Web Entrepreneurs Manage Artist Community Site from Their Home
My husband and I are entrepreneurs, and together, we co-founded EBSQ Self-Representing Artists. Our business is a bit of an anomaly in the social web realm. A lot of businesses are built specifically to attract a community as its business model. Our community, founded by California artist John Seed in 2000, came built-in, so to speak, and we built our business around that pre-existing community and its needs.[…]
At first, we were purely a directory website with an online forum/chatroom for a handful of artists who were selling their work on eBay. Since then we’ve evolved to include a wider array of services including full-portfolios, auction templates and counter tools, multiple platform support, e-cards, online exhibits, monthly how-to demonstrations, an online monthly magazine, a blog, some “outposts” on sites like flickr, squidoo, and facebook, and a community that now numbers in the thousands.