Artist Megh Knappenberger - Working Session
Join us for a unique episode of the Art Marketing Podcast as host Patrick interviews artist Megh Knappenberger in an informal fireside chat. They dive into the challenges of creating engaging video content, the impact of hiring a marketing assistant, and the transformative power of AI tools for artists. Discover practical tips for enhancing your online presence, leveraging CRM systems, and using technology to connect with your audience. Whether you're an artist or a creative entrepreneur, this episode is packed with insights to help you thrive in the digital age!
Podcast Transcribe
Patrick Shanahan: All right, coming up on today's edition of the Art Marketing Podcast, uh, throwing another curveball, another audible here, Meg, something we've never done before. Uh, I am joined by our storefronts customer, longtime friend, Meg Knappenberger. Uh, multiple podcast guests actually for you, too. Probably done this like two or three times. Um, I slacked and harassed Meg and said, "Hey, Meg, I want to start doing a new concept, which I'm calling, I might as well get my super sweet screen share, the working sessions." And sort of the idea, the genesis for this is, you know, get a customer, get an artist into a like a however long we go, 30, 45 minutes, and have it be an informal fireside chat slash consulting slash talking about AI. What are you working on? What do you need help with and see where it goes and there's really no other parameters or guidelines other than that. So I think what we do Meg quick intro by you who you are what you do and then we'll just dive right into it.
Megh Knappenberger: All right. Hey uh I'm Meg Knappenberger. I have been on with Pat a few times. Uh I'm a painter in Kansas City. I do a lot of work inspired by the Midwest. I have a license with the University of Kansas and do some local sports work. And um today you want me to talk about what we were what we're trying to solve today?
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah. Well, I got the I got the whole formal agenda, so we might as well just get in here. Okay, let's pull it up. All right, I got to figure out how to drive this one. I'm still on here. Okay, the working sessions. What did I say? Talking shop, apps, insights, what's working, and where we go from here. It's going to be informally formally awesome. Um so, so I say. So, in terms of the formal agenda, Meg, I just took what we had in our in our messages back and forth. So, we can start with video content. How to solve for everything being shot in the studio and it all looking the same and how you're going to fix that. I have a very very easy fix for that. Um, Meg recently made a new hire and actually has the full-time employee, which places Meg in the top 1% of artists because so few artists have employees, which is like a thing I love AI and I drone on about. So, she mentioned that it's going or I want to find out how it's going. Get a check-in. Um, she mentioned her Instagram numbers are up. So, I want to talk about that. Maybe Instagram deep dive a little bit. Then, um Megan's really struggling with the CRM tool. She's got some deep needs for this. So, I want to talk about what these needs are broadly. Uh, and then dive into some things that she can do right now because AI is amazing. It's moving at a million miles an hour. Uh, Meg uses ChatGPT. So, I want to talk about prompts and prompting. Um, and you know, let's let's even probably create a live prompt for Meg's business on the fly, which I think would be really really cool. Um, I want to talk about Gamma app for IG carousels if we've got time and then I'm going to ambush you on Meg hosting podcast. So that's the that's the agenda, I think. Um, so I can slide that one in there.
Megh Knappenberger: Oh yeah. Yeah, of course. Of course. You know, there's you got to you got to you got to just take shots.
Patrick Shanahan: So, one, let's let's talk about um I've got the phone up on my end and I'll try to make it and see if I can make this a little bit easier to see. That's not going to work. I'm just stick to this. Okay. But you So, it'll be a little bit hard to see, but you know what? You can zoom in. Um your concern broadly speaking with video is everything's in your studio and so you're like, "Oh my god, the backdrops are always the same. You're in it right now. How can you get into a scenario where you're not in it all the time?" Right? Is that is that like the primary concern? How can you sort of adjust the backgrounds like when you're showing the art, when you're doing things and mix it up a little bit?
Megh Knappenberger: Uh yeah, I think um you know it's pretty easy to make still photo mockups of my work where the background and that is all dynamic. I think especially with like Copilot that's become very easy to do that in a lot of ways. But what I'm seeing especially through Instagram is that the content that's bringing new people in Sorry. Yeah. And uh the stuff that's performing well is video. And so what I'm trying to move into, especially with some of my work that I created towards the beginning, all of my video content is kind of old. It's not as the quality isn't as good. And so I need video content of me holding the work, me putting it up on the wall, walking up and kind of looking at it in a space. And I can do that in my studio. But uh like I have, you can't see it. of Dorothy like staged on the wall back there. Um, I don't want all of my staged stuff to look exactly the same because what I'm trying to do is show people this is what it could look like in your space. You could put this over your couch, blah blah blah. So, that's a hard thing to solve for because uh it as from what I know, I'm sure you're going to solve this for me today. Uh, doing this with AI, I haven't figured that out yet.
