Selling From Now Through Father's Day, The Power of Not Quitting, & Acquiring New Customers vs True Fans
In this episode of the Art Marketing Podcast, hosts Patrick and Nick discuss essential strategies for artists and photographers to boost their sales throughout the year. They emphasize the importance of acting immediately and not delaying action, especially during key promotional periods like Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, and Father's Day. They dive deep into the necessity of thinking like a businessperson, the advantage of offering custom artwork, and the critical metric of new customer acquisition. The discussion also highlights the power of perseverance and not quitting, encouraging artists to keep refining their strategies and adjusting their marketing messages to stay relevant. Key takeaways include leveraging timely marketing opportunities, the importance of new customer acquisition, and nurturing these customers into becoming true fans or collectors.
Podcast Transcribe
Patrick Shanahan: All right, Nick, welcome back to another episode of the Art Marketing Podcast. As you and I were talking about this offline, as well as some of the feedback we've gotten from our customers, I think we should kick these things off every single time we record with art selling strategy right now. So, a notion of don't wait, don't sit on the sidelines. You have to ship it; you have to get going immediately. What is the art selling strategy right now, at this moment in time? Then we can pivot into some of the more evergreen stuff, right? Because I think one of the biggest problems that we have and see regularly with our customer base, especially, is this notion of waiting to get started, this notion of "I have time." The Stoics dealt with this so appropriately, and I love some of the things they've said: don't be one of those who is always delaying to live because you think you have forever to get going. You don't. The clock is always ticking, and when you're trying to grow an art or photography business, there's always something up on the calendar that's coming that you need to get ready for and be prepared about if you're intentional. So, I thought we could maybe kick it off with a little bit of strategy on what we need to be doing right now as we sit here at the beginning of the year.
Nick Friend: Yeah, I love that. I love doing it every time. I love artists being able to come and listen to this and get an update on what you should be thinking about strategically right now. Because, Pat, the other thing is that every month your marketing should be different. And I'm not—I don't just mean that as like a it should be different than what you did the month before, just generally. What I mean is there is a very specific strategy to run in January. There's a very specific strategy to run in February. It relates to holidays like Valentine's Day, and this goes every month throughout the year. Most artists, if they're doing any art promotion at all, which many are, they're just throwing it out there. As we know, many of them start the ones that start actually promoting themselves doing marketing right, they will just be posting generally on social media, maybe sending an email out there. But if you look at their—if you scroll up their Instagram or their Facebook feed or whatever, you notice that there's no real strategy there month-to-month, and they're not taking advantage of the big art selling holidays and things like that. So, it's really important that on a regular basis, we're trying to update everyone on the strategic thinking that is appropriate for right now because it changes. So, we just got out of the fourth quarter, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, all of the holiday, right? And we're in a whole new thing right now where a lot of art sells, and it's right here. We're in that time, and so it's super important to get everybody's minds shifted to understand how they should be marketing and how they should be thinking about it.
Patrick Shanahan: Absolutely. And I think this notion, this line that I like to use from time to time, it's okay, yes, you're an artist or photographer, but you also want to make a living out of this wonderful craft. So, that requires acting like a business person, acting like a businessman, businesswoman, right? And when you put that hat on, you start thinking about things a little bit differently. I think art has this notion that you're going to creatively get inspired, and you're going to go away for a while and create things, and that's going to be inspirational, and then you're going to come back and bring them to market. It's going to be this huge success, and that sounds super romantic in theory, but that does not pay the bills in the real world. You have to think like a business person. One of the interesting ways—and I'll use this as a segue—to think about it is how would you think about your art, your photography career if it was a retail store that was open seven days a week that you are responsible for driving revenue towards? Because it is. That's what it is. It's a business. Everybody knows the path to a hobby is to do whatever you want, behave the way you want to, follow your creative whims, be inspired when you want to be inspired, and that's awesome. I'm not knocking that lifestyle, but we exist to give people a plan where they can actually turn what they love into a business. I love this notion of don't reinvent the wheel, okay? Don't reinvent the wheel. One of the interesting questions or comments that we get all the time in the seven or eight years, nine years where we've been catering specifically to artists, like the history of this company, can I see some website examples? Can I see some website examples? Can I see some examples of people's websites? I love to see some websites, and I always respond in the same way. Yeah, I could send you a couple, and here are a couple. They all look the same. They all look the same. There's a fancy design. I can't edit the colors and the fonts and the CSS, and I can't add in these things, that things, and the other things. Despite the fact you can do all that, my answer is no, do not do any of that, okay? Because we are not trying to reinvent the wheel. I look at thousands upon tens of thousands of people's websites because a lot of times I'll study who's signing up for our email list and who's coming in and what their Instagram profile looks like, and I'll go and I'll look at their websites. Artists and photographers screw this one up so bad all the time. Why? Because they're trying to reinvent the wheel. You don't need to reinvent the wheel. If I was going to ask you, Nick, we run this exercise all the time, what is the single solitary best way, best art-buying experience that exists?
