Cloud Folios started as a way for Jose Gomez to catalog his own work and evolved into a platform for artists to manage and sell their artwork. The platform allows artists to create editions of their work, track additions, and generate certificates of authenticity. Artists can also submit their work to art shows and exhibitions through Cloud Folios. The conversation also covers topics such as signing prints, creating COAs, and the marketplace feature of Cloud Folios. Cloud Folios is an online platform that helps artists sell their artwork and curate exhibitions. The platform allows artists to create folios to showcase their work and provides tools for managing sales, shipping, and communication with buyers. Cloud Folios also offers a website feature that allows artists to generate a fully functional website to sell their art. The platform aims to minimize middlemen and fees, giving artists more control and maximizing their profits. Cloud Folios also provides a curation feature that allows artists and curators to organize and manage art shows, including the submission process and the generation of exhibition collateral.
- https://www.cloudfolios.com
- https://jgomezfineartgallery.com/
- Music by Old Romans: https://www.instagram.com/old_romans
You can listen to the episode here (or wherever you listen to podcasts) or read the transcript below:
Nick (00:02.452)
Well, today I'm welcoming back to the podcast Jose Gomez, incredible photographer, and he may not know it, but an inspiration for my photography journey. Thank you. And Jose is also the developer behind a platform that I've used for a lot of local art shows called Cloud Folios. I definitely don't use it to its fullest extent. And Jose also recently added a whole bunch of new tools to it to
Jose Gomez (00:11.658)
Thank you.
Nick (00:29.998)
help artists build online stores to sell their work. So Jose, thanks for taking some time to talk to me. And let's start with the beginning of Cloud Folios. How did it begin?
Jose Gomez (00:41.388)
Yeah, so Cloud Folios first started off as a way to catalog your work. So it started really from my own need to catalog my work. I was creating a lot of produced works and I was forgetting the titles I was submitting to shows and forgetting what pricing and what additions I was creating. And so I was doing in the beginning, you know, with a spreadsheet or just writing it down in a log somewhere. So I decided, you know, to create a piece of software that allowed me to do this more easily. And when I created it, we.
designed it so it could be multi -tenant so that I could expand whatever I was doing for myself to other artists that I knew that might want to use it. And as we did that, know, Cloudfolio has kind of evolved from that. And, you know, before we knew it, had hundreds and now thousands of artists using it for their work.
Nick (01:28.794)
So definitely in regards to the tracking additions aspect of it, when I first started doing prints on disks, I was just using a spreadsheet, which kind of becomes a little annoying when you don't make like, say this is limited to 50, but you don't make 50 at the time. So then you have to try and remember like which one sold, which one didn't. So what were the solutions you put in place for that type of situation with prints?
Jose Gomez (01:54.454)
Yeah, so in Cloud Folios, everything starts with the folio at the top level. And some people use that in different ways, but the folio is designed to be a series, it's for a series or it's for a concept or a collection. And you can put your works in that collection. So when you upload the picture of your work, that's just a representative or representation of the work. It doesn't mean that you necessarily printed it, doesn't mean that there's a finished
piece out there, but it just means this is for photographers. This is the initial edited work. Maybe for a painter or sculptor might be this is the visual of my work in some way, right? Either a conceptual image or it's an actual picture. And then there's what's known as a produced work. So InkLobFolio is a distinction between the work and the produced work. And the produced work is always kind of a combination of two things, the work and the addition. And so I might create a work.
produced work the produce work is an assigned a a serial number that we assigned to it and you can actually generate certificate of authenticities based on that number different things that you can do with that but most importantly you can track it so this is my number one of fifty my number five of fifty my number seven fifty and it's sold you can actually mark that in this one that the status of this is that it's sold
And then if you want to really get fancy with CloudFolios, there's a way that your buyer can actually create a CloudFolios account and you can actually transfer that work officially to their account so that it's still your work as the artist, but it's in their portfolio as a purchased work from you. And that is a nice way to track provenance. It's a great way to track the kind of breadcrumb trail for the ownership of the work.
Nick (03:44.558)
So when you have a piece up in a folio, as you mentioned, you can have multiple editions tracking the different things. And each edition, I guess, kind of refers to how it's printed in the case of like digital art or photograph.
Jose Gomez (04:00.44)
Yeah, so additions can additions that is kind of a loose definition and addition is really any combination of things that comes together to create an iteration of a work so it could be that I'm using it's a five by 10 printed on metallic. And it's printed with this particular printer type of ink and there's only 50 of them made right and then the moment I take that same work and I decide why I'm going to create a 12 by 18.
but this is going to be on luster paper and it's going to be framed in a certain way. So it really is kind of a loose loosely defined term, but it's, it refers to a way of presenting the work that is limited to this specific aesthetic.
Nick (04:40.922)
Okay. then, thinking about the other side of cloud folio is where you can do like a call for art and submit pieces from your folio to an art show or an exhibition. When we're setting prices on the addition on the personal cloud folio side, is that automatically piped into your submission or can you change it there? Because what I'm thinking is if your addition is just tracking the size and the printing material,
you're probably going to charge extra based on what the cut of the gallery is or based on what framing costs go into it.
Jose Gomez (05:17.25)
Yeah, so generally speaking, all of it ports over to the other. So when you submit something to a show through Cloud Folios, it's going to ask you to upload the work, obviously the visual. But then it's going to have you either, if you've already uploaded this work before and you're just selecting from your folios, it'll actually show you all the additions you've already put in there and it'll ask you which one of these are you submitting. Now here's the fun part is that it'll pre -populate the
Dimensions and everything in your submission form along with the price, you can change it So you can say for this show I want this to be you know instead of five hundred It's 550 because of the Commission or six hundred or seven hundred Whatever I want to charge for that but you can do that at the time of submission and then for that show it'll be listed as that amount
Nick (06:05.19)
And I see we also have an option here for produced works. So that lets you track not just the nebulous idea of the edition, but also how many of those have been physically printed.
Jose Gomez (06:16.596)
exactly that's that's actually what the produce work is it's something that I've actually produce it's physical I have a print or I have a frame or I have a canvas or I have a - some sort of a physical iteration of the work.
Nick (06:31.266)
Okay, and so say you've got a photo that you really love and you're putting it up in your folio. When do you decide how many additions you're going to make and what those numbers are or do you kind of decide that over time?
Jose Gomez (06:45.784)
You know, for most artists, they do decide it over time. Now, when you're selling artists and you're really out there selling this stuff, you know, let's say you're a Peter Lick or you're somebody who's really producing work specifically for iteration, for iterative purposes, like additions, you typically will have that predefined. So the example of Peter Lick I give is he does additions of 99 and he sells them from 99 to one. Okay. He has a very set fixed way of doing this.
And so now he may have other additions that we don't know about or might have other additions that he uses for gallery purposes or any other type of purposes that he might have. But for the most, for the most part, he has his, his, his definition of what an addition is. So for many artists though, we might start that way. We might say, well, you know, all the works that I do, I do an addition. do one original, I do two artists proofs and I do five, a limited edition of five. Maybe that's me as an artist, how I do it. But along the way, I might change that.
