Tell us a little about yourself
I was an avid miniature collector when I was in school and still love the little metal men. I’m also a serial entrepreneur, one of my projects which I’m quite proud of is Razer! where we make various gaming peripherals. I’m currently working on lots of cool stuff on CoolMiniOrNot full time. I’m a lawyer by training but never really developed a taste for other people’s problems.
How did cmon begin?
Dave (the other guy behind CMON) saw an early incarnation of HotOrNot.com and thought it’d be cool to have something like that for miniatures. This was sometime in mid-2001. So he bought an off the shelf script, dumped it on the net “as is” and sure enough it was getting a lot of attention. Some of it was negative though, in the early days of HotOrNot it wasn’t really a dating site and was just there to kind of ogle and giggle at people’s pics, so naturally the clone was the same. I looked at the site and then thought it’d be cool to add stuff like proper attribution, user accounts, PMs and the like and put up an alternative site. Dave got wind of it and asked me if I’d like to join forces on CoolMiniOrNot.com. I said, sure, why not, transferred everything over and started running CoolMiniOrNot.com from October 2001.
Did you ever guess at its popularity being so big?
Well, we had some indication in the early days that there was a hunger for some kind of organized gallery of painted figures, but really I personally had no idea. I basically stuck my head in every few months, made performance tweaks and improvements as well as implementing requested features and if just kinda went from there.
Do you paint or game yourself?
I don’t really have time to paint anymore. I used to play a lot of WFB, but my work life involved a lot of computer game playing which occupied a lot of time (not that I complained really).
Do you sometimes feel you created a monster?
Not really; there are lots of sites out there related to the hobby. CMON isn’t as big as say, deviantart.com which started around the same time, mainly because it serves a more focused niche
I think.
What do you feel are the biggest positives of Cmon?
It’s got a big international audience, with very very active participation from some of the best painters in the field. For those that thrive on competition, CMON is one of the best places to learn. It’s easy to find out how well you’re doing (say I’m painting at a “6” level) and observe what everyone is doing to get “7”s. There are several very good painters on that I believe have galleries of their first few paintjobs all the way to their current 8+ scoring figures, which I have to say is just awesome. We’ve also been the launching pad for some popular independent lines of miniatures, and that I’m also particularly proud of.
Any negatives?
That said, if you don’t like a competitive environment, the harshness of a hard, numeric score turns some people off. Sometimes, all you want is the rest of the world to share the joy you have when you’ve created something cool, not critique it and tell you what’s wrong with it. That makes the CMON artists and contributors, including and perhaps especially the beginners such a rare breed whose work they are prepared to let the rest of us enjoy (I admit, I even enjoy the bad paintjobs).
The rating system i s sometimes criticized - how would you defend it?
I wouldn’t. It is what it is. I may not agree with some of the scores, but that’s the whole point. Everyone understands a 1 to 10 scale, it universally cuts across almost all language and cultural barriers and that’s why it works.
As the market leader cmon obviously meets a demand, how do you avoid it getting stale whilst keeping it recognizable?
Well since most of the content is user generated, it should never get stale, there will always be something new to learn. My job I think would be to make the information easily accessible and keep up with new developments on the interface design front that make it easy for the community to connect with each other. We have lots of physical world projects like the annual and Game Forces magazine, as well as manufacturing of miniatures themselves, which also adds a significant dimension to the site that doesn’t really exist on pure portals.
Do you have favourite artists?
Not really, although I tend to gravitate towards humorous and/or darker themed pieces.
Cmon now has its own minis - what are the plans for this range long term?
We’ve got major news on this front coming up soon.
You have the first cmon convention coming up - can you tell us more about that?
Nothing concrete planned yet, it’s still early days.
What does the future hold for cmon?
No idea… should be an interesting rest of the year though.
Who would win - The terminator or Predator?
Terminator of course. No sense of fair play?Ouch. Predators are too nice!
Many thanks to Chern for taking the time to answer our questions. If you havent checked out coolmini yet then make sure you do www.coolminiornot.com
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