Nick Friend: The paradigm if you like just being face to face, right? In person, if you just want super quick efficiency, but what geographic location? I don't know. You tell me.
Patrick Shanahan: You're underestimating me right now. You're feeling it.
Nick Friend: It's being in an art gallery.
Patrick Shanahan: Okay. It is being in an art gallery. The single solitary paradigm or the single paradigm of buying art, buying photography, is going into an art gallery if you like going in and viewing it in a museum. What do all art galleries, all museums have in common? They're minimalist, they're simple. It is art on the walls, lighting, and nothing else, nothing else. So, all we've done at Art Storefronts is take that website experience, mimic it, or take that buying experience and attempt to mimic it directly in the digital world. What exists in the retail world, that is the paradigm. Minimalist, all focus on the art, all nothing else. What do all artists and photographers do left to their own devices? Colors, fonts, image sliders, videos, music playing. If anyone saw the art, it would be a modern-day miracle with all those distractions. The point, the takeaway there is don't reinvent the wheel. Every consumer out there knows what the best art-buying, art-viewing experience is. It's your job to just give it to them. So, minimalist, look like an art gallery. Your website should look like an art gallery. Settled science. Once that happens, your conversion rate goes up. Turns out you sell more art. Let's move it to this next realm, and you and I have had to learn this one the hard way over the years a little bit. There are retail—we're not reinventing the wheel again. When the biggest retailers in the world have sales, specials, promotions, i.e., on holidays, it is our job as artists and photographers trying to sell our work to mimic their behavior identically. Why is that? Because they spend a ton of money on advertising to get people in the mood, to whip people into a frenzy, to get the credit cards coming out of the wallets and spending money. We are just water skiing behind those opportunities. What I realized last year is I had been failing my customers a little bit based on this because I wasn't in there day one figuring it out. What do I mean by day one? Going into the biggest big-box retail stores that exist and understanding when they shift from Halloween to Christmas, understanding when they shift from Christmas to Valentine's Day, understanding when the Mother's Day stuff comes out because these businesses are huge companies, publicly traded, massive market capitalizations. What am I trying to say right there? Not capitalizations, valuations. Anyway, market covers. They know. They have decades and sometimes centuries of data that says this is what you do. This is when you move this stuff out in a retail context, and you make a ton of money as a result of that. This year, I did it. I went to Target, then I went to Home Depot, and then I went to Walmart. You know what I noticed at all of them? The exact date, which I was able to parrot back to my customers, which I was actually able to show photos and videos, and I will include some in the show notes. April, could you get into our show notes some of these? I walked into my Target, a store I despise and loathe, and I did it just to film how much of that store utterly, totally, and completely, two weeks ago, completely changed to Valentine's Day. They had moved full stop and do massive promotion for Valentine's Day, and this was on like January 3, maybe. Yeah, it was like right after New Year's. Guess who else did it? Walmart. What do they know that we don't, Nick? What do they know that we don't? What is it that's driving that
behavior for them, and what can we learn from it? Those are the questions you have to ask yourself.
Nick Friend: Yeah, and I would go one step further. I went back, I searched Google, and I looked up where did Valentine's Day come from, okay? Because, Pat and everyone listening, it's probably made by marketers.
Patrick Shanahan: Exactly.
