Focusing on Success

In this engaging and insightful video, Nick and Patrick from Art Storefronts discuss their core business philosophy centered around customer success. They contrast their unique approach with traditional companies like Shopify and Squarespace, emphasizing the importance of focusing on the success of their customers—artists and photographers—and building products and strategies around that success. They share several anecdotes and examples of how their marketing tactics and tailored support have led to significant sales increases for their customers. They also stress the value of marketing in achieving business success and dismantle common misconceptions artists have about marketing. The episode concludes with practical advice for artists on integrating marketing into their routines without feeling overwhelmed.

Podcast Transcribe

Nick Friend: Literally has the post on his site that we have to give, we have to razz him for a little bit because he literally looks like a Calvin Klein model emerging, emerging out of the ocean to sell a cologne. We flawless. I got a little bit, it's so good. What are we talking about? How do you Sunday, by the way?

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, yeah. So what I wanted to talk about is focusing on success, right, and what it means and really like customer success. I want to talk about it from our context, like the context of Art Storefronts, and then in the context of artists themselves, because I just think it is really profound and just, it's super important. It's a really, really important topic. You ready to get into it?

Nick Friend: Yeah.

Patrick Shanahan: Alright, so you and I have talked plenty about how Art Storefronts, like one of the core differences between us and anything else out there, right, is that all we focus on is customer success, right? We don't build a product, like start with the product and then just like build features and build outward, you know, and then give that to customers. We start with customer success and then we build a product from that, right? It is a completely, entirely different mentality, right? And we don't just focus on customer success. Obviously, our customers are photographers and artists, so we focus on artists' and photographers' success in their business. And why that is significant is because we are not biased about where people should be marketing, what type of products they should sell, right? Whether they sell originals only, or only limited editions, or maybe only commissions, right? Or maybe only courses where they're teaching courses, right? It doesn't matter. What matters is the success, and then you build an entire program and product around that success, right? Think about that, right? Like, when you start thinking about it, you're like, wait, okay, like this is important. This is so important. Who else is talking about success out there? There's not a single company that's even telling you that they're focused on customer success, right, or artist success. Name one. There isn't one.

Nick Friend: No, there isn't a single one.

Patrick Shanahan: And think about how profound that is. Every day on our email list, every day, like on social media and on our email list, what are we doing? Like pretty much every day or every other day, we are emailing out success stories that are happening literally like the day before or the week before, whatever it is. Just constant, constant, constant, because we want everybody to know, right? Like, I mean, it's really interesting. Like, if you are actually looking for success, you should probably like be around where success is happening, you know? And it's so interesting, but no other business claims that. Because, for example, a website company like a Shopify or Squarespace or Wix, and we've talked about this plenty about how you can Google "99% of all Shopify stores fail," right? And it's not a knock against Shopify. It doesn't matter whether it's Shopify or Squarespace or whatever. It's because it doesn't matter who it is. And that kind of brings me to this whole point, which is, you know, if you're focused as a business on creating a great website product, that's what those companies are doing, right? A generic website product that appeals to all, and that's like a product-focused mission or company, right? And so that's what they do.

Nick Friend: I don't know if you saw this like three days ago. Shopify announced a huge partnership with Walmart.

Patrick Shanahan: With Walmart, okay.

Nick Friend: Exactly.

Patrick Shanahan: But you think about that and it's like, so that Shopify customers can list their products on a Walmart website. And you think about that, you go, that is literally like so not in alignment with what a professional photographer or artist cares about or would want in any way whatsoever. It's like the antithesis of building a valuable brand in any way, right? And getting higher prices for your work has nothing to do with it. But this is the point. When a company is focused on its product, like, we need to provide the best websites that we can to any type of small business that is possible, versus starting with the success of the customer, and the specific customer, right, and then working backwards. And so how this relates to the artist, right, is the artists and the photographers who are focused on the success of their own customer and they work backwards from that are the ones that are the most successful. What do I mean by that? If you're focused on the success of your customer, the art buyer, what does that mean? It means, what is success to an art buyer? For me, when I'm buying art, I want the art on my walls to provide me with inspiration, you know, some feeling that makes me feel better. I can talk about the pieces, there's something there, there's an experience, right? That is success to me. What creates a successful art buyer? If an artist or photographer is focused on that success and then works backwards, what do you think is gonna happen? They're going to be creating, you know, a product. In other words, they're gonna be creating new pieces of art, right, that actually provide maximum customer success to the people who are looking at them and are buying their art or who are collectors or whatever it is. And as a result, the business does dramatically better, right? And this is something that you see consistently with the artists and the photographers that are doing well. And so why that's, why focusing on success, on your customer success, is so profound, it's so important.