Maybe I might decide to do a brand new edition at a different size, different medium, or maybe I want to do like what I do, I'll do gallery editions. So I'll do my artist proofs and my limiteds, but I'll also do a gallery edition that's just limited to one. That's just the one that I show until it's sold. And then if I get orders for the other pieces, the other editions, then I'll process those. But that one gallery one is the one that travels, or two, or three, or five, whatever I choose.
But I can choose that along the way. What you don't want to do generally is you don't want to change that addition after you've created it. Now, does CloudFolios let you do that? It does let you the flexibility because you may not have sold any yet and you may just want to make that decision to say, you know what, I'm going to expand this to 10 instead of five or 50 instead of 25. But you want to, as an artist, always enforce that. Once you've sold one out of that addition, you generally don't want to change that number.
Nick (08:36.058)
So I'm glad you said that because I'm looking at stuff I have submitted to Cloud Folios and I see I've got an open edition of a 14 by 14 inch print priced at $160, unlimited quantity. So that's definitely a mistake looking at that, charging $160 for a 14 by 14 open edition print. My guess is I typed in that number when I was submitting it for something and I was including the framing and the cut.
So I see it's currently locked. I guess I'd have to create a new edition maybe, and then I can delete the old one. But I do feel like I need to go back and organize some of this stuff.
Jose Gomez (09:14.456)
Well, should be able to go in and you should be able to edit it. you click on the name of the edition and you're in there, you should be able to gain access to the settings and be able to save that edition, the changes to that edition. But yeah, generally speaking, so you do have a few tiers of editions. I think we talked about that in our last TV Silver meeting where you have your originals, then you have your artist proofs, next valuable, then you have your limiteds, and then you have your open editions, which is, I'm gonna print as many of these as I want.
But opens could be something that's just, you the $20 print that somebody can buy on the street. But it can also mean, hey, listen, my open editions are framed. don't sell anything that's not framed. And yeah, they're $160. I'm just going to sell as many of these as I want, though. There's no numbering to this.
Nick (10:00.815)
So what about you? When you have a photo that's not something you made for a client, just a photo that's part of your own portfolio, how do you go about deciding what kind of additions, without any knowledge, say at the start, without any knowledge of how desirable that thing is, where do you begin on putting together these additions?
Jose Gomez (10:20.984)
Yeah, that's a great question. for me, my original is my raw file. I'm a digital photographer. So my raw file is an original. And I don't price my original because I don't sell my raws. What I'll typically do is I'll do two artist proofs. I'll do an limited edition of five. And typically, are normalized to 12 by 18, but they're like 16 and 1 by something. I think it's like by 11.
but I'll do five of those on luster paper. And that's my, those are my typical edition. So my artist proof and my limited edition of five. However, I'll always do a gallery edition of one and that's to figure out. Is this an image that people want? Is this some, piece that people want to buy? And if there's enough demand for that piece, if that piece sells, then I'll create a new edition. I may create a new edition to be able to show on the road, just a different.
different medium, different size, but now I'll know that there's something to this piece, so I may want to create a new gallery edition.
Nick (11:27.358)
And you get to track all those individual sales through CloudFolios. So if someone doesn't have a CloudFolios account and buys it, you can mark that individual one as sold. Can you put like internal notes on who sold it when or anything like that?
Jose Gomez (11:30.743)
Yeah, I do.
Jose Gomez (11:40.728)
Yeah, there actually is an area there where we're to produce work for notes. So you can do notes. You can also do last known location. So sometimes we use this to track what gallery is my piece in. For some artists, they're showing at any number of shows at a time. There was a time in my career where I was submitting to many shows. So I might be in five shows at once. And I don't remember where that work was, but I may have given them 12 pieces.
A great example of this was there's a company called Galleries to Go for a while and Galleries to Go, I'd give them 10, 15 pieces. She just asked me, Sarah would say, can you give me 10 pieces? I want to show them around. So I just give it to her, but I'd forget which ones I gave her because I wouldn't get it back for like six months. They kind of go on a little bit of a tour of her spaces. So we have the last known location in there and of course serial number. We track signed or unsigned, you know, what
what the going price for that particular piece is, that the iteration is, and yeah, and what the status currently is.
Nick (12:46.118)
So let's talk then about, I mean, this isn't the main reason we had this conversation, but something that came up in the TV SOPA meeting when we discussed this for the Not Your Father's Art Show, but I thought would be useful for anyone listening to the podcast is, say it's a limited edition print, do you write that information on the print, on the mat, on the frame? Do you sign everything? Do you leave things unsigned? What kind of writing goes onto the product?
I
Jose Gomez (13:16.322)
So the print itself, it's always important to know. this is different for, well, if we're talking about iterations, we're always gonna be mostly talking about prints, right? There is the possibility of, let's say, sculpture, that somebody could do a cast of a sculpture and then sell that as an addition, right? And it'd not be the original. But generally speaking, with art, you want to sign and...
put any authentication, any providence information directly somewhere on the art itself, on on the work itself, whether it's, you know, it's sculpture, it's at the base. If it's a picture or a canvas, it usually is on the back or a front area where it's, you know, it's not going to interrupt the aesthetic of the piece. So for photographers specifically, you may want to do that on the front margin, right? You'll print the picture.
smaller than your mat and you'll typically sign it right in the front and in the white space or you can do it on the back and not show it at all in the front. That's another thing you can do. The only difference is it's usually not as impressive looking at it because you don't know if it's original or not but if there's a signature on the front you do. The back signatures though are acceptable for the sake of the work moving forward and typically any of your numbering information any of your addition information
you would also somewhere include on the work. Could you do it on the front? It's a lot of information to have to include sometimes like serial numbers and that. So typically you'll want to hand number them on the back or you can machine number them of course, but it's usually nicer to hand number them, hand sign them and then indicate this is two of 10. For numbering, you could do that on the front. A lot of artists will do that. like if it's an artist proof, they'll do like AP one of five, AP one of two, two of two.
or they'll have an addition name, something you know, gold, you know, seven of 25, whatever, whatever you want to call your addition. But typically you'll want it there. Now in terms of mats, the only time that I recommend putting any of that type of information on a mat, is if you are stating that the mat is part of the work. This goes for works that that are, that,
Jose Gomez (15:38.092)
that the work, the matting and the framing is typically part of the entire presentation. So maybe you might have this amazing Gothic piece that you put in this beautiful Gothic frame and the mat is specifically cut and patterned for the piece. And it's just the whole thing that you're saying, this is all my work. I made this frame. I made this mat. You know, this is all hand done by me. Then I would see putting authentication information somewhere on.
the mat and even on the frame if you made the frame. But unless you did that I would I would really make sure that all your stuff is on the print.
Nick (16:15.204)
For the buyers, you think there is increased perceived value when they see a signature on a print? OK. So it's not good.
Jose Gomez (16:23.448)
100 % Yeah, 100 % and the more that more that it looks like a real signature the better. So I know there's some some people who like they'll print their signatures in the front. It's it's it's kind of the one it's one of the worst thing you could do because if you're printing on the front it looks like it printed on the front then what you're basically doing is it's screaming this is an open edition. This is not any limited thing because this isn't even the real signature.
