IMVU Creator Program

Co-Founder  |  VP Creative  |  Strategy  |  3D Pipeline  |  Economy  |  Design System  |  Testing

APRIL 2004 - MAY 2015

I LOVE CREATORS!!!!

IMVU Creators are a special class of IMVU user with permission to submit their own content for sale in the IMVU catalog. They are the glue that hold IMVU together. From IMVU's earliest days, our goal was to empower the user base to guide what the product was; to continually surprise us with their collective genius.

The Creator Experience

IMVU has become both art store and gallery, providing the tools, the education, and the marketplace. The Creators bring the magic. 

We ended up building an ecosystem that makes every IMVU user happy. Professional Creators are happy because they can build a business (with several Pros making over $1 million/year!), Hobbyist Creators are happy because they are publicly affirmed, and the core IMVU user is happy because she has hundreds of millions of customization options to choose from.

Types of Creators

Creators fit generally into four categories: By far, the largest is #1: Painters. These are hobbyists with a flair for texturing existing 3D meshes. Much smaller but still #2 are the meshers capable of weighting & mapping their own meshes for use on the existing IMVU skeletons. Last, we have the full stack Creator: capable of making every aspect of the pipeline. Each of them started the same way and some have worked their way up the challenge ladder.

The Early Tools

Circa 2004, content creation happened in the Previewer, a standalone app that...was not the easiest thing in the world to use. Lots of floating windows and super tight input fields.

Create Mode

Since I had been primarily focused on the IMVU product redesign, It took 15 months to come back to Creators. Now, it was time to axe the standalone Previewer, pull content Creation into the IMVU app and address all known Creator issues. I ran this project very similarly to how Marcus and I ran the IMVU product redesign: I talked to hundreds of Creators to both learn about pain points as well as bounce mocks off of them. The result was much easier to understand for new Creators and more reliable for existing Creators. The added benefit to IMVU, inc. was that now we didn't need to maintain two disparate code bases. This project was a huge win. New Creators went up 6x and we dramatically increased all Creators' productivity.

Minimum Coverage Guidelines

Creators LOOOOOVE to push the edge of what is socially acceptable. As part of our strategy to grow the core product, we also implemented a new set of guidelines and rules Creators were meant to follow. One aspect of this project was to change the default avatars to come with a baked in Minimum Coverage skin texture so Meshers had a much better idea of where the line was, literally.

Peer Review

To align everyone's interests, we also created a Peer Review system that allowed existing Creators to review content submitted by other Creators. Until a product passed Peer Review, it could not be purchased or used. It had to be approved by 7 of 10 Creators to pass. If an approved product was flagged by the community and found to have violated the TOS, the influence of its original reviewers was reduced to zero. In order to participate in the Creator program, all Creators had to review a certain number of products per month.

Education Center

While we had made great strides in growing the Creator user base, I regularly responded hundreds of 'how to' questions per month. So, I had the idea of pulling together a publicly available resource for Creators to pull from. I wrote 100+ tutorials covering a wide range of topics from the basics of derivation through how to animate for IMVU in 3DS MAX.

This site is still in use today. Check it out: http://www.imvu.com/creators/education_center.php

The Power of Derivation

Derivation turbo-charged IMVU's content catalog. Derived products inherit most of the attributes of their parent product but overwrite a few features. This means the kb size of derived products, themselves, is much smaller than the parent. The combined parent+derivation payload is much smaller than baking the derivation's overrides into a new product and, therefore, downloads and renders much more quickly.

I created all of the parent product types from which Creators derive, keeping IMVU at the base of every derivation chain.

Products made by full stack Creators could be derived by meshers whose products, in turn, could be derived by multitudes of hobbyists. The Creator of each level of derivation sets the amount of profit in Credits (IMVU's virtual currency) they earn per sale. This allows the parent Creator to earn Credits even when a product deep in the derivation chain is sold. IMVU tacks on a 10% markup to allow for sales events without hurting any Creator's profit. Also, IMVU is able to sink Credits out of the economy by baking the price of the parent product into each sale.

The Creator Journey

The existence of the derivation chain means the most technically proficient Creators are incentivized to continue adding high leverage content to the catalog. It also expands IMVU's reach to hundreds of aesthetic niches. The result is a program that is many millions strong and the world's largest virtual goods catalog.

We thought this revenue distribution pipeline warranted protection so we took a chance at filing...and we got a few patents awarded! Click here and here and  here to check them out. So cool!

Rewarding

One of the best parts of co-founding IMVU was the privilege of getting to know so many of the Creators that make it great. They're just such awesome people from all over the world. Cheers, Creators. Thank you for so touching my life.