Finish off your Dec strong, Being ready for Jan, Asymmetry of the Art Biz, & Shiny Object Syndrome

In this episode, Patrick and Nick provide an in-depth discussion on maximizing art sales with strategic game plans, especially during key shopping dates. They highlight the significance of aggressive marketing, the use of gift cards, and maintaining sales momentum through the holiday season. The hosts discuss the unique benefits of art businesses, like low startup costs and high potential returns, while warning against distractions like NFTs. Emphasizing the importance of mimicking big-box retailers and art galleries, they advise on leveraging consumer spending habits during holidays. They also focus on long-term success, encouraging strategies such as consistent marketing, leveraging support systems, and fostering devoted 'true fans'. Overall, the episode provides actionable insights for artists looking to sustain and grow their business.In this episode, Patrick and Nick provide an in-depth discussion on maximizing art sales with strategic game plans, especially during key shopping dates. They highlight the significance of aggressive marketing, the use of gift cards, and maintaining sales momentum through the holiday season. The hosts discuss the unique benefits of art businesses, like low startup costs and high potential returns, while warning against distractions like NFTs. Emphasizing the importance of mimicking big-box retailers and art galleries, they advise on leveraging consumer spending habits during holidays. They also focus on long-term success, encouraging strategies such as consistent marketing, leveraging support systems, and fostering devoted 'true fans'. Overall, the episode provides actionable insights for artists looking to sustain and grow their business.

Podcast Transcribe

Patrick Shanahan: So Nick, as you and I are recording this, there's still a lot to do in December. Before we get into the broader topics, I think it's important to discuss our game plan from now till the end of the month because this is still a critically important time of year. We are still in the throes of the buying season, so give us some color on that.

Nick Friend: Yeah, absolutely. Every day from now through December 24th is like maximum attack on trying to get customers across the finish line. The way I think about it is promoting different pieces, promoting different media types, promoting gift cards. The gift cards should probably be close to the 22nd or 23rd, like when you're getting to that end. If you're a late shopper like me, a late Christmas shopper, I'm looking for those things. I like to get my wife something, but I don't know what piece she might want. I know she likes this artist, so I'm just going to get the gift card. You just simplified my decision. Taking your pieces and your product offering, and by that, I don't mean a 2D image you post to social media and email out. Show people the actual product that they're going to hang on the wall or whatever it is and get that out every day so they might be like, "That's the one I'm going to get. That's the piece I'm going to get." Be as aggressive as possible in whatever type of incentive you want to offer, whether it's a discount, free shipping, or a two-for-one. Whatever discount it is doesn't matter, but this is when people's wallets are still out, and it's going to run all the way up till and through December 24th. You should be marketing even on that last day, "Hey, last-minute shoppers, I've got something for you. Here's a gift card you can get for your significant other. It's good for anything on my site, in my store, in my gallery, and you're good to go." So it's maximum aggressiveness right there. Then you enjoy your Christmas, if you celebrate Christmas. The end-of-year sale is the one that closes out the year. You have an end-of-year promotion. You can call it "I'm getting rid of inventory." You can call it anything you want, but you should have an end-of-year sale. The psychology around the end-of-year sale is very strong. People are ending the year; they've got tax write-offs, they've got this, they've got that, and you know, Christmas cash. 

Patrick Shanahan: Christmas cash, exactly.

Nick Friend: You've got an office; this is the time. "I'm going to furnish the office, so I'm going to get art, I'm going to get furniture." Whatever it is, this is your last chance to keep this December holiday purchasing mentality and close it out. You definitely don't want to miss that. It's every day from here through the 24th, maybe a little break on Christmas, and then the end-of-year sale through the 31st. Then we're getting into January. I think that's the most important way to say it. I wouldn't even say till the 24th. I think the 24th is a trap, and I think you got to let that go. It really is just the buying season till the end of the year. What it represents is a time when more money is being spent, when the wallets are out. It's the most important time of the year to be selling art, period. I think a trap that we ourselves have fallen into too is this expectation that somehow you have to get everything done before the drop-dead date shipped for Christmas. The trap there is falling into the thought that art and photography are somehow like all the rest of the consumer products that end up under a tree or in a stocking. They don't. They qualify to a certain extent, but I don't know if you're aware of this artist. There's this Southwestern artist; he's rapidly becoming one of the biggest of that generation. His name is Mark Maggiori. I'm terrible at pronouncing his name, but what's interesting is this guy, like I said, he's got to be one of the biggest artists in the entire world at this point. He has a sale right around the time for Christmas. Do you know when you actually get the prints? Four months later. Four months later. What he's figured out, again, one use case because this guy's so successful and he has so much demand, but the learning that you take from that is the expectation is not that the art ends up underneath the tree. There are all these various scenarios, some of which you just covered, but okay, "I took care of everyone else's Christmas shopping, now it's my time for Christmas shopping. Now I got all of that through that holiday season, now there's everything that I've got wrapped up in these tax scenarios." There are a million different little things that just state that you need to stay on the gas from now till the end of the year. As I look back at our data on the last three years, the activity around New Year has actually been very significant. Those New Year sales have really captured some of those extra dollars. Under no circumstances do you come off the gas till the end of the year. You really cannot let your hair down until the New Year's Eve celebration. 

Patrick Shanahan: Correct.

Nick Friend: That's the world we're living in now. That does represent new thinking on our part because for years and years, it was like, "Okay, you have three weeks before Christmas, which is the drop-dead ship date." That's out the window. These are important trends that you have to talk about. Through experimentation on our side and understanding, oftentimes, we just get in our own way. You have your own thinking like, "Oh, the holidays are over." What am I normally doing on the 26th, 27th? You're kind of getting ready for New Year's, getting ready for the new year. You're a little bit checked out mentally. You're going to try to enjoy that time, take a little break, and get ready to get going in 2024. You naturally want to think that everybody is doing that and doesn't care about buying anything, but you're probably buying things, and I'm probably buying things. We're still looking at social media. We're probably looking at it even more and checking email even more because we have more time on our hands, which means everybody's doing that, and these things work. People, you're still selling all the way through the end of the year. I hate to say it too, but a lot of people probably don't even understand this because you're more on top of things than I am, but I am the guy, the bad husband, who buys the wife's gift the day before Christmas. I print out the receipt in the email because it's not going to be there in time. 

