New Online Art Auction Website Goes Live

COLUMBIA, Mo. - April 20, 2015 - PRLog -- Collin Bunch, an advisor with the Small Business Development Center (SBDC), a free resource for entrepreneurs and small businesses in Missouri, worked with entrepreneurs in Columbia, Missouri and organized a weekend event called Domain Purge. The event was organized by five key entrepreneurs: Matt Murrie owner of www.whatif360.com, Matt Fishcher owner of www.sportsformulator.com, JC Holmes owner of www.everfin.com, and Sean Lander and Mike Phinney, college students at Missouri University in Columbia. The event was organized as an effort to look at unused domains to see if one of them could be used as an idea for a functional business in one weekend, and then build the business to generate passive income, with little effort.

The weekend started on Friday, April 17th with roughly 10 domains to begin the team’s conversations, and as the weekend progressed there were four strong contenders that turned into solid projects. One of those projects went live on Saturday, April 18th, called: www.badartauction.com, which is a website to help get art out of the trash and onto the walls. The website is for any person who likes to buy art, create art, or look at unique, one-of-a-kind pieces of art. The owner of the URL badartauction.com, Matt Murrie, bought badartauction.com a couple years ago. He was inspired by vintage tee shirts and thought if people bought old tee shirts, would they buy old art. This idea took off during the event with other entrepreneurs.  The plan for the art auction website is to measure success and see if they can get people to rank or review the online art, as well as a site to start conversation about art.

There are two ways to enjoy the Bad Art Auction website. First, anyone can rate and leave a review on how "bad" the art hanging in their gallery is. Or, second, they can place a bid and take home their very own work of fabulously bad art. The pieces are one-of-a-kind in both scope and execution. The bidding process starts with a person looking for art. Whichever work of art in the online gallery has the best rating becomes the next work up for auction. People can stay up to date on which work goes up for auction next by following timely announcements on Twitter and Instagram. Once an auction closes, badartauction.com will send the highest bidder the art.

The website is not only a free website to post and bid on artwork, but a celebration of art where people can share art, have conversations about art, and a place where people can generate art. This website makes it possible for people to find art, and a place for artist to be able to get their art in front of a larger audience to sell, and best of all, share their work with the world.

With this unconventional approach in mind to sell art online, the entire team worked together to make it a reality. Matt Murrie had the concept, acted as overall Project Manager, and will manage the social marketing; Olivia Gill with SBDC designed the logo; Blake Anderson owner of Expressive Analytics, along with Sean Lander, Mike Phinney and Frankie Cancino students at Missouri University developed the database and the auction website. Dan Komo partner of Intelixseo (an internet marketing company), was involved with creating the landing page, video production, SEO, and will continue to work with the team to market the website.

The teams were very inspired during this event, and the Small Business Development Center plans on doing many more events like this in the future.

Check out our video on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4yN1StX3qA



Check out http://www.badartauction.com for the one-of-a-kind art pieces.