The Next Big Thing in Art Marketing w/ CEO of Art Storefronts

In this special episode, we welcome Nick Friend, the visionary CEO of Art Storefronts. Nick shares the evolution of the art industry over the past two decades and discusses how technology and marketing strategies have reshaped the landscape for artists worldwide. From the early days of print-on-demand to the rise of e-commerce and automated print fulfilment, Nick traces the journey that has transformed the artist's role and responsibilities. He provides valuable insights into the limitations and challenges artists faced in each phase of this evolution, which not only encompassed product creation but also marketing, distribution, and fulfilment. Diving deeper into the discussion, Nick introduces us to the groundbreaking "Co-Pilot Model" – a revolutionary approach designed to significantly streamline and enhance the business processes for artists. This model, which is quickly becoming a game-changer in the industry, enables artists to focus on creating incredible art while the technical and marketing aspects are expertly handled by a dedicated co-pilot. Listen in as Nick emphasizes the significance of specializing in art creation while leaving the technological and promotional intricacies to those who excel in those areas. This shift in roles, he argues, is the key to unlocking massive potential and growth for artists in the modern digital era. Don't miss out on this insightful discussion which sheds light on the future of art entrepreneurship and how artists can adapt, thrive and ultimately solve the 'starving artist' problem. Whether you're an artist just launching your business or you're already established and looking to scale, this episode is packed with invaluable advice that could redefine your career trajectory.

Podcast Transcribe

Brandon Carter:Welcome to another episode of the Art Marketing Podcast. Uh, I'm Brandon again, guest hosting for Pat on CoPilot Stories. I've got a really exciting guest. Um, good friend of mine and, and, uh, someone that, uh, you know, is a pioneer in the art marketing industry. I've got Nick Friend, CEO of Art Storefronts. Uh, welcome Nick. Welcome to the show.

Nick Friend:Thanks, Brandon.

Brandon Carter:It's uh, I think it's been a while since you've been on the Art Marketing Podcast. We decided to get in this conversation and, um, wanted to chat with you today because you wrote an article on our Marketing CoPilot, uh, called The Next Big Thing in Art Sales: How the CoPilot Model Will Change the Game for Artists. And we'll get to that here in a little bit, but for the listeners out there, and maybe some folks that don't know your background, you've been in the art business for decades almost. And you've seen a lot of major shifts happen. You know, you've seen the ups and downs, you've seen how, uh, you know, we've had pandemics that have changed the landscape. We've had all kinds of things that have happened. So I wanted to see if you could just give a brief history lesson and walk us through some of the big shifts that, uh, you've seen in the art-selling industry.

Nick Friend:Yeah, for sure. I mean, there has, the key thing is, is there hasn't been that many. Right. And so every time there's been one, it's, it's created a huge unlock for artists and photographers. Right. And so I think it's, these things are important to know, and especially because like, as a result of technology, you know, and the internet and, and just computers and all of that, there's been a few that have happened in the last, like 30 years, right. That have been very profound. And prior to that, you know, there, there really weren't any that were happening for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Um, and the way that artists had to run their businesses in those days, which was largely, uh, they relied on third parties like galleries or art dealers, depending on how far you go back, right. Where they had limited distribution. So they would only be selling to like the local gallery or galleries if they were lucky. They didn't have like global distribution or national distribution. So they were very limited in what they could do. And then in addition to that, the galleries, um, and, uh, the art dealers, you know, had way too much power in these relationships. And, you know, like anything, uh, what does that saying? Like an ultimate power corrupts or absolute power corrupts? Absolutely. I think that's it. Yeah. Yeah. It's like in anything, if you have that much power, um, you can, you know, take the highest percentage of revenue and, you know, that's the way that these relationships sort of evolved and went. For a long, long, long period of time, um, which was a big contributing factor to the starving artists problem. Right. And so every one of these unlocks, right, coming up to what I believe is the next evolution of selling art, which we'll get into, um, all of these unlocks. Were very profound moments for the individual artist entrepreneur in, in stopping or, or, or, uh, you know, uh, minimizing the starving artist's problem the way that it was in the past that I just described.

Nick Friend:And so that's what's super important about it. So the first one that happened, uh, and I, and this is right when I was actually getting into the art market, was in the late nineties. And it was, you know, you could call it print on demand. Okay. But what actually happened was inkjet printers were released, right? Like in the nineties and, um, you know, people were buying them and all that stuff. And then companies like Epson and Canon and HP released wide format printers. In fact, uh, I think Epson was the first one who released like a very user-friendly version of it. Okay. And what and what they released was a 17-inch, a 24-inch, and a 44-inch wide printer. Okay. That any individual could buy and make their own prints. They could buy, they could print one at a time. Now, this was so profound because the way that the art market worked prior to this with serigraphs, which is called serigraphy, right. Or lithography, uh, lithographs, which are kind of like, it's kind of like poster art, um, believe it or not, a lot of lithographs that were sold, there were lithographs that were done with limited edition. So these were not posters. These could be actually pretty expensive prints. Okay. But big publishing companies would have to decide which artists they were going to represent and what specific image or two or five that they were going to publish for the artist. And then they would have to invest in a print run. Um, and by the inventory, right. And, and they would be making a guess. They didn't know whether it was going to sell or not. And this actually became a huge problem for the publishing companies. And they'd end up with a bunch of inventory that didn't sell because you're literally picking racehorses, trying to guess what art is going to sell. Right. It's kind of like the, it's kind of like the book game now, right. Where you have these big publishing houses, they're making bets on authors. And if they don't sell, they're stuck with us inventory.

Brandon Carter:That's right.

