Thoughts on Ai and the future of Art Helper

Join us for a special live stream episode of the Art Marketing Podcast, where hosts Nick Friend and Patrick discuss the transformative impact of AI on the art world. They dive into the features of their innovative tool, Art Helper, designed to streamline marketing tasks for artists and photographers. Discover how AI can serve as your new marketing assistant, helping you get your work in front of more eyeballs and ultimately sell more art. Tune in for valuable insights, audience feedback, and practical tips to elevate your art business!

Podcast Transcribe

Patrick Shanahan: Go on. All right. Coming up on today's edition of the Art Marketing Podcast, we're going back to the roots with the live stream. Haven't done a live stream, you and I, in quite some time. Probably even going back maybe like six months or nine months. So, very, very excited. Uh for those of you that don't know, this is Nick Friend. He's our CEO.

Patrick Shanahan: And we wanted to we wanted to just get a live stream going. And by the way, if you're if you're listening, if you're watching, comments are welcomed. We will certainly uh uh talk about them, respond to them, uh engage in them. But I thought we would start out high level like we're 6 months in on the art storefront's journey from our own AI product, Art Helper.

Patrick Shanahan: Right? We are broadly living through one of the most disruptive periods in all of human history with what AI is doing at a macro. I thought maybe we talk a little bit AI at a macro and then we get right into the nuts and the bolts of like how we're thinking through and this is where I would love audience feedback. What features to prioritize for our audience? what what new AI capabilities do we want to bring to them that is going to help artists and photographers ultimately get their work out to more eyeballs and yes sell more art. So I thought that would be the agenda. Give me a quick intro so I can pin a comment and then and then I'll then I'll start prompting you.

Nick Friend: Yeah, sure. Hey guys, I'm Nick Friend and I'm CEO of Art Storefronts. And you know what it when you guys are giving us the types of features and things that you want. I think another another way of looking at it that we would love to know is like what is the outcome that you're actually looking for? What's the day-to-day you're actually looking for? Right? Because like do you guys want to be using tools and software all day or do you just want you know social media posts made? Do you want, you know, uh do you want the marketing done for you? Do you want as much of the business and the admin of the business done for you? Right? What does your day-to-day look like when you think about running an art business on the whole? Okay, because there's those of you that are out there that you know, many of the art storefronts members, for example, some of you like you like using tools every day.

Nick Friend: You like making your own social media posts and making sure every single word is perfect, you know, and doing all of your marketing to perfection level and all that. And then there's many of you who are like, just get it done. I don't care if like one post out of 29 isn't as good as I thought it would be because you just saved me from doing 29 posts.

Nick Friend: You know what I mean? And and like that's a way bigger and more important outcome because the game that you're playing, you know, is I'm going to create more art. I'm going to enjoy doing this and I need marketing to get done, but if I have to do all that marketing, it's just not going to get done. You know, there's other business aspects that I need.

Nick Friend: I need to grow my audience. I need to do things like there's other things that you're going to need to do. But you really at the end of the day are looking to get all of that done it with the least amount of effort and time possible, right? Or so where do you fall? Do you fall on the side where you like tinkering and using tools all day long and you want to be like doing marketing and doing the business admin or are you just like what's the easiest and simplest way to get this stuff done for me? Okay, because we want to know both sides of it. If you're on that side with the tools, you're probably like, "Well, I need this exact feature and this exact little thing." if you're on the other side, it's like, "Hey guys, what more can you just take off my plate that I'm doing right now?" So, love to hear your feedback.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, it's it's such an interesting way to frame it, right? Because watching this, listening to this downstream are going to be three types of people.

Patrick Shanahan: They're going to be the ones everyone's heard of AI at this point. But on one side of the aisle, there's going to be the ones, I heard about it. I tried it once or maybe someone else talked about it or I'm not ready to do that. That's not my jam. Then you get the folks in the middle that have tried it a couple of times, didn't get the result, the outcome, the expect what they expected.

Patrick Shanahan: They're like, "That's cool. Uh, but I'm busy. I'm going to get back to my life." And then you've got the ones, you know, like like a lot of our customers that are using it daily to help improve their lives. Our POV is that this is this represents the absolute perfect storm for artists. Absolutely perfect. Because I've interviewed hundreds of thousands of artists.