Nick Friend: I think it's important for people to go and Google and check it out because it's not like 100% that way. But when you look at what the big-box retailers are doing, you mentioned Target, you could go down the list, right? Do you realize that basically all year long, they're going from holiday to holiday, to theme to theme? Why do you think they are doing that? There's always got to be something to sell, right? There's always got to be a reason to buy things. I want to go look up Halloween and where that came from because everybody spends a lot of money on Halloween. I've got three kids; we're buying costumes, we're buying candy, there's parties that are happening. When you get behind all this, you start realizing that a lot of these holidays are all around just getting people to spend money. They're economic drivers, okay? They're economic drivers, not created by—we all are just born, and we come into this world, we're like, wow, there's Halloween and there's Valentine's Day, and I'm supposed to get a gift, and I'm supposed to go out to a really expensive dinner at a restaurant with my significant other, and maybe we'll go away for a weekend. They're giving like, imagine if all of that was gone all year long. There wasn't a Mother's Day, there wasn't a Father's Day, there wasn't a Fourth of July. Just go through the whole day, Christmas, take your exactly all of these times when we're spending all of this money and creating all this economic activity. You would have so much less economic activity. So, all of these things are basically just cemented into the psyches of the American consumer and consumers all over the world, depending on what holidays they celebrate or recognize, whether it's intentional or not intentional. These things are there, and they work. They're absolutely brilliant. I would say many of these things have been either created by marketers or exacerbated by marketers. Maybe Christmas many years ago was like you just gave one gift to your kid or something like that. When did it turn into 10? When did it turn into 20 and all this different stuff? And then giving gifts to this person and that person, then office gifts and office parties, and just all of this movies, everything. Go to the movies, buy movies. The most important thing to understand about this is that this is going on all the time. This is standard marketing to consumers, which is what you artists are doing, okay? You're either in that game and a part of this and understand this, or you're not. So, when you're going back to what I was saying earlier, if you're just randomly marketing while all the big-box retailers, every time you go into the store, is reminding you and trying to get you in that aisle for the Valentine's Day stuff right now and has been, then you basically don't have a strategy. You're going against what is working and what's with the psyche. What you want to do is go with it, right? Have the wind behind you, be going downhill rather than uphill. That's the key difference. Right now, with Valentine's Day coming around the corner, you've got to start your marketing many weeks beforehand. You've got to have your messaging all on point. The artist that's doing the wrong thing for the past couple of weeks is just posting reels, posting, just posting on social media, their description of their most recent photo shoot or their painting or something that they recently did. You know what they're not doing, Pat? They're not saying things like, this is going to make a great Valentine's Day gift because of blah, blah, blah. Have you thought about something for your husband? Have you thought about something for your wife? Just sprinkling that language in here and there, you're starting to plant those seeds and you're teeing people up for your Valentine's Day sale or incentive or whatever it is that you're going to do to get people to buy your product for Valentine's Day.
Patrick Shanahan: The other thing I want to say before I pass it back to you is to appreciate what goes in when you see Target on January 2nd or 3rd, however quickly they went in. Do you understand how many millions, tens of millions of dollars went into that? If you've ever talked to anyone, yes, if you've ever talked to anyone who works at any of those companies, they've been planning for Valentine's Day since the summer. They've been buying the inventory, placing the purchase orders with all the vendors, all the decorations, and everything they're going to do. There's a whole team that owns this whole thing. New Year's hits, and the next day, in the middle of the night, all night, from 10 p.m. until 8 in the morning, they are literally changing the decor of the entire store for Valentine's Day. That's how serious this is. They are ready. So, you have to ask yourself, what have you done with your own art business to be ready for Valentine's Day? That's how serious they take it because it works. What have you done, and what are you doing? Are you even thinking about it? Are you even aware of it? This is a really important point.