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, I think I think more broadly like even even before we get into the AI and AI can do a ton of for you as well is like don't don't sleep on the green screen. The green screen is like the the greatest thing ever and it's not expensive. Okay, it's totally not expensive. And wh turn my lights off. That's not what I want to do. Like if you look at my background, I'm in a completely different room, right? And you know, I can change this room in two seconds or I can pull this screen out from my ceiling and you can see how big of a mess my office is. Right. Right. So, you're one screen in two lights away from having this completely nailed. And I think like it's it's an investment that you need to do. And once you do it, you can have any background in two seconds. And like people fail to understand how cheap this is. And so I wanted to like literally just show this to you. You can get a green screen and this is literally who I recommend going with. The problem I have mine like fist tuned to my ceiling. Um, which makes it kind of nice because I can just pull it down. Problem is you've got 18 foot ceilings. First world problems over there, Meg. Um, but you could get a green screen like this or even a little bit bigger. You're going to be like 200 bucks. Okay. And literally two of these key lights, okay, which are totally movable and you can use to change your background when you're doing video chats or not. and you're gonna be like five or six hundred bucks in and you're going to be able to switch whatever background whenever you want for any reason and you can place an easel in front of this thing and and like the lighting concerns are not even you know once you have this it's one little piece of software. I will teach you how to download it and you can be in green screen mode at any point in time that you want. So I can I can send you all the links to this. I totally think you should do it. I think it'll be I I think it's just an easy fix. And if you do that, you know, you're you're you're you're not going to be in a situation where you ever feel hamstrung in terms of the video background. And another one of these things where AI is so good. Like literally, you take a photo. Okay. You I mean, this is this is like another one of these things which is just amazing. I might as well even just show you. So, why isn't it going? Oh, because I have my green screen thing on. But you can literally take like a screenshot, you know, of your setup, go into chat GPT. Let me get I got so many windows going on. And Meg is a chat GPT user. And so I can do a new window. No, it's right. New chat. How is my lighting? any recommendations on how to improve it? And I I literally saw a guy doing a tutorial on this. And you would do it obviously with the with the the green screen, right? It'll tell you where to place the lights. It'll tell you how to move it. It'll tell you what to do and connect. And that whole like that whole Elgato suite, these things are adjustable on your computer. It is super easy. You can change the color temperature in seconds and it will take your video production to like level 11. And let's be honest, your your your brother is a super video nerd anyway and so you would have that dialed in in two seconds. So in in terms of a first step there, do you feel like that would solve things? You know, you might need to still use this easel in front of the green screen, but the background could be anything. You could be anywhere. your favorite places, an AI generated image inside of hotels. And most people don't even know, right? Like people say to me all the time like, "Oh, wow. Your art gallery is amazing." They have no idea. They have no idea.
Megh Knappenberger: True. Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to think how to make it work with like having the physical piece of art in my hand and then h and merging that with a green screen and showing, you know, like showing it on the wall and then walking up to it and being able to show like it's this deep and look and this is how it looks over the couch and kind of showing that like you know I can I can use like a simple um you know like zoom in on the screen of a photo to show somebody like you know with a with like a flat mockup, but what I can't do is like walk up to it and kind of give it that whole dimensional thing. And that's what I'm that's what I'm needing with the physical stuff. You know, I'm I'm doing the ASMR thing. It's like, you know, holding the piece and kind of for sure.
Patrick Shanahan: And and and one of the things that I've learned doing this is like you have to have something that's uncomplicated that you can press a button in 30 seconds. Otherwise, you're not going to make the video content, right? Yeah. Like case in point for this, like we just turned it on, we started talking. We don't know where it's going to go, if it's going to be great or whatever. It doesn't matter. We're we're live. We're testing it. So you could two I hooks in one of those ceiling beams, the wires with two additional little hooks to hold any work you want and that's it. Yeah, it would just hang there in front of the green screen. You would have whatever background that you have. It could look like it was on the wall, but it would be in real time or use that easel. But I think you could do that. I think you could visually mix up, you know, what this looks like. I, you know, I do think I do think that it it can get monotonous, the same background, and if it's the same background every time, you're not going to be inspired. If you're not inspired, you don't like the content, you don't feel good about it. But you could do all of this that you're doing right here with any background you want. It's really not that hard. So, I think you should I think you should invest in the setup. I especially know that, you know, most of the time what happens when you invest in this type of stuff. Oh, I'm not showing the phone. Um, when you when you in in invest slash do this like uh uh you end up getting motivated, inspired to try out the new gadget tree and you're all fired up about it. I actually love your building, but I do agree that I think it would make your content more compelling.
Megh Knappenberger: Yeah. Yeah. Because I I want to make it about um the person looking at it and not about me. And so, yes. Um that's that's where this comes in. People aren't as imaginative as as we think they are in certain, you know, about like um the difference between 18 by 24 and 24 by 36. Like I I know the difference between that, but you know, an average buyer has no idea. Does not.
Patrick Shanahan: And to be honest with you, that was a massive statement on Meg's part because most artists do not learn that ever. They think that their buyers have the same artistic brain powers that you guys do to visualize things. We don't. We don't. We need to see the real thing. And you know, you you could also, if you do this green screen thing, like, send me the shot of your house where you want to hang it. Then you put that as your green screen background and then you're showing them in real time and it gets that much closer to being a reality for them. So, I absolutely want to see you do that. I'm gonna send you the links. you can have your brother um test it, but I think given given where your business is, it's it's it's just a no-brainer. It's a no-brainer. You can use it all day long and you can move these things around. And you know, I think if you nailed your template and you had a screen, like you can literally do anything. You could be anywhere. You could change the backgrounds. The backgrounds can be videos. You know, it's it's time to level up. You got a studio.
