An Interview about MyDrawings.com

Scott and I were contacted by a group of MBA students studying Marketing Management at MGSM. They were asked to prepare a short presentation about a web 2.0 company and chose to present on MyDrawings.com. I thought others would be interested in the response to their questions.

• What instigated the creation of this site and how have you been able to create awareness of it?

  MyDrawings.com was created based on an idea that Scott Johnson came up
  with. Scott works as an artist, podcaster and designer and has a
  quite impressive portfolio including his web comic at MyExtraLife.com.
  Scott and I (Dennis Muhlestein, AllMyBrain.com) work together in
  various different ventures and he approached me with the idea of
  creating a virtual canvas for people to draw on. The idea is based on
  an experience Scott had during his art classes. The teacher provided
  a great big piece of butcher paper for the students to doodle on.
  They would draw their own sketches, then interconnect them with what
  others did. Scott said it would be cool if users could do that online
  and I said I could do it. Scott already owned the domain name
  MyDrawings.com which was a great fit with what we’d come up with.

  Scott originally posted links to MyDrawings.com on his blog at
  MyExtraLife.com. The original version didn’t require registration and
  we quickly had a canvas filled will all kinds of creative things.
  Somebody drew a giant picture of Mario which gained popularity on digg.com.

• Did you have a marketing strategy and target audience in mind when you first launched?

  After the initial viral popularity, we haven’t really tried to market
  our product, but we have tried to make sure our keyword density for
  drawings terms was reasonable so that we can be easily found when
  searching for drawing or “online drawing”. We’ve not really tailored
  to any specific crowd although we have filtered inappropriate drawings
  so that younger or sensitive audiences wouldn’t be offended by
  material on the site.

• Has it created a social platform for doodlers?

  Absolutely. We’ve seen this manifest in a number of ways. One of the
  earliest was a giant picture where the user didn’t have time to color
  in all the squares. He simply made a large X that was the appropriate
  color where he wanted. Other people began to help fill in the squares
  to complete the images.

  We also see themes in a lot of images. One user will create a road,
  and another will extend th road. A third comes along and draws the
  road going off a cliff. The process will continue and the result
  really has been quite entertaining.

  In terms of groups of people, a person can add a watch to an artist
  they like. As that artist continues to draw new images, they get
  emails informing them to come back and check out the new content.
  Users can comment on drawings and send messages. We plan on adding
  forums and additional communication tools as time allows in the
  future.

• Do you have longer term objectives and a plan for the World Canvas?

  We plan on adding the ability to print in the near future. In
  addition to printing individual images, it would be nice to choose
  views from the World Canvas that could be printed as a poster or other
  size media.

• Our group are completing their own doodles as I write and would love to see the world canvas displayed in a Museum of Modern Art.

  This would be fabulous. We haven’t yet figured out how to create
  something of that size but would be glad to work with someone in the
  future to publish some of the art that way.