Patrick Shanahan: You've been doing this your entire career. If we were to interview a 100,000 creatives, it is less than onetenth of 1% of those folks that can say that they have an employee in their business. Nick, one full-time team member, less than one of 1%. Okay? AI is going to change this. And it does not matter where in your business, it's going to change it.

Patrick Shanahan: For the first time ever, you're going to have an employee. Okay? You're Christopher is like, "Of course, get it off my plate as much as possible." And and and that's exactly it. This is what he and I are grappling with and and a bunch of our other team members on a daily basis. Like what is the way that we can make you guys more effective and ultimately spend more time on the things that you love doing while actually the work gets out there while actually eyeballs get on the work.

Patrick Shanahan: And the things that we're grappling with like and some of you guys know this and some of you don't. So I'm just going to I'm going to I'm going to show it very very quickly Nick at a high level so they can get an idea. So, we've released an application called called ArtHelper, right? We've customtuned our own AI, and there's a whole bunch of things that this AI can do, right? It looks at your images. It generates room mockups.

Patrick Shanahan: It helps with product titles. Uh, it helps with various different marketing tasks. We've just added unlimited storage. Uh, so you can store as many images as you like. Uh we also have copyright protection uh that we've just installed in the the art guard.

Nick Friend: Yeah, the art guard.

Patrick Shanahan: The big question is like uh it it now posts to the socials on your behalf. You can use it to create reels. Like there's all these amazing things that it can do, but what we're trying to level in on and what what we're really seeking feedback on is like how can we make their lives easier? How can we make it just a little bit easier for them to do the time the things that they need to do such that they can spend more time on the highest impact parts of their business essentially Nick? How can we give them an employee? How can we give them a team member?

Nick Friend: Well, and and I think and I think it's I think it's really important to kind of step back and connect the dots right now because it's like to to many people like we're obviously way ahead of the technology curve, always thinking ahead for our customers, right, on AI. But, you know, I would I would guess that the majority of the people listening to this, the majority of the artists listening to this are like AI like what what do I do with this? It's like, you know, like what am I supposed to do? You know, how am I supposed to grow my business? They're just thinking like, "How do I get my art out there and how do I grow sales?" You know, like that's really what the outcome is. And so I think it's important to tie all of this back you guys to the main message that we've had over the years, you know, on this podcast and as a company. It's like the mission that we have at Art Storefronts for artists, which is it doesn't matter.

Nick Friend: This is a really important statement. It doesn't matter what industry you are in. Doesn't matter. You have to market your business. You have to grow your audience. And you have to get your product out there in order for you to grow sales. Okay? Fish are not going to jump into your boat and magically your art is just going to start selling and you just blow up and go viral.

Nick Friend: Okay? That is not going to happen. That is not how it works. You have to build a business just like everybody else does in every other industry, whether it's like plumbers or it's this or it's that, you know. So, the marketing work has to get done. And what does that mean? It means you got to make social media posts, you know, you got to build an audience.

Nick Friend: You got to have people following you. You got to get out there. You might have to do some art shows in person. Those are great. In order to validate your art, you know, start building an email list and getting people in front of you, you know, then you got to start sending emails out. Like, you have to do active promotion of your products in order to stay top of mind for potential consumers that are out there.

Nick Friend: Otherwise, they got plenty of messages coming at them every day. Okay? Plenty of things to sell them. they're going to forget about you in a second. So these are just fundamentals, right? And so AI, okay, AI allows you and and when we say AI, you take out the thought in your head that is like, you know, producing your own art with AI, like creating imagery with AI.

Nick Friend: We're not talking about that at all. We are not talking about that at all. It's AI as a marketing assistant. It's AI as a business assistant to help you to actually get the things done that every business has to get done. You have to get it done. There's it. It's not optional. You have to get the marketing done to grow any type of a business, right? And so, you can use this AI in order to do it.

Nick Friend: And that's exactly what we've built Art Helper to do. Okay? For for all of you that are out there, it's like, I don't even know what to write on social media. Don't worry about it. Just get your art into Art Helper and use the social media spark that Patrick just showed. You just literally click the button and it creates a perfect social media post for you.

Nick Friend: And then you can edit it. You can either just post it right there. You can schedule it for later or it just goes. But you don't have to think about it. You could literally do it right now in like 30 seconds. Like you could literally go there right now and sign up and go do it in 30 seconds, right? You can also write all the titles and descriptions for your art.