Megh Knappenberger: Yeah. You know, there's space in there.
Patrick Shanahan: All right. back to our back to our our our meg necks. So, new hire, lessons learned, how's it going, numbers up. Um, love to just hear about this and and and dive into it. You know, I think so many artists over the years that I've talked to have hired Oh, why don't I have it on the screen? I got the wrong window up. It's weird. Um, so many artists that I've talked to I've got too many things going on. Too many windows have hired somebody Meg and it hasn't worked out and you know it hasn't it hasn't stuck and some reason it's not showing the right thing. It's showing chat you try again. Um so tell tell us about it because I'm curious. I want to hear.
Megh Knappenberger: Yeah. Um well I hired somebody. She's actually working 20 hours a week. So she's like halfime not full-time but 20 is pretty many. Yeah. And um she came on uh around October of last year. Mh. And I spent a lot of time last year prior to beginning to interview just really thinking about like what do I want this person to do? I had some coaching from a like friend and business coach to just help me build the um job description in a way that was like before I hired this person um I've been doing this for like nine years. I have kind of like over the years hired people and it hasn't worked out. And I think one of the big reasons that it didn't was because I didn't really spend the time to like really build like what is this job? How do I want to see it grow over time? How do I want to support this person? What is this going to give back to me? And I would just like put a thing up on my Instagram stories like I want to hire somebody to do XYZ and then like interviewed four or five people locally and you know and that was it. And then the expectations weren't set. um there was no like room for growth. All things got wires got crossed. Things didn't work out. And that's why because I didn't really spend the time to to really do it. So I looked at it completely differently this time. I put it out onto LinkedIn. I got so many applications that I had to turn the job off. So the it was a good listing interviewed blah blah blah. Go through all that. And um the person that I hired is actually located in San Diego. Doesn't matter. could have been anywhere in the world. Um, so that was one thing to just open it up. And so this person is helping kind of generally, she's like my um like director of marketing or I think that's what I called the job. Um, so she's helping with a lot of social media um stuff like um working out giveaways. So there's a lot of like um personal interaction that has to happen to set up collaborations and giveaways and all of that. and it that is a really great way for me to grow, but it takes a lot of time. So, she's kind of taken that off my plate. She's also helping with um some of the like offline marketing that I do for my KU and my licensed work. There's stuff that kind of runs through the alumni association and there's a lot of components there that she's helping with too, as well as like some general launch stuff, some ideas. It's it's kind of a big bucket of stuff, which is all to say uh I hired her and the whole point of this was to buy back painting time. So I found like as I was going that the more time the more I was growing, the more time I was having to spend on the administrative and the marketing and kind of keeping everything going. And I really wanted that. The painting time is how I make money. That's what I'm best at. That's what gives me energy. So, um I've been kind of in this process like throughout the year last year of just trying to like buy back that time, train up people as well as having like my VA who um virtual assistant is somebody who manages my inbox. I gave her a lot more tasks. So, she kind of got pulled up too. And uh the advice that I got was like nothing will really start really going for about six months. like you got to you have to invest in this, invest in the time really getting them like up to speed and I swear like to the day at like the six month mark it was like whoop so just like things started clicking you know all the things that we things started actually happening so it's like it takes a few months to get a person trained and all of like getting all of the stuff out of my phone and into a place where we could share it like all the videos and uh and then just setting up, you know, sharing the strategy and then letting her run and set things up. So, um it's a little scary because it is a big investment and it does take time for things to get going. But uh I think um what one of the main things where we've seen kind of pulling it back around of the numbers being up on Instagram uh one of the things that we've seen is that um my growth like with new followers has been kind of like slow and steady with little blips where there's things that go like a little mini viral. But um my existing audience of people got completely reinvigorated. So those people were starting to see my content again, starting to interact with it again. It was like all those people had just their interaction with my stuff was really low and I would go through these periods of like, you know, blah blah and then I would kind of pull back while I was painting and then blah. So I'm trying to level that out and um this has really helped with that.
Patrick Shanahan: And those are all the people that you want interacting with your content because they've already purchased and you need them to come back again and again and again. Do you do you have her using AI at all? And if if so, how or do you just kind of leave her to do her thing?
Megh Knappenberger: Uh, she is sometimes using it when we have like um I write the big sort of main, you know, content paragraph about something and then using it to make like little um, you know, here's here's a comment for this, here's this, here's the website. So, there are like versioning reasons that she uses it. And I use it a lot for like um headline ideas, strategy ideas, all feed, you know, we're doing this big campaign with the KU alumni association and just like helping with like what's what's the strategy? How should we divvy up this budget? And so, we're do we're using it kind of um I would say like collaboratively in that way.