Nick (16:51.13)
Okay, so say for a new photographer exhibiting at a show who has made limited edition prints, writing the stuff on the back is fine, but the potential customer won't see that. it does them, it does no good in causing more of a sale. I know I'm not saying that right, but I think you know what I'm trying to say.
Jose Gomez (17:10.892)
Yeah, no, I would you're saying and I think there is there is there are ways to go around this like if you have a COA and it's on the back right you've got it attached to the back of the piece. Richard sell does this with his scratch boards he does beautiful certificates of authenticity on the back so when you pull the frame out you can just turn around see it you know.
Nick (17:30.927)
Yeah, but in a gallery or in a museum setting, no one's gonna pull it off the wall to see if there's anything on the back.
Jose Gomez (17:36.547)
Potentially potentially sometimes if it's put on cam on on what am I trying to say the the standing? The stands no the actual stands the easels right these I don't know why that word was escaping me But if you put it on an easel you can look at the back pretty easily But if you're up on a wall, you're right. You won't be able to see it So it's not quite as you won't be able to easily nice nice No pun intended
Nick (17:46.04)
art card or some easel okay yeah
Nick (17:57.839)
Easily. That's funny. Yeah. So would you put the addition information on the art card that goes next to it on a wall?
Jose Gomez (18:09.388)
Yeah, that might be a good solution there to put that in there. And this is now, this is where, you know, the role of the gallerist comes in, right? The gallerist is there to explain these things in the absence of the information being there. So one of the, you know, one great thing about like our art shows at like House of Shadows and TV SOPA by consequence of using Cloud Folios is that we have a style of art card that you can print that includes the work description.
or whatever the statement is from the artist about that work. In absence of that, it's the work of the gallerist to explain it. So in absence of addition information, this is where gallerists should be there to say, this is a one of five, this is a limited edition, by the way, this is the artist's personal work, it's one of their proofs, or this is an original, it's a one of a kind.
Nick (18:58.276)
So when you print a photo do you print all the way to the edge of the page or do you leave a white borders they have space to write.
Jose Gomez (19:07.801)
I typically leave a border and when I map the piece I typically leave a border around typically about a half inch or so and then on the very bottom of the print well I kind of do something a little different so I'll do the bottom if it's a heart if it's a vertical print I'll do more space at the bottom maybe like one inch and then I'll sign it there if it's a horizontal print I'll actually do the spacing on the side so my signature is sideways yeah so I still have that one inch on the shortest side
Nick (19:33.53)
Interesting.
Nick (19:37.54)
So one thing that I feel looks kind of bad is when you sign the bottom right of the print and then you matte it and your matte is covering most of your signature, but you just see it kind of like a couple loops peeking out from behind. I think that looks pretty rough. But OK, OK, just making sure I'm also seeing that right. So I'm thinking about my no. Go ahead.
Jose Gomez (19:49.078)
Yeah. That's awful. Yeah, that's all. You know, I was gonna say, you know, that's actually one of the things that like drives gallerists crazy is like, you know, this is your art man. Like this is your stuff, right? And you want to make it just look polished. Somebody who's going to a gallery and looking at your work or they're in your gallery or studio looking at your work, they should see something that was thought out.
And when you see something like that, a signature being half covered and you just look and just go, artist, were you just throwing this together? The answer usually is yes. Yeah, I didn't have time to mad at right. And after, you know, so you just scream and like, I don't really care how my work's being presented, which makes people care about it less too.
Nick (20:25.677)
Hehehehe
Nick (20:35.13)
All right, so I'm thinking about some of my own prints. should put them on Cloud Folios, create additions just to start off maybe like 10 of the 9 by 12 prints that I've been doing. And then I should also create COA graphics or cards to put in the sleeve that I'm selling them with. Put that serial number that is generated by Cloud Folios as well as signature and number, and then write that information on the back.
If I'm selling it as a print with a backing board in the sleeve, they'll easily be able to see that COA on the back with the information. And that definitely adds that perceived value. The issue I'm struggling with is when it's on a wall. I don't know how to present that without making it kind of gaudy and having that signature right up in front.
Jose Gomez (21:02.103)
Yeah.
Jose Gomez (21:10.125)
Yeah.
It does.
Jose Gomez (21:20.214)
Yeah, and there's some times where you just can't get around that. Again, it's where the gallerist really plays their role. What Richard does, a lot of artists actually do this, is they'll actually standardize the size of their COAs and then they get plastic sleeves for it. that the plastics, they'll buy ones that have like a loop at the top, they put all their paperwork inside and then they just attach it to the back of the print or of the frame. So now you've got this, know, protected certificate of authenticity.
one thing that cloud folios does actually two things. Number one, when it prints the COA, it includes that serial number. So you, you, when you hand write it on your piece, it's going to correspond to the certificate itself. The other thing too, is when you create an edition inside of your folio. So let's, let's just picture this for a moment. Your folio is like a folder, right? So, you create a folio it's called, you know, I don't know my time in Paris and you have 10 pieces in there and you create an edition. You go to one of the pieces, you create an edition.
you're able to push that addition to all the rest in the folio. So you can say, I'm creating a limited edition, this price, this size, this many. And you say, well, I mean, it just stands to reason. If you're doing that for one image in the folio, you're probably going to do that for the rest of them. So you can literally push the addition. It'll create that addition for all the pieces in the folio in a second. And then you can go in and tailor them per piece if you need to. So that's a nice shortcut. What I'll typically do is create all my additions in one piece in the folio.
Nick (22:21.465)
Mm.
Jose Gomez (22:46.806)
in the collection, and then I'll push every addition to the rest of the pieces in the collection.
Nick (22:52.044)
Okay, yeah, I'm definitely going to do that with my latest tarot deck, so I'll turn each card into a graphic on there and turn those all into an edition so that I can print those COAs, slip them into the back.
Jose Gomez (23:00.472)
That's great. And that's a great use of that push because what you could do is you just set all the additions for the one card you push and it just saved you having to do that for 78 cards, you know.
Nick (23:12.612)
So if I print out COAs at home, is it fine if I just print one -sided card stock and then sign that stuff with the information? Because you mentioned protecting it, like should I be laminating these or something?
Jose Gomez (23:23.212)
I mean, you know, you what I would do is when you're going to attach it to the work, I would attach it, you know, you could do it where you get a plastic sleeve, you know, to put the COA in and then attach the sleeve to the to the frame. That's what many artists do. Could you do it where you just attach COA in there or even put the COA inside of the backing board? That's something somebody, some artists do too. Like you can't see the COA. It's inside the piece itself. I don't, I'm not sure if I really appreciate that because it's hidden.
but you know, does it, does it provide an Easter egg in there? Absolutely. And does it, does it, know, protect the certificate? It does. but generally speaking, the importance or the important thing in your COA is less the paper, the stock, the print, or anything. It's your signature. So just make sure the right information is there and that it's signed your physical signature. That's what makes it a COA, not necessarily what kind of stock use. Is it nicer to use the advanced your stock yet?
Nick (24:20.09)
Do you... So I know this is like, we're really getting in the weeds here, but if a COA is providing perceived value, then you wanna make sure you do everything you can that makes it not a money sink. Is it better to hand write the addition numbers and the serial number on a COA? Or is it fine, is it just as good to print it and then just write it? I mean, just sign it and leave it as a signature.