Nick Friend: You talk about success like a big picture, and I've got to give the breakdown of something like the before and the after, a little bit, an analogy, and then talk about where we are now. So the breakdown, so we take pre-pandemic. We started doing Zoom sessions with our customers, right? Twice a week, we've got all of our customers in Zoom sessions and we teach them whatever marketing technique we want to do. We go over the plans for the week and we get them to execute on it. Pre-pandemic, it would have been just, what, the playbook posted somewhere, "Hey, go do this." Post-pandemic, an individual group session, "I want you to go do this." And this last week was "Run the Live Art Show" playbook, right? And the results have been so insanely profound. The sheer amount of live art shows that went down as a result of this is like nothing I've ever seen. And, you know, the movie, the movie, sort of the corollary, not corollary, but like example, case point, there's this film by, like, super famous film by Akira Kurosawa called "The Seven Samurai," right? And there's basically like a narrative in there that's exactly what we're doing. It's the exact same. And if you haven't seen that one, I'm using "The 13th Warrior." I don't know. The narrative is like you have these villagers, right, that are living in the village, okay? And they're peaceful villagers, and they're going about their life and they just want to have a family and grow their crops and everything else. And then some barbarians come outside the gate, right? And these guys have pitchforks, they don't know what they're doing, they don't know how to defend themselves. There's no city wall, there's not like, they're just, they're farmers. They're simple peasants, right? Peasants is the wrong word, but they're simple, just like farmers. And so a group of warriors comes in to help train them and get them ready to defend, right? And what happens is that inevitably the barbarians come in and they like raid and burn a bunch of things and kill a bunch of villagers. And then the hero warriors come in and start teaching them to defend themselves and like arm themselves and build city walls. And as a result, they're able to defend themselves and like really do kind of well. Like, it's no different than what we're doing. Like, the vast majority of artists and photographers, you know, it's just sort of a weird analogy, but it's a Sunday, you got to give it to it. They weren't defending the village, right? They weren't marketing, they weren't doing anything, right? And all you needed to do is just come in and teach them the basic techniques and tactics, right? It's not even like crazy advanced stuff. It's like, look, build a city wall around your city, here's how you defend, put guys here and here, shoot the arrows down, whatever it is, like do the common sense, right?

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, but do the common sense. Like, the analogy is it like, you know, it's a weird one because it makes it sound like you and I and like our marketing team are like the master warriors. We're not even claiming to be that. It's like, where I see it, it's like, you weren't doing anything, you weren't marketing at all. And now that you are, you realize like, just by doing a little bit, how strong you are, how well you're doing it. And I see the sheer amount of art shows. So again, we encouraged all our customers to run a live art show this week. And I'm seeing like twenty or thirty of them in various different venues. And I probably didn't even see them all. And what other ones are out there running those right now? Not a whole lot. I got encouraged like twenty or thirty. We dropped like twenty or thirty that I've seen. It might even be fifty or sixty or seventy.

Nick Friend: I would be even more clear. We didn't encourage our customers to run a live art show. It was on our art marketing calendar for Friday. We've been teaching it for the last two weeks in our private member workshops, right? Like, this is how we organize everything, guys, like with a 365-day-a-year marketing plan for photographers and artists, right? And I should mention, because we have a couple of comments on here, and I see one from Shira, she said, "Any chance I could get a demo at some point today? So eager to just get going." I think so. Actually, Victoria on our team is working this weekend. So if you put in a demo request right now, then she'll probably get back to you. I know there's other demo requests that are coming in all morning. So I would do that and then maybe reply to an email when you get an email confirmation. Reply to that and say, "Hey, is there any chance I can run a demo today? I'd like to get going." And somebody will reach out, hopefully, today and do that. If not, probably tomorrow. And just a reminder to anybody else...