Patrick Shanahan: So, collab status. Yeah. I um I want to show you some stuff there and we'll get into that and you know we'll work on creating a project for Meg and then getting getting some of the the the prompting in there. I'll I'll show you this cuz I'm finding that the like the line is in the sand and it's clear as day. It's you're either using this to be more effective, more efficient, do more, put out higher quality stuff, uh uh not start with a blank page, or you're being left behind. And like sort of the analogy that I give is it's all so new and it's all moving so quickly that it's like a bunch of us from a bunch of different countries, none of which speak the same language, are all dropped onto an island. And none of us have ever been to the island before. and none of us speak the language and everybody's just equal. Yeah. What's going to happen is who's working, who's working at it, who's trying, who's figuring out the new things. No one has a leg up on anyone else, like practically speaking at all. And you know, everyone always says to me like, you know, even members of my team like, should I go take a course? Is there something that I can learn? I'm like, yeah, open the damn thing up and start promping. Just start figure it out. So, I want to show you some stuff on that today that I think will really, really level you up. But what is next in our um our little slideshow here? So yeah, the CRM tool and this is this is really really interesting and I want you to just speak to the issue green screen two lights be anywhere about 550. Your case probably about 750 because you're need to get a bigger green screen. Shout out to Taylor there. Um so Meg's CRM needs and you can let me know if any of this has changed. So easy to access from your phone especially when you run run into people out in the wild. Um, and we're not going to talk about the glasses that would automatically see who that person is and go, "Hey, Meg, this is so and so. They've purchased this, that, and the other." Even far off. Um, list each person and what they bought with details like year, size, frame, color, etc. Sometimes people want to add to an existing collection, and I have to look up what they bought before. And personal notes like kids names, birthday, stories they've told me that there's so much use for this. Um, continually auto updates based on purchases through my website backend. allows me to manually for one-off purchases like commissions or ad manually um enable this to leave my brain which is probably the most important of all of it. Right? And you know a couple of things I want on this broadly and then I want to show you something that you can literally do today. I would say again things are moving at a million miles an hour right now. The whole world changes every month in terms of technology when you're on the front lines of this. Why do I bring that up? You have your Art Storefronts back end, which is like all other CRM. It's in CRM 1.0 land. We're about to enter CRM 2.0 land. In CRM 2.0 land, your CRM is going to have all of this context for absolutely everything that you've ever done. It is going to pull in every conversation that you've had with anyone across all of your different platforms and profiles. It's going to have all of your order history. It's going to let you know when they've come to your website. All of that is coming and it's coming soon. We're working on a version of it at Art Storefronts. It'll probably dovtail with ArtHelper. Every other CRM company in the world is probably going to have to start from scratch and completely rebuild theirs. The beautiful thing though with with AI, and I think this is like such an important lesson in AI, do not wait. Start working on it now. And in your case, you have your email. Okay. You have that you that you're talking with everyone. And is that Google hosted mail that you do that for?
Megh Knappenberger: Nope. No.
Patrick Shanahan: What is it?
Megh Knappenberger: Um, it's hosted through GoDaddy.
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, I get that. But like what is like the email program where you're actually like talking to Oh, I see. Um, I'm using Outlook.
Patrick Shanahan: You're using Outlook for that. Okay. It's probably Okay. I wonder who's doing the Okay, we'll we'll look at that. We'll talk about that. We'll table that partially. You have your entire order history, which you can export directly out of our storefronts. Absolutely. Every order, every everything, all the all the everything, and it comes out one sheet.
Megh Knappenberger: Not a not everything. I have uh some offline stuff that's happening like commissions and originals that are not in my art storefronts back end that need to get How do you Yeah. How do you database that?
Patrick Shanahan: Uh it's in spreadsheets right now.
Megh Knappenberger: Very good. Okay. So you have spreadsheets on the one and then you have an export of your art storefronts um instance that you can do. Okay. Great. So what will happen? What will happen is and you can literally start playing with this today because you are a chat GBT subscriber. You can you can start literally doing this today. And I'm just going to add this to the stage. So chat GPT just recently um I think like in the last I don't even know last um it now integrates with Google Drive. And so you can integrate this and I'm trying to think I had it pulled up earlier. No, I didn't know. I can't find it. How do I integrate with Google Drive? So, essentially what you can do, Meg, is you can get a folder. Okay. So, you just ask how to do it and it'll tell you how to do it. Um, personal for yourself if you're trying to connect. No, no, no, no. There's a native there's a native connection. I might have to make you a separate video because I don't want it to take all day long. Okay. It had like the little thing down here was show and of course when I go to demo it, it's not working. No, not do search, not web. That's really annoying. Um, it did this for me earlier. Oh. Oh. Oh, I see I'm in the wrong window. Sorry. There it is. Do you see it?
Megh Knappenberger: I still see lighting improvement tips.
Patrick Shanahan: Oh, connect Google Drive to help your team. Yes. Yeah. You are you are literally Okay. You are literally 20 minutes away from being able to chat with your entire customer database, including your other spreadsheets in an LLM in natural language. All you have to do is hit connect, tell it what folder, and put those files in there. It will it will tell you every single solitary thing about every single solitary person. How many orders have they done? How long how long did it take? D. And you know, this is the the perfect example to get into prompts. And let me just make sure that this is I'm going to show you this. I'm going to I'm going to make a small so we can make this a little bit bigger.