Nick Friend: You can find Facebook groups and other areas where people might like your art, you know, and you're just clicking these buttons and it's like you didn't even have to think about it. You didn't have to think like where's my audience or what am I going to do today? It's like you go in there and you click the button and the assistant is essentially working for you, finding these things and putting them in front of you, making it easy for you to take action.

Nick Friend: All because in order to grow your business, you got to do these things. These are just we're just building the tools in there based on the 10 plus years of building our storefronts with over 15,000 artists and learning and knowing what you have to do to make an art business successful. We're just trying to package those little things up in there to help you guys do it faster and easier, right? But Pat, you got to get the work done.

Nick Friend: And this has been the consistent problem in the industry for ages, right? And the reason that I've always said, you know, and I'll repeat it again, that like you guys, you think that there's so many artists out there, and there are, right? But you have no competition. You have no competition. Why? Because no one is willing to do what I just said.

Nick Friend: They're not willing to do the marketing. This is a problem. This is why most people are not entrepreneurs. You know, at the end of the day, they're not willing. It's hard. They're not willing to do the work and they're not willing to just, you know, you hear, you just heard it from us. Are you going to actually take action on it? Right. Well, a lot of you guys are not.

Nick Friend: You know, I would I would argue to say that eight out of 10 people listening to this probably won't, but there's two of you who will, and you will be the ones who make it. Anyways, go ahead.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, I think you know the larger topic that we're grappling with internally and you know again would love to hear your guys' feedback on this but the hardest thing to do is consistency right no one ever does it so what did we do internally such an important point this is preAI okay this is preAI we came up with this product called Copilot okay...

Patrick Shanahan: ...and what Copilot did is it posted for you automatically it sent emails for you automatically. And the idea was because we had your website and all of your website content, we would just grab it, we would have our team handwrite these posts, we would schedule it and the work would get done. And what happened along the evolution of that product is a bunch of artists that signed up for it, okay, were consistent in their marketing for their first time ever.

Patrick Shanahan: And that's not to say, by the way, that every single solitary post was perfect and it felt like it was custom-tilted to them. There were some bumps along the road, but the takeaway was the ones that were consistent sold more art than the ones that didn't. Okay. But there's there's one big thing underpinning it that Nick and I are trying to get to the nub of, which is the reason co-pilot worked is because you guys were taken out of the equation.

Patrick Shanahan: You did not have to do anything. Essentially, the work was just done for you. Okay? Now, the entire world's changed. Now, we have access to these PhD level brains that can do things for you. And so, what we're grappling with, it's like an existential question. Like, how much can we program this thing to just do for you? Where you don't have to lift a finger.

Patrick Shanahan: Okay? Where your work goes up, it's there. The AI has access to it. The AI knows how to think about it. And how many downstream tasks can it just execute without you having to lift a finger?

Nick Friend: Yeah, that's that's the question.

Patrick Shanahan: That's right.

Nick Friend: And Pat, and you guys, we're talking about Art Marketing Copilot. This this product that we released, what was it, three it was like three or four years ago now, right? That does your social media marketing and your email marketing for you, right?

Nick Friend: And what's so interesting is the commentary that we get on it and some of you might be thinking about this that are watching it is like every once in a while you get a comment that's like um you know like what are the people selling on co-pilot versus not right well we've ran the data and the people that are on co-pilot sell way more art it's like I forget what the numbers it's like 3x you know 300% more art is sold more sales is done if you're on co-pilot and so but then but then their next question or their next thought is that it's like a magic bullet like oh I'm going to automatically you know go from no sales to some sales you know if I just get this as if it's a magic bullet and it's like no no no guys it's not a magic bullet these are not magic bullets it's it goes back to just understanding the common sense right that these businesses that are doing marketing these artists that are doing marketing by simply having co-pilot and automating it and it's just and the promotion is just happening every day because on co-pilot there's a social media post on on Facebook and Instagram every day, right?

Nick Friend: Like it's just going through your catalog and it's just rotating through and it's promoting stuff that you might not have even thought of promoting and all of a sudden people get sales like I haven't even promoted that piece of work for like a year and I never would have because everybody tends to promote their recent stuff and not their older stuff and they get these random sales, you know, and random things happening. They're like, I would have literally never done that unless co-pilot just did it. But that's the whole point is like it's this, you know, the consistent marketing happening all the time just generally is going to help everyone win more, you know, um who's who's actually doing it.