Nick Friend: There's this avatar that I always think about, and it's in my customer base, our customer base, and people listening to this podcast, and just artists in general. They're sat on the sidelines, and they're like, I'm a fine artist. I don't have to worry about these things, right? That's just not how I sell, and that's not how I do things. I want to shake them, and I want to say, you might be a fine artist, but you are your own worst enemy. You are your own worst enemy because what you do all year long is you create art, you attempt to market art and sell the art. What we've learned is that there are times when it's much easier to do that. There are times and there are opportunities that come along that make things just a little bit easier just by virtue of you being in the game, you understanding the timing, your marketing message goes a little bit further, it's a little bit more effective than it would be ordinarily, okay? That's what these holidays are, and that's all they are. They're that way every single solitary year. One of the other common misconceptions that people get so hung up on thinking is that whatever the holiday in question, somehow doesn't apply to you, somehow doesn't apply to the style of art that you sell, somehow doesn't apply to your niche. I totally get that argument, but I have come to learn that it is so naive and misplaced, okay? It has got nothing to do with what your art is. It's just when the fish are biting, that's all it is. Is your line in the water when the fish are biting or not? It turns out the fish are biting in this scenario, and you and I were talking a month ago or so about this famous Facebook ads guy, and he was talking about how his ads were pumping, and they were really working, and he ended up selling out of the product that the ads were talking about. Now, you hear a scenario of that, right? I'm selling widgets, okay? All of my ads are for these widgets, and I'm now out of widgets, so I'm going to turn the ads off. He's like, oh no, I'm not turning those ads off at all because I'm not just selling widgets. I'm selling all these other things too. Do you know what the most difficult thing to do is? Get people into the damn store in the first place. I've got a way where that's working right now, so guess what? I'm not touching anything. That's what it is. Don't get hung up thinking that it's flowers and chocolate and art is now a part of that. I don't care if art's a part of that or not. That's not the thought process for me. For you, your only thought process is things get a little bit easier if you ride on the coattails of what everyone else is doing, what everyone else out there is doing. It's like you're going to send an email that would normally be ignored, except that they're going to walk into that Target, they're going to walk into a Walmart, they're going to see all the Valentine's Day stuff, you're going to have some Valentine's Day language in your email, and they're going to click. It doesn't matter if they buy it for a gift. People shop for all sorts of reasons, okay, all the time. Sometimes it's a gift for them, sometimes it's a gift for their moms. It isn't romantic at all. It's just about whether or not your line is in the water. Don't reinvent the wheel, you guys. We're not here to reinvent the wheel. We are here to study and follow the people that have already figured this out and leverage it for our benefit and leverage it such that we can take our creative passions and turn them into businesses. That's it.
Nick Friend: That's right. So, looking ahead of us now, you've got big art-selling holidays, huge art-selling holidays. Valentine's Day, right? You've got, following that, you've got Easter, then you've got Mother's Day, and then you've got Father's Day. So, we're looking at a whole series of holidays that happen that are big marketing holidays. How do you know it's a big marketing holiday? Just go to your local supermarket or Target or Walmart or name the retailer. If you see the decorations in there, it's probably a big deal. They're getting people to spend dollars. They're taking advantage of the psychology of the moment. What's another important point, Pat, is that when you're talking about engagement on your posts and subject lines and getting open rates on emails, it's all
the same thing. If you're talking about Valentine's Day stuff, gifts for him, gifts for her, stuff like that, people are more likely to open that email right now. If you send that in the middle of the summer or if you post that, people are like, what? This doesn't really make any sense. But right now, it makes a ton of sense. So, this is all about riding that wave, having the wind at your back, and not making it so hard on yourself. Another point here is that when I see, because we've been doing this for nine years with a whole art marketing calendar and providing our customers with everything to do every day of the year to market this stuff correctly, this period of time, Pat, is phenomenal for custom artwork. I've got the custom artwork strategy. Let's get that in the show notes. April, if you can add that, everybody should check that out. Because it's Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Father's Day, you've got some very personalized holidays. Is that public-facing? Do—
Patrick Shanahan: It's public-facing, yeah. So, it's free for everyone, and it's been very successful. The reason I bring this up, and it applies to photographers as well, and you can think about that a little bit differently, but to talk about it from a painter's perspective, you're talking about commissions, right? But it's better to say custom artwork because the average person doesn't even know what a commission is. So, that's language that just doesn't make sense to them. Custom artwork or a custom painting, because if you're talking about Valentine's Day, like I'm starting to think about, I've got wedding photos, I've got photos of our kids, Pat. Getting one of those turned into a painting, are you joking? Amazing gift, amazing gift. So, if you're a painter that can actually do those things, then you've got something really good. Even if you're a painter, you have to understand how creative you have to think about this. If you're a painter who only does florals, that's your specialty, then you should be asking people for a picture of their bride or their spouse holding whatever bouquet they were holding with their hands. There's probably a picture of it, and you paint and offer to paint that thing. These are ways of getting extra business, getting business at these times. Most artists out there, especially those of you who are struggling and haven't found a great niche yet, you should be leveraging custom artwork all the time and way more to pay the bills and to get some consistent dollars in your pocket every month. Even if you only do one or two or three, it doesn't matter. People will pay you for custom artwork because it's way more personal and it is a direct hit. It's a direct connection with the subject matter that they want. Family, pets, all of that, these are huge sellers. So, while you're figuring out a niche that you might sell to the masses, custom artwork is something that should be a weapon in your toolbox, in your war chest, and you should be utilizing it all the time, especially to cover your cost of the art business. In our last episode, I talked about the high asymmetry of an art business. If you haven't listened to that, you should go back and listen to it. I think it's one of the most important podcasts in the art industry at this time, or segments at least, that we have done. The short of it is the art business of today, and this was not the case 10, 20, 30 years ago. But the art business of today has ridiculously low costs, so low you should be able to keep the business lights on forever, period, because you're talking about a low monthly website cost and maybe some low cost for marketing help. It is ridiculous how low the costs are to run an art business these days, legitimately, and sell globally compared to the cost of running any other business that's basically out there. The high upside that you now have as an artist, right? We have artists at Art Storefronts that are selling over a million dollars. This is unbelievable. So, the asymmetry: low cost, high upside. Being able to take advantage of all of that is a really big deal.
