Introduction

Hello my name is Russ, and I am the co-creator of DrawPool. My friend Matt and I originally had an idea for a drawing social network in around 2009. Unfortunately, it never saw the light of day. We were too busy making rubbish iphone games!

Our original vision was nothing like the DrawPool you see today. In fact it wasn't even called DrawPool. It was called WeDraw. Still, our ambition to build a drawing website was clear.

Fast forward to the spring of 2020 and we finally made a start on our idea. In truth, we had been discussing about setting up our own company for a while. But at that point we didn't have a company, we just decided to start coding.

Who does what?

I decided I would repurpose my previous failed attempt at building a website, as that would allow us to hit the ground running. Meanwhile, Matt decided to start work on the app version. We figured we would initially concentrate on building the basics and then going live as soon as possible. For us, the basics were:

• Register/Login
• Post a drawing
• View drawings from other people

We figured it would take around a month but we actually managed to cobble something together and release it in only 2 weeks. And so, on 24th May 2020 at 00:15, DrawPool.com went live!

The vision

From the very start our vision for DrawPool has not changed:

A place to draw great art with simple tools

That's the core of what we are. We see DrawPool as a celebration of the fantastic art people can create with simple tools, which we feel shows off the raw talent of the artist even more!

With that being said, we also see an artists art as a way of attracting people to their DrawPool profile, where they will soon be able to add other content, including uploading their own art, adding links to YouTube videos or other relevant links, writing articles and participating in interactive Q and A's. Maybe we will even throw in personalised guestbooks. All of this will make DrawPool a unique hub for our artists' portfolios.

But that was a year ago!

Yep, what can I say, we get distracted easily! Almost immediately, I began working on two new and completely separare side projects. Still, we spent a little time adding some features, such as comments and pixel art. I also found the time to add a cool animation feature. Matt spent time working on product printing directly within the DrawPool app - a feature that lives to this day!

We also decided to formalise our partnership and set up our company, Moon 15 Ltd. Exciting times! But with various projects on the go, and fresh new ideas always tempting us away, it was time for us to focus!

New year, new start

At the turn of the year we had a good chat about what the direction of Moon 15 should be. We decided that DrawPool has real potential for future development and is also lots of fun to work on. I bought a whiteboard and immediately put it to good use by doodling on it. After that, I got serious and wrote down a list of features that we wanted to prioritise.

We new we had to prioritise social features otherwise it wouldn't be much of a social network! We began working on tagging posts, searching by tags and an updated user profile experience.

It's worth point out that even by that point (Jan 2021), we hadn't invested any money into DrawPool. No real advertising had been done. The only expense was the hosting costs which were (and still are!) fairly cheap.

At the same time, I realised that one of the major reasons our enthusiasm had dwindled was the lack of artists. Therefore, I felt it was time to start advertising DrawPool at little. I experiemented with Twitter, Facebook and Reddit but nothing seemed to stick. Then I tried Instagram and immediately found a much better response.

The future

At the time of writing (Mid March 2021) DrawPool has grown substantially in just 1 month, both in terms of new users and new features. We have recently released the following updates:

• Users can draw their own profile pictures
• Users can draw comments
• Add profile bio and links to other networks
• Search by tags

We have also started a new discord to allow our fantastic artists to talk with us and each other, and actively take part in the future development of DrawPool.

I can't wait to see how the next few months pans out. But until then, please stay, take a look around, and have a draw!

- Russ