Patrick Shanahan: What's up, what's up, Shira? She was on the Zoom on Friday, I remember.

Nick Friend: Oh yeah, that's right. So anybody that's looking to join Art Storefronts, we are running a summer special right now. It's ending in two days, okay, at the end of June. So if you want to save big on joining Art Storefronts, become a member. You can request a demo. On Instagram, there's a link in the bio. Just click on that and you'll see "Request a Demo." And then on Facebook, in this room, there's a link in the post to request a demo. You can always go to the website. Anytime there's always a button in the upper right-hand corner that says "Request a Demo," and one of our team members will reach out and see what your goals are, take a look at your art and stuff like that, and just make sure that you're a good fit. And then they can go over all the details, pricing, and all that stuff. So if you're interested in doing that, request a demo.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, so that, but we can't, we can't lose, we can't lose if we continue to take our customers, okay, and get them working on the latest and greatest marketing techniques that no one else would have in a vacuum. And all Gruber one, they ship it, the wins are never gonna be what you think the wins are gonna be. But the fact that they were all out there and I saw the feedback, and you know, Ali had one, she's like, "I was, my audience was so stoked beforehand. The sales were a little underwhelming." And then I saw someone else's feedback, "It was great. I screwed up twenty-five times." Relationship building. We cannot lose if we continue to get our team, our customers, to execute on the marketing tactics that we've identified as highest ROI. We will not lose. They will win.

Nick Friend: And that's the point about focusing on customer success, right? If all you care about is success, surprise, surprise, a lot of success is happening, right?

Patrick Shanahan: Why?

Nick Friend: But why? Because it's there. It's there always. I mean, all you do is focus on it. If all we do is focus on success, what are we doing? What does that mean? We are looking for every ounce, every detail of success happening everywhere in the whole industry, from every person, from every email that we like, email marketing tactic, social media posts, strategy, ads, it doesn't matter what it is. It's the whole thing. It's when you have a whole team, a whole company focused on customer success, and then you build out from that, you build a product around that, what do you think is gonna happen? Surprise, surprise, there's a lot of success stories happening every day. And we're publishing them, right? Think about that.

Patrick Shanahan: But I think it's even more important to think about, right, like how many artists and photographers are listening to this and are watching this? Like, how much are you thinking about customer success?

Nick Friend: Yeah.

Patrick Shanahan: Right? Probably not very often. Probably not as often as you should be, because you know what happens? You know what happens is people say, like this happened yesterday, people like, "I just want to find somebody to do my marketing for me," right?

Nick Friend: Said everyone ever.

Patrick Shanahan: Said everybody ever, right? And we talked about how that's never gonna happen, because we have people selling hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and nobody's gonna do the marketing for them either. So if you think that you're gonna get marketing done for you, good luck. You might as well just cross that off your list. But when you do your own marketing, right, you learn what is actually making your customers successful, which is obviously they feel great about the art that they have on the wall. If you don't know what that is, how do you build a company around that? How do you build a successful art business? You don't. I'm just gonna tell you, you don't. If you do not know what it is that makes your customer successful, you don't focus on that success in the same way that we are. This is the way that you build a great company. This is how Amazon and Apple have become trillion-dollar companies, focusing on customer success, right?

Nick Friend: Yeah.

Patrick Shanahan: Focusing on customer success. Figure out where success is happening with your customers, where they're loving what you're doing, and do more of it. And do more of it. And guess what? You make the world a better place as a result.

Nick Friend: Yeah.

Patrick Shanahan: That's how it goes, right? You're providing more value to the world because you're making customers happier, their lives are brighter and better, and your business actually increases in revenue. Surprise, surprise.

Nick Friend: This one's right, guys. I've spent my entire career as an entrepreneur for twenty years, building six different companies, learning this lesson, right? Just start with success and work backwards. It's a little easier than starting, "Okay, I'm gonna try five niches and then just throw them out there, right? Like, what do you think is gonna work for me? I don't know. Let's get it to the market and let's find out what's successful. And then let's really find what that is, all the details and nuances of what it is that's making your customer successful. And then let's build something based on that." That's how you build a great business. That's how you build a great business.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah. I'm just telling you how I'm blown away, right? Because we're in such a unique situation where you and I are having multiple live sessions a week with non-customers, people that are just getting started. And by the way, it's interesting for me, what, let me say, somebody was asking how to talk to you and how to talk to us about how many pieces they should have on their site. Listen up right now to what Patrick's talking about. You're gonna want to come to one.