Patrick Shanahan: Exactly.

Nick Friend: Because it's not going to be there. It might not be there for three weeks or sometimes two months. I remember I got her a pair of boots that she wanted. It might have been last year or the year before. It wasn't coming for two months. I literally print out the thing on my printer at home, and I wrap the printout, and she's so excited. She loved the boots, she couldn't wait to get them, and so I'm like, "It worked." But if you think that they're not going to get the piece, or what are they going to get, a gift card? How are they going to give the gift card to their wife? They will print it out, they will show it to them, they will email it to them. There are people like me out there that will literally buy at 9:00 PM on Christmas Eve without any idea of what I've got to buy. I just know I got to get something, and I got to do it tonight. You got to get out of our own way and execute all the way through the end of this month. The other thing too is if you just started your art business and you didn't have a great Black Friday or Cyber Monday, and you're still kind of in that iteration phase of trying to get traction, you have to keep going. You don't just stop. You're going to kill yourself if you do that. You cannot do that. If any of you are listening to this, you got to keep going. You got to do it. It's part of the way of passage. It's all normal. Everybody's had to go through it, but you can't stop marketing. That's another important point because a lot of people see all this Black Friday success and Cyber Monday and all that, and they're like, "I didn't get a part of that." But you got to keep going. You got multiple different opportunities. Like Kenny Rogers says, "There'll be time enough for counting when the dealing's done."

Patrick Shanahan: Not till after New Year's. Not till after New Year's. It's that time of year, Nick, when the year is winding down. Despite the fact there's still things to do in December, inevitably, all of us start looking at 2024. How is 2024 going to be different? What are we going to do differently? What is our game plan to ensure that we have the most successful art or photography business that we can in 2024? I'm thinking about it, everyone else is thinking about it, I know you're thinking about it. Where do you want to begin?

Nick Friend: Well, what I'll say is, look at how much time we have here. It's December 8th, so we're 20 and some change days from the new year. January is such an important time in the art business for artists that we've seen because it's the time where a lot of people get started, and it's a time when a lot of people make a change. They're looking at their 2023, their 2022, and they're like

, "What am I going to do differently this year?" I think that's the main mentality. If you did not get the results that you wanted, January is the time to make those changes. Start experimenting with some different subject matter or some different things, and fixing what you believe is wrong with your business. Are you struggling with marketing? Are you struggling with this? Are you struggling with that? This is the time to do the self-reflection and make the change. The reason why that's so powerful is when you see the people who are crushing it this last Black Friday, Cyber Monday, this holiday season that we're in, they had things working from January through the rest of this year. They were building the right audience of buyers and stuff like that. They probably weren't before. Everybody's got to go from a point of not building the right audience, not having the right people following them on social media, to getting to the right ones. It's not a magical process; it is a journey. If you're struggling with that out there, just know you're not alone. This is totally normal, but you got to keep iterating, keep experimenting. January is the perfect time to make those changes, do the self-reflection so that the tweaks you make are going to get you starting to build in the right direction at the beginning of the year. You've got the whole year to take advantage of all of that time to have a much better year. The crescendo of the holiday season sales, not to mention we have big art-selling holidays coming up in January, February, March. Valentine's Day is a very big art-selling holiday. There's like two weeks of marketing that you got to start doing that begins in mid-January. January 15th through the end of the month, you have to get ahead of Valentine's Day because the prints need to ship and get to people and all that stuff. You actually start right there. January's, we're basically right there. That's the way everybody wants to be thinking about it.

Patrick Shanahan: I'm remiss to say this, but it's important to say it. I always go to the line my buddy's wife, who is like a fitness extraordinaire, always says: summer bodies are made in winter. You got to get exercising now. Whether you use that analogy or the farming analogy, that's what this business is. At the beginning of the year, you're getting your land ready, you are planting your crops, you're starting to water them, you're taking care of them all year, such that at the end of the year, you have this ability to harvest. It's a really important way to look at the cycle that is an art or photography business. You start at the beginning of the year, you do all of these things that are very important, and then at the end of the year is when you harvest because you've done all that work all year long. It's really important to have the perspective of starting off a new year, how important that is, and how when you give yourself that entire year to get everything in order, get all your ducks in a row, that's when you have the ultimate level of success. No different than the farm analogy: you can't just show up with two weeks left to Black Friday or Cyber Monday or Christmas and say, "Okay, I'm going to have this huge business." You have to go into the new year looking at it saying, "Okay, I realize what happened in 2023. I neglected my talent. I put it out to pasture. I did not give it the love that it needed. I did not plant the seeds. I did not water the crops. Here I am showing up at the end of the year saying I want these results, but I didn't do the work all year." I think it's really important to have that lens to look at that entire year and say, "Okay, I realize that if I do everything that I've got to do and I execute on the plan all year long, I'm going to have a great year. But it starts in January. It absolutely starts in January." It becomes a very important time to get focused on the things that matter.