Jose Gomez (24:47.608)
It's fine to print. The COAs that CloudFolios makes has the serial number that printed on there. So your signature is what validates that. says, yes, I agree. This is the right number for this produce work. And then whatever system you use to attach that to the work, you're maybe handwriting that serial number. Or if you have a printing mechanism to print it, you could do that too. I just find that it's...
It just adds that extra zing if you hand number them, hand serial them, it just makes it so that these things all look like they coordinate. And you're right, making the certificate of authenticity look fancy is definitely a great perceived value boost. using better paper, even embossing your seal on there, all these things are things that can add to the perceived value, but more importantly, which is what COAs are for, later when you're dead.
somebody has to validate that this was the print. This was not only your work, but it was your printed work. It was the one that you sold and it was the seven of 50. When they have to do that, the more that you give them, the better. So the bossing and signing and corresponding to some sort of a serialized number, a serial number, all that stuff adds to the proof.
Nick (26:07.448)
Okay. So, I mean, I'm also thinking of like, the way that I probably would be going about doing this is I would, hopefully I can export all those serial numbers as a spreadsheet. Then I could throw that into InDesign, generate all those as graphics, and then print them all in bulk with my own kind of like customization and stuff. But then it comes to the fact of like, well, now I got a whole stack of these things that I'm only going to pull them out when I actually print one, which then kind of becomes annoying. So it might be better to just print them as I make the prints. But I don't know.
Jose Gomez (26:35.308)
Yeah, we find is that, you know, and we talked about this about printing beforehand, printing afterwards. So there are artists who print all their, you know, their entire edition. They'll print that edition. They'll store it. Those artists are ones that tend to sell a lot. So they know, Hey, we're going to sell out of these in the next month, the next six months. So they'll print everything at one time and then go to town selling those, those numbered edition, those numbered works. for most artists though, we don't.
Nick (26:49.626)
Mm
Jose Gomez (27:02.316)
We don't sell out of our editions. Matter of fact, some artists never sell their editions in their lifetime. you'll be printing them and you'll be numbering them as you go along. And that's acceptable too. So for that case, I agree with you. It'd be hard to of pre -print all that stuff and then store it somewhere. For everything that you do, it's crazy.
Nick (27:22.988)
And so generally speaking, would you say open editions or unlimited editions are smaller?
Jose Gomez (27:29.592)
no, no, wouldn't say that at all. think, an open edition, the intention of an open edition is that they're more of the, they're more of either the giveaway or they're, they're kind of the consolation prize for not buying the original, you know, or are limited. So it's like, still want it. I still want on my wall, but I just don't have the money to for, okay, here's, here's a, I don't know, a 20 by 30 that is on poster paper. You know, it's, it's.
It's where you don't put quite all the finesse that you do to your more valuable additions. But it's kind of the, but here's the piece if you just want to put this in a frame and put it up on your bedroom wall or something.
Nick (28:14.06)
Okay, cool. Because again, I'm thinking about that tarot deck. I also make small like four by six prints. Those would probably make sense as open edition because like, yeah, because people aren't expecting to spend much on a print that size anyways. So.
Jose Gomez (28:24.096)
Yeah, you could do that. Those are good.
Well, a great example is so we all know Boris Fajero, right? And Boris has all these works that he produced through decades of time. But you can go to like a hot topic and get a poster of one of his works. Well, those are open editions. But if you were to get his original, mean, you're talking maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars to get an original.
Nick (28:51.642)
Okay. All right. So now that we've learned all about prints and additions, I know there's also notifications I regularly get from Cloud Folio saying that my submitted piece has been accepted to the marketplace. I think it is. Can you explain what that is?
Jose Gomez (29:07.288)
Yeah, so the marketplace is evolving very quickly. we originally called it the gallery. It was just a place to see the works, right? We just wanted, we didn't want, one of the things that I didn't want right from the beginning of Claude Folios was I didn't want the burden of Claude Folios to be selling art. And the reason is because most artists don't sell art. Most artists will never sell their art. And there's a lot of reasons for that. It isn't because people aren't good artists.
But there's a lot of reasons that involve everything from marketing to branding to just, you know, are we doing this as a hobby or a business? And unless you approach it as a business, you're not going to sell your work. You might randomly, but you're not going to sell your work. So what we wanted to do was really create more of a system that's emphasis was cataloging work to create legacy. So the gallery was kind of the way of showing like, Hey, these are all the works we have in here, like discover an artist, like in that, wouldn't that be fun? And people do. I mean, we actually get somewhere close to about a million and a half.
views a month in our gallery alone. it does work, later we did think about the fact that, you know, since we're showing the work, why not offer the ability to purchase the work from the artists? And we started to kind of go down that road. And so now we have some components there of purchasing art through the marketplace, but we're not pushing it quite yet. Right now we're still perfecting the process.
of buying art online. know, one of the things, the major things that happens with art online is that there, there's a lot of fraud. And this comes from this. This is a fraud from the standpoint of the buyer and fraud from the standpoint of the seller. have a lot of issues where people are selling other people's art, or they're using, you know, AI generation of art. And that's derived from someone else's works. A lot of not only ethical issues and legal issues, but just logistically.
It's become a little bit challenging. From the buyer's perspective, we're getting a lot of people who are using the buying of art as a way to kind of funnel money and get money. So they might buy your work for 3 ,000, but then they'll send you 4 ,000, ask you to send them back the thousand extra, but they actually wrote you a bad check. So you just send them a thousand of your money and now you're out, not only the 4 ,000, but now you got some federal agent calling you about, you know,
Jose Gomez (31:28.374)
bad checks internationally. So what we're doing right now is we're kind of working through a few processes. And one of those processes involved getting involved with a company called escrow, escrow .com. So we're implementing a lot of those pieces right now into the marketplace. Short answer to all this though, after all that, is that the marketplace is a place where all the works of all the artists that have marked their work publicly can be viewed.
to take one step further, we go through a curation process. So now all the works can be viewed. Some works we feel like, is more of a private thing or this isn't really, doesn't really fit a gallery setting. So we might have somebody who just like, I don't know, just upload some pictures that they love of their kids, but doesn't really qualify as really art to somebody else who purchase, at least not in our standpoint, from our standpoint. And then there's also the issue where we go through the curation process to ensure that.
the images, nothing is uploaded that shouldn't be uploaded.
Nick (32:29.068)
Okay. So with that marketplace, how do you go about selling pieces or how do you go about shopping for pieces?
Jose Gomez (32:36.254)
So the marketplace is pretty easy. You get on there, you can search by search term, can search by size of the image, you can search by medium. The medium is now getting a rework because we've categorized works a little bit differently. But generally speaking, you can go there and you can basically browse around. You can use the search tool to try to kind of narrow some things down. And if you like a piece of art, you can click on that piece of art and see if there's an addition that's for sale. If there is, then you can go ahead and process that.
order right through the site.
Nick (33:07.81)
Okay, and so when your piece does get purchased, I assume you get an email notification, you'll see their mailing address, how does that all work?