Nick Friend: It's something that we need to devote an entire episode to, but we can table that for now, absolutely. But to wrap a bow on the custom artwork, Pat, if you, as an artist, have a creative talent, okay, and you're able to paint something specifically for one person based on a picture or whatever it is, some sort of inspiration that they can give to you, you have a way to make money from your talent immediately. Keep the lights on, and while you're figuring out the business and improving it over years and years of time, because it's going to take years, it's just the way that it goes. So, you've got a great opportunity coming up here for Mother's Day, Father's Day, and Valentine's Day coming right up. These are three unique holidays where you can really take advantage of that. Photographers want to be thinking about romantic locations of shoots that they've done or plan on doing or that they can do custom. Maybe it's like, hey, I asked my wife to get married on that bridge. Can you go take a shot of that bridge? They buy that custom piece for you, something unique about it that relates to you. But there are ways of doing this. You just have to think about it creatively.
Patrick Shanahan: There's no question. Another interesting thing you said in there is it takes years, which I think pivots us to our next topic, which I'm calling "Do Not Quit." Do not quit, do not quit. I was on office hours, and it was last week, and a gal, her name escapes me right now, offered up some positive feedback on the podcast. Being a classically trained marketer, like I am, of course, I said, oh yeah, what did you like about that specifically? What episodes were you drawn to on the show that you really found interesting, right? Trying to get an idea, because we've tried a number of different things on the podcast recently in a couple of different directions: customer interviews, the hardcore tactical marketing stuff, and then most recently, which is our last episode that you and I did, is I believe a lot of positivity and encouragement. That was what she cited more so than the hardcore marketing stuff and the tactical marketing stuff and these customer interviews and everything else. It's yet again another one of these times where the lesson comes back and slaps me in the face that one of the things that artists and photographers need to hear more than anything else out there is just don't quit. Do not quit. The understanding of how hard it is to make it, especially early on, about how many years you need to be grinding to get it all done. While that sounds intimidating, the ones that win are simply the ones that didn't quit. That didn't quit. It's particularly pertinent for me because I am a content marketer by trade, right? That's what I cut my teeth doing in terms of marketing. When you're a content marketer by trade, the parallels to being an artist are staggering because you're starting off with zero followers, you're constantly putting out stuff, you're getting very little response early on all the time. You're like, why am I doing this? Others are like, what are you doing investing all of this time? You haven't even gotten a single solitary order, right? Whatever the case may be, you're bashing your head against the wall, and so many people quit. So many people stop, and they're not encouraged, and they're not told it is totally normal to be on that path, and you've got to just keep going and going. I know during the prep for this show, you and I started laughing. It's okay, go and pull your favorite ones you have saved, and I've got this hilarious one right here from Bezos, which is, you can be grinding for four years with no results, and in the fifth year, become the biggest thing on the planet. The power of not giving up is real, right? We've seen this with artists too. You've seen it, and we see it on a regular basis. There's another guy that's a software guy, Jason Fried, that you and I always really like. He's on Twitter all the time, and his line is, for all the BS hacks and secrets and routines and the top 10 lists of things you should do to win in business, there's only one truth: Outlast. Which I also think is a great one. I'll share some of these. I'll put them up on the screen so you can see them. They're great. What an under-delivered, underutilized, under-talked-about piece of advice that does not get communicated. I'm desperate to hear your thoughts on the issue at a macro, but more importantly than anything else, selfishly, when I asked that gal, why did you like this podcast? What resonated? What was good for you? I'm the marketing guy. To me, all the problems, all the questions can be solved by a marketing solution. To the hammer, the nail, everything looks like a nail, right? But for her, she said, I don't care about any of that. I'm getting all of that. All I need is the encouragement to keep going. Our job fundamentally, in terms of education and providing the software and doing everything that we do, is really just making sure our customers don't quit. Because if they don't quit, all their competitors will, and they'll be the one left standing with a huge business.