Nick Friend: Yeah, and I don't know about you, but over the years in running my different businesses and stuff like that, I've come to a point where I have my own process of self-reflection at the end of the year. I do it all the time; I kind of do it quarterly. I started doing it annually, always right around that December 26th, that period of time, that week, just is a good week to do it. I just go outside, go somewhere really quiet, like out in the woods or wherever it is, whatever is a good spot for you, and I take a yellow pad. I literally just start writing down what went well, what didn't go well. It's really as simple as that. In the case of an art business, you just look at every big section of your business. My product: is my product resonating? Do I need to consider some different types of subject matter next year? Just have an honest assessment about it because your product is everything. Even the best marketer in the world, the best salesperson in the world, the best salesperson in a gallery in the world, can't sell an unsellable product or an unmarketable product that isn't resonating with people, even if it's some of the most talented artwork you've ever seen. There's so much artwork that is so high talent that you're like, "This is unbelievable, but I don't want it on my wall in my house. I just want to admire it here." You go product, you look at your audience: is the problem with your audience, your social media followers, your email list? Did you spend a lot of time on audience, or did you not? Is that where the problem is? Do you not have the qualified buyers in there and all of that? You got to address that next year. Then consistent marketing. You've always got to do consistent marketing. You can never stop. Did you give up really easily? Did you just kind of do a couple of social media posts or emails? Have you only been marketing for three months, six months, or even a year? The number of artists that we know who are like, they almost gave up on marketing, had no results, and then in six months they get contacted by an interior designer, or they get a big order, and it's like a $112,000 order. They're like, "Oh my goodness, I almost quit. I almost quit." You talk about this all the time, but a business has to be marketed. You make a product, and you have to market it. Outbound marketing: get it out on the social media channel, get it out on email. Eyeballs need to see it. You cannot stop that process. The more of that you do, the more the odds are that you have the serendipity that somebody falls in love with one of those images. Have you been doing that? Did you do that all year? Did you do it in 2022? Did you do it in 2021? This stuff takes years of compounding. Or did you have the mindset that you should only have to do it for one month and you should have had $10,000 in sales, and otherwise you quit? You might have to fix your own mindset and your own expectations because that's not normal. The people that we know that are selling hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, if not over a half a million dollars a year, that's not how it went for them. So you can't think that, "Why are you different? Why are you different?" Self-reflection: go somewhere quiet, look at what went well in your business and what didn't go well. Now you've got a plan ready for January to make changes and to start the new year off fresh.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, and I think for most people, it's like, look, I constantly use the Hotel California line, and I think it's a really important one. The Hotel California line is, "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave." Artists and photographers, year after year, try to start marketing, try to start selling. This is going to be my year. It's like the New Year's resolution. January's coming up, perfect timing. It's like that gym membership: you sign up in January, you're going four days a week, you're on it. March rolls along, it got hard, you quit, you haven't been once, rinse and repeat. You don't do anything for the rest of the year. Then towards the end of the year, you're like, "Okay, I'm motivated, I'm inspired, I'm going to do it again." You can't turn off this bug to want to be a successful artist, to want to be a successful photographer, to continue to create. It's not going away. I routinely see people in my webinars in every season of life: 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, still having the same desire. Yet, they're just trying to figure out how they can get the business out there. The reason they're trying to do that is because all the previous years and decades that they had, they gave it a shot, it got hard, they quit. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. So ask yourself, is 2024 your year? If it's not, it's all good. If you don't want it to be your year and you want to have a hobby, you know what that route is. It's all good. But if you're like, "This is going to be my year, I'm actually going to do it," and you commit to marketing yourself consistently all year long, you're going to win.

Nick Friend: You just made such an important point. If you're not looking at even if you want this to just be a side business and make five or 10 or 15 grand a year of extra

 side income, if you're not looking at the big picture of the whole year and going, "I'm going to commit to the whole year," you might as well not even get started. You're just thinking about it all wrong. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, they think 10 years ahead. They plan 10 years ahead. Some of the best entrepreneurs and best businesspeople out there talk about if you are planning long-term and you're playing the long game, you have such an advantage and you win. It's really easy if you start thinking about it. Imagine the artists that are thinking right now, "I'm going to start in January and I need results by the end of February, and I need this and I need that," as opposed to the person that's like, "Okay, I realize I got to get my stuff out there. I might have to make some changes in my subject matter. I'm going to need to market for a period of time. I might not have the right audience. I'm going to go find that audience, and I'm going to get better every month. I'm going to get better, better, one step better each time." Now you've got a realistic plan to take the business somewhere in 2024, as opposed to some short stint where you're totally unoptimized, you're doing things wrong, and you're not even giving yourself a chance to actually turn this into anything.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, so new year, new you. We're going to obviously be coming with a ton of content on what a New Year's plan looks like and how that all folds out. But I'm very excited. I'm very optimistic about where things are going in 2024. I'll say more broadly that more and more commerce moved online. We're still awaiting the majority of the numbers to come in from Black Friday and Cyber Monday and the holiday buying season. There'll be time to look at that data in January, but the percentage of transactions that are going online is really getting staggering. Art and photography are in on that, so this is a fantastic stat line for all of us that are trying to sell direct and want to be located wherever we want to be located to be able to sell direct online and not have to worry about anything else, not have to worry about brick and mortar and that it's not in a retail experience. I think that part is very exciting, and I think 2024 is going to be a huge year.

Nick Friend: January is just the best time. It's the time to be motivated, it's the time to make the change, it's the time to improve. If you want to make it your year, it's the perfect time, and the industry is going in your direction. The ability to build a great art business is only helping you. People are on social media all over the world; that's no longer a question of all age groups from top to bottom. People are on it, they are there. The fact that you can access them with your own marketing now from your own house is absolutely unbelievable. The whole world has completely changed. Every year is a new opportunity, so greatly looking forward to January.

Patrick Shanahan: I think that's a good handover to unpack that a little bit because you've had this topic that you want to delve into that we have not talked about nearly enough, which is this notion of the asymmetry of an art business. We just talked about how all of the trends are more and more commerce going online, more and more hours and more and more purchase decisions being made via social media. How does that apply overall to this concept of the asymmetry of the art business? How do you want to define that?

Nick Friend: The asymmetry of an art business. What is asymmetry? Asymmetry means low downside risk and very high upside. The delta or the difference between both of those is the asymmetry. It turns out that art businesses are very high asymmetry businesses. Let me back up for a second. I've been in the art industry for 25 years, and I've seen so much happen in that period of time with the internet starting and e-commerce websites starting all the way to today with companies like Art Storefronts that are helping with all sorts of different things. I just have to say that the art business used to be a terrible business. When I say that, I mean it's a shame, but we all knew it, and everybody kind of knows it. Artists that were trying to build a business in the late 90s, you know what I'm talking about here. Some people would frown upon it. You'd have family members or friends that are like, "Oh, they're a starving artist. Oh, that's not, they're not getting a real job or having real income." Why is that? Why has this been the case? I call it a millennia-old business problem. There aren't many thousand-plus-year-old business problems, but the starving artist problem and the lack of asymmetry in an art business historically have been true and a big problem. How was, how were things? Why was there a lack of asymmetry? Well, you had very high startup costs.

Patrick Shanahan: Explain that too.

Nick Friend: If you wanted to launch your own art gallery, there's no internet. You had to go and commit to a lease in a town, and you might have a year lease or a two-year lease, and you might be paying $5,000 or $10,000 a month.

Patrick Shanahan: A huge deposit.