Jose Gomez (33:17.824)
Yeah, so you'll get a notification. We collect all the all the shipping information and the payment information. We process the actual purchase. This is actually going to be changing though. We're going to be making it now where artists can actually put their own processor in place so that that money can go directly to the artist right away. Again, there's some changes that we're making to this process and it's going to involve the escrowing of money.
because of the fact that we do have so many artists and we do have people that are really browsing through, we need to protect both sides. So you'll see over the next about a month or two, you'll start seeing more of the implementation of escrow. So what basically will happen is when somebody purchases a piece of art, that money that they just paid will go into an escrow. When that work is shipped and they verify they've received it, the money is released. This helps a few things. Number one, escrow will make sure that they validate the individual.
and make sure that this is the right individual, the payment is valid. Once that's done, then you as the artist can feel safe to send that work, but also the buyer can feel safe knowing that you don't quite have the money yet until they can receive the work, make sure it's in good condition, it's exactly what they ordered, and then they can let escrow know, or like a timeout can happen. I think they have like three to five days to validate whether or not they received the work or not.
Nick (34:40.654)
So the artist would be submitting the tracking number and information on there. Are they able to charge escrow for the shipping so that gets subtracted from what the customer purchased?
Jose Gomez (34:53.986)
So right now, the way that we're doing it is we are only charging for the work itself. The artist is at that point given all the information they need to so that they can communicate with the buyer to coordinate shipping. Because there's so many different shipping options, including local pickup, that we want to give the artist that ability. The buyer is told right up front, this does not include shipping. You will be contacted about shipping arrangements. There are also different arrangements with art. So art is a little different, right? So you order from Walmart.
Nick (35:18.855)
okay.
Jose Gomez (35:23.48)
you know, you're going to get a standard box. have their way of doing it. But art is a little bit different. You might have a buyer who doesn't want you to ship it in a box. They want to create and it's going to cost $10 ,000 to send it, you know, because they want this real, really fancy thing, you know, so it really depends on the buyer depends on the arrangement, the artist and buyer make, and we don't want to really get in the middle of that. So could, will we maybe in the future,
Possibly, but right now what we want to do is just facilitate the purchase of that work Make sure that it's safe on both sides and then allow the two parties at that point to make their decisions on shipping
Nick (36:03.044)
So I had a podcast episode months ago with a gallery owner whose gallery is all online. So he's got a network of artists all over the world and their pieces are all presented on their website. And when somebody buys one of their pieces, the gallery owners would send the shipping materials to the customer. I mean, sorry, to the artist and the artist would use those materials to ship it.
Jose Gomez (36:15.437)
Mm -hmm.
Nick (36:31.054)
just to keep everything consistent around the whole thing. And that seemed kind of like a terrifying process as like a business owner to do that. But as a customer, that seems pretty amazing that you can know exactly what type of shipping you're going to get. And then it allows them to also coordinate special deals with UPS or whatever you have. So for the marketplace on Cloud Folios,
Jose Gomez (36:34.669)
Mm
Nick (36:58.082)
Are you planning on doing integrations with Shopify or Wix or any of those other online storefronts?
Jose Gomez (37:05.534)
No, actually, what we want to do is kind of keep independent of those processes because what we want to do is keep as much money in for the artists. We want to make sure that the artists have this, this is is few middlemen involved, few middle as few monthly fees and transaction fees as possible. So our direction here over the next few months to explain is really to connect the artists directly with the processors.
so that we can not be so much in the middle and no one else could be either, right? The process happens, we pull the two parties together, which is very different from the gallery model. The gallery model, which is what we kind of started in a direction of, which was you kind of veil it behind. You protect the buyer from the seller. You protect the buyer from the artist because it's my client as the gallery, right? So I'm gonna protect that buyer, none of your business. Give me your work, I'm gonna sell it to my buyer. I contact them, they contact me if they want more of your work.
Nick (37:57.721)
You
Jose Gomez (38:01.752)
Well, at Cloud Folios, we're not really getting in the middle of the transaction. We're allowing that buyer and that seller to meet because we want the artist to build their own database. And you're going to see more of these tools over the next 12 months, more database building tools, more email marketing tools, more tools to just foster and grow that artist's base of customers.
Nick (38:24.76)
And so you want artists to be able to fully operate their business from cloud folios and not need additional tools outside of there. Okay.
Jose Gomez (38:31.648)
Yeah, at the very least to be able to use CloudFolios as a great drop, you know, for the exposure of their work, but also as one of what possibly could be many different avenues of sales. So an artist can have their own website, can go through CloudFolios, maybe they upload their stuff to a few marketplaces, and maybe they're showing in a few local galleries. What we don't want to do is create an exclusive channel, but we want to make one that's as helpful as possible.
Nick (38:58.682)
Sure. Well, so I guess kind of one way that I'm envisioning this being used is currently my website is on Shopify and I don't sell art prints through it. But I would like to be able to. So it would be fun if there was like a section that was like art prints, limited edition prints powered by cloud folios or something like that. And since there wouldn't be any Shopify integration, it would just ultimately be a link to my cloud folios.
Jose Gomez (39:20.258)
Mm -hmm.
Nick (39:27.866)
page where people can do all that stuff from there. So I guess that's kind how that would happen.
Jose Gomez (39:31.372)
Well, this is where our new direction, this is where our newest kind of journey is starting to intersect now. So one of the things that we realized over the last few months is that we have all of these vendors that are entering into the marketplace and some of them are art specific. There's one specific one that's really, I mean, they're doing fantastic. They're jumping in, they're providing websites, they're providing a lot of marketing training, which is actually the value of what they offer, not so much their platform.
Nick (39:39.181)
Okay.
Jose Gomez (40:00.568)
But one of the things that we really, that, kind of took us back was when we started to look at the pricing structure and we started to look at what the value of their actual technology was. And we, I realized that, you know, being myself in the web business for a while, I've been in the internet business for 30 years now. I've served over 60 ,000 clients around the world. and. You know, I realized, you know, there's, there's just a better solution than what, what's being offered here. And there's not a whole lot of, a lot of explanation as to why.
people are marking stuff up so much in terms of service. So I looked at a few of our artists' folios and I said, well, I could probably generate a website out of this. And that's what we started to go down the road of. we created a way, we call them the websites, CloudFolio sites, where you can take all that work that you've put into your CloudFolio site and literally generate an entire website in seconds. You just go in, you say, this is the...
brand. So in CloudFolios, you can create different brands for your for folios. This is the brand I want to create the website for. Go. And the system generates an entire website that's fully ready right now. This second start taking orders right away. It's already integrated with escrow and PayPal is an alternate. It'll use your CloudFolios account email address is your PayPal address. And if you have an alternate one, you can change that in the settings. You can change your sale. You could set your sales tax as well. Your sales tax settings.
And the only thing it won't do is the shipping again. We don't want to get in the way of shipping We just want to sell the works what we ended up doing was creating an amazing Merchandising site and it is so so fast and so easy. It's mobile friendly It even installs as a a portable web web app They call a progressive web application right on your on your mobile device and even on your desktop. You can install it as an app But you can go in you could search you can add to cart one of the
Nicest things that I love about our system is that you your customer only needs to provide minimal information to check out. And this is actually the first time I've ever seen anything like this. All we need is a first name last name email address. That's all I need. Because with that information we can literally finalize the sale, create the transaction with escrow and then from there your customers providing all their information in our system and it's piping it back into the cloud folio system.