Nick Friend: Yep. It's really, I've spent my entire life as an entrepreneur, five companies I've had to start from scratch in the way that you talked about. I can relate to every artist that's out there that's brand new or has been doing it for a while but really hasn't gotten traction because any entrepreneur that's been at it has been in that position. I've spent so much time thinking about all of this and all the pain and misery
I've gone through over 25 years now. There's a lot more information about it today than there was 20-25 years ago. You're really on an island at that time. The quotes that you read here today have become a lot more known in the hardcore entrepreneurial community, but that is very different from the overall mainstream media messaging, which for forever has just been these articles of these success stories where it just seems like that person was an overnight success, and it was so easy and all of that. There's something really romantic about that, and there's a reason why those articles get the clicks and whatever it is, but it is so far from reality. I'm so glad that information is actually getting out there now. That's the few unicorns. Everyone else, the millions of other people that are trying, there's a normal way, which is it's really hard, it takes many years, you're going to want to quit many times, everything in your mind is going to tell you, what am I doing? What am I doing? Why am I doing this? I'm going to want to quit, and you just have to not quit. So, what's so interesting about what you said, and I totally agree with it, is that if an artist came up to you and I, let's say we were just down in the town, hey, you're the Art Storefronts guys, let me talk to you about my art business, what's the number one thing I should do for marketing right now? We're sitting there, and we would answer the question, but we'd also be thinking or we'd also tell the person, what we just told you literally doesn't even matter because you may not make it. Because if you don't have the right expectations about what it takes to build a business, and this is not just an art business, just any business, right? Because it's all the same. If you want to start a nail polish company, you're going to go through the exact same things. It's going to take just as long. This is what is commonly discussed in entrepreneurship circles: five to ten years. Sometimes it's year seven or eight where things really take off. But we know that just not quitting, because we'll give a tactic, and that tactic might be executed properly or not properly. There's just all sorts of things that happen when that individual goes to execute a tactic, and it doesn't matter because you've got to do more. You've got to do more tactics. You've got to try more things. You're going to have to test things. You're going to have to work at it. You're going to have to figure it out, what's going to work for your own specific art. The perseverance, the not quitting, is the biggest thing because if you can keep your cost low, and I'm going to go back to the asymmetry conversation again, why that's so important, because if you can keep your cost really low, and you can sell just enough, however you do it: consulting, custom artwork, custom photo shoots, it doesn't matter what it is, you just pay your cost, you get to keep going. You have this chance of lasting and having a chance to hit that high asymmetry part where your subject matter resonates or something hits with the business. That's what we often see. In fact, the vast majority of the artists at Art Storefronts that are selling hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of art, Pat, I don't even think I can think of one that didn't go through all of this. All of them did. That's the whole point. All of them went through all of it. They went through 10, 20, 30 iterations of their subject matter, years of failing before succeeding, hacking away. What they didn't do is they didn't quit. They kept the business alive, they kept marketing, they kept trying new things, and eventually they hit. When I say they hit, what we see from the results is like first year, $500 in sales, second year, $1,500, third year, $5,000, $7,000, fourth year, $100,000. It just goes because you finally figured out a product that the market wants, and it took you some iteration. I'm not quitting, I'm not quitting, I'm not quitting. Everybody, and it's like people will think about this, and they're assigning their own timeline to it. You have to realize every artist that's listening to this, your own intelligence level, your own background, your own upbringing, all of these things factor into your success because all of those things factor into your decision-making and what you do with information. We give artists a ton of information and guidance, and then they go, and everybody does something a little bit different based on that, right?
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah.