Nick Friend: A huge deposit, exactly. You'd have to build it all out too and design it and all that. You're talking about big risk right there. Your risk is through the roof. That already crossed out the opportunity for the vast majority of people because they couldn't afford to do that. Not to mention, you'd have to sell enough to stay alive. That's a really big point because if you have high costs, you got to sell way more to stay alive. Those odds were really stacked against you. So you had high startup costs, then you had high ongoing costs. You're paying the lease every month, you have to have inventory. If you were buying prints back then, you couldn't print on demand. You'd have to do like serigraphy or lithography. If you weren't selling originals or you'd have to paint a bunch of originals if you're a painter. But you would have to have some sort of physical inventory to take with you and to stock the gallery or to supply to other galleries or wherever you were going to sell these things. The other options you had were publishers and art dealers and different things like that, but you also had the problem of extremely limited local distribution. Even if you had your own gallery, you were only marketing to the people that were in your area. You're not marketing nationally or even statewide or even hard geographically. The risk is even higher, the challenges are even greater, and that affects the upside, the amount of sales that you can get. You've got a situation here in the past where the lack of asymmetry in the art business was you had very high startup costs, you had very high ongoing costs, and then you had limited upside. That doesn't sound like a great business, and it wasn't a great business. The only artists that really did well could be considered unicorns. Some of them made it through the eye of the needle and were able to get through all of that with all that risk and break through. God bless them, but it was really hard. That is reality, but today everything has changed. An art business is one of the best businesses in terms of asymmetry that you can start. This is a really big deal because I have family members, I have friends who are artists, and the whole game has changed. Many of you listening to this might have a spouse who is like, "You're going to be an artist? Are you really going to do this? You're going to quit your job or whatever it is?" Don't quit your job, by the way. But they wonder about this business just because of the baggage from the past. Everything has changed. Nowadays, you can do it from home. You don't need any employees. You don't need a physical gallery. You don't need to rent a space and have that ongoing cost. Your costs can be extremely low for a startup, and your ongoing costs, you've got a website fee, a couple of monthly really low fees, but in the scope of comparison to other businesses out there, it's the lowest you could possibly be. It could be under $100, it could be under $200 or $300 a month to be doing serious stuff. You got a serious website, you're doing serious marketing at this point, getting your product out there in the world. The fact that your ongoing monthly cost is that little is unreal. This is unprecedented. What I mean by that is, number one, you have a low sales threshold to make that back. It takes time to build the business. You're going to have to work at it and invest back in the business and all that type of stuff, but you have an easy way to actually make that back. In addition, if you aren't making it back, you have an easy way to pay for it. You save a couple of expenses, you don't go to the restaurant that month, you drive an Uber one day a month and make an extra hundred bucks to keep this business going. There are easy ways to actually save money, maybe go on the sacrifice side, or consult for somebody, or do a custom art piece every month that's custom for one person, a friend of yours that'll pay you a hundred bucks or 150 bucks. There are no excuses to not do it these days because just getting a little creative, like I'm talking about here, you can keep the business going forever. Now on the upside part, we have artists that are selling 500,000, $700,000 a year, ones that have gotten over a million dollars of sales, and they are at home. Some of them are stay-at-home moms and have kids

 and all that stuff, and they're working at it. You just have to step back now and understand how much things have changed. None of that was possible before. None of it was ever possible before. But the asymmetry is through the roof. You can do this at home with the lowest bare-bottom startup costs, bare-bottom ongoing costs that you have full control over, by the way. How much your monthly cost is, is totally in your hands. Nobody can tell me that they can't cover that cost, whether it's through selling or through some other means. Not as if that wasn't good enough on the cost side, you actually have the upside of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars of potential in this business. How many businesses actually meet that criteria? There are not very many.

Patrick Shanahan: No, there's not very many at all.

Nick Friend: The whole world has changed. There is high asymmetry in an art business, and this is a really big deal, you guys. This is a reason to do it. This is a reason to stick with it. If you are a creative, if you have a talent, if you want to have this as a retirement or a business for you, you got to realize that it's now at a point where it's worth it. It's worth the investment, the suffering, the time to put into it, even if you don't do it. The reality is for many of us, and for many artists out there, what are your other options? What other option do you have in your life where you have an upside like this unlocked in your life, where you could actually have your own business that you can do from anywhere in the world and have that type of upside? That is a worthy endeavor, even if you do it for five years and then you're done with it, and you've invested in it, and you give up on it. You will look back at yourself and go, "I'm so happy that I did that because the opportunity was there. This was a logical decision. I couldn't make it happen, or I couldn't make it happen the way I wanted to, but I am proud of myself for trying because this was one ticket that I had that was getting me out of the rat race of regular jobs." Your regular job does not have that type of upside. No regular jobs have that type of upside. If you're telling me that it's not worth it to try to do this and to invest in it and to make the sacrifices and to keep on going, I don't know what you're working on. I don't know what you want from your life, but you've got something here now, and it's real. I just want every artist to know that. Learn that word: the asymmetry of the art business is extremely high, and this has changed everything.

