Just Ship It

Patrick and Nick discuss the common self-limiting beliefs and misconceptions that hold artists back from succeeding in their businesses. They emphasize the importance of taking action rather than getting bogged down in perfect strategies, and highlight that most artists fail because they don't put in the necessary marketing work. The hosts share practical advice for artists to stop overthinking and start selling by getting directly involved in their own marketing efforts. They also invite listeners to join upcoming live sessions for personalized advice and insights.

Podcast Transcribe

Patrick Shanahan: Morning. So I had a huge epiphany after the call yesterday and for, for the uninitiated, I guess I would say is that we,

Nick Friend: Which

Patrick Shanahan: call? You

Nick Friend: mean the workshop for members?

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, I was just, I was thinking about it, you know, and there's this whole series of questions that we get, right? And they're not even questions, they're preconceived notions and It's about pricing strategies or how you deal with limited editions versus originals or how you deal with prints or if I sell prints, uh, I'm not going to be able to sell my originals or my buyer is going to come in on a limited edition and they're going to ignore the limited edition.

They're going to go to something else, right? Like there's, there's all these preconceived notions of it and the, the, the underpins it. Is again, it's one of these self limiting beliefs that if I can just figure out this one tactic, I will dominate, right? I'll have it all wrapped up. I'll be able to achieve great things.

I'm going to sell a ton. And I just need to figure out the tactic and I realize what it is. And we'll use the NFL. I'm not a huge fan of the NFL, but we'll use the NFL. Anyway, you're sitting at home on your couch and you're like, Oh my gosh, I've got this play. I've been thinking about this play for a long time.

I know this play will be the best play ever. Yeah. When I get out on the field, when, or if I get out on the field, what I'll do is I'll run this play and I'll dominate the whole thing. This is what artists are doing. This is the best play ever. You don't have, first of all, you're not at the stadium. You're not even in the stands.

You're at home on your couch. Okay? You don't have a helmet on. You don't have pads on. Okay, your shoes aren't laced up, you're not stretched, you're not warmed up, you're not in the game, you're not in the game, and you're sitting here contemplating and worrying about this nonsense, and you're not even in the game, you gotta get in the game, you're not even in the game, and you know who I'm calling out on that call.

Because he's not in the game. He's sitting there designing plays that he thinks he's going to dominate the NFL with, and you're not in the damn game. Your store is not open. It cannot take a credit card. You're not in the game. You've got to get in the game. If you're not exactly. Right.

Nick Friend: Exactly. Exactly. Yup.

And that is, you know, you, you, you know, where I go with that is, you know, this is this heuristic, this mental model, this heuristic that I've been talking about recently. Right. You know what I want to tell him and you know what, I'll tell a lot of artists out there actually like listening to this right now is whatever you think you need to do next, do the opposite.

Right. I'm dead serious. I'm dead serious. I've had this out. This sounds, this sounds crazy to a non executive CEO. If you've been an entrepreneur for awhile, it'll, it'll make a little bit of sense to you because. Oftentimes, uh, people, you know, they don't know what to do. They've never done it before. And if they're not, if they don't have mentors, they're not leveraging, you know, um, people who have actually done it before.

And in this case, photographers and artists who are selling hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, they are getting held up right on things that don't matter when they need to get in the game, because getting in the game, getting in the game, which this is what you're saying, getting in the game, it far supersedes.

Like getting the perfect strategy up front, right? If you're not in the game, you're dead. You're dead And and here's the other thing too. Here's the other thing, too The odds are whatever strategy you come out with it's going to be wrong. It's going to be wrong

Patrick Shanahan: You can't execute it if you're not in the game.

So why are you can't execute

Nick Friend: it? Yeah, it doesn't matter what price you launch with period i'm just telling you it does not matter Nobody cares. Nobody's watching you the way you think they are. Nobody's hanging on You You know, the pricing on your website, nobody cares what you're doing. They won't even remember what your pricing is, you know, tomorrow or the next day, nobody cares and you don't have enough traffic, you know, or customers anyway, nobody does.

Right. So, you know, all of these things are like, you know, uh, I'm used to selling originals, but I've never sold. Well, just get them on your site. It doesn't matter. Like what order should I have them in? It doesn't matter. Get them on there, get them on there. You know,

Patrick Shanahan: let's, let's first TJ, anyone on Instagram live, we're doing a live non customer zoom call in 20 minutes.