Nick Friend: And it's just because if you're if you have to make those posts every single day and send those emails out, like on the whole, the vast majority of people never do it. They just don't do it. So you just can't win, right? So the real question is the problem that we're trying to solve for you guys is knowing this is like get this assistant behind you to get this work done for you because it's powerful.

Nick Friend: I mean it's just you're just adding like you're not just adding an employee to your business. It's almost Pat it's almost under under-selling it or like under like not really grasping when you call it an assistant, right? Because like an assistant seems like somebody who's like lower level than you, right? Hire this assistant.

Nick Friend: I gotta train them to do everything, you know, but they can't do everything as good as I can. No, no, no, no. This is like a COO level assistant, right? This is like an adding an executive to your team that is able to do marketing really well and actually will get it done and never gets lazy, you know?

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah. I mean, I you guys, you know, I say this all the time. We've been doing this for a long time. I know conclusively I don't need to do a show of hands on Instagram or Facebook or YouTube or Twitter or all the places we're live right now. If there was a product, if there was a service, if there was an individual where you just created the work and somebody did all the marketing, all the sales for you, where you didn't even have to think about it, you didn't have to spend any time on it.

Patrick Shanahan: You didn't have to you didn't have to invest any creativity in it and you could just focus on creating your work. How many of you would take that deal? Every single solitary one of you would take that deal. That is what every single solitary creative wants. Okay. 99.9999%. I just want to create and I want someone something them to take care of everything else.

Patrick Shanahan: Okay? And even if that's not possible right now, even if that's probably never been possible in history, even if that is a myth, right? Even if that is a a a fairy tale, we're starting to get a whole lot closer to it being the case. And what he was saying with co-pilot, what we learned is if the marketing gets done, the business grows.

Patrick Shanahan: Yes, the artist inserts themselves as the bottleneck between the marketing and it going out, the marketing doesn't get done consistently and they lose. And they lose. So, we're sitting here looking at this promise of AI saying, can the artist just upload their work and that's it.

Nick Friend: Yeah. And and I think another important point to make is like volume of marketing is far more important than perfect marketing.

Patrick Shanahan: 100% right.

Nick Friend: 100%.

Patrick Shanahan: Because it's like guys, just look at the way you scroll your own feed. You know what I mean? And you scroll through your own emails. I mean, we live in a headline society. If you think people are hanging off of every word you wrote, the vast majority of people won't even read it. They're just looking at your image.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah.

Nick Friend: You know, and then they read a little bit and maybe it romances them a little bit. You know, some people will read, some people will just look at the beauty of the imagery, but it's getting it out there that is way more important. Like, if you can get out 20, you know, one post a day every month, 30, versus the guy who's trying to have perfect posts and loves them and is so happy with what they wrote, but they got like five of them out in the month.

Nick Friend: The person got — you lost. You already lost because you're missing the point of the game, you know? You're missing the whole thing.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah.

Nick Friend: We are all in a battle for attention, you know, and the attention wars are just getting stronger because with AI allowing artists, creatives, and everybody in the world to make content easier, if you're not using it and you don't have that going behind you, and you're the guy that, you know, is putting out five posts a month and you're you're struggling to do that, you've already lost, you know? So,

Nick Friend: you've got to embrace this and get and get these tools working behind you and just but at the same time, it's like going back to what you were saying, Pat. It's like understand how amazing this is, right? This is like in the industry and uh for the art industry and for all of you guys that you — this stuff was hard.

Patrick Shanahan: Still is.

Nick Friend: This stuff is like it was hard to do. It was, you know, it's demotivating.

Patrick Shanahan: Still is.

Nick Friend: Nobody wanted wanted to do it. But like the progress of the art industry and what has happened to empower you guys as creators, you know, to um to be able to make a living from your art or to legitimate side business from your art, this is one of the most unbelievable things that can happen.

Nick Friend: And why is it? Because in order to have marketing at this quality, you normally would have had to hire a full-time person to do it for you. You know what I mean?

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah.