Patrick Shanahan: It's so many different things combining at once. Print on demand has played a huge role in that, the fact that you can find an audience with just this without leaving your geographic town, a massive aspect of it. It's funny, as I was listening to you explain it, it's sort of like the restaurant analogy. I love the restaurant analogy; it's not the one you think of. Where we grew up, there were so many big restaurants that came, opened with a bunch of fanfare, and then boom, went bust. How much money did you spend on the decor, on leasing the thing? We're talking millions. The cost of entry is so expensive in starting a restaurant, and you have to hire people, all of it. You live in Austin, one of the hottest towns. Where I am, it's super popular. These new popup restaurants just show up in a kitchen that's already there. All they're showing up with is their pots and pans, their recipes, and their proteins and vegetables. You can try a concept out immediately without spending a dime on anything aside from just being there for a weekend. These things are starting to pop up like 24, 48 hours, sometimes just a one-day takeover. If it goes well, it goes again and again. You can be a chef, an artist of a different type, have this beautiful dream, and say, "I know everyone's going to like my work. This is going to be incredible. I'm going to give it a shot." You can show up, have a restaurant somewhere else for 24 hours, invite everyone you know via social media, and see whether or not you actually have a restaurant concept. That was not possible before, not even close. You had to take the plunge or work somewhere else for years and years. Take it back to art. You can do the same thing for almost no upfront cost. You can go and validate and find out whether or not you have a huge business potential. If you have the business potential, the upside with the smallest amount of expenses is absolutely staggering. This notion of whether or not it's a fantastic business is settled science. It is a fantastic business if you can get it to work, which is the whole point of the asymmetry of it. I don't think enough artists and photographers are fully equipped to be able to articulate that or totally understand that. I believe the perspective of what's possible is a motivating factor on how hard you work on getting it there. This is not, there are no expenses. There are almost no need for any employees. There's almost no overhead. You're not buying commercial vehicles and renting them. You're not sending injection molds off to China and getting it remade, then sending back prototypes, or waiting for pallets to show up to your house that are on a container. The fundamentals of what is possible in this business are incredibly exciting. There's a lot to say about that, and that should be an encouraging and motivating factor to say, "Look, if I can get this thing working, do you realize what's possible?" Then if I can get things working, do you realize what's possible long-term? Because if you create this incredible piece of art and it's phenomenal and people love it, you can be selling that incredible, phenomenal piece of art for the next 30 years. That's insane. There's not a lot of that going on. One of the quick tangents that I always talk about is that in the book industry, and I love taking it out of the art industry, in the book industry, it's a known thing that when you get a publisher, the publisher does almost nothing for you, almost nothing. It's incumbent upon the author to do the marketing for themselves. You get a little fanfare when the book comes out, and then it's crickets. They don't do anything. Do you want to know why that's the case in the publishing industry? Because some of the oldest books that have ever been written still are bestsellers every single solitary year. Those publishers have so much money coming in, they quite frankly don't give a damn. That same upside potential exists in art. If you can create some incredible pieces and they start getting traction, you have an insane time horizon, and perhaps even after you're gone, where that thing can be sold. It's important to understand this asymmetry and how it maps to the true potential of what you're doing. You're taking a shot, you're taking a risk, but look at what's possible if things go well for you. There are not a lot of businesses that exist like that. That's an important point. Know what you're working on, who you're striving towards, and in the grand scheme of things, compared to other businesses and risk, this is the lowest risk you could actually take. If you're not aware of that, it's important to know that the amount of money that you would be putting into this and your ongoing costs, I can't even think of another business you could compare it to.

Nick Friend: I've started five different companies. Any entrepreneur could talk about this. You've got expenses, you've got real commitments and expenses. If you can't make the sales, you're dead. You go out of business. But with an art business now, you got time. Time is on your side, unlike other businesses that have higher costs. You don't have that, where you've got to get sales within three, six months, a year, or you're dead. You need more funding at that point, you got to go get investors. That's not the case with this. Time is on your side. The reality is the only reason your business will fail is if you quit. That's it. Anyone, any artist these days that's giving up is quitting. It's not because they couldn't cover their ongoing costs. They could have. They could have sacrificed that one purchase. They could have gone out, they could have got a job. That's why I said keep your job. Keep your job until your business is earning as much income as your job. Your startup, there's no reason to quit your job because that will help you finance this dream that may end up happening, that might take a while. You may not be able to put a lot of hours into it. That's perfectly fine. If you got a full-time job and all you can do is put a little bit of time in it, it's just going to take longer. But at least you're going somewhere. At least you're actually taking positive steps in a direction that might unlock some big upside and happiness in your life in the future. Like I said, at least you know you tried, and you're working towards something like that. I think that's just a really big point. Everybody that's listening to this, you have to understand, just don't quit. Most people probably don't know that you can Google this, but in surveys of entrepreneurs and companies that close down, the number one reason small businesses shut down is because the owner quits, gives up and quits. They quit. They just mentally can't handle the challenge. They mentally can't handle not having instant gratification and all of that. If you just go in knowing, "I'm not going to do that," and you have a strategy financially for how to sustain yourself, and you have extremely low costs, you're going to be totally positioned mentally for the journey. Where people get off

 is where they think, "I've got to do this in 30 days or I'm dead." Or they quit their job and now they have no income. That's a really bad decision if you don't have existing sales to leverage because you need to invest in a business in order to grow it. You can't choke it to death. If you're constantly pulling money out of the business and you have like $1,500 in sales, and you're using that for income, you're going to choke the business. It's never going to grow. You have to figure out a way to invest in the business to get it to the level that you want it to get to. If you're thinking about that and you're like, "Okay, that changes my mindset. I'm going to have a job while I do this, or I'm going to have a part-time job," and I'm going to understand that my ongoing costs are going to be a certain amount that I'm comfortable with. One way or another, I'm going to find a way to cover that cost, whether it's through custom artwork, custom this, selling anything that you can, consulting, or saving expenses in your own personal life. There are multiple ways to get there, and you can do it. There's nothing stopping anyone from doing it, and that is quite frankly amazing. We've seen the stories, they're getting, there's more of them. You're starting to see way more artists that are selling 100K plus, that are hitting 500,000, 700,000. You better believe this is just going to continue and continue and continue because the ones that are sticking through it get to the other side, and there's just going to be a lot more people that can actually get there. The odds of more people getting there are now through the roof.

Patrick Shanahan: State it another way, there's not a single solitary person that can point to a successful artist or photographer that hasn't been grinding seven to ten years. Those are just facts. Knowing those are facts, give me the artist or photographer, knowing today's asymmetry in this business, give me the artist or photographer that's not going to quit for seven to ten years before you give me the more talented of the two. I'll take the one that's not going to quit seven to ten. Because there is the asymmetry, because you can afford to keep your burn rate low, it doesn't mean it's easy, you guys. No one's saying this is easy. You tell me what business you can start out there that's easy to grow and make a huge success. One doesn't exist. They're all hell, it's all a grind. You have to suffer on all of them, but with the upside potential available in this one, with the low expenses, if you can commit in your mind to grind and do the work for seven to ten years, you will win.

Nick Friend: Correct.

Patrick Shanahan: That's it.

Nick Friend: So many quit in this one. Your competition, how you differentiate yourself from the competition, it's so low. As long as you spend an hour every day reading books, you'll be one of the smartest people ever. As long as you start investing in your retirement account when you're 25, the differentiation between those that make it and don't, all you have to do is just keep showing up.