Jose Gomez (42:24.524)
So it's literally a frictionless checkout process. You go in, you agree, you say, yes, I'm going to finish this transaction through escrow or through PayPal, and the transaction's complete. You as the artist now have the person's information so you can reach out if they don't finish the sale. And if they do finish the sale, they've got all the emails and instructions on where to go to do that. So it's really a great system.
Nick (42:48.698)
Can you upload multiple images for each piece? Like if you wanted close -ups or if it's a 3D image or like a sculpture of multiple images of the different angles of that sculpture?
Jose Gomez (42:59.97)
So what we've currently done is we've created what we call at CloudFolio sites core. The core platform right now does not include that. Well, what we're doing is we're basically building the main functionality and we're building out all the rest of the features based on feature requests. So that's kind of the way that we're doing it. Cause one of the things that happens with this type of thing, it's why a lot of e -commerce systems are so clunky is because before they're released,
We catch up on everything that's been built before it right so we look like what is everything that amazon has what's everything that shop if i has a monster commerce has and we build a platform has the features of every platform which means we've now got hundreds of features that most people never use so we decided to do is we decided to take the opposite approach take the minimum what's the minimum thing. To process orders show the work and it and aesthetically pleasing way and quickly.
Execute on a frictionless transaction. That was the first goal of core. Once we're done with core now people customers who become Cloud Folio Pro members, they automatically get these these sites and they are the ones who get the privilege of being able to ask for features and what we've done is within the there's a there's a section of the Cloud Folio's dashboards called website center. If you're a pro member, you're able to go in.
request features, but you're also able to upvote other feature requests that are made. And so that's how we're actually building onto it. a feature is not requested, unless we think it's important in our own brainstorming time and backlog of sprints, then it won't make it until somebody says, I actually want this, I actually need this, I think this is a great idea, I would like to use this, and other people upvote it. So today, the short answer to your question is no.
Nick (44:51.588)
Okay, okay, cool. Yeah. Yeah.
Jose Gomez (44:54.818)
But if enough people, if someone requests it and some people upvote it, it'll get to the top of the list.
Nick (45:01.272)
I was just wondering what would be the viability for things that are tangentially art related but not traditional art. For example, if you had a limited edition photo book or something, or an art book, it'd be hard to sell that with just one image. You would need those alternate images. yeah.
Jose Gomez (45:11.288)
Yep. Yep.
Jose Gomez (45:17.666)
I actually agree with you. Yeah, I agree. And that is actually, that's actually a feature that we've thought about. So it's actually is on the backlog list. There's a number of features that we've thought, okay, now pass core. What are things that we think maybe should either should have been part of core or need to be added pretty soon.
Nick (45:35.864)
So what, let's talk a bit about the curation aspect of Cloud Folios. I know it's older, excuse me. I know with the curation thing, because all of this is tracked back to individual pieces, does that kind of become like if a piece gets accepted into a show, is that like forever reported on that image that is sitting in someone's marketplace now or sitting on someone's site?
Jose Gomez (46:00.236)
Yeah, yeah it is. So what we do is we attach it to that specific instance. So let's say you upload a piece. goes, initially that work gets put into a folio called Uploaded Works. And then it's up to the artist to kind of move it to another folio. I encourage artists to get stuff out of Uploaded Works as quickly as possible so you don't forget or it doesn't accumulate too much. A few artists listen to me, but when they do, it makes it easier for them. So.
That particular instance gets bound to that submission that you made. And if it's accepted, you can see it in the public information for that particular work.
Nick (46:41.346)
Okay, very cool. And so tell me about the curation aspect of Cloudfolios on the backend. What does it look like if you have an art show coming up and you wanted to use Cloudfolios to collect art from artists?
Jose Gomez (46:54.7)
So the way ClaudeFolios works is that you create what's known as an exhibition. You just tell the system, hey, this is the exhibition. This is going to be the opening date. I'm accepting submissions. Here's the deadline for submissions. Here's about when we're going to be curating it so that we let the artist know about when that's going to happen. This is how much we want to charge for the submission fee. This is what percentage we're going to be taking, again, for informational purposes to the artist.
And here's a general description, instructions to artists, all that stuff, all the stuff that you'd expect from an artist, an art call. And what Claude Follio does is it promotes it through the exhibitions area of the website, but it also sends it in the upcoming calls email that comes out. So I'm sure you've seen that before. So just so you know, I'm getting a little echo there.
Nick (47:32.58)
sends it in the upcoming calls email that comes out. So I'm sure you've seen that before. So just so you know, getting a little echo there. Yeah, sorry, my headphones just disconnected on the Bluetooth. Just reconnect them.
Jose Gomez (47:44.088)
That's all right. That's all right.
Nick (47:56.76)
All right, should be back now. Yeah, there we go.
Jose Gomez (47:57.622)
All right, you're good. right. All right, there you go. All right, All right, so yeah, so what happens is once you create the exhibition in the system, you get a page that's allocated to your call that you send, you market, you send all your artists to. So people typically will send out emails or they'll send, post Facebook events. For House Shadows, we would post a Facebook event specifically for the call where we do a separate one for the actual event. And the call, we'd actually market. So as artists come in,
They submit their works. You've gone through that process where you upload the works or choose from your current folios. And then you put all the information that you need to in there. You submit the work, you pay the submission fee if there is one, and then you go to the other side of the process. For the exhibiting organization, they're going to get notifications every time that those submissions are made. And it gets added to what we call the curation queue. Now, what's nice about our curation queue is that you can...
It not only shows you all the works that are being curated, but the status of those works. It also allows for multiple curators. So if I have five, seven, 10 curators, so TVSope has five curators, for example, everyone can go at their own time to go in and curate. And curation for each of the works is done one of two ways. You can either do like an American Idol style, accept, reject, yes or no, or you can do a scored curation, which we have a 6 .6.
a six tier system, five points a piece that you go in and you give a score to. So like visual impact is one of the categories, genre identification is another. there's a few, there's six different categories of points that you can give each work. Now that's a much lengthier curation process, because you have to do a lot of work as a curator, but it gives the artist more feedback. So you kind of know like, this one scored a lot in visual impact, but technicals, didn't get too good of a score.
or maybe the grading technicals, but it really didn't have a lot of impact. It was more of an academic image. So you get a little more feedback. Going through that curation process, every curator going through it, the system keeps track of those average scores and ultimately gives the exhibition a final view of what works were accepted and what works were rejected.
Jose Gomez (50:18.902)
Now, typically what the system does, it looks at the average and it says everything that's above average was accepted initially and everything that below average was not. And then what you can do is the master curator, so the main curator can go in and they can actually override at this point. So, right, you may have too many accepted or you may have too many rejected and you may have to override and bring more in or take some out. And that's typically done in person. Like we'll do it, TV SOPA, we do it in a Zoom meeting with everybody there. Everybody's curated, everybody's already done the initial work.
Now we're just going through and figuring out, let's fine tune this exhibition. And people get kind of an opportunity to defend or argue against a piece. But that's the curation process. And once you're done, you finalize the exhibition. Now the moment you finalize it, it lets all the artists know what works were accepted, what were rejected, or not accepted, I should probably say, chosen and not chosen. Some things are not necessarily rejected. They just don't fit.