Nick Friend: Yeah.

Patrick Shanahan: What do we do, one on Monday, Wednesday, Friday?

Nick Friend: Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And it will get under the eyes on Instagram. I'm talking to you. Come to the Zoom session on Monday. Tomorrow.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah.

Nick Friend: Monday or Wednesday.

Patrick Shanahan: We've got to see that portion, right? Like, the portion that are, that are all the reasons, all the BS why you're not doing whatever you're supposed to be doing, right? Marketing, taking the next step. Then we get to see customers at every stage of the game in the Zoom calls week by week. We get to see their progression, right? And then we get to see the data overall, like all of our marketing initiatives. And how, if you are taking the steps, and I'm so excited because I know as a result of just years of experience, when you actually do the work, the wins come, right? The wins come automatically. And I see all these people that did the live show, and a bunch stumbled, and it was their first one, and they were just figuring it out, and they had technical issues. But they still, they had some wins in there, regardless if it wasn't sales or if it was sales, we had everything in between. But you see all of that going down, right? Like, both the stress of going live on video and selling your art. I mean, we had Katie, one gal, God bless her, that was terrified to even quote a price, right? Was like terrified, like, you know, public speaking, so scared. And then I got to see all that. I got to see the success and the huge wins, financial, and then what I know to be the huge wins, which is they got the first one in the books. And now the second one's easier, and the third one's easier, and the fourth one's easier. So I see all that, and then I back up to the non-customer segments, right? And all of the excuses why you're not doing anything, all of the excuses why you're not taking the next step. "I got to get my website ready. I got to get my work photographed. I don't understand my niche. If I can just get some prints made." Whatever it is, it's all BS. You're not doing the work, right? And it's almost like universally consistent. You're not doing the work. And you contrast those two, and it's literally not any more difficult than that. That's what success is. It's just doing that work consistently, having the accountability system, whether you want to call our Zoom calls group therapy, I'm not the one to say that. A lot of people haven't. It feels like that sometimes. Whether you want to talk about tactical teaching, whether you want to talk about peer pressure, a bunch of your peers doing it in real-time and showing the results and getting you to do it. I don't care what it is. It's getting results. It's getting results.

Nick Friend: You got to, when this call's over, you got to go through the group and look. The results this week are like nothing that we've ever had in the history of the company in terms of everyone on our team, every one of our customers working on a marketing initiative at the same time. Phenomenal.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, and I'll mention that we have been seeing for the last two months, you guys, during the whole pandemic, Black Friday levels of sales from the individual artist and photographer websites on our platform. We're talking like a 150-200% growth every week. Literally, the sales are as high as the Black Friday week every single week for the last two months. We're not like a marketplace website, remember. This is individual artists and photographers being taught how to drive traffic to their own website and making sales on their own websites where they earn the majority of the sale, of the profit, right?

Nick Friend: Yeah.

Patrick Shanahan: Not anything else than that. I love this comment. I'm so glad you brought this up, Glenn. I got to help you, the customer though. He's a, Glenn's a customer too, is he?

Nick Friend: Okay.

Patrick Shanahan: So I'm gonna read it for Instagram. "The strength and quality of my art should be enough to market my paintings. The fact that I have to sacrifice time that I need for the serious creative process to happen so that I can fulfill my role as a salesman is tragic." I guess it is kind of tragic, but I'll tell you this, Glenn, very important lesson I'm gonna tell you and everybody out there. The best products don't win. And if you ever thought that that was the case, you don't know business. I'm dead serious. Study Steve Jobs, study any of these people, everybody talks about it. The best products don't win, okay? And if you have always thought that, you've bought that hook, line, and sinker. It's not the truth, unfortunately, right? The products that are the best marketed are the ones that win. It's just, you know, the best product is not enough. And especially in the art world. I mean, there is no shortage of great art out there. There is no shortage of it, right?

Nick Friend: But you know what there is a shortage of?

Patrick Shanahan: What?

Nick Friend: Great marketing. Because no one's doing it. And this is the loop. This is, no artist wants to do it at all.

