keii: a walkable 3D museum
A 3D museum I built for a friend's art career, then scoped as a product
Why I built it
A friend of mine is an illustrator trying to get his art career off the ground. I wanted to give him something that set him apart from every other artist portfolio out there.
The market wasn’t offering him much. Website builders all look the same, social platforms compress images and bury older work, and the hosted 3D gallery platforms charge a subscription forever and keep the gallery on their servers. That risk is real. Mozilla Hubs shut down in 2024, and Spatial deleted creator galleries in July 2026.
What I shipped
A demo site built from scratch with Hugo around his real artwork, with his permission. (It’s a capability demo, not his actual website, and a banner on every page says so.)
The centerpiece is a walkable museum in one self-contained HTML file, about 34KB with Three.js and WebXR. Desktop uses WASD and mouse-look, phones get touch controls, and on a Quest it’s full VR. A Victrola in the middle plays music with positional audio, so it gets louder as you walk toward it. No build tools, no accounts, no subscription. The owner keeps every file.
Then I asked if it was a product
The museum only took me evenings because of AI-assisted coding. So what’s it worth to the thousands of artists who can’t build it at all? I did the same research pass I did for Campus Scout .
The niche is verifiably empty. As of July 2026 there’s no downloadable, one-time-purchase walkable WebXR gallery for sale on any major marketplace, and the competitors that exist are all hosted subscriptions. But empty niches are usually small. 44% of Gumroad products earn nothing, so my revenue table leads with the failure case and sizes the realistic win at $250 to 800 a month. Not a gold rush, and the report says so.
| Rung | Price | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Free demo room | $0 | The live museum. It markets itself |
| Full template | $49 one-time | 20 art slots, music, VR, docs. The buyer owns the files forever |
| Install call | $99 | Template plus I set it up with you |
| Done-for-you | $149 | I deploy it to your host within 48 hours |
Decisions I’d defend in an interview
| Decision | Reasoning |
|---|---|
| One HTML file, no build step | The customer is an artist on Neocities, not a developer. Every dependency removed is a support email prevented |
| One-time purchase, not a subscription | “You own it” is the whole differentiator, and hosting costs plus churn are what killed Spatial’s creator tier |
| Sell through itch.io and Gumroad | They’re merchant of record, so 10 to 12% in fees buys out the entire global sales tax problem |
| Kill criteria written before launch | 25 sales in 90 days means build the product family. Under 10 means it stays a portfolio piece |
Where it stands
The demo and museum are live and work on desktop, mobile, and VR. The scoping report and 90-day roadmap are done. If I decide to sell it, the next step is packaging it with a config block and a plain-English README, then listing it at a $29 launch price.