Maybe we don't have enough space for you or just they don't fit in this exhibition, but it's beautiful work. So chosen, not chosen. And everybody gets that email notification. And they're also able to go back to the call page and actually see the status and see all the scores that they got as well. If it was a scored exhibition or secured curation. At that point, what CloudFolios does is the screen turns for the curators into more of an informational screen now.
Here's everything that was accepted or rejected. Here's all the artists, the full artists list, the final artists list. We even give them like a semi -colon delimited list of all the emails in case they want to do like CC, blind CC type of emails. But we also provide an email system where they can queue notifications to go out. So they can queue their artists, their artists drop off deadlines, pickup deadlines, informational emails they want to send out. They can choose whether it goes to everybody who applied or just the people who were accepted.
but they can queue all that stuff and they can do it ahead of time. You say, want this to go out two days before the exhibition, one day, a week after, whatever dates you want to put in there. But then it also goes one step further in printing all of the collateral that you need, all the printed collateral. So it generates PDFs of your art cards for the wall, for the gallery. It creates a buyer's guide for the entire exhibition. It prints an artist contact sheet, an art sign -in sheet. It does all the things that normally
Jose Gomez (52:41.194)
administratively would take you hours to do. Trolios does it in just a few seconds and it just gives you all the PDFs that you need, even a zip file with all the images in it.
Nick (52:43.418)
Wow.
Nick (52:51.298)
And so what does it cost the curators to run an event like this?
Jose Gomez (52:58.616)
This answer is actually pretty fun. So for years, it was 49 bucks a month. And you can do as many shows as you want and many exhibitions as you want. 49 bucks a month gives you access to everything. As of last month, that is gone. It's now free for people to come in, start putting their shows online. What we do is we charge, the way we make money from it is that we charge a 10 % processing fee to the artists when they pay their submission fee. That's it.
It's just that 10 % is what we get, which means that the gallery gets almost 100 % of the submission fees. We do take a 3 % out for processing because we have to pay the piper, so do they. 3%, pretty much 6K of it. But they get the service for free. So it's amazing. We're the only free art call submission system in the world.
Nick (53:53.858)
And so I know I've seen like when I as an artist, when I go in there and look at the exhibitions list of things that are coming up, I see there's a good mix of physical gallery exhibitions as well as digital ones like online exhibitions. And hearing you talk about this makes me think maybe I should do one or two a year of just digital events, because I've already got an email list of five thousand or so people.
Jose Gomez (54:06.232)
Mm
Nick (54:19.736)
And that would be a great opportunity for some artists to get their piece in the inbox of someone who's already into my kind of style of art. So, yeah, I'm getting kind of excited about that too. Yeah.
Jose Gomez (54:30.112)
I agree. You know, there's one of the things that we're actually working on and we've been working on developing this for a few years. just haven't really gotten to put the cross all the T's and dot of the eyes, but it's what we call the cloud curator. And there is an idea there's, there's an opportunity for artists and art lovers, but, but artists specifically to create exhibitions in their own, in their own areas, whether it's online or, or, you know, or in person.
There are spaces in every city and in every town that are just sitting there empty. That if you just talk to the business owner and say, you know, let me use this space once a month, let me put an exhibition up, make the space look beautiful, but also bring people to an opening, maybe a few hundred, maybe a thousand people to your venue once a month. I mean, for many business owners, this is a welcome idea. And as an artist or as an art lover, as a curator, you can now make
monthly income, semi -monthly income, quarterly income from not just the submission fees, but also the commissions that are earned from the art sales. So there's a lot of opportunity here. CloudFolios makes that really attainable and really easy to do. So all you would have to do is say, you know, make sure you have a space or set aside time for digital exhibition, create the exhibition call, the exhibition call on the system, and then just start passing out that URL.
and start getting submissions right away. We take care of everything else.
Nick (55:59.61)
So if, say, I did an online gallery show with a call to artist and pieces get accepted that are on people's cloud folars accounts, and I say I email that list out to people and also put it on my website as like, these are the things that were in like, know, the June show of whatever 2025. People can click that.
Jose Gomez (56:20.513)
Mm -hmm.
Nick (56:24.896)
image potentially go to the marketplace and buy it and they'll be able to communicate with the creator.
Jose Gomez (56:32.14)
Yeah. So, so there's, there's two, two good ways to do that. There's technically three ways to do that, but two good ways. Well, I'll give you the third, not so good way, which is when you create an exhibition, you can choose to create what we call a photo album of the images. So when you accept all the images, you can, you can then go to your buyer's list or go to your, you know, your audience and say, guys, here's the full, the, or the URL to the
to the photo album of all the works that were accepted, if you like it, contact me, you know, and I'll put you in contact with the artist. That's a not so good way, but it's still something that you could do. The better ways though is that we have something called Cloud Exhibit. And Cloud Exhibit is a viewable on more of a desktop tablet environment exhibition.
It's a virtual exhibition where you can go through, can next through, you have all the artist's art descriptions, you can purchase right through there. It's all set up for that purpose, for an online exhibition. You can do that. The other way you could do it too is if you want to get a little more manual with it, because some people, they like to do stuff old school, just generate the buyer's guide that the system generates for you and send it out to your buyer's list. We've sold, I would say out of every exhibition we do, about 10 % of our
physical exhibition sales are from the buyer's guide that we send to people who bought art before but weren't at the exhibition. So the buyer's guide works really well, and it's generated for you.
Nick (57:58.318)
Very cool.
Nick (58:02.98)
So if a piece is accepted to a show and that piece is on the Cloud Folio's marketplace, it can be purchased. People can follow the link to buy that piece from the artist. Does the artist need to have the website in order to have that sale happen? OK, very cool. So tell me, what is the price of the new website feature that you've built out?
Jose Gomez (58:15.405)
Exactly.
Jose Gomez (58:28.28)
50 bucks, 50 bucks a month. And there's no setup fee. So it's not like, you know, ex storefronts, whoever you want to go with, you know, it's going to charge you $3 ,500 setup fee. No, there's no $3 ,500 setup fee. It's no setup fee. You pay your first 50 bucks, just upgrade your account. I think we even pro -rated, so you didn't pay the full 50 for the first month. And that's it, you're in. The moment that you upgrade to pro, you just go over to a link in there. It's called the website center or on the left -hand side.
Nick (58:30.339)
Okay.