Nick Friend:And so you had to make this huge investment. Um, and, and, uh, and so the artist needed somebody to make an investment in them to get the inventory and to get it out there and, and stuff like that. And, but the artist was really limited because they might've had this great body of work. You know, and they're like, I'm only getting exposure for one of these, like whether that was one original or five originals in a gallery or prints in a gallery that wasn't representative of their body of work and without websites at that time, and you know, nobody had websites in the late 90s. right? Especially individual entrepreneurs. Um, there was really no way for anyone to see the rest of their catalog or to get it out there. And so it was very limiting. And so what the, what print on demand did is it allowed individual artists and photographers to buy their own printer and make their own prints along with, you know, there was an explosion in small mom-and-pop, what I call print studios or printing printing companies, right?

Uh, make a, uh, an inkjet print have a higher perceived value, but it was literally invented by like a handful of people that I know. Um, anyway, so that was a really big deal. So like you could imagine an artist that was just starting up and wanted to go sell at a local art fair in their city or town could actually make their own prints or buy them from a local print shop one at a time of like, you know, 30, 40 or 50 different images on, on, uh, different media types and bring them to the show and then sell them. They didn't have to go do a big print run, which they, most of them would never do, you know, um, and, uh, and they could actually like, you know, get that stuff done. So this was a really big deal. That was a really big deal. So that was the first one. The second one came, you know, a few years later, which was E-commerce. All right. So e-commerce and I would say that the ability to easily launch an e-commerce website and show your gallery and sell your art and have your own art gallery as an artist that's open 24/7, you know, globally to anyone in the world. So now you've unlocked the ability for the artist. All right. To sell direct to the consumer. Big, big deal. Okay. So instead of being totally reliant on third parties to sell their art, an artist could now show their entire catalog to everybody. All right. So you've solved that problem and anyone could buy from them and they can have a direct relationship with their customer. This is a huge deal because artists now could acquire their own leads. Right? Like getting emails from people and phone numbers or whatever it was at that time, you know, and send emails out to people and allow people to like, follow them and subscribe to them. This was pre-social media, by the way, I'll get into that in a second. Um, but by doing that, it was the first time that artists could really own their own customer list. You know, and own their own leads, people who are following them, but might not have bought them yet that you need to nurture to get a sale. Sometimes it could take months. Sometimes it can take a year or two, but this is what every single business has to do. You have to acquire leads and you have to acquire customers. And if you ever want to sell your business one day, you know, um, or build a valuable business, right. You have to own your customers, period. Right. So many artists at that time were so stuck with. Art dealers and publishers, and then they'd get dropped, you know, or their, or their art kind of went out of style and that happens all the time.

Nick Friend:Like one for a couple of years, you're hot in a gallery and then your stuff doesn't sell anymore. Trust me, they'll be the first person to drop you like, you know, uh, like a rock. And they just bring the next artisan because they've got a retail space and they need to make the most of it, you know, yes, it's crazy.

Brandon Carter:We forget how recent people were scared to put credit card information online to make a, you know, small $100 purchase, let alone, you know, buying originals, buying a several thousand dollar piece.

Nick Friend:That's right. That's right. So. You know, what happened from there? So e-commerce opened up, but it, you know, over the last 20 years of that, let's say it's just gotten easier and easier and easier to launch an e-commerce store and to have all of the features and functionality that you need in order to provide the proper experience for an art buyer, right? Visualization features, um, where they can try the art on their wall in their home with augmented reality, for example, where they can change the paint color on a wall, you know, in a wall simulation, they can change the room settings. They can look at it framed, unframed. They can look at it in 3D, you know, whether it's on metal or it might be on a merch item, like a mug or a tote bag or a puzzle, right?

Brandon Carter:Art Storefronts' main value prop kind of comes in.

Nick Friend:Yeah. So that's the main thing that we did with Art Storefronts, um, you know, for the website, right. Is to give them an e-commerce website with everything that they need, you know, because that at the time didn't exist. Okay. So what I, and I guess I'll talk about that for like a minute or two. It's worth it. Um, so what, when, as e-commerce was evolving, what I saw in my background, and it was through my background at Breathing Color, which is a company I founded in 2003, which is a manufacturer. It's one of the largest manufacturers in the world of inkjet canvas, fine art paper, photography paper, all for high, highest quality art and photography reproduction, right? And so we got to see who was buying the most material and, you know, selling the most art, so to speak. And there was a shift that we saw, um, after the great financial crisis, like 08, 09, 2010, where the, um, the companies that had a very robust online presence. Call it like the Art.coms level, right? Cause they invest, they had to invest millions of dollars into their own e-commerce websites that they developed from scratch and they had framing tools. You know, they had wall visualization tools and the things that I'm talking about. Um, in a more crude fashion in those years, right? But they were selling tons and tons of art. You can go look it up. It was crazy. And then meanwhile, you know, as the online revolution was happening, the artist was sitting there with generic websites with nothing like websites, you know, from generic platforms that we're all familiar with. Right. And, uh, call it GoDaddy, Squarespace, whatever. Take your pick. Wix. And they're, they're, they're using technology that people who are selling toilet paper and swim fins and ladies' handbags, you know, words.

Brandon Carter:Yeah, exactly.

Nick Friend:So for whatever it is, right. Anybody, you know, you, you launch, but those types of products are very low friction. You, there's not much you need to know or see in order to buy it. But art is one of those high friction items. You know, where you've got multiple people making a buying decision, usually like husband and wife or something like that, or roommates. Um, you've got, you know, what size is going to work on my wall?

Nick Friend:Is it going to fit with my interior design or my couches or my bed or, you know, all of these different things. You've got interior designers looking to outfit hotels that need to make sure that, uh, they're, they're buying art that's going to work for that setting. And so, um, there was a huge dichotomy between what the really successful art sellers had, you know, and then the individual artists and photographers. And so, so that was a huge problem to solve. And that's what Art Storefronts first set out to do was. Hey, let's give the little guy everything.

Brandon Carter:These guys have started arming the rebels.