Nick Friend: Or you'd have to be — learn it all yourself and be competent enough to do it yourself. Either way, you're talking about a big investment. And most solo operators, they don't have that kind of money.

Nick Friend: You can't spend, you know, seven, eight, $10,000 a month on a marketing employee to do what actually is required to get it done. And so, the fact that these things are happening, it's allowing every single individual anywhere in the world from your house without needing to hire an employee to actually get all these things done.

Nick Friend: Now, you've got print on demand. You know, your prints can get done and shipped for you. You don't have to do anything. You just have to create great art. Right now, you can get marketing actually done and get your promotion actually done um in a way that's competitive with other art businesses, you know, that are much bigger um like the Gray Malins of the world, right? The Whelans of the world who have, you know, 30, 40, 50 person teams that are actually running their businesses for them.

Nick Friend: You can do as much marketing as any of those guys. There's nothing stopping you. And it actually doesn't even take a lot of time. And that's what's amazing about what's going on right now. And um obviously we're trying to build the tools to help you guys be able to be on that type of a level doing it on your own.

Nick Friend: Um and still like enjoying what you do and not just being like why did I get into this?

Patrick Shanahan: Right.

Nick Friend: Yeah.

Patrick Shanahan: And I think, you know, it's funny because I saw one of the comments is like wait you guys are working on this now? No we already have it now. It's already working right. And and you look at K's photography here right like this is this is exactly what we're talking about.

Patrick Shanahan: Art Helper has helped me with giving me multiple title ideas for my photos. Otherwise, I'm spending so much time brainstorming. That's a perfect example. You know, you — we just kept talking about social media post, but that's not even what it is. It's like these productivity productivity units, right? It's almost like, you know, your creative business is this assembly line and how much business your business does is how many units come down the assembly line.

Patrick Shanahan: Well, what's a unit? How many interior decorators did you did you talk to last week? Right? How many photos did you get titled? How many collections did you get titled? Did you — did you write a press release for your business? It — the what it is almost doesn't matter, Nick. It's how many units per week are coming down your productivity assembly line.

Nick Friend: Right.

Patrick Shanahan: That's ex —

Nick Friend: That's exactly right. That's exactly right.

Nick Friend: And before it just it was the biggest chicken and the egg and remains the biggest chicken and the egg. You know, I saw a comment here from an Indian guy like, "How do I sell my work?" Right? And you know what? Do you know what I hear there? If I could just hire someone in my business, Nick, to help me do some of this marketing, I would start selling my work.

Nick Friend: But the problem is is that I need to start selling my work to be able to afford to hire that person. This has been the biggest lifelong chicken and egg scenario I've ever seen. I'm here to tell you, you've got somebody now. Like, this is ready to go. And you know, I'm sorry, guys, because there's this notion that like when you're so in the business, you don't realize that people have no idea. We have this app already.

Nick Friend: It's called arthelper.ai. You can sign up for it. Just Google Art Helper. But we're more existentially talking about — he and I are sort of of the mind that the best way we can help the most artists is just to automate everything so it goes out.

Patrick Shanahan: So as much as can be automated.

Nick Friend: Yes.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah.

Nick Friend: Like we're high level here. This is not like reality reality. It's just like you know it's conceptual. But there's things that the — like there's things that the artist always has to do. Like nobody can run your business for you. You know what I mean? Like AI will be able to do like the vast majority of things, right? But like you and your creativity — like you got to create marketable art number one. Like if you have the best marketing in the world, the best marketing in the world won't sell an unsellable product. Do you know what I mean?

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah.

Nick Friend: Like that's a fact. And so you have to find your audience. You can use AI to help you do that. But you got to build audience. You got to create fans, right? Like people who like you and follow you and you have collectors, right? Like you have a role in this.

Nick Friend: And so you don't want to think of it like very binary black and white like I'm going to do nothing and all I'm going to do is create, you know, because that's not going to get you anywhere. Okay? You got to do something, but you should be using the tools to get you there. I think another another important point to just reiterate again, right? Like just advice over the years is with the chicken and the egg scenario is when you're building like a startup and you don't have a lot of sales, you should have another job.

Nick Friend: You should have another job. Don't put all that pressure on you because you have to invest in the business and you can't choke a startup to death because you will choke it to death. You got to give it a chance. You got to do the marketing and promote your business. It's like you've talked about, you don't even know if your art is sellable unless you promoted it for nine months to a year and got out there.