Megh Knappenberger: How do I do that? Like this. And then I can also export my um the personal notes about people are in my native address book. And so there would need to be like an export of that which includes all the those are all the notes like their dog's name is Fluffy, you know.
Patrick Shanahan: So here's here's what I want to do. Okay. And and this is like literally going to get very meta, but I'm going to show you anyway. And I'm I'm gonna use I'm going to use my speech thing to make it a little bit quicker. Okay. I need your help generating a system prompt for a project that I'm going to do here in chat GPT. Uh first I want to explain it. I want you to ask any questions of me in detail that you need for clarification and then I need your help in generating the system prompt. So, it says okay, it understands what it's going to do. I am going to connect my Google Drive and I'm going to upload the entire database from my CRM on my website. I'm an artist selling art. I'm also going to include some individual CSV files into Google Drive that has the rest of my order history. I would also like to update my address book and ideally all of my email correspondents all into Google Drive into documents that you can read. Now I want to explain what you need to do with it. Okay. So I've now told it what it's going to do. It's already thinking about it. It's getting the context. So what I want you to do is write a system prompt for me that I'm going to use in a project here in chat GPT that will query, study, understand, know all the communications, basically act as a CRM for all of the documents that I put into my Google Drive. Can you please create a system prompt for me that will do that? So, it's doing its thing. It's doing its thing. Now, what it's going to do is create the system prompt for you. And by the way, you would never write out anything this detailed. None of us would, right? And literally, you're just going to go boom. Okay. Copy this thing. Mine didn't let me copy. Oh, clarifying questions. It's asking clarifying questions. It didn't write the prompt. Do you want the AI to surface personal information like clients, preferences, birthdays, past purchases? Should it be d sales and order history? Should I be able to summarize trends over time and identify your top customers? Do you want to include financial insights like monthly revenue, average order value, or bestselling pieces? What email documents be structured? Exact. So, it's asking some follow-up questions. Okay. Assume I answered yes to all of the above. Please create a system prompt v1. Okay. So what it's going to do is it's essentially now going to write a system prompt and it's going to say you are a helpful d you are an advanced personal assistant and CRM system for a professional artist. you have full access to the users this that the other da right and what will happen here is that once this thing is done okay we are going to have a very very easy ability and I'll just show this for for good measure once I can create the whole thing it's done I mean do you see how detailed and insightful this thing is right out of the gates it's like insane there's no way that I would come up with that prompt you would come up with that prompt right in here that's a good reminder too was like when when using AI, uh you can use AI to help you use AI. I I don't always remember to do that when I'm prompted to say like, I don't really know how to write a prompt for this, but here's what I'm thinking. And you can use ums and a's and and do it verbally and it can completely understand it. And that's that is a uh a one of those tipping point things that you learn from using it. But I feel like for if anybody is listening or watching and is completely new to AI, I think that's a really important thing to say, can understand you even when you take a pause or you don't make any sense or you repeat yourself. You can talk very naturally and it can still understand and help you learn how to use it, which is very very meta. It's kind of hard to understand until you're like, "Oh, you can teach me."
Megh Knappenberger: We have all been dropped onto the island and it's just the ones that are working on the language. That's like literally it.
Patrick Shanahan: So yeah, exactly. So what I want you to do is I want you to come back. Okay. So you're going to copy this. Okay. You're in projects. You click plus. Okay.
Megh Knappenberger: Okay. I can't see on your chat GPT screen. I can't see anything happening by the way.
Patrick Shanahan: See that?
Megh Knappenberger: I see that too. That's really really annoying. So you didn't you didn't get to see any of that prompt generation stream.
Patrick Shanahan: I did not.
Megh Knappenberger: And I was just letting Well, that's good. I appreciate you letting me roll. That's really, really frustrating. Chat Gvt, you're you're letting me down.
Patrick Shanahan: Hold on. Can you see it now? When I just clicked on projects.
Megh Knappenberger: No. Nope. I'm I'm very very frustrated.
Patrick Shanahan: Let me just see if I can call an audible here. Boy, that really I I was just in a state of massive flow. I was using my fancy voice recorder.
Megh Knappenberger: I see what I did there.
Patrick Shanahan: I know. Let me see what I did. I screwed up and used the wrong thing. Just It was interesting to listen to to watch maybe.
Megh Knappenberger: Uh this is this is V1.
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah. Okay. So, you can see in a way this is a good representation of using this. I'm gonna I'm sharing it now and recording this just so you can see exactly what I put in here. Although I'm going to share the prompt with you directly and I'll include the prompt in the show notes too if anyone else wants to do something like this. So, okay, it wrote our system prompt, right? I'm going to copy it. I'm going to come over here to projects and I'm going to go Meg's CRM. I'm going to create the project.