Nick Friend:Yeah. Arm the rebels. Exactly. They're selling hundreds of millions of dollars of art a year, literally hundreds of millions a year. Uh, but like each company, so they were selling billions. Okay. But they would literally sell hundreds of millions of dollars using this type of technology. And so very simple premise, arm the rebels, you know, give the artists exactly what they need. And so you can see that that was a big step right there, you know? So now the artists have multi-million-dollar technology at their disposal that, you know, nobody else has an advantage over them. The big online art companies have no advantage over them. Zero. In fact, now they're even, they're even behind the individual artists, you know, with Art Storefronts because there's way better technology and a way better buying experience for, for the consumer. Okay. And so these are huge leaps that have gone on. Right. And, uh, and then, so the next one that, the next leap that happened, I would say this one's a little bit smaller than the previous two, but, but very important is just automated print fulfillment. Okay. Because at the time you could have your own e-commerce store. All right. You could have all the bells and whistles or whatever, you know, um, at that time, the bells and whistles really weren't there, but the automated print fulfillment allowed the artists to, um, it allows an artist to connect their website via API to some of the best printing companies in the world. Okay. And have those printing companies who are at scale, they are huge companies. They have the best printers, the best ink, the best quality. You cannot replace what they do. Okay. And they have the cheapest shipping rates because they're so big. They have the cheapest rates on canvas, metal, acrylic, everything you'd ever want to print on. You know, they have the cheapest. Packaging boxes, all of that, and they can ship internationally cheap as well. And so for the artists, this was key because it unlocked their ability to sell their art on any type of product that they might want to do at any price that they want it to and have, uh, uh, a professional printing company automatically print those orders and ship them and do so in a very professional fashion at a very low cost.

Nick Friend:You know, that allowed the artists to completely take that headache off their plate and make a good, a really good profit margin on it, you know, and control their entire offering. And so that was a very big unlock because it was such a big headache for artists. And so you have artists, even to this day that don't have automated print fulfillment that are sitting there offering like their images only on canvas or only on paper, or maybe only on those. And they're missing metal and other types of media types that are best selling, like some of the hottest sellers for the last, like five years, right. Metal being one of those, and they can't offer it because they can't do metal because you cannot do that on your own with just an inkjet printer. You need a dye sublimation, uh, printer and, uh, and a dye and dye sublimation equipment in order to be able to make a metal print. Right? And so there's there's things like that that have to, uh, that you have to be able to take advantage of in order to sell those items. And then, of course, all of the framing artists are not running their own frame shop. You know, and, and frames, you know, uh, 15 or 20 percent of, of orders are probably going to come with frames from what we see in our own data. That's an easy upsell to make more money. Right. And if you, if you have that headache, you're not even going to do it. I don't usually don't see artists offering that if they don't have automated fulfillment. And so there's losing all of that extra revenue on all of their orders. Um, or if they do offer any framing, they're offering like, you know, some ready-made frames that are that are cheap and very simple. They don't have like a broad array of frames that consumers with, you know, any type of home, whether it's modern or it's, uh, you know, Spanish Mediterranean, like, or it's like a hotel that has like some sort of different vibe that everyone will want, right? And so you want to have an offering that appeals to the broadest part of the market. And that's what automated print fulfillment unlocked.

Brandon Carter:Got it. It seemed like a very interesting thread just in this industry, right? It's, it's, you, you have a lot of moats that are being kind of torn down over time, right? In the beginning, it seems like you kind of have these publisher kingmakers that would curate and sort of pick winners over time. That went away. Um, then you had heavy inventory costs that kind of went away with the individual inkjet printers. Um, and then the distribution side of things, right? Where you had like these big online marketplaces. People like Art Storefronts and companies that were focused on the individual so-called arming the rebel gave them all the tools for distribution. Um, and so now we're here and I want to kind of get into, uh, I love that history lesson. Uh, some things I didn't know about. I didn't know where Giclée came from.

Nick Friend:I always wondered that. Um, but I want to get into some of this, uh, co-pilot. Things I'm hearing about because you've teased, you know, in this article about a major, another major shift, another paradigm, another wave coming, um, around this art business co-pilot model. Could you elaborate on this and tell the audience, you know, sort of how this model differentiates from the traditional ways that artists have, you know, sort of managed their businesses. It sounds like it's more on the, the marketing and distribution side. And a lot of the innovations we talked about so far have been on the operations and sort of enabling artists, but it sounds like this co-pilot model is a little bit different.