Nick Friend: How many people, how many Art Storefronts members have we had, Pat, where they're just marketing and marketing and they're on co-pilot. So the marketing is being done for them and it's going and going and going. It's like, why haven't I sold anything yet? Well, how come I haven't sold anything yet? And then all of a sudden, they get a sale in like month nine and they're like, oh wow, like I didn't realize it.

Nick Friend: And then they go back and they're like, oh yeah, that person signed up for my email list in the first month.

Patrick Shanahan: Right.

Nick Friend: Yeah. And it took nine months for them to buy this original and they — but they bought it and it — you know and it's like this is how it goes. It's like people — you know, with art, it's not a transactional thing, right? Like where, you know, we call it like caveman art selling where it's like you buy an ad and that person like literally buys instantly.

Nick Friend: Like people are not just sitting there with like open wall space looking for your art right now. You know, it's a different type of a game than that. You know, you're trying to create fans and you're trying to get them and move them down, you know, your funnel in order to buy and that's a process. How does that happen? Regular marketing to them, right? You capture the leads.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah.

Nick Friend: You get them on your email list, they follow you on social media and then you are, you know, you are doing outbound marketing to stay top of mind so that when it is time — when maybe it's Black Friday, maybe it's the holiday season and they're buying a gift or maybe they have open wall space — you're the first person they're thinking of because they've got that image in their mind or two that they really liked and they're kind of going back to you on it, you know.

Nick Friend: And one other point I want to make too when you were talking about like units of output on the business. How many units of output, you know, that you're doing — like what we've always said at Art Storefronts over the years, you know, is like the units of output — they come down to at the end of the day, if there's like one metric that matters — how many eyeballs saw a piece of your art today.

Nick Friend: Yeah guys, I want everybody to ask themselves that question right now. Maybe just say yesterday. Okay, since the day is over. How many eyeballs, how many sets of eyeballs saw your art yesterday? Anything. Well, those of you who made a social media post yesterday, even if you have five followers, you know, and even if it's just your mom and dad or a cousin or a coworker, if you got some of them to see, then you got at least one set of eyeballs or maybe you got five or maybe you got a hundred.

Nick Friend: Like, you are better off than everybody else who's on this who got zero. Right? So whether it's interior designers or your social media following, you know, or you do a reel that like gets to a brand new audience, you know, the number of eyeballs that are on your art every day in all of these different venues, right, is ultimately going to be — like it's going to determine the output of your business, right? Like that's it.

Nick Friend: So, when you're doing — using these different tools, when you're using Art Helper to write titles and descriptions and then you're making a social media post or you're trying to find interior designers or you're doing whatever, it's like at the end of the day, like how many interior designers saw your art? How many people saw your art? If you can maximize that number, like just focus on that and maximize that number, very good things are going to happen.

Nick Friend: Why? Because you're going to be like, I need more eyeballs. Okay, wait. I need to get a bigger audience. I didn't have enough eyeballs seeing my art. And then you're also going to be like, I got to be posting more often, you know, because when you have — you guys, if you have like a thousand followers, Facebook and Instagram doesn't show your art to every one of those people.

Nick Friend: I mean, Pat, what do they say? They might show every post of yours to like 1% of your audience or 2%. And if the post does well, it'll — it might go to four or five, right? So like every time you post, like not everybody is seeing it and different — and it'll show a post to different people in your audience based on the subject matter of it and whether it resonates with them or not.

Nick Friend: So like if you paint or shoot waterfalls and then you have like, you know, wild animals, it's going to show each of that content to different people, you know, in your audience. And so by posting regularly, you're going to actually get your art in front of more eyeballs at the end of the day. But it's a very simple way of looking at it every day.

Nick Friend: Like what am I going to do right now today to get my art in front of eyeballs, you know, and how many of them? You can almost start writing it down on a sheet of paper next to you and you'll be shocked at how much it'll change your behavior and especially like the compounding of day after day after day.

Patrick Shanahan: But, you know, we talk about this like employee scenario and it's like, okay, so I've got this group of wild flowers that my buddy Johnny had, right? This is a new body of work you were you were working on. Let's just say, Nick, right? And I want you to give a description to this body of work and tell me about it. And you sit there and you think about that and you're like, okay, I did this — I did this new body of work and I need to come up with like a description of it, right?

