather than a binary I like this or that type tick box filter.

I'm very much with you on this. In my experience, taste has less to do with discrete, obviously-nameable qualities like a certain color or subject matter, and much more to do with the way the parts fit together to make a cohesive yet surprising whole. That said, we had to start somewhere -- and the filters have been pretty useful to a portion of our users.

Like you mentioned, as more people use the site, we're building up the ability to recommend art to people and we anticipate that being a rewarding way to discover new art.

This feels right. The site name seems to promise something it doesn't deliver: the process of production as education / entertainment. This could be a major differentiator vs bricks and mortar galleries. Lots of streams of the work in development.