Nick Friend:Yeah, it's, it's mainly on the marketing side, but it's also the tech side as well, you know, and, and, you know, before I, before I go into that, I like, I want to underscore the point that you made because it relates to, you know, co-pilot in this next evolution, which is every one of these points that I just discussed was disrupting somebody in a power position, you know, and, and shifting the power to the artist. All right. So this is, these are all amazing things. Right. Every one of those occurrences shifted power to the artist and unlocked something that the artist couldn't do, you know, and that's a, that's a major, major point because co-pilot is doing the exact same thing, right? This whole philosophy, this next evolution, it's doing the exact same thing. Right. And so what is the problem there? Is that okay. So let's, let's review artists. If you, if an artist is taking advantage of everything that's happened, they have, you know, an e-commerce website with all of the features and functionality that are designed to sell art and to provide the best experience possible to an art consumer, right? They have automated print fulfillment using print on demand, so they can offer everything in their catalog. You know, they, uh, they, they can offer any type of product they want or media type canvas, metal, acrylic, you know, merchandise items, uh, like mugs or tote bags or whatever. Um, they have global distribution. Anybody can buy from them at any time, 24/7 from their gallery online, your gallery. Is your website is this e-commerce website, right? That's the artist gallery. It just happens to be online, but that is their fine art gallery. Right. Um, and you know, they can ship anywhere in the world at a very cheap price, so they can service anyone. All right. But what's left, what's left here. So artists have to be tech experts. They have to learn how to manage their own website. They're constantly updating their website, you know, uploading new images, setting their pricing, you know, doing all these different things. And, uh, so they have this tech burden. They, they have to learn these platforms, um, and they have to constantly waste time or spend time updating their website. And there's no leverage in that, you know, like. There's just, you're not like materially improving your business when you're just updating your site. I mean, of course, if you're just updating some images and people are going to buy those images, that's a worthwhile update, right? But generally speaking, the vast majority of the tech that artists are doing is largely a waste of their time. You know, that's not something that's going to double or triple their sales. Okay. Um, in addition to that, another thing you have leftover is marketing, right? So you think about a good way of thinking about this is like. Multimillion-dollar art artist companies. Big ones. I'm talking Peter Lik, you know, Weiland, uh, Gray Malin. Go down the list. These are big companies. Um, Thomas Kinkade is another one from many, many years back, uh, selling many millions of dollars a year of art, you know, have full teams, full marketing teams. 3, 5, 7, 10 full-time marketing employees that are only working on marketing, you know, as well as a whole tech team that's managing the website. The artist isn't doing any of it, you know? They're just creating, yeah. They're just creating. They're just, their job is just to create and make a better product, okay? And when they make a better product, they increase the marketability of the entire business, right? Because, because if you, if you only paint, uh, you know, beaches. And then you start painting cities. You're going to attract a different audience. And now you've just potentially doubled your potential rev, like audience size, which has increased the upper ceiling of, of the revenue potential of your business. And so they're able to do that. You know, in this amazing scenario. And not only that the artist gets to enjoy their life much better than having to sit here tinkering with the tech burden, and then trying to become a marketing expert, which give me a break. How do you do that? You know? And so that's the thing is that the artist still has that tech burden and they've still got this major marketing burden. They have to get exposure. You have to get your art out there. And that's why artists. Traditionally have been like, you know, trying to rely on galleries or hoping that galleries would sell their art because galleries at least like had people walking into, they didn't give you any like global distribution or even national or even statewide distribution, but they had a little tiny bit of distribution. They might sell an original for you, you know, and that's better than you trying to do it on your own and not have, you know, not being able to. So, um, so. This is where the evolution, the next evolution of an art business is okay. And this is what co-pilot, you know, what we've created at Art Storefronts is all about. So to go into that for a second, you know, number one, um, you never manage your website again. Right? Like you're not a website expert. We know that artists are not website experts. Why we have over 10,000 of them managing their websites. And at a certain point, you know, we, we just said, this is pointless.

Nick Friend:All of your websites are out of date. We're releasing all of these features. You haven't activated them. You we've released them because all we do is study e-commerce trends and we know what is creating, you know, the highest average order value, uh, the highest conversion rates. Conversion rates are the number of people who buy divided by the number of people who visit your website. Like all of these things in the art business are critical. And, uh, all we saw was that artists are just totally out of date on all of this stuff, even ones that are selling really well. And so you're, you're not going to be a tech expert. And then if you, if you even fast forward further, Brandon with artificial intelligence and what's coming. Every artist is you're not going to be managing your website. It's gone. It's going to be over anyway, right? It's just a matter of time. Okay. And so we just figured that we need to do this, we need to hire a, a, a big enough team to be able to do it and do it at a, at a ridiculously low price. And pr like, don't even worry about making money on it. It just needs to happen for a bigger reason, which I'll get into in a second. But let me now go over to marketing. Same thing, right? An artist is not going to become a marketing expert. Okay, it's it's that. In addition, we've seen we have people who are actually pretty good at marketing that sell more than anyone than we know. Top-selling artists, right? Brandon, their marketing expertise is like 20 percent or 15 percent of what it should be. Right. They're leaving all of that money on the table, all of that success on the table. And so they're just barely doing decent marketing. And I'm talking like we have 10,000 customers and we've spoken to over 200,000 artists at Art Storefronts over the last 10 years, like these are the unicorns and they're only at that level. Right. And why is it? Because. You've got to create art. That's what you want to do. You know, you've got to run all these other, you've got, you're managing your website, you've got admin, you've got all this different stuff. And then now you've got to learn how to blog. You've got to learn how to send and become an email, email marketing expert, a social media expert, you know, needless to say the trends on all of these are changing all the time. Like every three to six months that what like posts. That are like working really well on social media are no longer working. Emails that were working well before are no longer working subject lines, you know, on emails that get that used to work before are now getting you in the spam folder. It's like you, you artists are not up to date on all of this stuff. And it's another headache that gets in the way of this bigger thing. Uh, which is, and this is where all the leverage is for the artists is. Iterating on their product, meaning their art. That is where all the leverage is. Okay. And that's the most important point of this is that if you want to have a much bigger art business, it's way more about your content, your subject matter. Okay. And the marketability of your subject matter than anything. Okay. And if you combine. a great product with great marketing, then you have magic. Okay. That's where you have magic. If you, if you have a, uh, an unmarketable product that that's never been sold and you have the best marketing strategy in the world by the best marketer that's ever been alive, you still will have 0 in sales because the best marketing can't sell a bad product. And the best marketing can't like. Turn a, uh, a decent product into like a 5 million art business, right? Right. And so that's the key in this next evolution, right? The artists should be offloading the tech to an expert and the marketing to experts, okay. As much as possible. It doesn't mean you don't participate in any of it. But you can now do that. That's what we've made possible at Art Storefronts is doing market and in an unbelievable volume of marketing and promotion of your art at an insanely low price. So that artists have a marketing department, Brandon, that's on par with a multimillion-dollar company.

Brandon Carter:Let's talk about some of the challenges they would have prior to this. So, um, you know, you, you kind of mentioned earlier on, you'd have to do lead gen, you'd have to generate, uh, emails, set up your, you know, MailChimp and all these campaigns. You have to learn email marketing. What's a good subject line. You'd have to be an expert across. multidimensional channels in marketing. And, you know, as, as I know, being a marketer myself, um, and you kind of alluded to this, it's, you're always chasing your tail, right? Like it's, you're chasing the newest thing where the attention is and it gets really exhausting. Uh, you really, you really can never sit on your laurels though. So the options were, you know, be a lifelong student of marketing and be a practitioner, get better and better and fine-tune your skills there. Or, and you kind of talked about this a little bit, you outsource that to a large agency, you know, where you're having to pay several thousand dollars a month, or, you know, hiring people for several thousands of dollars a year to kind of take on the marketing for you. So just, and if you're new to selling your art or you're just starting your business, these are expenses that sort of make it prohibitive to hire somebody.