Anyone can join if you're on instagram. All you have to do is hit the link in the bio We'll send you the zoom link. Um if you're on facebook same thing. What's up, andy crawford? Uh, All you got to do is come into zoom you get a live demo see the website see everything ask us any questions You want we're doing that in 20 minutes?

So hey

Nick Friend: andy andy you want to come on this come on this zoom call with non with uh It's with non art storefronts members. You remember? Come on, come on. It'll, it'll be at the top of the hour if you want. And we'll, we'll answer your question. We'll give you some, some advice and you can tell about your experience on our storefronts up to you, totally up to you.

Um, and we'll, and we'll, uh, yeah, we'll start you out at the beginning. If you want

Patrick Shanahan: to your point. Okay. My wife is. My kids are massively into dinosaurs, massively into dinosaurs. So Vanessa, my wife goes on Amazon and gets a dinosaur and they love tools too. So it's a dinosaur where the legs and the arms, and you turn the batteries on and it goes, and it's walking like that.

Right. And what, what my wife did, what I did is we tried to buy that toy to buy us some time. Right. To buy us some time. I went and worked out this morning. I got my coffee. I came back. The screws in the legs and the tail of the dinosaur are strewn about everywhere, everywhere, all over the house. The thing's destroyed.

So that toy had a life cycle of about 30 minutes, 45 minutes, an afternoon, an evening, whatever you want to call it. And now it's done. The thing's destroyed. It's never going to be used again. We use that as the easy way out. When we didn't want to do the hard work, the hard work was actually engaged in some genuine parenting and teach them something or keep them enraptured in something.

What did I do? Took the easy way out, took the easy way out. How is that any different than everyone that's struggling with their art and photo business? You take the easy way out, right? Instead of doing the thing to your heuristic, the thing that you don't want to do, which is stop whatever you're doing, put your damn phone down and go parent your children.

Right. Go spend time

Nick Friend: And that brings us right to this question from TJ. If I'm the only one person trying to get into a market of many, should I even try? So TJ, this is exactly like, I did a whole rant on this. Let me tell you something that you've never heard before. There is no competition in this market.

There's none. Do you know why? Because nobody, nobody is willing to do the marketing work and the regular work that it takes to build a normal business. That's it. Okay. That is a fact. We have talked to at least 50, 000 photographers and artists over the last five or six years, probably more. I'm talking about not just talking like I mean, on phone calls, 30 minute phone calls, right?

And we know everybody, what you have to do is you avoid where everybody is going, right? What everybody's doing. And I'll tell you what that is. You already know what it is. Everyone uploads to Etsy. Everyone uploads to Fine Art America. Everyone, you know, they launch their website. They do a little SEO, a generic website.

They do a little SEO, right? Somebody told them to do SEO, search engine optimization. The easiest things that you can do sitting on your couch eating a bag of Cheetos is what everybody does from all over the world, okay? Everybody all over the world, every artist all over the world is uploading to Fine Art America every day.

Every single day. So those things will never work, right? Those are the areas that are crowded. What 99. 9999 percent of the people will not do is actually build a real business direct. That's it. Okay. And so you can immediately become one of the rare few by making the commitment to go, you know what you're right.

Like, why don't I just treat this like a normal business, like a business in any other industry. Right? Like you go out and you market your business and you own your own customers and you don't sell through third parties. It's okay to sell through third parties, like if they're doing something for you, but you have to build your direct business, your direct channel.

That's the only way you get consistent income. And in the world of building a direct business, Hardly anyone's doing it. You know who's doing it? The 3000 plus art storefronts members. They're the ones who are doing it. And Patrick, what do we see? What do we see? We have, we have world class, world class photographers and artists that come onto our platform with a million plus followers.

They're on the front cover of magazines. And we have members who are totally unknown. Who are outselling them, outselling them until they start doing their own direct marketing. Right. That is like unbelievable to even think of. Right. It just, but it shows you how deep this problem is. No one wants to do the work.

Just go out there and ask. I mean, just think about it yourself. You don't want, you probably don't want to do the work. People are like, where can I get somebody to do the work for me? Where can I find a marketer to do something for me? Who will do it for me? Will you do it for me? Will they do it for me?