Megh Knappenberger:
When you create a project, I don't actually use those yet. Um, are you creating something that keeps the same parameters and then you have multiple prompts with like under it so it continues to learn and use itself?
Patrick Shanahan:
Okay, that's cool. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to add instructions. I'm going to save that in there. Okay. And now anytime that you have a chat, now obviously we have not connected all of the data to this yet, right? But anytime that you have a chat, it's going to remember the system prompt. And so what I'll do is I'll I'll and obviously we need to connect all of this and I'll help you with it. But I I've been playing around with a bunch of these, right? And so this one's called the artwork evaluator, right? And you can see it's got a big system prompt in it. You're a world-class art critic with deep expertise in classical and contemporary art. D. Okay. So what I can do is I can just give this thing an image. And I'm going to upload a file. And I've got some of your art that I downloaded. I'm going to put Hrix in because I like Hrix. Watch this. So, this will do.
Megh Knappenberger:
I can't see it, by the way.
Patrick Shanahan:
God, why deals too hard? This one feels visually important. So, there we go. Okay.
Megh Knappenberger:
Yeah. Yeah. Um, and let me make a I love that it's talking about it.
Patrick Shanahan:
Yes. I mean this and and and art helper does a lot of this too but it's like you know artistic analysis style genre and technique composition and use of space color palette and emotional tone okay execution so market viability high portraits of cultural icons especially those with associated music are consistent sellers in the contemporary pop arts market audience sales channels ideal platform sachi art or artfinder or I don't know why it doesn't say we got to get you in That's too um social media potential. Will it resonate? It suggest hashtags tips for presentation Omega. It's going to give you a score. Final average score 9.3.
Megh Knappenberger:
Right. I will take it.
Patrick Shanahan:
Yeah. 100% you will take it. I mean it's amazing, right?
Megh Knappenberger:
And I feel like I need to preface like you may have a different um approach to this than I do. Like there was definitely even though this is a robot there's a moment and I think other artists might feel this too where you're like h like like in a way you don't want your work to be judged but this is actually something just looking at it and and it's like let me help you sell this piece of art. So if the like getting a score or like a a grade on something gives you a little bit of anxiety. I feel like uh I I had like a little bit of anxiety for like a second when you started. So um I feel like that's that's kind of a normal it's a normal feeling to have.
Patrick Shanahan:
100%. And and you know for me the ends justify the means, right? Yeah. Like the number one thing that you guys always struggle with is how do I talk about this in a sales context? How do I market it? How do I think about the marketability? And you know the like the the replacement factor of the whole thing is like really strong to me because 30 years ago what would have happened you would have taken the work to a gallerist and a gallerist would have just done this right and then would have told you straight and you know what you wouldn't have cared about what the gallerist said because you you would have just done I don't have to do any of this you know the gallerist is going to do all of this for me and there it is it's all ready to go you can think through the things You don't have to take it literally. Like, you know, I I get the judging of your own work and I have it run on I have it run on my work sometimes, too. So, I know I I know I know the feelings that it gives you, but it's it's just so so amazing like what it's able to to cook out and and and let's just play with it and then I'm going to I'm going to go um so I'm going to grab the analysis. Okay. And I'm gonna grab just the analysis. And why don't you let me copy that? And I want to show you the next I want to show you the next tool. Um, so I'm going to grab just that analysis and I'm going to open up a new window. I would like to make an Instagram carousel about my Jimmy Hendris piece. Can you see it this time by the way?
Megh Knappenberger:
Yeah. Okay. Definitely call it if not.
Patrick Shanahan:
I have a block of text that I need you to break down into short pieces such that it would work in an Instagram modality, an Instagram carousel modality. Okay. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to paste in everything that just happened there. Okay. It's doing its thing. It's going to it's going to chop it up into whatever it chops it up. And I think like one of the One of the things that I love about about how this works is how quickly you can do this stuff, you know, and like the work never got done before. Not like this, right? And so it's taken it's taken everything that that analysis just did. And again, I'll share the prompt on that one. And I'm going to grab all of it. Okay. I'm going to grab all of this.
Megh Knappenberger:
That's really cool.
Patrick Shanahan:
Yeah. And wait, do you see this? So I'm going to grab all of this. Okay. All right. And then I'm going to do a different screen share. And you know, like one of the things that I wanted to do with these working sessions is just like give people an idea of how fast this can all happen and how much more productive you guys can all be. So I want to show you this. So there's there's a new slideshow app out. Okay. And again, this is AI and this is going to be crazy meta. I'm just getting this thing sized the right size so I can share it. And I'm going to go create new from blank. Okay, hold on. Let me just share this MIG so you can see. Got to remove this. Add this. Nope. Sorry. Stop screen. Add screen. I think I think you should very seriously consider this app too. Um, let me show share. So, okay. I'm going to go home. I'm going to go create new AI. Okay.
Megh Knappenberger:
Cannot I can't see it.
Patrick Shanahan:
God, just keep telling me this is this is okay. I need like a little flag to hold up.
Megh Knappenberger:
Yeah. Yeah. Just yell at me.