Nick Friend:Right. That's right. Because marketing is expensive and why it's, it's because it's an insane amount of work. Like there's a lot of hours of work. It's not like. You know, agencies or anything like that are trying to rip people off. I mean, Brandon, you know, you're, you, you've been a marketer for 20 years. I have to write and it's, it's a lot of work. Anyone who has put emails together and sent email campaigns and I was just thinking emails, crafting a, you know, 50-word email can take hours.

Brandon Carter:Yeah.

Nick Friend:You know, just giving all the, giving all the expertise and psychology and everything else. So, and then you, and then you send it out and you, and you, and you're, you see your open rates are really low and your click rates and you're like, why? Like what am I, and then you find yourself reading a blog article about how do I improve my open rates and click rates and, you know, and then you're reading books on it and then you're, you know, it's, you know, years and years and years of becoming an absolute expert in this stuff.

Nick Friend:Right. And so it's just hours and hours of work. Your art has to be promoted. There's a great line by Patrick, our head of marketing that he says, like. You can have the best website in the world, like a, like a Ferrari, you know, but, but that's just a Ferrari sitting in your driveway with no gas in it. It's going nowhere. The gas is the marketing. You know, so fish are not going to jump into your boat with your random website on the internet. Okay. And you're not going to SEO your website. Don't buy any SEO packages. SEO stopped working like 10 years ago. Okay. And it's all getting up uprooted anyway by artificial intelligence. Um, with, uh, you know, these chat tools where searches are going to be starting to route through that. So that'll be a whole nother disruption of SEO. But anyways, I'm digressing. The important point on this is, is that you have to promote your art. Okay. No, one's going to do it for you. And by promoting it means getting it out there and getting eyeballs on it. How many eyeballs a day, a month, a week are seeing your art? Are seeing every individual piece of art that you have, right? These are very, very important points. Like think about it right now. Like every artist that's listening to this in the last 30 days, how many pieces do you have on your website or in your catalog, right? How many people saw each one of those? I hate to break it to you that when people go to your website, they're not going through and looking at every piece of art that you have at all. If you don't believe me, go check your analytics. Go look at your product page, 30 seconds, 30 seconds on your homepage. They forget everything they saw, except the one that they might've liked. And they click on that one. That's all they remember. And they're gone, right? If they don't buy anything. And if you look at your product page views in your analytics, you'll see. That like almost nobody is going to those individual pages, right? It's very, very few. And so what you think might be happening is not actually happening. You need to bring your art to them. That's where social media and email really come into play, especially social media. You need to get your art on main street of the internet. That's what these social media platforms are. Facebook, Instagram, for example, this is like, uh, you know, CNN and Fox news. 10 years ago, right? Like this is the main street where those ads were driving a lot of stuff. These, this is the main street of the internet. And so when you're posting on social media, you're, you're giving your art a chance to get eyeballs on it and you need eyeballs on your art, right? So that's the benefit of growing a following and growing an email list is you're getting people's people's attention that you can show your art to. So if you think about the last 30 days or even the last 12 months. A lot of artists listening to this right now probably are like, Oh, wow, I've had my website up there and I've seen some people visiting, you know, but nobody's really looking at my images and go, they look at their analytics and it's confirmed like nobody's really looking at all of these different things. And so you're not going anywhere. Your business is going nowhere. You know, you have to promote your art externally. And get it out there just like the multimillion-dollar art companies do, right? They're doing social media posts every day, you know, or close to it or more. Some of them are doing three to five posts a day. Uh, and they're sending emails out a couple of times a week and so forth, right? It's just. Active promotion of art, it's, no, it's no more complicated than that. It has to be done. And anyone that is selling a lot of art is doing it. Anyone who is not selling a lot of art is not doing it.

Brandon Carter:Got it. I mean, it sounds like it's, it's really just people that are not doing, it's a tree falling in the woods. No wind seeing it. Never getting the light of day.

Nick Friend:Exactly.

Brandon Carter:Um, and, and many artists unfortunately, like they're new to entrepreneurship, they're new to business, they just don't even know that they think that they just launch a website and like fish are gonna jump into their boat and just start buying. And like, that doesn't work. And it's, it's not, it's not just about art. This is any business. You could launch any business in any industry with a website. The same thing is going to happen. You know, it doesn't matter. You have to promote the business. I don't, if you just launched a restaurant, you know, in town, you have to promote the restaurant. Okay, for people to come. Otherwise, you're going to have an empty restaurant.

Nick Friend:Absolutely.

Brandon Carter:So let's talk about a little, like, kind of get into the details. We've got a sort of a high-level understanding of Copilot, the Copilot model. You know, essentially, you're outsourcing a lot of these, uh, tasks. You know, marketing plus some tech sort of management. Yes. Uh, to a tech-enabled service, right? That, that, uh, you know, like Art Storefronts would take care of for you. What is it doing on a, like a day-to-day basis for you, for, for me, the artist or photographer.

Nick Friend:Okay. So on the tech side, if you need to change anything on your website, You just let our team know, and we do it for you, right? Like, Hey, I need to upload these images and put them in my store and price them like this. You, you, you do that in a minute, you're back to creating art, you know, and doing that. And it all just gets done for you. And, you know, you get a, you know, an email back. Hey, it's done here. Here it is. Check it out if you want to, but it's done, right? So you have that headache lifted. Um, so the tech side is really simple, right? Um, the marketing is. Very sophisticated. All right. So you, for those who don't know for many, many years, Art Storefronts has provided an art marketing calendar. Okay. It's a, to all of our customers, it's a 365-day a year art marketing calendar that tells you exactly what to do on every day. What social media posts you should do, how you should do them, what your text should be, what emails you should send, and when, what your subject line should be, what the copy should be, you know, all of the strategy within it, when you're running Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Valentine's day, these other big art selling holidays that you need to take advantage of all year long.