Nick Friend: Because everybody has their own brain. They're going to go, oh, I'm going to do it my way, I'm going to do it like this, I'm going to do it like that, or however it's going to go. It's all going to be your journey, your art, the way you approach it, your effort, all of that, all of that's going to determine your success and when it happens. You're going to have your own unique journey. But if you understand the way that this works going into it, or wherever you're at right now, and you change your mindset to understand this is a marathon, not a sprint, and keep your cost low and just cover your costs, even if you have to drive an Uber, it doesn't matter where you earn the money, right? You're just trying to keep that dream alive to give yourself a chance of earning significant side income or going full-time and leaving the job that you hate or having retirement income, at least something coming in from it at some point. It's worthwhile because of the asymmetry of this business. The upside potential is that high nowadays that you can do it, and you can do it from home and all that stuff. I don't want to go into the whole asymmetry conversation, but I think you get the point here. There's just so much reason to be motivated to not quit. If you can understand that, just remember, we told you, don't quit. At the end of the day, don't quit. Just find a way, and you will eventually find success. You eventually will find it if you are working at it and you're not just passive, sitting there just going. The don't quit is not just not doing anything and just keeping your website up and waiting. It's actually like testing, seeing if something is working. If it doesn't work, you try something new. Your subject matter is not resonating, nobody's buying it, nobody's joining your email list, it's not working on social media, nothing's really happening. You've got to do something different. You can't just keep going on the same path. Even if you're just seeing people like your posts, okay? There are plenty of people who are just sitting back on their couch eating a bag of Cheetos that just like posts and follow travel blogger type of artists that are just entertaining. If you're never seeing the sales and you're not seeing the clicks to your website and the following sales from it, then it's probably not working and you need to move on to the next thing. Iterating, constantly trying to put new lines in the water. Pat, you always have fisherman analogies. I love it. It's like lures, right? Baits, just trying different bait, moving the boat to a different location. That's what you've got to do. You would not sit there if you were fishing as an artist at the same location with the same fishing rod and the same bait and just go there, just literally staying there all year long. Nope, I am hard-headed, I'm just going to stay right here. The smart artists, the ones that we see that are successful, are moving the boat around. They're dropping lines, they're putting, they might have eight fishing poles going at once, meaning they're different subject matter tests, and they're not going deep on the subject matter. They just try one thing in that subject matter, see if it resonates. But if you're doing that over time, you're eventually going to be starting to see different levels of success, things improving, maybe not rapidly. It may happen rapidly, but eventually, when you really get to that point, you do end up having this rapid growth once you find the subject matter that really resonates, that has a good market size and all of that. It's going to take you some time to get there.
Patrick Shanahan: It represents a significant shift in my mind on how we need to do things, like what we're responsible to do, both in terms of our customer base at a macro and then in terms of anyone listening to the podcast, anyone that comes into our ecosystem. I believe on some levels, by our own economic needs, we've helped foster some of the wrong ideas here. What have we done as a business? Immediately, we've gone in and we've grabbed our superstars. We've grabbed the artists that are making over 500, making 750, selling a million dollars a year of art, and we're putting them in our social media updates. We're interviewing them on the podcast, and they're going into our ads, and they're going everywhere else, and everyone's seeing that. Obviously, that is the stuff that drives all the crazy amount of clicks, and that gets people to stop the scroll and come read the post or come listen to the thing. Our company's big enough now that we're blessed that we have some of those folks that call our business home. That's awesome. We're going to continue bringing those stories, but we have to temper it with the people that are in year two, are in year three, are in year four, according to Jeff Bezos, are the ones that are heads down and grinding and what that actual growth looks like. It's funny because I just looked at my email, and I've got it back and forth with a guy that's in almost year three, and I find him to be on a perfectly normal, this is what an art business
actually looks like trajectory. So, I'm going to bring him on. I'm going to do an interview on the podcast. You guys will hear it on the feed, and I'm going to do more of them throughout the year because I realize that the best thing that we can do is just get people not to quit. That's how you win. That's how you win.
Nick Friend: Yep. When you hear these success stories and all that stuff, you just have to understand, don't let those get you down. There's always going to be a they who's done better than you, who's doing better than you right now, somebody who's making more money than you, somebody who's a better husband or a better wife than you. That's always there. You guys, don't get down over that. You're not them. We always try to talk about it in those interviews. You will see, you will hear the questions that are being asked that are about the background. Nobody wants to remember that part, but it's like they're all a 10-year overnight success or a seven-year overnight success like that you recently did. If you guys haven't seen it, Patrick's interview with Meg Knappburger, sold over a million dollars of art at Art Storefronts, built an amazing business. Jonah Allen, selling over $100,000 of his photography as art in a month, consistently. This guy, incredible. But when you actually go back and you understand their backgrounds, it's like Meg had the wrong subject matter for years, and then she figured it out and it hit. She had to iterate like we were talking about. Then Jonah, he started with us in, I think it was 2018 or 2019 he talks about, but if you go back from that, he worked at a gallery for a while. He's been in the industry selling art, understanding it, getting his hands dirty, figuring it out. It's like he's been in the art industry for seven or more years doing that. You look at this and you're like, these are people that have been at it for seven-plus years before it actually really hit. That's the real meaning behind the story. When you see them, have you put in seven years? Have you put in even one year, even five years? It just rolls back up to the don't quit.