Patrick Shanahan: That's exactly right. Just don't quit because everybody else, we've worked with over 100,000 artists, the vast majority quit. They just quit. They quit in three months, they quit in one month, they quit in six months. They all come back, and then they all come back a year or two years or three years later, and the whole cycle repeats. The whole cycle repeats. They have the wrong expectations, the whole thing is just wrong in all of these different ways. If you simply just manage this process and don't quit, you will win. I mean, that's...

Nick Friend: We're going to have to expand on that in a future episode, but I think that does a good job covering the asymmetry.

Patrick Shanahan: Definitely. I want to talk about something that I'm sort of observing more broadly and get some of your two cents on it. But I think we're sort of witnessing a tectonic shift in how the software industry operates. I have sort of a premise at a high level on this, that software isn't enough anymore. Software isn't enough. I want to talk about it through the lens of the importance of office hours. I know this needs a definition. It's funny, as I was starting to do my homework, I found the Harvard Business Review article on this that was super fascinating, and Jason Fried's quoted in there. I will throw it in the show notes for anyone that wants to read it. But what is office hours and the concept? I'll quote from this thing: the concept of office hours for business goes back to a universal ritual from our college days. We take classes with professors who were busy, distracted from teaching with research or in the lab or the library and otherwise were remote and unapproachable. But we knew for a couple hours at least one day a week we could stop by their office, ask for advice, try out an idea, and get the guidance that we needed. I love that definition because that's what it is. What has morphed from this college idea of the professor is this has morphed into a digital reality that we see more and more software companies doing. What's been interesting is that on our team internally, people are starting to send these various different other software providers and vendors that we use and some that we don't, they're announcing office hours. There's a reason for that. There's a reason for that. It's a huge trend. What everyone is starting to realize is that software is not enough. Software is not enough. You always cite the Shopify stat. Do you have that one at the top of your head, by the way? Do you remember what year it's from?

Nick Friend: 2021, I think.

Patrick Shanahan: Which one is it?

Nick Friend: The average duration that stores last on Shopify, it was like 80 days or 70 days or something like that.

Patrick Shanahan: 70 days. I always bring this up and I say, why is that? Is that because Shopify's product was crap? Because it's a bad company? No, because software is not enough. If you want to be successful in today's day and age, you need to be supported. You need encouragement. You need somewhere to go to get answers. You need to be able to bounce ideas off people more experienced than you. You need to be learning from artists that are seeing the same success so you can copy it quickly, or seeing success so you can copy it quickly. In short, it is too damn difficult to be successful alone on your own. It's too hard. The math says that you will quit. When I look at what our version of office hours has become, it's really staggering. When we're sharing these things internally of these other companies, they're like, "Hey, we're going to launch office hours. We'll see everybody Tuesday at 3 PM. Can't wait to see you." That concept's awesome. But the reason that I chuckle is because we have been at this for a long time now. Internally, I looked at all these. I'm not even sure if you're aware of all these numbers. We are now up to nine sessions a week that we are having on Zoom that we loosely call office hours. We have plans to expand this into the new year. Not only do we have the nine sessions per week, but we've also this year introduced breakout rooms. These are just Zoom sessions inside of Zoom sessions. What happens is if you need support with your website or with Copilot, some of our other products, you can show up on this Zoom and say, "Hey, put me in the other Zoom." Instead of you opening a ticket or you sending an email to support or you searching forums for how to get something done or you searching Google for how to figure something out or you searching YouTube for how to do something on Instagram or Facebook, you can jump into a Zoom session, talk to a human being, they can look at your screen, potentially take over control of your screen, and get the problem solved. Get the problem solved. When you contemplate the typical journey out there for an artist or photographer, what do most do? They find some sort of an outfit that is going to give them a website. You sign up for the website, you pay for the website, and your emotions are really high and your motivation is really high. Then you get to the end of the road, the website's done, and they say, "Good luck. Have a great experience out there. I really hope everything works out for you." You contemplate that and you're on your own. You're on your own. If you contemplate that with the office hours modality, you get that same website, you're super motivated to get going, and then they say, "Congrats," we say, "Congrats." Then your journey actually starts. Five days a week, nine sessions a week, you can pop in, you can get coaching, you can get mentoring, you can bounce ideas off, you can ask for your particular situation, you can say, "What should I do about this? How should I approach pricing? What are people's best practices here? How do I ship internationally? Does someone have a framer shop they love?" All of these questions get answered by being able to go through it with the community. It is just night and day. It is the difference between having a hobby or a failed venture versus actually having an actual business. I would go as far to say I think it is 10 times more important than the website itself. I'm starting to believe that the software is becoming a commodity and everything that happens after the fact. When I see these other businesses out there starting to offer office hours, mark my words, it is going to be a massive thing in 2024,

 and there is a reason for it. If you are not supported with the software day after day after day, your business, your results are not going to go anywhere. I don't know if you feel as strongly about that as I do, but I feel like it is fundamentally becoming one of the most important things that we offer as a business.