Patrick Shanahan:
So, I'm going to go create new paste in text, right? And we're going to paste in all of that text that it just did. I'm going to go social. I'm going to go portrait 4x5. Continue.
Megh Knappenberger:
Uhhuh.
Patrick Shanahan:
So, what this does is I use this to build Instagram carousels. Okay. And you can get this app. And it's is it doing its thing?
Megh Knappenberger:
Oh, yeah.
Patrick Shanahan:
I'm going to use I'm going to use a custom theme and I'm going to use my podcast theme. I'm going to click generate. Okay. And I'll put links to all this stuff in the show notes for everyone that's watching. It's like, what the heck is you doing? Yeah. So, what it's done is it's now taken all of that text, right? And it knows that we want to do an Instagram carousel. So it is literally writing the entire thing in 4x5 images, okay? 4x5 size image cards of everything that it did and then it throws AI images in there as placeholders, right? And so what you do is you just come in here and you edit the images, put your own stuff in and you put your own stuff in. And like that's cool. And this is this is like a scenario too where it's like, you know, um why is that why is that being buggy? You want to get your Jimmyi Hendricks in there so it looks cooler. Um, this is a scenario where it's like you can come up with the text. You know, you can come up with what the style is. You can pick your fonts, everything else. You save the theme and you dump it in and it's created this whole thing this quickly, right? You may not like you may not like this particular prompt, but you can do one in your voice if you're so inclined, right? You can grab the outputs that Art Helpper gives you if you're so inclined, and it immediately lays out the entire thing. And I I build these and you know I just hit export, it downloads all of these images into a folder and it goes directly onto Instagram and I have like a massively compelling you know collage and like one of the things that I've been doing recently is like for that's really cool for photographers or artists that are on the podcast and I use their work I talk about what what's unique to them and boom I go and drop it and I have like a massively compelling super super easy you know done in two seconds and it's like if if you had to go if you had to go to Canva
Megh Knappenberger:
I was gonna say doing this in Canva would take or do it manually and are you out of your mind how much time that would take
Patrick Shanahan:
And it's like well and I'm thinking I'm thinking about too like uh creating carousels is often like to tell a story that you need to divide into um you know five small paragraphs or fi excuse me five small sentences and I'm thinking about like it's it took me hours to try and um this was like two years ago um to try and like take this one project that was like a really deep story and try to start distilling it into carousels because that is how uh that's the way to tell a really big story right now especially on social media.
Megh Knappenberger:
Yes. uh and to try and try and chop that up.
Patrick Shanahan:
And you know, again, what Meg should do is and this time, let me just share this so that we can actually see.
Megh Knappenberger:
Mhm. And again, hold the flag up if this doesn't work.
Patrick Shanahan:
Okay. Not still not seeing anything.
Megh Knappenberger:
Yeah, don't worry, sir.
Patrick Shanahan:
Hold the flag, Meg. Hold the flag if needs be. Um And this is a bear with us guys because this is a crazy interactive session. So, and again, I'm going to do the talk thing because it's faster. I need your help coming up with the system prompt. What I need you to do is be an Instagram carousel creation master. I will paste in large blocks of text that can come from interviews or video transcribes or articles that have written been written about me or website text. And I need you to break it down into chunks of text that will work on individual Instagram carousels and it's like you have it helped you come up with these system prompts that are absolutely awesome. Then you go, you grab it and of course, what is it? Got it. I'm ready to break down any content you throw my way. Ah, so it just saved it. It didn't. I need you coming up with a system. Oh, I didn't. It's okay. Please write these instructions into a system prompt. And and like more than anything else, this is what I wanted to show on this is like no one has it all figured out. Just hack at it, right?
Megh Knappenberger:
Yeah. Exactly.
Patrick Shanahan:
System prompt. Instagram carousel creation master. You are an expert in Instagram carousel design and copyrightiting. Your primary role is to take long form text such as interviews, transcriptions, articles, website, and take it down to punchy, engaging, and easily digestible slides. So what you do is you just copy this. You go and start a project Meg. You throw it in the system prompt and that is your now go to right. You know you now have a project in the sidebar. And by the way your your your you know your um team member will have the same thing too where the instructions are just in there. Every single solitary time it is working on creating that content to your specifications. And then the feedback loop is after a result comes out tell it tell it what you liked and what you didn't like about the output and to edit the system and then it goes fixes it and it puts it back in. That's what I mean by like this iteration and just trying and testing like you have to you have to start doing that now on the fly and that is that is like how you ultimately are going to significantly level up.
Megh Knappenberger:
Yeah. I feel like for uh I'm thinking about anybody who's watching or listening to this and maybe having this feeling like ah you know it takes all of the humanity out of my writing or it's you know it removes the person and what I'm thinking about watching you do that is like when I do a piece of work I often write think sit down and think really hard about writing like the full description of the piece like my master document and like it's focusing the creative energy entirely into that thing and then like being able to walk away is a really like that's what AI can be used for. It's like to it just focuses your energy into like the most important thing and then you can use it to you know do all the divying. So, I I don't know. I just think about it as like it I want to use it in ways to make me more human. Like, how can I use the robot to allow me to run into somebody out uh at the hardware store and be like, "Hey, um how's your kid?" You know, or I kind of like turn to the side and I'm like, "Who was that person that I met at that thing?" And I'm always doing this, but I'm like just trying to Google the person or like go on LinkedIn and uh and now and now you won't have to because you'll just use your phone and ask it in two seconds.
