intothefuzz

In the latest installment of my sporadic Q&A series with online community builders, I chatted with Infectious founder and CEO Tim Roberts. Before starting Infectious, one of the best and most interesting design community sites around, Tim worked at companies like Odeo (where he was part of the team that created Twitter), Yahoo and Bigstep.com.

As someone who knows the ins and outs of building an online community of artists, Tim’s advice was particularly relevant to what we’re trying to do with the Mozilla Creative Collective and our conversation, held over IM a few weeks ago, is transcribed below (with my questions in bold). Read on and enjoy, and thanks very much to Tim for sharing his time and expertise.

How did you get started with Infectious? What was your inspiration for doing it?

The truth is, I had a friend who decided to have a muralist paint his car. This was back in around 2001 and we all thought his was kinda nuts. Then we’d ride around San Francisco in this ridiculous Honda Civic with a pastoral Spanish landscape all over the car and it was a fascinating experience…everywhere you went you ended up in conversations with people about it and the reactions people had were just amazing.

So, it got me thinking about art and surfaces and expression and the social interactions created by mixing these together. Those were the earliest seeds of Infectious.

It was a few more years before you actually started the company, though. Were you just waiting for the right time to get it going, or was there another moment where you realized it could be a good business?

I started playing around with the idea and researching materials during nights and weekends, figuring out if there was something there, and during that time i was also cueing in on how these same variables (art, surfaces and expression) were manifesting on the web (Threadless being one of my heroes).

It was the intersection of these two things that made Infectious start to feel more real…like there was something there. So it was really just an idea I was obsessed with for many years, and annoyed most of my friends with by talking about it obsessively and brainstorming out loud to whoever would listen. Then I finally hit the moment where I realized I had to either take the leap or shut up. At that point I realized I had to go forward, since the ‘what if’ question would have driven me nuts.

At what point did you start getting artists involved? And how did you do that? You’ve built up a great community at Infectious.

We started with the car art or car decals. We always had the vision of a larger product line, but the idea of car art was where the concept started and it was very novel. No one had done anything quite like it, so we started to create a site for community created car art and then we realized ‘oh wait… no one knows how to design car art’. We weren’t even sure what the specs were: how big could you make these things? What resolution was required? How complicated could the cut lines be? And so on…

We quickly realized before we could get open community involved in anything we needed a core catalog so people could see products and get the basic idea, and ideally that catalog would come from inspirational artists. We set out to recruit the artists we loved, and took a very personal approach to it.

That was just months of discussion, research, courting and explaining the idea to various artists. It probably took us 9 months to get the first 15 artists…was really hard, but the more artists joined us, the easier it got.

Was there a tipping point where you realized your artist community was big enough that people were coming to you, rather than you going to them?

Mmm…I think it has been an evolution. In the beginning we dreamed about the days when that would happen. We definitely have many artists coming to us on a daily basis now, but we still do lots of proactive outreach and I imagine we always will. Building community is very much of a dialog.

Do you have a philosophy for attracting artists? What’s your sales pitch?

There are some core principles we have…

We existing to replace blank spaces with art and creativity. We think about ourselves as a platform for artists…we try to make them the celebrities of Infectious. We only sell pieces on the site that an artist loves. (This may seem obvious…but it’s surprising how many times companies will mess with an artist’s work.)

If an artist doesn’t like something we work hard to make sure they are happy. We don’t own artists’ work… we just license it. And finally we don’t mess with their $$. There are so many stories of artists getting screwed over on royalties or late payments so we try to be really on top of taking care of that stuff.

Are the artists generally pretty receptive, or do you have to do a lot of selling? When you first contact them, that is.

It varies. I guess like any relationship, sometimes we fall in love instantly and sometimes relationships are developed from months of courtship.

You’ve been in the online world for awhile now – have you noticed any differences between building a community focused on artists vs any other type of online community? Are there different rules to follow, or issues to overcome?

Hmmm. I guess I can only speak to this anecdotally, but i feel like building community with artists is harder. Getting people engaged can be tougher, but once engaged, it is a deeper and more sincere level of engagement. You’re asking people to participate in very thoughtful and creative ways, which is precisely why it is harder. I think it also means you need to treat that participation with more respect and appreciation.

Do you have any can’t-miss tips for someone starting an online design community? Words of wisdom?

Persistence and sincerity.

Care to elaborate?

Building a design community requires commitment. It’s something that needs daily attention and involvement. It is essentially building relationships in a world where there are lots of other things competing for the time and attention of creative people out there. You need to commit to that relationship a long time before the community commits to you.

By sincerity, I just believe that people are good at smelling BS. They want to be part of communities with people from companies, not companies. Infectious is built with a voice and communication philosophy that tries to be truly our voice, not something contrived or invented. It might turn some people off, but it’s pretty real.

Great advice, thanks. In terms of building a community, it seems like it requires some combination of having the right product (an interesting concept), the right technology (website and tools to make it happen) and the right promotion (spreading the word, getting people involved)…are those equally balanced, or does one stand out to you as being the most important?

I think there are even more you can throw in there, like the right incentives and the right mix of people in the community, but out of everything I would say that the most important thing is something really creatively engaging. Something that makes a light go off in a designer’s head somewhere, that makes them stay up all night because they are excited about the idea.

If you can make that light go off in someone’s head they’ll work through bad website design and proceed to tell the world for you. Not that i advocate bad website design or ignoring promotion, because they are critical, but they gotta be built on a foundation of inspired creativity.

And how do you guys deal with things like inappropriate submissions, trademark violations and other pitfalls of the trade?

We review all submissions and use our judgment as best possible. Most of the cases when this stuff pops up, it tends to be pretty flagrant, like porn or a real obvious copyright ripoff. Those are easy. We’ve been lucky to not have had too many hard times with it yet

So, in closing…what’s next for Infectious? Where do you guys go from here?

We see the world as blank spaces that are opportunities for creativity. For us to effectively cover more of the world with art, there are a few things we need to do…get more artists, designers, illustrators and photographers joining us and contributing their creativity. We need to extend that artwork onto more and more products/surfaces, either on our own or though partnerships with companies that make products in need of art. And finally, building awareness for Infectious with consumers. We, of course, want to get as much Infectious art out there as possible.

Great stuff – thanks very much for your time!