Nick (58:36.035)
Hehehe
Jose Gomez (58:57.728)
And then you can actually choose your brand. Usually you just have one brand in there. Most artists do. So you just choose your brand, say generate website. It generates it in a second. And then all the settings, we only have a few settings right now. So things like sales tax and a PayPal email address. If you want to use a different one that you have listed with us, a few other settings in there. We're going to be adding things like color settings, customization settings really soon. Right now, the default in the system is that we're defaulting to the idea that
that most artists complicate their web presence. And it's why people aren't selling art to their websites. I get a lot of artists to say, I've never sold a piece through my website. I go to their website and I see why. They're trying to get way too creative with the presentation on the website itself, and it's overpowering the work. Or maybe they have the work on there and it looks great, but the way that people buy it is kind of funky. It's just not conducive to it. And then, you
Third is they're not marketing the sites. Nobody's even going there, even if it's a great website. What we've done is we, the site we generate is very much a gallery. It's an online gallery. You go in, it is white walls and your art. It is click to buy, click to check out. It is very, very zoomed in to the presenting your work cleanly and getting people into the buying process. So we feel it's the straightest line from A to Z. Now,
We're going to be adding some customization so you can kind of move things around and customize a little bit, but we don't want to get it ever to the point where you you're wanting to replicate somebody's website. So you're to be able to do that to the platform. It's just not going to happen. That stuff isn't good for most people. No, no, yeah, go do that on. Yeah, exactly. Go go get a wick side or go get a Squarespace site. Go do all that work there. We're interested in in best practices and this is actually the exciting part so.
Nick (01:00:39.45)
It's not MySpace.
Jose Gomez (01:00:53.026)
This isn't just about building websites for artists. It's not at all. It's really about creating an art sales system. And what we've seen over the last year, two years, there've been a few systems that people have been selling. You're on Facebook and you're an artist. You're getting sold this stuff all the time. And quite honestly, a lot of it's bull crap. What it is is that these people are telling you to market. That's all they're telling you to do. Market your stuff.
Now they're gonna give you a checklist and they're gonna even outline they're gonna be all these steps and these technologies you can use and how to build the funnel. At the end of the day the reason you're not selling your artist is not marketing your art right so you don't need. So and so storefronts to tell you that you need to run specials this is easy to understand you need to run specials you need to sell your arts during father's day your art during father's day you need to.
You know create coupon codes. You need to you know be able to process a credit card Fulfillment is a whole different issue, which I I really applaud a few of the vendors out there They've been able to link their technology to fulfillment But at the end of the day what we're trying to do is create a sales system So we're always gonna be looking at what are the current standards? What's what's actually selling art and how do we integrate that into this platform? Not what are artists asking for because those two things are opposed
Nick (01:02:15.982)
Well, this has been an amazing conversation. I'm really excited about the options out there. And I think there's probably a lot of artists who, just like you said, they want to start, don't really know where to start. where in the Cloud Folio's universe, where should someone start who's Cloud Folio's curious?
Jose Gomez (01:02:33.496)
Yeah, so just go to ClaudeFolios .com, create a free account. It's free. Start archiving your work. So just go in there, start creating your folios, organize it in a logical way. Then what you do, once you're free, you're in there, you're kind of getting used to it, just jump into your settings, upgrade to pro. It's 50 bucks. We're going to pro rate you for the month. So you'll pay less than 50 for your first time. And then it's just 50 bucks from that point forward. Generate your site. The moment you generate your site, it's going to use all that.
all that work you did, all that organization you did with your folios, with your works, with your editions, and it's gonna generate the website for you. And it's live, so any changes you make in your CloudFolio site will reflect instantly on your website. So it's your entire management piece. And that's it, that's as simple as it is. Then once you're done there, all that geek stuff that you're done doing, now just go market your stuff. So on your CloudFolio sites, you're able to go into your individual work, you can see that you are all right at the top.
take that URL and start pushing it out. There's URLs for your individual works, for the individual folios, so you can see all the works in the folio. And then of course there's the homepage, which is not like most homepages where it overkills you. It's like these are the latest works and these are the latest folios. Click in here, there's all the new stuff. Click in there, start exploring. And I think it's really conducive to sales.
Nick (01:03:52.642)
Is there an example site out there, maybe one of yours that people can take a look at?
Jose Gomez (01:03:57.878)
I'd love to show you mine, but mine, you I do expressive nudes, I, it would get you, would get, would, it would take your, podcasts offline, but, but yeah, you could, I would say go in there. It's easy to generate. if you, yeah, if you do want to go to my site, yeah, you can take a look at it. the one that we have right now is Jay Gomez, fine art gallery .com. And that'll give you a good example of what the platform does. I've got a lot of work in there, so you're going to be able to see it populated with a bunch of work.
Nick (01:04:00.634)
Okay.
Nick (01:04:11.812)
We can just tell them the site. Are they... yeah.
Jose Gomez (01:04:27.99)
and how the work is actually presented. You can click around, play around with it. Just don't place any false orders, because then I'm wanna charge you money. But you can go in and you can register, you can add stuff into your favorites list. mean, play around with it. And if you wanna order something from me, won't be mad at you.
Nick (01:04:29.358)
wow. It's beautiful.
Nick (01:04:48.122)
So you can connect your own URL to your Cloud Folio's site.
Jose Gomez (01:04:52.568)
Yes, so for when you first create the cloud folio site, it's going to use your username dot cloud folios dot gallery. That's that's initially what you'll get. And then there's an option in the website center where you can say hey, I'd like to use my own custom URL. You put in the request. We tell you the settings to go back to your registrar to set to point to us and then it takes within 24 hours you'll have the domain connected. We do all the geek stuff in the back end to make that work.
Nick (01:05:21.966)
I do want to point out that you have a lot of pieces titled Untitled, and you have harped on people for using Untitled as a title. So just want to call you out.
Jose Gomez (01:05:26.572)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. I do.
Yep. Absolutely. No, definitely call me out. Those are work so when you upload something to cloud folios and you don't title it by default titles it untitled. So a lot of the works that you're seeing there, they weren't really even prepared for me to do all this stuff. But I said, you know, let's just generate the site. Let's get it going. But yeah, I've got a lot of titling to do. As matter of fact, this leads to a few other things that we're doing really soon, which is going to be to create better tools in cloud folios to manage things in bulk.
So right now when you go in, you got to click on each work to retitle it. We'll have retitling screens now where it'll show you bulks of work at a time. So you can do all your retitling, hit Submit once, and everything's retitled for you. Same thing with things like pricing and additions and all that.
Nick (01:06:11.822)
Very cool. I really love the way that it zooms in when you mouse over and it adds frames and mats to everything. Would you be able to customize those frames and mats that you see on the graphic?
Jose Gomez (01:06:20.172)
Mm -hmm.
Jose Gomez (01:06:24.352)
Yeah, so in cloud folios you actually have the ability to do things like say I don't want Matt. I do want Matt. I don't want frame. I do want frame and then the frames and mats. You can actually designate the color that's in the folio settings. It's not individual work settings, but in the folio that the work belongs to. So the assumption it call folios is everything is going to be similarly within one series is going to be similarly presented.
Nick (01:06:48.42)
Very cool. Well, again, this has been amazing talking to you about it. And I appreciate you giving me some time, giving the listeners some time to chat about Cloud Folios and the latest iteration of it.
Jose Gomez (01:06:59.628)
Yeah, no problem. Anytime. Thanks for having me, All right, buddy, take care. Bye -bye.
Nick (01:07:01.505)
All right, thank you so much, Jose. Thanks. Thank you.
Outro
Chain Assembly: Art for profit sake is recorded through Riverside FM, distributed through Spotify for podcasters, and edited on Adobe Audition. The music is provided by Old Romans. If you learned anything useful or found this podcast helpful, please rate and review us five stars. If you want to learn more about me or my art, head over to ChainAssembly.com.