Will someone do it for me? No one, nobody's going to do it for you. No one's going to do it for anyone, right? It just doesn't even exist. Right. And so, but, but no one wants to actually do any hard work. And so this is the, this is honestly out of all the industries out there. You think. That because everybody's got a phone in their pocket or that everybody can paint, that there's a lot of competition.

Your competition is almost none. They're unskilled. They have no business expertise. They're lazy. They don't want to do any work and they're under the impression that it's easy to do and that they should throw up a couple of social media posts, send out an email. And they should be selling 100, 000.

Otherwise it's a failure, right? Let them think that let everybody think that because, you know, uh, you'll have more of an advantage. It's really just common sense. And that's what we're talking about here. You know, what we're doing is not, it's not necessarily rocket science, right? It's just that the industry, people walk into the industry and they follow the path.

They follow the sheep off the cliff, right? They follow. And what are the sheep doing? The sheep are telling you to go upload to online galleries. The sheep are telling you to go find local galleries. That's what they're telling you to do, right? Oh, sell online. Okay, here's a big list of sites you can go sell online.

All they are is third party galleries. That's all they are. They're just like offline galleries. They happen to be on and they don't work. And if they do work for you at any time for a small amount of revenue, you'll get the rug pulled under underneath you because they change their algorithm and you're no longer in their bestseller section or whatever it is.

Regardless, you just build, you got to build your house on rock, not say, you know,

Patrick Shanahan: um, okay, hype, hype the upcoming live session and. You know, we're going to replay this video a little bit later because I thought it was a good one and we made some good points in it. So one, we're having a zoom session, literally in 15 minutes, you can get on.

If you click the link in the bio and Instagram, it's in there. You can join, ask whatever questions you'd like. If you're on Facebook, uh, it's, it's in the description. Uh, we'd love to have you join us. There will be a live demo. Uh, and then we're going to do direct one on one marketing consulting, cause that's what we do.

We'd love to hear where you're struggling, uh, what you think your biggest issue is. Uh, if you're like Ashley and got some self limiting beliefs in there, um, that's, that's the way it goes. Well, we'll actually come. We'll get

Nick Friend: under the session, we'll

Patrick Shanahan: get your,

Nick Friend: under the session. You like the fact that you say you're, you're, it's not that you don't wanna do the work.

You're willing to do the work. Fantastic. Come, come talk to us. We'll help you, we'll help you on this session. Love to love to anyone, anyone who understands what we're, what we're talking about and what we're doing that wants to build a business and understands that you build a business, that's how you get consistent income.

You know, that's how you, that's how you get to where you want to be. That's how you reach higher levels of success. You're ready. You're ready to talk to us and come over here. You, you will fit in with our group and our audience. And in fact, you see the comment from Andy Crawford up there. Well, actually it's on YouTube because we're live on YouTube right now.

Andy's a member and he said, he's going to pop on just to say a few words to some of the members. Maybe he'll take a couple of questions from people who, uh, Andy's been a member of our storefronts for a couple of years, but Um, super cool guy. Awesome.

Patrick Shanahan: All right. I need no problem, Ashley. Happy to do

Nick Friend: it.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah. I need to get in there and get prepping. So we'll, uh, we'll end this here and hope to see you guys on. Right. If not, it starts top of

Nick Friend: the hour here. So 10 minutes hop in there. We answer your questions. Oh yeah. And a reminder, we have a new sale, uh, going to join our storefronts. We've got, we launched a new sale, um, to join our storefronts at a discounted rate.

So if you're interested, request a demo, um, it's if you're on Instagram, the links in the bio and you can see it in the feed right there, there's always a link up there too. And one of our team members will get back to you also on the zoom call. Um, Joseph, one of the members of our outreach team is going to be on, he's going to run a really short demo at the beginning.

So if you've never seen a demo and you want to see the pricing and all that, he's going to be on there. He's going to answer a bunch of the common questions. So it's a great opportunity to just, you know, hop on there and check that out. It's going to happen right at the very beginning. Okay. We'll see you guys there in 10 minutes.

Patrick Shanahan: Yep. We'll also stream it on Facebook too. So you can just check out our Facebook page, which is a really good thing to like, by the way, if you haven't, if you haven't liked going to Facebook, like the art store, friends page every time we go live, which. Six days a week at this juncture. Hop on. Hop on. Hop on.

Ask a question. All right. See you guys.