Patrick Shanahan:
And I think like to your point to your point about the the humanity of it all, I think we all struggle with that. It's like yeah, you know, especially me, I'm so in the weeds on this all the time. I'm like, if everything's written by AI, nothing's human at all. There's going to be such a backlash to all this stuff. And I think that'll be the case. But that's not the issue. The issue is choose your own adventure. You don't have to have it write everything for you. It's a thought partner, you know?
Megh Knappenberger:
Yeah. It's a thought partner. And like I find more often than not in my own use cases, it gives me all of these thoughts in ways that I wouldn't have necessarily thought about it. And I'm not rushing to just verbatim grab what it did and dump it out there. Although there's an argu there's an argument for that versus not posting it at all, you know, because it is still you. But I edit it. I edit it to sound what I want and I take out what I don't want it to say.
Patrick Shanahan:
And I feel like you've invested you've invested this money in the health to make you more efficient. Like at the end of the day and and and I and I break it into like brass economic tax, which is why I wanted to like show you all of this. Meg Knappenberger's art business can be judged in terms of GDP, no different than a country. What is the GDP? The gross domestic product, right? It's the total goods and services produced by a country. That's how you measure the overall efficiency of the of the country, the overall economic output. What's Meg's GDP? It's a sum total of every conversation she has, all the social media posts, all the email responses, all the messages, all the art she creates, all the inerson events that she does, the shows, the fairs, the speaking things, the newspaper articles, that's her GDP, right? And you want to grow the business. Well, let me tell you, if you want to grow the business, you need to increase your GDP. And you can do that at a staggering level. Like by what I just showed you, you could be doing more carousels. You could be having, you know, a better CRM. You could be having your your your team member, what's what's the team member's name?
Megh Knappenberger:
Natalie.
Patrick Shanahan:
You could have Natalie. I'm like team member like trying to figure out like what to call.
Megh Knappenberger:
You could have Natalie.
Patrick Shanahan:
Yeah. You could have Natalie in San Diego like significantly increasing your output. And you know, the world has told you that they want to see that content. So give it to him, Meg. Give it to him.
Megh Knappenberger:
Yeah. Yeah.
Patrick Shanahan:
Yeah. And guys, guys, as a final one to wrap up, I'm going to put, you know, everything that we shared and talked about and that I didn't screen share. Uh uh uh we need I need some grace on my lack of screen sharing ability. There was just some wonky things going on here. Um you and I have long This is where I ambush you on the podcast. You and I have long talked You and I have long talked about the fact that you have this massive audience of artists that all follow you and and look to your story for inspiration and everything else. We've talked about you launching a podcast and doing a podcast and doing your own thing. It's on Meg's to-do list, you know.
Megh Knappenberger:
So, but I would call it's on Meg's someday to-do list. We all know about someday, right?
Patrick Shanahan:
Um, so I am Meg and I did it did did it to a couple other Arts Storefronts customers, too, because I think you guys interviewing artists with the unique insight you have would be just amazing amazing content. Meg said, "I love it. I want to do it, but I got to think about it and I'll get back to you." which is a couple set like I made a joke about it because I I hit up a couple art storefronts customers to do this at the same time and your responses were like identical which is like this is awesome I love the idea let me get back to you right the let me get back to you is like let me think about all the reasons why I don't have the bandwidth or time to do that but anyway my I think you would enjoy it I think it would be an energy of experience my team will te tee the whole thing up if you guys want to see me on a podcast leave feedback on this leave me a comment so that I can harass her further but I would tee up the amazing artist to talk to and they will be amazing, okay? And they will probably have the level of success similar to yours and you just show up, do an hour interview and that's it. I think you should invest one hour on the first one and see how it goes. My guess is you would really enjoy it. You would be really really good at it and I think it's something you should be doing.
Megh Knappenberger:
So that's that's it. I love it. Now I have to do it because you're going to tell people to comment that I need to do it.
Patrick Shanahan:
Yes. Do you see how I ambushed you? Um I do. I do.
Megh Knappenberger:
To wrap it up, anything else that I can help you with, number one, and then number two, where can everyone find you so I can put it in the show notes?
Patrick Shanahan:
Um, well, uh, everybody can find me at Meg makes art. Meghart everywhere. Um, primarily Instagram. And, um, I think you can help me by, um, I don't know. This, this has given me a lot of things to go and play and experiment with. So, I feel like um just allowing me and you know other people to just see some of the options and see some of the new apps and things that are coming out, things are changing really fast and so I always feel like you're very plugged into what's happening.
Megh Knappenberger:
Yeah. Okay. Amazing. You guys, thanks for listening. I got one more thing to show you too when we end we when we end the stream. Um as always, have a wonderful day. Thank you very much, man.
Patrick Shanahan:
Thank you.