Patrick Shanahan: And so for those that are listening, like I've just selected nine images that are all over the mountains, the Wasatch mountains in Utah in summer and spring when the flowers are going. All of the images just got grouped into one folder and I threw all of them into the AI and said, "Write a product description for this collection," right? And they just named it the collection Nature’s Palette.

Patrick Shanahan: This captivating collection showcases the breathtaking beauty of wildflowers set against majestic mountain backdrops. Each piece reveals a unique moment in nature where vibrant blooms dance in the gentle breeze harmonizing with the rugged terrain, right? And it goes on and on and on.

Patrick Shanahan: And so if I asked you to like explain to me what you were working on, Nick, like what this new body of work encompasses, how much brain power would that have taken you? How long have you sat down in pen and paper? Right? And so now I can save this description, right? And with a couple of clicks of a button, I can go right to social. It's going to take what it wrote as the product description for this. And it's going to say, "Are you ready to do a social post?" And in a matter of like the 30 seconds while you were thinking about what the heck you were going to title your new collection and why you did it, I've got this live on Instagram in a beautiful carousel post or a reel with the description and it's all done, right?

Patrick Shanahan: And like the promise of that to me of that actually getting done versus how long it would have taken. I've already shipped it, dude. I'm already moving on. By the time some — one artist A is still thinking about it and is going to probably spend the whole day thinking about it or the next week, artist B literally already has it shipped. And even if it's not perfect, you don't know what's going to resonate with your audience.

Patrick Shanahan: You have no idea. You don't know if you're on the right track. Are you on the right track?

Nick Friend: You don't know if you're on the right track. So, just ship it, right? Like, you should practically just ship what the AI gives you and then write your own in, you know, a week later because nobody's seeing it anyway, right? They don't care.

Nick Friend: They don't care that — like if you showed me one of your pieces this week and then you show it again next week and I follow you, I probably will not even remember that you did that.

Patrick Shanahan: That's right.

Nick Friend: Okay. And secondly, I will not give you-know-what if I see it again with a different description. Nobody cares, right? And so understanding that, it's like you just — you fire the arrows, you know, and then gosh, you never know — some — you might, on one of these, you might be shocked and you get a bunch of comments on them where the description completely resonated and you're like, "Oh my gosh, I didn't even think that that's what people thought about when they saw my art." Because it's one thing to describe what you feel about when you see your art, you know, and it's another thing of the way it makes me feel when I see your art because your art might remind me of things in my life and that's why I'm buying it and that matters to me.

Nick Friend: And so sometimes you got to get out of your own way.

Patrick Shanahan: Not sometimes. All the time.

Nick Friend: All the time.

Patrick Shanahan: Let's talk about a winning strategy versus a non-winning strategy. You know what a non-winning strategy is? Not getting the work in front of anyone's eyeballs.

Nick Friend: Exactly.

Patrick Shanahan: What do all artists — being your own bottleneck, right?

Nick Friend: Yeah.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah. That's just it. Being your own — I got to wait till this is perfect. I got to wait till that's figured out. I got to wait till that's sorted. Guess what happens? You wake up, you're 80 and no one's seen your damn work. That is not a strategy.

Patrick Shanahan: And I already know. I don't need any feedback from anyone because I've talked to hundreds of thousands of you over the last 10 years. Like AI, the promise of AI, what Art Helper can already do, what some other tools can already do out there is help you get the hell out of your own way. You guys need feedback on the work. You're never going to have an idea of if you're on the right track, if you landed in a subject matter material that worked, if you're cooking with gas, if nobody sees it.

Patrick Shanahan: And what do you do? You make up all these excuses and throw up all these walls. And I'm not even blaming you. I do it too. I do it too with the content that I put out. Like we are our own worst enemies because we need the feedback. We need to understand is what we've created resonating. Is this something that someone might be interested in? And in the time that you and I were yapping, I could have had a series of 10 images, a description, a social media post, and a carousel.

Patrick Shanahan: And maybe — and I don't learn anything, but maybe I get some feedback. I'm hoping that there's an artist on here right now that's actually already done it while we were talking. They went to arthelper.com. They signed up because guys, you can sign up for free. You know, at Art Storefronts for our websites and membership, you can't just sign up as many of you know, right? It's a closed — it's a closed thing.