Nick Friend:We basically wanted our artists to have just a huge advantage over everybody else and be able to do the marketing DIY on their own. But according to a strategy that was proven and worked, how do we know that it worked and was proven all of our customers are doing it or the vast majority and have been for eight years. And we have all the data and all of the research we do, we, we track all of it to understand what, what emails, what social media posts, what strategies are working, and then we update all of the, all of the, uh, materials. To make sure that the artists that are following it, um, have the latest and greatest proven tactics and strategies that are actually working. Right. So when they're going to spend their own time and hours doing marketing, they could do it in the right place. Now co-pilot does all of that for them at an insanely low price. So we've built a huge team, Brandon, a huge team of people so that we could take, we could look at all of the tasks that the art marketing calendar does and even do more, but it's almost like a hundred hours a month. All right, if you do everything that we want you to do to obviously to have like a great art business, you know, um, that can sell a lot, co-pilot the whole point of co-pilot is to do all of it for you. And so that you are consistently marketing, you have a proven strategy that you're plugging into. You basically have. An entire marketing team, you know, that's working for you, um, at an insanely low price. Okay. Now we still encourage our artists that they should still make social media posts on their own if they want to, like if they're very particular about their social media or they're constantly doing videos that are really personal, love that. They should do that. But the bottom line is your art has to be promoted. Okay. All of it. If you want it, if it's on your website and you want to promote it, it needs to get promoted. Okay. And so what a lot of artists tend to do is they only, they're only promoting stuff that they just recently painted, you know, the stuff that they might've painted years ago, which, you know, if you want to make passive income from your art, You need to keep selling what you made two, three, four, five, 10 years ago. And the only way you're ever going to do that is if you promote it again, every once in a while. You don't have to promote it every month, but you probably should promote it a couple of times a year. You need to promote everything. So if you look at like how big of a catalog you might have. Whether it's your, your, your new fans might not have seen your older work.

Brandon Carter:They definitely didn't see it.

Nick Friend:Yeah, they, they, nobody seen it, you know, um, and especially when with social media, they tell you Facebook and Instagram literally tell you that, um, when you make a social media post, they only show it to like 2 percent of your audience. So if you think that everybody who's following you is seeing every post you're making. You are, you have the wrong perception of how social media works and you don't even know what the platform is telling you. They're literally telling you, we're not going to show it to 98 percent of your audience. Okay. Think about that. Why do they do that? Because they want people to buy ads, right? That's, that's the whole point of it. But if you understand that you, you realize that, um, you know, every image that you post, Facebook and Instagram are going to show it to like a different subset of people in your audience. And, and they'll, they'll usually always show it to your top, top, top fans that are constantly like commenting on your posts and stuff like that, but then they'll sprinkle it out based on who they believe is going to like that image and how they know that is because they collect, I forget what the number is they, that they publish, it's like it. Five or 600, 000 data points that they have on every single user. Every time a user stops the scroll in their feed, right? They see something and they stop, or they click on something or they comment on something, or they like something. Facebook knows everything all of us has done on all of those platforms and that we're doing every day. So if they think that one of your followers might like a waterfall image. Because there's something related to waterfalls that, that they've been interested in in the past, they're probably going to show that guy, that image, but if it's something else completely different, they're not going to show it to that guy.

Brandon Carter:And so you want to get there. All goes kind of know they're all goes know what's in the images. They know what's in the videos. Exactly. I read an article recently where I would see I'm here in Austin and I see a lot of Austin ads. Um, but I found out that the, you know, uh, because I've posted stuff. From Austin. It knows I'm in Austin based on the images. And so it matches to those ads. It's just wild stuff.

Nick Friend:So it sounds like, you know, the algorithms have gotten really good at just finding, you know, a match for your product. So the more you post, the more serendipity you're kind of building up with your business to go out and find collectors, find new customers. Don't worry about just posting once and over posting because 20 people are going to see that out of your thousand followers. The more shots. There's a reason why Gary Vaynerchuk, like probably the most knowledgeable and skilled person in social media, right? If you don't know who he is, look him up. Um, he says that you need to do 20 to 40 posts a day and people like that cause every platform.

Brandon Carter:Yeah.

Nick Friend:On every platform and people's jaws drop. They're like, what, what are you talking about? And it's because people have misconceptions about. You know, over posting or like the way that the algorithms really work and he doesn't, you know, and like I said, if you do a little bit of research, you start understanding.

Nick Friend:So if you, if you do five posts a day of different art pieces, You're going to have your, all you're doing is getting more eyeballs on those five pieces and it's going to be different people. And the same thing goes with email. I mean, email is way more obvious because email, you see that you only have a 20 percent open rate. So 80 percent of the people that are on your email list didn't even see it. Didn't even see it, you know, so whatever image you had in there, only those people opened it. And it's not the same people every time, just like social, it's only the people that that subject line that you wrote resonated with. Right. And there's going to be different people every time. And that's why you want to mix that stuff up. A good marketing strategy will mix all of this stuff up, you know, so that you're, you're, uh, appealing to the widest portion of the audience that you've acquired and that you're building.

Brandon Carter:Got it. So what is the, like, how does the role of the artist or photographer change, you know, in this, this new sort of paradigm? Well, you mentioned they could still do a little bit of marketing, but how does it affect the quantity and quality there are, you know, what, what, what should they be focused on in this next sort of wave?

