PaintBerri

PaintBerri is an art role-playing and storytelling community co-founded by Katherine Tung and I in 2016. The site began as a side project inspired by the vibrant art communities on Japanese Oekaki boards—visual forums where posts and comments are drawn with a simple painting program.

As a small team, we grew the user base to over 23,000 artists, which includes over 120 paying customers, without outside funding or paid advertising.

Through extensive user research and rapid iterative testing, we honed the experience to better meet user needs. Ultimately, PaintBerri didn’t meet our monetization goals and we decided to pause further development.