MyArtway

MyArtway is a local art discovery app that helps regular people find art they'll love and helps artists get their work seen — without having to become influencers to do it.

The Problem

If a normal person wanted to buy a nice painting for their wall, where would they even look? Galleries are too expensive, Google is unreliable, and art markets have become more of a pastime than a purchasing destination — which forces artists to cater to impulse purchases rather than deeper work.

On the other side, as an artist, doing the art markets is a bit of a mixed bag. Its great meeting people and seeing who's buying what, and the sales aren't bad, but it's not always worth the energy it takes to load everything up and work the event.

Myartway aims to be that middle step connecting regular people to everyday artists. Helping buyers find what they want to buy and makers focus on what they want to make.

How It Works

Users swipe through art posted by artists in their community. The algorithm is skewed to show you local art from artists you haven't seen before at the top of the stack. While getting more engagement does boost a post's rank, it's tuned to prevent mega-viral posts from being pushed out constantly. It prioritizes showing you things that are nearby and new to you.

There's no video — just photos, descriptions, and tags. You can follow an artist to see their posts come up in your following feed.

A Level Playing Field

Lots of artists want more people to see their work but don't want to make silly videos just to get eyes on it. Traditional social media cares more about engagement than connections, forcing artists to perform rather than just display.

MyArtway is designed to get them more visibility with just photos and a small description. This allows buyers to find what they want without it being buried under ads, influencers, and spam.

Users have a limited number of posting slots that are meant to be replaced and updated to keep things fresh. This prevents power users from overposting and crowding out the less prolific users. Helping art get judged on its own merit rather than on the production value.

Meet You Where You're At

MyArtway isn't trying to be another place to sell your work. We meet you where you're at, driving traffic to where you're already selling, so you can keep using whatever setup you like and just get more eyes on it.

We don't handle any financials or payment transactions — we just connect people. So whether you're a seasoned art seller, a small Etsy page, or doing business over text messages and Venmo, we aim to give you a little boost and help you find more of your people.

Lots of artists want to have their work seen more or sell more but aren't ready for the step into a fully fledged business. We provide more equalized opportunities so they can grow at their own pace.

We help artists promote themselves to their local communities so they can spend less time standing at a booth and more time in the studio.

Search & Discovery

The search function lets you look for art in a specific city, at specified price ranges and location distances, as well as tags for different types of art — pottery, paintings, tattoos, and more. Use it to see what the local art scene is like in a city you're visiting, or to find a specific piece you want to purchase.

Portfolio Hosting

Not every artist wants to run a website just to host their work. And the free options are often inadequate with weird URLs and poor traffic. It's a lot of setup for something hardly anyone sees.

On MyArtway, we host your portfolio for free and give you a clean, readable web address that's easy to share and easy to find in search engines — something like MyArtway.com/ShannonsPottery.

Google favors websites with lots of content, and as small artists, it's hard to have that on our own. But by posting our work together, we create authority that will help get eyes on us. It's like having one big party that everyone knows about rather than a bunch of little get-togethers with just our friends.

Private Studio

Something I've always struggled with as an artist is documenting my work. I'd take a photo but it would be hard to find, I'd take notes but they'd be somewhere else. It wasn't working that well for me and I didn't feel motivated to keep records of my day-to-day projects. I really wanted an easy way to capture my art and organize it quickly.

That's why I built the private studio feature — to help people like me take better notes with less effort. You can organize your work as item cards on boards and drag and drop things between them. There's a search function that lets you text search the descriptions of all your items so you can find what you're looking for more easily. Everything is stored locally on your phone, and any item card can be dragged straight to a public posting slot for publishing to other users' feeds and your MyArtway profile page.

Platform

MyArtway is currently in development. Sign up for the early access waitlist at MyArtway.com.