Nick Friend:Yeah. So, so now we can summarize the big unlock of the things that I just talked about, right? The big unlock is that you're now in the same position as the Gray Malin, Peter Lik, Weiland, these big multimillion-dollar artists who, who have a high volume of, uh, uh, and, uh, consistency of marketing happening for them because they have full-blown marketing departments. They're sending emails every week. They're doing posts every day, right? And, uh, and, and the artist has this being done while they get to that, while they get to create, right? So that's the biggest difference. The artist gets to spend the maximum amount of time creating, which is what they usually want to do. Right, which is great. But it's what I say, you know, I'll add the business part to it. The big unlock and why this is such a profound evolution for the artist is that that's where their leverage is, Brandon. That's where they've always needed to be focusing. Everyone who is struggling with sales. Has a product problem and a marketing problem. You're either, you've either got a good product that can sell a lot more and you need to have outbound marketing done. Right. You need to solve that marketing problem so that like eyeballs are actually getting on your art. Right. But if you actually have eyeballs getting on your art. And your art is not selling at the level that you want, um, or not at all. Then you have a product problem, which is your art, right? You need to create and focus on creating more marketable art. And it's actually not that hard to do. You just need to know how to think about it the right way. Um, quick examples. I won't go deep on it, but, um, cause you know, we, we have a, we train our customers on all this stuff. We've got a course on it. Um, but the, the two things I could just say is like, there's an artist, uh, that, um, you know, was really struggling selling almost nothing. Okay. Doing marketing, promoting it. It's like, what? It's not working. It's not working. You know, um, and I asked, it's like, was it working before? And they're like, no, it wasn't. It's like, okay. So you're basically just like putting gas behind a product. That's not resonating, you know, and just go try painting something way more marketable, just as a test, just humor me and do it. There was resistance, but they did it right. They painted a celebrity and Brandon, their sales exploded in like days. They released it. It was like the day they released it. All of a sudden they sold like 10,000 of prints, right? And they came back and I talked to him. They're like, Oh my goodness. I had no idea that I was pushing a cart up a hill, you know, um, rather than like going downhill. I didn't, I didn't realize I've been sitting here trying to force this. You know, and this just opened my eyes up. There was another photographer who was, you know, just taking photos of a city, like a local city that he lives in. Um, and you know, he was selling, he was actually selling. Okay. But he's like, gosh, I want to retire from my job and I need to sell like a hundred thousand dollars or more a year in order to do that. And so, um, you know, we told him the same thing. Like, you got to think about marketability. You got to think about product, right? That's where you're at. He goes and he starts taking pictures of Disneyland. Okay. No joke. Sales explode now at the 100,000 level and was able to retire from his job and do his photography full time. Right. And so, you know, people ask about like, um, you know, the first thought on many people's minds is, well, how did they get a license? They didn't even get licensing deals. Okay. I'm not telling you to do that or, uh, but I'm just take, take the broader point of it and understand that there are things like, like, for example, where you went to college. What teams you like, what athletes you like, what, what city you live in? What are the, what are the best spots that are popular where people get engaged or, you know, that are, uh, uh, spots that people want to go when they visit that local city, every piece is a niche basically, right? Every piece is a niche. You there's, you can, you, what are your hobbies? Are you into cigars? There you go. Huge niche. Are you into cars? You know, you could go on and on and on by just unpacking your own hobbies. And, and interests and your background and where you're from or where you got married. Like these are all things that resonate with other people.

Brandon Carter:And I think, you know, they may resonate with your audience because if, if your audience, even if your audience is really small and it's really only friends and family members and like work colleagues, you probably live in the same area or are interested and share a lot of the same hobbies or thoughts, like there's crossovers there. And that's the first place to start. To start iterating. And then you get, you get a sense from the market and your audience of who's kind of attracted to following you and, and what you might want to create in the future, that's more marketable. Right. And so that's what the unlock is for the artists. This is where the leverage is. If the artists can spend the maximum amount of time creating and iterating on their products, that's how they're going to get their business to a hundred thousand to a half a million into a million dollars a year. It's not going to be Brandon. I can I this is a 100 percent fact. It is not going to be trying to learn how to be a marketing expert when it is impossible to be one. Okay, given the all of the responsibilities that you have and that you're not going to be as into it as any other marketer that's out there like us, right, who have spent our lives doing it. And we were reading about it every day and we're researching every day. We have Stockholm syndrome with marketing. You're not going to be a tech expert, right? And like, what's the point? And then, and then, you know, even more so, what is the point? What's the point if you can't do better than somebody else and you can get it all done at an insanely low price, like that is the unlock that is the unlock right there. And so if you notice what I'm saying here is that all of these points of evolution that we've gone over, right. And these unlocks that have happened have. allowed the individual entrepreneur artists who might be starting out with just today, like they're going to start their art business today, can literally have You know, their own e-commerce website with print on demand and automated fulfillment that is state of the art every bit of it is state of the art. Nobody has better than you. Right. And then now you've got somebody helping you with manage your website ongoing permanently. So you don't have to worry about being a tech expert. You don't have to worry that you have the right features and functionality to maximize art sales on your website and average order values, right? You don't have to worry about that anymore. And then you don't have to worry about becoming a marketing expert. And you've got the same power behind you that a multimillion-dollar artist has. Right. So again, the power is just swinging to the individual artists who's able to have these things at a lower level, whereas these multimillion-dollar artists. I mean, the things that they had to go through to get to the point that they're at their unicorns. They're unicorns, right? Like it was not easy for them to get to the point that they're at. And Weiland wrote a great book on it. I love his book. It's called Don't Be a Starving Artist. Um, it's, it's, it's slightly outdated, um, but only slightly. It is worth a read for anyone that this is resonating with, um, because I think he goes into the The, um, you know, e-commerce and selling direct and the importance of owning your own customers and all of those things. Um, and that, and, and like the literal hell he went through to get there, not having a lot of the things that you have today as an individual artist. So it's really an exciting time. Um, for, for the artists, the most exciting time. And, you know, I think there's going to be probably future revolutions. I know we're, we're constantly thinking about that because. You know, um, if, if an artist are very small businesses, they don't have a lot of money, okay, they may have none, you know, uh, they, they may only be able to, you know, uh, uh, yeah, what they, what they've sold and, and all of that.

