Silicon Valley artist Danielle Baskin launches Moonlight, an online tarot platform
You might know Bay Area artist Danielle Baskin for her viral, immersive art installations and jokes. Her newest project, Moonlight, is certainly not a joke, but she still finds her characteristic whimsy when describing her new venture: âItâs SaaS for witches.â
Sheâs not kidding. Moonlight is a free online tarot platform, where you can draw tarot cards on your own, do a reading in a multiplayer room or even book a session with a vetted tarot professional (thatâs where the SaaS part comes in).
Some founders would kill to have just one good idea. Baskin has so many good ideas that some of her performance art projects have inadvertently spun into legitimate companies. What if instead of getting more corporate swag, you could go to a conference and get a Salesforce-branded avocado? (âThat was actually a solid business,â she told TechCrunch, but it was quashed by the pandemic.)
Sheâs also spent four years running Dialup, an app that pairs strangers in one-on-one phone calls. Then, there are less time-consuming joke products like OneHoodie, a hoodie with swappable Velcro logos, in case your company gets acquired and you donât want a whole new hoodie; Drone Sweaters, to keep your drone warm; or Warby Parkour, photos of glasses doing parkour. Some of the funding for Moonlight came from selling her business Maskalike, where she made photorealistic face masks with peopleâs actual faces on them.
âAfter I sold my mask company, I felt like for the first time in my life, I wasnât hustling anything, and I could just think about what I wanted to do next,â she said. Then came Moonlight.
Moonlight has an appropriately mystical connection to one of Baskinâs first companies. About 15 years ago, Baskin ran a business painting custom bike helmets, but around the same time, she had just begun learning about tarot.
For many modern practitioners, Tarot isnât fortune-telling or psychic reading. Dating back to the 1400s, each of the 78 cards in the tarot deck tells a story. Tarot readers help people interpret the cards they pull, and draw from the stories of the cards to help clients think through life events from a different angle.
âI had this idea to paint each tarot card on 78 unique helmets, and sell them all in New York, so that theyâd all be shuffling around, and when you pass a cyclist, you could get a reading on your bike,â she said. âYouâd be biking and pass the three of swords and youâre like, âOh, Iâm going to think about heartbreak right now,â or you pass the magician, and youâre like, âOh, I should be doing more spectacles today.ââ
Sometimes, sheâd trade a helmet for a few tarot lessons with a witch (which is how some tarot practitioners describe themselves). It was at one of these lessons that Baskin first imagined what an online tarot platform could look like.
âOne of my teachers, I went to her place and she had this desktop computer in the corner, and there were these beach sounds coming from it,â she said. âI asked her what was on her computer, and she explained that she was a tarot reader in Second Life [at a beachside tarot shop]. She would meet clients there, and people all over the world would voice chat with her⊠Thatâs always been in the back of my mind. Even when building this, Iâm like, âWhoa, should I get in touch with her again?ââ
Baskin has spent 15 years studying tarot, giving readings (sometimes at corporate parties) and getting to know other witches. Now, the path to Moonlight has come full circle.
Moonlightâs interface is beautiful and intuitive. When you enter a room, you start by shuffling your tarot deck â the default is the iconic Rider-Waite-Smith deck, but decks from other artists are for sale. You can pull cards in four different preset spreads, but you also can just pull cards onto a blank canvas, which can be helpful for people learning to read the cards. If youâre not a tarot expert, thereâs a built-in handbook inside the app, but the descriptions are pretty open-ended â âI just put in the most minimalist keywords, so you could project your own meanings onto it,â Baskin said.
As she was building out the idea for Moonlight, Baskin teamed up with Caroline Hermans, a game designer and former UX engineer at Google.
âIt took a whole two years before I actually made it, because I was also like, who can I collaborate with? Are there tarot engineers?â Baskin said. Hermans fit the bill.
Moonlight was first bootstrapped with the money Baskin made selling Maskalike, but she managed to find some investors to jump in as well (she declined to say how much sheâs raised). Given her history of poking fun at Silicon Valley â she sold blonde wigs and âblood energy drinksâ outside the courtroom at Elizabeth Holmesâ trial, and she was behind the TouchBase trading cards, which treated venture capitalists like baseball players â she wasnât sure if investors would take her seriously.
âI was worried that investors might think Iâm a prankster â will that hurt me in actually making a business? But I think if people actually know me, they know Iâm multi-faceted,â she said. âA lot of investors I met with were familiar with my artwork. Theyâre like âOh, you did BART Basel,â the art show in BART.â
Itâs important to Baskin that Moonlight has an actual business plan from the get-go â she learned that lesson while running Dialup, which has since been sunsetted.
âI was in this sort of mindset, maybe similar to Clubhouse, where I was like, âWell, we can keep growing our app, and keep it free, and then as itâs more popular, weâll figure out a plan to monetize it,ââ she said. Neither Clubhouse nor Dialup thrived under that model â most companies donât. But Moonlight already is generating some income by taking a 15% platform fee from bookings with tarot readers and sales of digital decks. The platform launched without fanfare about a year ago, but now that its booking flow is in place, Moonlight is looking to make a splash.
âI was worried that witches would hate technology. You know, theyâre like, âMy physical deck is charged with a crystal in the windowsill and thatâs the only one Iâll use,â but no, everyoneâs on the internet,â Baskin said. âWitches have Instagram. Weâre all using technology, and I think theyâre excited that someoneâs making a platform whoâs a tarot person, too.â