Patrick Shanahan: No.

Nick Friend: I mean, I can't stop talking about this because I'm like, it is the funniest thing to me. I have been in this industry for 20 years and I have never seen an industry where people do not want to do any work at all more than this, right? And so if you literally understand, because you guys are, it's okay because of human brains, like our animalistic brains are wired for efficiency, right? So your brain is always trying to convince you to conserve energy, right? It's nature. And so it's always kind of pushing you to do the least amount of work and to resist anything that looks like work, right? And so if you understand that, if you simply understand that and go, you know what? Every artist or photographer that's out there, you know, 99.999% of them, they don't know that. And they're falling for it and they're gonna be lazy about it. But I'm not. I'm gonna actually understand, like, you know what? I'm not gonna let my mind win that one. I'm gonna cross over that log that's in front of everybody and I'm gonna be one of the rare few as a result of that. And if you do that, guys, I don't know any artist that's successful that isn't a genius at their marketing, right? And whatever capacity that they do it, right? It might be, you know, everyone wants to like pigeonhole it into like, you know, whatever a little narrow silo of sales and marketing that they think they're above or beneath them, but they don't want to do or whatever else the crap. The biggest artists in the world, whatever they were doing, it's called marketing and they're phenomenal at it.

Patrick Shanahan: Exactly.

Nick Friend: They're phenomenal. I mean, if I had a dollar for every time somebody said, "I'm as good as Peter Lik," even though Peter Lik has galleries all over the world and, you know, one in the, I think it's in the Mandalay Bay or something like that, right? In Vegas, a lot of people have seen him. They're all over the place. He's got one in Jackson Hole, you know, but from a marketing standpoint and a presentation standpoint, one of the best. You name, doesn't matter. Don't get emotional about it. Just understand how the game is played. Understand the game that is played.

Patrick Shanahan: And we are teaching you that right now, you guys. Look, learn that and then you go, "Oh, wow, now I've got some knowledge about how this really works," whereas everybody else doesn't. You know, they don't know. You're beginning to someone else's middle or someone else's like 80 or 90%, which everyone wants to do. It's like, okay, oh, Damien Hirst, you know, Damien Hirst with the dots. He doesn't even paint those things. His understudies paint them and he makes $350,000 per. You know what else Damien Hirst did? He put his shark in a glass tank of water and sold it. And you think that was all to make some great artistic piece? Do you think that was all to make the newspapers talk about him? Somehow bought or brought a shark in from Australia and put it in a glass tank, sealed with formaldehyde. Like, that guy is a genius marketer. That's why he got there.

Nick Friend: More the reason if you think, yeah, you think that you are God's gift to green earth and that you were just gonna paint and not do anything else and make a ton of money, you're lost. You're lost.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Totally, totally true. And so guys, if you are in this position where you're stuck and you know, you feel your business is stuck or whatever, Patrick and I are running a non-customer Zoom call tomorrow, okay? It'll be tomorrow afternoon. Get on our email list. Look, if you want to be notified.

Nick Friend: We moved it to 11:00 PST, 1:00 Central, right? So the deal.

Patrick Shanahan: Well, my memory, Monday is always afternoon, late afternoon.

Nick Friend: Yeah.

Patrick Shanahan: So we could do, we could just stick to the one if we want.

Nick Friend: So you want to do 1:00 p.m.?

Patrick Shanahan: It's just your call, yeah.

Nick Friend: All right. So we'll do 1:00 p.m. Central, guys. 1:00 p.m. Central, 11:00 Pacific and 2:00 Eastern. Tomorrow, non-customers, we're gonna help you unplug your drain, get over whatever hurdle is in your way with your art business, okay? It's free art business consulting tomorrow. Now, in addition to that, we have a summer sale that is expiring at the end of the month, you guys. So if you want to join Art Storefronts at a discount, make sure you get it.

Patrick Shanahan: When does it end? Wednesday? When does it end this week? How does this week go?

Nick Friend: Tuesday.

Patrick Shanahan: Tuesday?

Nick Friend: Yeah.

Patrick Shanahan: June's the 30-day month.

Nick Friend: Tuesday's the last day. So there's two days left, right?

Patrick Shanahan: Two days left.