Nick Friend: I absolutely agree because it's based on the premise that you are better off having mentors and surrounding yourself with people, with experts and other artists, other professionals that have been there before you, that can help you with the hurdle that you particularly have versus doing things completely on your own, fighting every battle on your own, trying to become a marketing expert on your own. That is what doesn't work. Trying to be completely on your own and running a business is very flawed. A lot of people ended up in that spot because they were sold a bill of goods where all you have to do is launch a website and fish are going to jump into your boat. There's people with their credit cards waiting in their hand just waiting to run to your website and buy them from you. You will all learn, everyone listening to this will all learn that that's not the way it works, and that'll never happen. You will have crickets when you launch your website. Your journey has just begun. Everybody's got a website. Everybody can get a website. That's not the differentiator that's going to take you to $100,000 or to a large number of sales. There's this great saying that I always think about a lot and I always talk about it, which is, "You're the average of the five closest people you surround yourself with in your life." That's like your friends and family, who are they and all that. In your business life, you have to answer the same question. Who are the five closest experts, whether they're industry experts, experts at selling art or other artists who are more successful than you? Who are the five people in the art business that are surrounding you the closest? If that number is zero or one and the closest person is some friend or your spouse who's not even in the business who's giving you advice, you basically are completely on your own. The fundamental problems that happen in an art business are not related to just having a website where people can buy things from you. The problems happen on a day-to-day basis or on a week-to-week basis based on the hurdles that you as an artist specifically run into based on your art, your subject matter, your audience, and the unique direction that your art business has to go to become successful because every art business has to go down its own path. That is day-to-day hurdles and questions and issues that you have to work through, and you've got to get past these things. When you understand that that is the course of an art business, that's what's going to happen over a year, two, three, four, five years, then you have to step back and ask yourself, "Am I properly equipped for the journey?" Is my strategy, is my approach of going it alone, searching Google, looking at the latest trends in social media or email marketing or how to write a subject line and how to not end up in the junk folder, and all, should I be on TikTok or Pinterest and all this different stuff? If you're going on all of that alone, that is a very tough path that usually doesn't work well because you're going to be making mistakes, you're going to be wasting time, and you're not even going to know it the vast majority of the time. You're going to be like, "Oh, I'm posting on social media, it doesn't work," but you might be doing everything wrong on social media. "Oh, I'm sending out emails," but you might be doing everything wrong on that. You might not understand where your exact problems are. How do you solve that? How do other business owners typically solve that? You typically have other mentors or friends, consultants. I know for myself, I have a whole series of mentors and consultants to help me run Art Storefronts and build Art Storefronts. I can't do it alone. That's just a fundamental aspect of building any type of business. As an entrepreneur, making sure that you're surrounded with wisdom that can help you get over hurdles and you're not just sitting there for weeks or months or years with the exact same problem that you could have gotten over. For me, I think that's such an important thing because with an office hours type of solution, you actually have something that's going to help you forever. It's not just today or tomorrow; it's forever. It's totally overlooked. Most artists are like, "Website, website, website." It's really hard to articulate is what it is.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, it is.

Nick Friend: The things that most artists are looking at like, "I need that, I need that," they're actually looking at the completely wrong thing. It's like, yes, you do need that, but there's something else that you need very deeply, and you're going to need permanently going forward. It's going to make the biggest difference in your daily decision-making because all your business is, is the sum of your daily decisions. That's what it is. Your job as a business owner every day is to optimize your business toward perfection every single day, just one step forward every single day. That one step forward might even be a failure where you learned not to do something that doesn't work. You just got better. A lot of people might not have a lot of sales, and they might be really down on that. But if you look back and if I talk to them, I'd be like, "Well, what have you learned over the last three months or six months or a year or two years?" They're completely different people. They've learned so much about business and entrepreneurship and marketing. They're probably a couple tweaks away from finding the right product or the right audience, and figuring that equation out. Then things just start going. We've seen that happen all the time where people are at it for one or two or three years, maybe even five years, and it's the sixth year where it just hit. Everything clicked for them. They understood where they were going wrong, why their subject matter wasn't resonating, wasn't selling as much. But they learned everything about it. Then once they got the right subject matter, or it clicked, all of a sudden they're at $100,000 or more in sales in that next year. It's like five years of struggle and then up and to the right in that last year.

Patrick Shanahan: We're going to continue to see it as a trend. We're going to continue to expand ours. I think it fundamentally is the difference. We just got through earlier on the podcast saying, "What is the most important thing? Don't quit. Don't quit." To the extent that office hours keep you from quitting, why is that Shopify stat so damning? The website, the average website time that they lasted was less than five months because they didn't have the support, because they quit. It's everything that we're just talking about. It doesn't even matter what business you're starting. If you can just keep moving forward every single solitary day, if you're going through hell, keep going. If you can just get through those quitting points where everyone else quits, you've got it. You've got it. That's what office hours is. Fundamentally, just properly equip yourself for the journey. Understand the journey that you're on and that you're going to be on, and prioritize that.

Nick Friend: Yeah.

Patrick Shanahan: I wanted to wrap up today with a little bit of a rant. Things get under my skin and fire me up a little bit. I'm calling this section "NFT Shiny Object Shortcuts." I'll put this chart up because I saw this headline on Bloomberg about NFTs. I thought it was worth mentioning because it said, "NFT trading volumes have collapsed by 97% from the January peak." 97%. When you see a chart like that, you go, "Whoa, this is very rare that something appears out of nowhere, spikes on a chart like it did, and then completely disappears." The article goes on to say that apparently somewhere between 95% to 97% of NFTs that were selling for all kinds of crazy prices are now completely worthless. They're worth zero. So something like 23 million people that invested in all of these things essentially lost it all. Now, I bring up, and you're not going to know where I'm going with this, I bring up NFTs and this crash as one, a very positive for our community. Because there's so many different ways to talk about NFTs, and for us in our community, it's just that our customers quit getting these damn scam messages. Because I get so many of these messages, "I want your art as an NFT. This would look great as an NFT. Do you sell? Can I do it?" If anyone is saying that to you, it's a scam, you guys. It's a scam. Run the other direction. That needs to be said, period. But for you and I, we both love crypto, we've been in a long time. We love NFTs, we purchased NFTs. We believe quite strongly in the promise of the future that they will deliver someday. For me, as I've studied this, it has everything to do with NFTs being shiny objects that completely derail artists and photographers. They completely derail artists and photographers. I believe that NFTs, as well as two other examples that I'm going to give, are very important cautionary tales. This is where I get really fired up and fried out. I believe one of the most valuable services that we offer for our customers at Art Storefronts and for people to listen to this podcast is when we can tell folks, "This is a shiny object. Avoid this like the plague. Get out of the way." Do not get distracted by this thing, which is really just a shiny object that is going to pull you completely off what you should be focusing on. Instead, stay focused

 where you are. There's a lot of nuance to this. NFTs were certainly one. The number of people that I saw that were not selling any art period, that all of a sudden thought, opened the Coinbase account, bought crypto, figured out how to mint an NFT, put it up into OpenSea. Instead of having their website address and their Instagram bio, had their OpenSea. All of that was a distraction. They didn't need to do a single solitary thing. They didn't sell any art as a result of that. They wasted a tremendous amount of time. While you learned something cool, you wasted a tremendous amount of time because that was a shiny object. NFTs was a huge thing there. What about the other big ones this year? This guy named Elon Musk bought Twitter, which was a terrible platform to sell art and photography in the first place. It never worked to sell art and photography. It never has worked to sell art and photography in any measurable result whatsoever. What happened after Twitter got started? Everyone was like, "This Elon Musk bought it. Some people liked him, some people hated him." The people that hated him were like, "This is going to fail." Then everyone else said, "Oh my gosh, he's gutting the company, it's all going to fail." First, this thing called Mastodon emerged. Then secondly, what did Facebook do? Facebook copied Twitter and called it Threads. First of all, I was so happy because many customers asked us, "Should I go get on Threads? Should I go start a Threads profile?" I was looking at a Slack message from Meg today. She's like, "Hey, this Threads looks really good. It looks really tightly integrated. Should I get in there?" Nick, I'm pulling my hair out of my head because I'm going, "You guys, Twitter, which was crappy for selling art in the first place, has now been copied by Facebook, which is also going to be crappy for selling art. You want to go and jump on this? What are you doing? What are you talking about? This is a shiny object." What I've seen is multiple customers went and did it anyway. How do I know they did it? I'll tell you how I know, because there is now a Threads link on their Instagram profile.