Nick Friend:And so that's like a fact. And so. You know, how are you going to empower an artist to compete in this type of a world? And that's what co-pilot, that's what we're trying to do, right? It has to be something that like, you have to be able to unlock these things that everybody else is doing, but you have to be, do it at a, you have to be able to do it at a price that an individual artist entrepreneur doing it out of their home can afford.

Brandon Carter:I love that. And so just a few more questions here and we can kind of wrap up because I know you've got to run here pretty soon, but. You know, um, me knowing Art Storefronts for some time, you kind of mentioned this before, right? This prior to this wave, a big piece of it was just marketing education, teaching you how to be a marketer. Now you have the sort of co-pilot era where you're outsourcing a lot of your, your marketing. Um, you've introduced this a little bit at Art Storefronts already, uh, through I guess like a beta launch. How's it, uh, how's it received by those customers so far?

Nick Friend:Uh, it's been unbelievable. It's been unbelievable. Um, you know, internally, we're, we, I mean, one of the things that we care a lot about because We're, we're very concerned with like customer success and customer experience. And so we want to see positive feedback in the form of reviews and, you know, things like that unsolicited, like just what, how are people feeling about it? Are they happy with the service? You know, Are they getting results? Um, and we're getting we're getting more testimonials and unsolicited reviews than we've ever gotten. Um, I think the content of them is fascinating. We posted some of them on our website. You can obviously like Google us and read a bunch of them. But people talking about how I can't believe it like I was on vacation, you know, or I was taking care of a sick family member and all of this art promotion is happening for me on my social media and my emails and I'm not missing anything and I'm not missing any of the big art selling holidays and I'm getting orders and you know, they're coming in and so that's incredible. And then from a data standpoint, you know, us being the platform and we can see the sales. You know, coming through, we're seeing more sales than ever before. And the customers that are on co-pilot are seeing dramatically higher sales. I mean, like a hundred percent higher sales or more, you know? Uh, so you're, you're looking at co-pilot versus non co-pilot customers.

Brandon Carter:Correct.

Nick Friend:Exactly. So, so because we want to see the people who are, you know, following the art marketing calendar on their own, you know, um, how are they doing compared to. People that are on co-pilot. Right. And what we found is that it's just hard for artists to, to do all of the, the, the, the marketing work they don't want to work. It's just a lot of, it's, it's a lot of work and co-pilot already does more than that. Right. Because As a marketing department, we can do more, we can send more emails, we can do more posts, whereas an individual artist, they just can't like, if we want, if we're, if we're in the middle, Brandon of a, uh, we, you know, uh, a Mother's Day sale or a Valentine's Day. So like big, this is a two or three-week campaign that you need to run, right? There's a lead up to it and you got to lead people in with your social media posts and your emails. There's a lot of work that gets done. It's like, I think seven emails have to get sent or so, and it's around like 20 social media posts. You know, and, um, when we're in one of those sales, uh, are big art selling times, we can juice the amount of marketing that we can send more emails and we can, um, uh, do more social media posts if we're seeing results from it and, um, and we do that. Whereas, you know, if you're not looking at the stuff and the data and you don't know whether this thing is working or not, or you're just busy. Most artists are not able to do that or they're just not getting it done. So the results are there overall, you know, and that, that is the big thing. That's the biggest thing for us, right? Is that, um, we're executing a proven marketing strategy and the results are there in the sales. And that's exactly what has to happen.

Brandon Carter:Well, it sounds like an amazing service.

Nick Friend:It has to be, this is a key point, Brandon. It has to be better than anything an artist can do on their own, even if they're following our marketing strategy, which is the best marketing strategy. That's ever been created for artists comprehensively. Right. I think that that's objective. If you ask, you know, uh, we have 10,000 artists that are on it. You can ask people that are on it and people that are not on it. Right. Um, but the important point is. It doesn't matter if an artist is, you know, doing marketing on their own outside of our storefronts or following our marketing calendar or has hired an agency to do marketing for them or something else. Art Marketing Co-pilot will beat all of it, all of it, because it's, it's, it's, it's actually common sense. It's not just, this is not like a hyperbolic statement, right? It's common sense. If you look at any of the artists that are on co-pilot and you look at their social media and you're on their email list and you compare it to multimillion-dollar artists that I've already mentioned, you can do this, right? You look at their social media feed and the posts and what's happening there. And you look at their emails and so forth, you will see that they are marketing at a multi-million-dollar business level objectively. Right. And then you will, you can compare that to other artists. Any artists that's out there and you will see very clearly that they are not. And if you're wondering why, why your art, your business might not be selling as much, you know, it comes down to promotion and a volume of marketing. That's the differentiator, you know?

Brandon Carter:Wow. I mean, with a, with a bold statement like that, I don't know how any artists wouldn't be, wouldn't be curious about it. Sounds like. A lot of thought and time and money has gone into the service. And so, um, man, this has been a great conversation. I've loved the history lesson and kind of learning about all these big pivots. It sounds like co-pilot is going to be just this huge wave in terms of a model of, of outsourcing a lot of your marketing. Um, where can people, if they're interested in Art Storefronts or they're interested in Art Marketing Co-pilot. Where, where can they find out more about it?

Nick Friend:Uh, they just come to our website at artstorefronts.com. Um, there's a big orange button that says request a demo in the upper right-hand corner, just fill that out. And then somebody on our outreach team will reach out to you pretty quickly. And, um, you know, you can tell them about your art and your business, give a little background. Um, help us understand you a bit, um, cause we want to make sure that we can make you successful if you want to work with us. Um, and, uh, they'll give you any information, pricing, you know, any, any of that stuff that you want to know all the details. And then they can show you a demo of everything as well, like all the features of the website and e-commerce that I mentioned, um, as well as anything related to Co-pilot.

Brandon Carter:Awesome. Awesome. Sounds amazing. Well, thanks, everybody. That's our episode for today. Appreciate Nick coming on. Great talk, and we'll see you next time. Thanks, everyone.