Nick Friend: So get your demo request in, guys, if you want to do that. The other thing I was gonna say to you about the marketing is like, here's another reason why artists don't want to do marketing. Why they immediately are so against it or defensive, like, "I just can't do it," right? Of course, there's the "I just create all the time," and that's understandable. Like, we all want to do things that are fun all the time, guys, but that's just not how life works, right? But I think so many artists think about, like, they think about the marketing as like, "Oh my gosh," it's like they're getting a new full-time job, and the whole world is going to change, right? The whole day is gonna change, the whole world is gonna change. And as soon as you start thinking that way, our reptilian, animalistic brain immediately rejects it, right? Immediately rejects it. And what you guys need to know is that's not how you want to look at it, right? There are times when you get on your computer, probably every day, you probably check your email, maybe it's every other day, maybe it's every third day. There's times where you probably get on social media and check things out. What I want you to do is that's what I want you to do a little bit of marketing. That's it. I want you to do it right when you're doing the thing that you're like, right when you open your email and you check your email, right? Or you do it, if that's 3:00 in the morning, I don't care, right? I don't care what it is. Because if it works for you, then that's fine. Do your marketing whenever you can. Do it whenever you're actually on the device or on your computer. You're not changing your whole world. You're not adding this whole full-time job, right? That's what's getting you to stop doing it. What you need to do is do it in a congruent way with the way that you run your existing life. And guess what? It won't feel that bad. It won't be that much work for you, right? You'll fit it right into the same period of time when you're doing these things anyway, and your mind is in that frame of mind. You're looking at some emails, right? You're on social media already to post. It's not hard. It'll take you five minutes, right? You don't have to set time aside to be a CEO of your business. Just fit it into the way that you already work, however that is, and that's the best way for you. And then you go from there.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, and Glenn, I don't mean to pick on you, right? I don't mean to pick on you with this comment, but "The strength and quality of my art should be enough to market my paintings," okay? Operate under that premise. How's your business doing?

Nick Friend: Yeah.

Patrick Shanahan: If you're happy with it, then it's enough.

Nick Friend: It's not.

Patrick Shanahan: It's not. It's not enough. You've been told the market, "You know why should..." But why should it? There's one company I know that never marketed. Okay, there's one company I know that never spent a dime on marketing. It's huge. It does... This is like the...

Nick Friend: No, no.

Patrick Shanahan: The Sriracha.

Nick Friend: Tesla.

Patrick Shanahan: Tesla doesn't do any marketing.

Nick Friend: No marketing budget at all. Did you know that? Zero dollars.

Patrick Shanahan: So there you go, Tesla, which is only kind of true because they have giant Apple-like events, and Elon Musk is the marketer. There's no paid marketing. But my point here, though, with Glenn's comment here, is that the strength and quality of my art should be enough to market my paintings. Why? Why should it be enough? Because we as artists think that it should be enough. It doesn't. Where do you get that assumption? Get that assumption out because it's not truthful.

Nick Friend: No, it's shitty.

Patrick Shanahan: It's not the way the world works, and it's not the way the world has ever worked.

Nick Friend: No.

Patrick Shanahan: It just hasn't.

Nick Friend: Nobody tells you that. You said nobody tells you that.

Patrick Shanahan: The best product doesn't win. If you knew that, you would never have that assumption. That assumption causes you to waste energy.

Nick Friend: Motivated, it's poison.

Patrick Shanahan: It is absolutely poison. You got to get that out because it's not the truth. It's not anything any smart businessperson or experienced business owner ever said, ever. Ever. It's something maybe some artists said it and put that in other people's heads, but guys, get that out of your head because it's not the truth. And therefore, it is poison. It'll hurt you. It is not how it works. The best products do not sell. It's why we have totally unknown photographers and artists on our platform that are outselling world-renowned people on our platform. Literally, how is that even possible? We have world-renowned people that have a million-plus followers on Instagram, right? And they're getting beat by other people that have, you know, what, six thousand or something like that?

Nick Friend: Twelve hundred.

Patrick Shanahan: Because they're doing marketing. Why?

Nick Friend: Because they're doing the marketing.

Patrick Shanahan: They know they're good at it. They're executing, and they don't have any mental roadblocks.

Nick Friend: No.