Nick Friend: No, no.

Patrick Shanahan: Now, Nick, what would you say is the most important platform for selling art right now for artists and photographers?

Nick Friend: Social media, Instagram.

Patrick Shanahan: If you had a store, Nick, and it was the most valuable revenue-producing store that you could have, would you, inside your main real estate inside that store, put a billboard for another store, let alone a billboard, a door for another store that sells nothing? Would you do that?

Nick Friend: Never.

Patrick Shanahan: Insane. Now, I'm seeing artists and photographers on the most valuable platform, the most valuable real estate for selling art and photography, having a link to another platform that does not sell anything. Do you know how stupid that is? On your most valuable social media site, because you didn't want to do the work and chase the shiny object, you have now put a link to somewhere that's not going to sell anything. You're taking up the most valuable real estate in your valuable store and sending it somewhere else. It absolutely infuriates me. I needed to get that off my chest, but I think...

Nick Friend: You doing okay over there? You doing okay?

Patrick Shanahan: Give me some heart medication. I realize, though, it's emblematic of a larger thing, which is I'm doing the work over here in the right place. Let's just say for the last year it was Facebook and Instagram, which it's going to be for next year. I'm doing the work, I'm getting results, but it's hard and I don't want to do it. Ooh, this new shiny object, an easier path, somewhere where I don't have to spend as much time, where I don't have to work as hard, let me go do that, tell myself I'm busy and not get the results. Our job, your and my job this year, like it was last year, is to say, "Guys, these are shiny objects. Avoid them like the plague. It's supposed to be difficult, the marketing you're doing over here, and stay focused and keep going."

Nick Friend: Yeah.

Patrick Shanahan: That's a huge thing that we're doing. We are saving people hours and hours and hours of time based on the fact that one, we're good at this, and two, we have data on over 10,000 customers, so we know what is selling versus not selling, and we can make those calls. Dude, the shiny objects are cancer and they will kill your business and they will derail you and demotivate you. Yet, all of these people immediately go and run to whatever the new shiny object is at the consequence of actually doing the work and growing the business.

Nick Friend: The shiny objects come in different forms too.

Patrick Shanahan: Always.

Nick Friend: I think the thinking is, "Oh, maybe this is the reason I'm not selling as much. Maybe I need to try this and that's the reason I'm not selling as much." The other areas that it comes in are, we see people, they literally cannot take their fingers off their website. They are changing things every single day. You have this great analogy, whether they're like, "Oh, should I move my gallery, this image, into this gallery, into this folder, into this category on my homepage?" It's like, do you realize how insignificant what you're talking about is compared to what actually is going to do things? You got to get people to your website. That's what you got to do. Your website is fine. The little tiny tweak you're talking about, like 0.1 percentages, unless your website is just completely messed up, of course. But if it is set up according to best practices, it's done. The box is checked. But some artists that we work with, every week they come back with questions about their website. It's like, oh my goodness, it's been two years. All you are doing is talking about the website. The website box has been checked for two years. It's a shiny object. Another one, analytics. People are like, "Wait a minute, you got to look at analytics. You got to look at analytics." Guys, if you don't have statistically significant analytics, and if you're an analytics person and you don't know what that phrase means, that's a problem. You need to go look it up. Statistical significance. You're looking at data from like, you get like 100 visits or 200 visits a month to your website, and then you're like, "Oh my gosh, is the reason that they're not checking out is because I don't have this or I don't have that or blah, blah, blah," or, "My buddy told me it was confusing," or, "My other person said I didn't understand this." Then you're just moving in different directions. You're changing things. You're totally sidetracked with the wrong problem, and you're falling for it. These are all the same thing, whether it's Threads or a website thing and all of that. You're distracted from the things that you actually need to do to grow your business and the real problems or hurdles that are in your way that you really need to focus on. Is my product marketable enough? Is that the reason? These are the high-level things that happen before the website even, before social media. Your number of followers, your ability to build an audience, is all going to be based around your product, which is your art. Period. Period. The more marketable, the more that your subject matter resonates with human beings out there, the easier it is to build an audience. All of a sudden it's like, "Wow, I can't believe all of these people signed up for my email list." It's like, yeah, you painted Jesus. That's how it works. There's 3.2 billion Christians in the world. There was a big audience for that. The rocks that you were painting or shooting had an audience of 48. 3.2 billion versus 48. That's how it works. Product and then marketing, to get on social media, email, all this different stuff, to actually get people to come to your website, to actually use your technology to check out, is way further down the list. The more that you're focused on the smaller things rather than the bigger things, the more you're wasting time and the more you're falling for this shiny object syndrome.

Patrick Shanahan: 2024, we will resume the battle in keeping the shiny objects off of your radar.

Nick Friend: Keep them off.

Patrick Shanahan: By the way, it's hard, isn't it?

Nick Friend: It's super hard.

Patrick Shanahan: It's hard. It's hard for everyone. This is not the pot calling the kettle black. Last time I was distracted was this morning. You and I are as shiny objecty as it gets, but you start having to catch yourself. We love catching each other too. "Hey, dude, that's a shiny object. You got to stop. It's a shiny object. No, no, no, no, I think." Then it's like, "Oh yeah, you're right, you're right. What am I doing?" Go back to what is working. Where are the leverage points in this business? Got to focus back there.

Nick Friend: Exactly.

Patrick Shanahan: So much fun, buddy.

Nick Friend: All right, you too.

Patrick Shanahan: All right, we'll see you next week.

Nick Friend: Later.