Patrick Shanahan: You got to request a demo. You know, it's it's a different type of a thing. But Art Helper, you can go to arthelper.com right now and you can sign up and you can make a post right now just like Patrick was showing in 30 seconds. The question is, will you do that? You know, there's literally nothing stopping you.

Patrick Shanahan: You don't have to pay for it. You can just go and do it. And it's the promise of AI. That's the promise.

Patrick Shanahan: And that's the thing. It's like, if you got a pro like, oh, some of you might be thinking, "Oh, wait. I've got my art, but I don't have any descriptions for it. I've never titled them." Go do it. You’ll have it done. You'll have it done in 10 minutes. All of them. And when I say 10 minutes, I mean like 10 minutes for like 50 of your images, you know?

Patrick Shanahan: Oh, but I want to promote a collection of my images. Great. You can do it in there right now. Pat just showed it in 30 seconds, right? Start moving your business forward. Get some eyeballs on your art right now. If you actually do that right now, like you can literally do it in 60 seconds. You could sign up, upload a piece or two, make two posts or make a post and you're done for the day. Like this is — it's unbelievable.

Nick Friend: And something happens. Something got done.

Patrick Shanahan: And something got done.

Nick Friend: Something got done and you don't know what's going to happen. And don't belabor it. Don't read the description and go, "Oh my gosh, this isn't perfect. I don't know what to do." Just ship it.

Nick Friend: You know, when we say just ship it, guys, it just means just post it. Just go. Nobody cares.

Patrick Shanahan: No, you really want to think that all your friends and family and all your followers really care that much about your post. I hate to break it to you. They don't.

Nick Friend: They didn't see it.

Patrick Shanahan: They did not. They didn't see it. Nobody cares. You know, your best friend might look at you — call them like, "Hey, did I do anything wrong with that?" Stop doing that, okay? Because they're going to tell you all the wrong things.

Nick Friend: What matters is what the whole market is — like, how it's responding to what you do. But just go do it. Okay? You — we're giving you the ability to go do something in like 30 seconds or 60 seconds to move the metric that we just talked about. Getting more eyeballs on your art today. I don't care if it's one person.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah.

Nick Friend: One person that sees your art today. That could be zero. Make it one. Okay? Try to make it 10. Try to make it a hundred if you can. You'll learn how to do that. But go make it one right now. Because if you can't do the 30 seconds or one minute right now, I don't know what to say. Okay. You have to do it. Right? It's right there.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah. And I know you've got a hard stop, Nick, so if you want to drop off, you can drop off and I'll just wrap the thing up.

Nick Friend: All right. Um thank you guys.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah. Thank you for the comments. Um guys, I would just say this broadly — like, you have an employee for the first time ever.

Patrick Shanahan: Stop overthinking AI. Stop worrying about uh how does it sound? What does it do? What is it this? What is it that? I don't care if you use Art Helper — ours — or if you go and use one of the ones off the shelf. I know conclusively if I can motivate you guys to get the hell out of your own way and start getting your art out into the world, everything in your business is fundamentally going to change.

Patrick Shanahan: None of you have ever had an employee in your business. Now, here is this employee, this PhD subject matter expert brain, okay? Ready to work for you. And you just got to — you got to get out of your own way and let it help you. Let it help you. All of you want to spend more time creating, sell more of your art, and you don't want to do the admin marketing stuff.

Patrick Shanahan: This can help you out so significantly. So, we'll leave it there. We'll wrap it up there. I'll say for those that are not subscribed to the podcast, that are watching this live, it's called the Art Marketing Podcast. Going to be coming with a ton, a ton, a ton of episodes on how to think about AI, where you should jump into it, ways that you can use it.

Patrick Shanahan: And just don't wait, you guys. Don't wait. This is like the biggest fundamental game changer for artists and photographers, creatives of every stripe that I have ever seen. That I have ever, ever seen. And if you can just start embracing it now, it is going to empower you guys, creators of all stripes, to start getting eyeballs on your art.

Patrick Shanahan: You need the eyeballs on your art. And if you can just embrace it, if you can just let go of a little control and start increasing the output — that is the business, that is your factory, that is your assembly line of creativity — everything's going to change, you guys. Everything's going to change.