Patrick Shanahan: A lot of photographers and artists that are world-renowned, you know, are usually not running the greatest businesses. I have to tell you that because we work with so many, and I know all these people, right? And what do they do? They are lazy about it. They are lazy about it. They, in some way, I'm framing it as that. I'm not calling them lazy. I'm just saying that, like, you know, I think that they think the quality of their art should carry the day, right? I think that's what they think. And as a result, they do less marketing.

Nick Friend: They look at us, and they think you're...

Patrick Shanahan: And they get beat.

Nick Friend: No, that's Graham.

Patrick Shanahan: That's Graham, yeah.

Nick Friend: He's good. She's running around. Going back to one final point. So Sriracha's never spent a dime on marketing, okay? Sriracha, the hot sauce here, had a phenomenal... So 30 years. I think it took him 30 years to build that business. So maybe your art is good enough that you don't need to spend a dime on marketing, and you can be like Sriracha. Took him 30 years to build that business, I think, 25-30 years of taking it to restaurants, taking it to restaurants, taking it to restaurants, just inching it up, inching it up, inching it up. So, you know, there are stories, but you better have stories or perspectives. And let me tell you, you're not building a Sriracha-sized business in six months, a year, two years, or ten years without any marketing. Let me tell you, no chance. And it's not like he didn't work at it, right? No part of his marketing was not having any marketing or having any website. And everyone's like, "Have you heard of this sauce? Have you heard of this sauce? Have you heard of this sauce? Oh my God, have you heard of this sauce?" Right? That was his marketing, but it took a long time to get there. I don't know.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah.

Nick Friend: Again, I don't mean to pick on you, but that one fries me the hell out. To think that you're gonna have a big business, anyone's gonna have a big business without marketing is just unrealistic. It's a trope.

Patrick Shanahan: It is.

Nick Friend: It's a trope that has been sold.

Patrick Shanahan: Let it be your superpower, guys, because, you know, nobody thinks that way. Nobody thinks that way. And that's exactly why, you know, there's so many photographers and artists that are not successful, right? Because you don't have a business. You don't have a successful business unless you have a successful marketing strategy. Period. Ongoing. Forever. And guess what? Because I've been in this position before. As soon as that marketing strategy doesn't work anymore, or it gets stale, guess what happens? The business starts going down. The business starts going down or it's stagnant, you know? So anyways, back to the main point of the whole thing, right? Focusing on customer success and working backwards, right? That is so profound. So profound. And it ties into the marketing problem, right? Like, how don't you focus on success, on your customer success, the art buyer, and work backwards if you're not doing any marketing and you have no pulse, no grasp on what is actually making your customers successful, right? In other words, the inspired, you know, like, "I'm loving the experience of your art on their wall." Right? That's a successful customer. You need to create more successful customers if you want to create a more successful business. So that's what you've got to focus on. And that is all we do, right, at Art Storefronts. It's just literally every minute of my day that I'm spinning, thinking about the businesses, how can we figure out how to make the entire all-in-one solution more successful and profitable for every artist that is on. That's it, right? That's it. If you focus on the customer success, guess what happens? You get more customer success. Every time you guys are like, if you're on our email list or you're on Facebook, and you see our posts, and you see that every day we're posting multiple stories about customers selling originals for thousands of dollars, limited editions or open editions or whatever it is, all these different stories, guys, the reason is because all I am doing, all Patrick is doing, all we are doing is focusing on generating customer success. So you're going to get more of it if that's what you do, right? I want you guys to do the same. I want you guys to do the same with your own customers. Follow what we're talking about here, right? Focus on customer success first and build your business around that. It will be amazing. You will feel better about yourself than you've ever felt in your life. I promise you. Right, Pat? How good does it feel making artists and photographers successful every day? How good does it feel?

Patrick Shanahan: It's incredible. People come at you and they're like, "Hey, you should give to charity. You should do this. You should do all this stuff," right? And the real way...

Nick Friend: Best we had a love fest on Thursday. It's actually not good because it's going to our heads a little bit. We need to start getting some complaints again.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, we had a love fest on Thursday. But anyway, three times this week, non-customers, 11-11-11, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Let's just stick to a little. I like it. 11:00 a.m. Pacific, 1:00 p.m. Central, 2:00 p.m. Eastern. You can get on a Zoom session with Nick and I. We'll unplug your drains, talk about what you're stuck with, why you're not.

Nick Friend: It's a free consultation.

Patrick Shanahan: It's really fun actually.

Nick Friend: It's a consultation, yeah. I enjoy those sessions so much.

Patrick Shanahan: And then Tuesday, Thursday is gonna be the hardcore customer tactical. Do we have anything planned this week already on the agenda for that?

Nick Friend: Well, yeah. Well, for Tuesday, we're gonna do a post-mortem on all of the success from last week, all the shows, you know?

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah.

Nick Friend: And go over all of that. Because what we do, you guys, is after we do a big tactic and everybody runs it, we gather all the information and then we find out where the maximum success was in all of it. And then we update our playbooks. Playbooks are step-by-step guides on how to run a tactic, a marketing tactic that we want everybody doing in order to get more eyeballs on their work, generate more traffic and sales, right? And so this way, every playbook that we have is constantly state-of-the-art. It's the best in ordinary that you could get.

Patrick Shanahan: Rapid iteration.

Nick Friend: Rapid iteration.

Patrick Shanahan: You know that. You know it.

Nick Friend: My kids are yelling at me, but more exciting than anything that is happening with our business, almost, and I'll say selfishly, anything that's happening with our customers, like how quickly you and I are learning with this feedback loop of go live, hash an idea out, talk about how I can best benefit our customers, talk about how we can most grow their businesses. They're in here leaving the comments and giving us the feedback. Then the thing shifts, i.e., the live art show. Then we get all the feedback on a Tuesday and continue to build into it. That system of iteration and learning and recycling is so much faster than it was before.

Nick Friend: It's so much faster that we have weak-eateth the pace. If we keep at the pace, our competition, which we don't even really have in any way, it's gonna be so far in the rearview mirror, it's ridiculous because you can't ever learn as quickly as getting instantaneous feedback from your customers.

Patrick Shanahan: You can't. You just can't.

Nick Friend: Not even close.

Patrick Shanahan: Hey guys, take that lesson, right? Take the lesson. That's the point, you know what I mean? Like, with your own customers, you got, again, you got to have a feedback loop that's constantly coming back to you. And that's the benefit of doing your own marketing, right? Like, that's the benefit. That's why, I mean, that's why once you're successful and you can hire an assistant, you know, you're gonna have to train that assistant in your ways because you figured out what makes your customers the most successful. And then you will also train that person to be delivering you direct feedback constantly because you know that is the gasoline that is actually running the business at the end of the day, right? What is it? What is making your customer successful? The detail in there of what is actually making your customer successful is actually the gasoline for your business. And you probably didn't know it until I said it. That's all it is. It's gas. It is straight-up gasoline for your business to grow. And we're moving 250 miles an hour faster than we were even nine months ago. And that's a big deal.

Nick Friend: Yep. Can't stop, won't stop. All right, I gotta make dinner or make lunch.

Patrick Shanahan: All right. Okay, guys, so yeah, non-customers, you want some free art business consulting, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Okay? At 11:00 Pacific, 1:00 Central, 2:00 Eastern. Get on our email list. You will get the Zoom link tomorrow for that session. Okay?

Nick Friend: Yup.

Patrick Shanahan: And we're gonna help you out. Other than that, final reminder here, the summer special to join Art Storefronts is ending, okay? On Tuesday. It's the last day of the month to save big to join Art Storefronts and become a member and get your business, you know, really rocking. All right, so get a demo requested.

Nick Friend: Look at Shira. She's trying to, hasn't got through to Vicki.

Patrick Shanahan: Shira, I already did, while Patrick was talking, I already messaged the team. And so whoever is working with you is probably gonna reach out to you, Shira. So yeah, no worries. We will get you going.

Nick Friend: Yeah. Okay, guys, enjoy the rest...

Patrick Shanahan: Okay, all right.

Nick Friend: You gotta say the thing, put it in a series of the random...

Patrick Shanahan: Yep, I will, no worries. Right, right.

Nick Friend: All right, guys, thanks.

Patrick Shanahan: Bye.

Nick Friend: Thanks, guys. Hope everybody has a great Sunday.

Patrick Shanahan: I just don't know how to end this. I get it. I get it. All right.