Patrick Shanahan: Exactly. It's sad that you have to say it, that we have to say it, but we do. Anybody who's listening to this, this is just gold. We've never used this language in the entire—
Nick Friend: No, not once.
Patrick Shanahan: It's such gold for your own mental game and personal psychology as an artist because you're fighting against these fake mainstream stories that make it sound like you have to be an overnight success. What happens is too many artists come into this, too many people starting any business, and they're like, they might not say this, but they are thinking this in the back of their subconscious: if I'm not selling a ton in three months, I'm out. What should happen is you should know in advance, everybody that's starting an entrepreneurial business should know, you're going to want to be doing this for five to ten years. It may take that long. You're going to want to keep your cost low, and you're going to want to think about how you're going to do that and all that stuff. You're going to want to be properly equipped for the whole journey, make sure you're covering your marketing and all that stuff. Don't just throw up a willy-nilly website or whatever it is and not do any marketing or not do anything. You've got to take it seriously, but you're going to be at it for many years. You're going to be at it. If you go into it, if you knew that upfront, how many people probably wouldn't quit? They probably wouldn't. But if you tell them five years, people would quit right at that five-year mark. It's just the way that human nature is. They hear it once, and they're like, that's my date. But this is loose. It's a marathon, not a sprint. But don't be the person that is expecting to be a unicorn because you're like, oh, it's been a year and my sales are not $100,000 like Meg's. It's like, yeah, but nobody's is like that, and hers wasn't either. So, why are you so special? What have you done? Are you putting 18-hour days on your business? Are you painting like crazy or shooting like crazy? Have you done so many things that you deserve to be more successful than these other people or on a faster timeline? Probably not. It's hard to accelerate just the regular timeline that seems to be the five- to ten-year marathon journey or experience. So, just have that in your mindset. You might be disappointed hearing that today, but I promise you, it will make you so much better off, literally, like this moment and in months to come and in years to come. It may be the one piece of software update in your own brain that you just got today that might make you successful. It might be the thing. Just getting you to understand that it's a marathon, and you just cannot quit, seriously, might be the thing that gets you there. So, there it is. Don't quit. While you're on that marathon, because it's the beginning of the year, it prompts me the opportunity to talk about one of my favorite metrics. I oftentimes talk about the three most important metrics in an art business, and this is one of them. It's the importance of new customer acquisition. The importance of new customer acquisition, and I place this as either number one or number two in terms of the predictive revenue potential of an art or photography business, especially early on. This is my obligatory yearly, yes, you are an artist, but you really also want to have the business. Like I said earlier, at times, you need to think like a businessperson, a businesswoman, businessman. So, what exactly does that mean? I'm going to assume that no one's heard me say this before because I've said it a lot. Even if you have heard it, it bears repeating, and it's good to hear it again and again. But there are only three ways to grow an art business: purchase frequency, or the number of purchases per customer, we'll call that F; increase your average order value, we'll call that AOV; and increase the number of customers acquired, C. Really, the three together, the F times AOV times C, equals the revenue that your business is going to earn. What do most artists and photographers do? What do they all tend to focus on? Pretty much anyone in business usually over-indexes on this one, which is acquiring new customers. But guess what? Doing so is not always the best way to go about it. I know what you're saying, what are you talking about, Patrick? You just introduced this whole notion of the importance of how many new customers you acquire per year. But my position is that the best way to grow an art business is actually to ensure that you're working on all three all year long. Yes, the number of new customers you acquire, yes, increasing the average order value, and yes, getting those folks to come back to purchase again and again. But what the savvy artist knows, you guys, that most don't, is that the art business, way more than potentially some others, really relies on purchase frequency. That relies on first-time customers coming back and buying a second time, and then coming back and buying a third time, and then coming back and buying again and again as they morph into our favorite C word in the world, collectors. Guess what? Along with the number of new customers acquired per year, the number of collectors an art business has is also in the top three most important metrics that are predictive of revenue of an art business. How many new customers are you acquiring per year, and how many collectors do you have? Very few artists think about this. Very few artists approach each new year saying, how many new customers am I going to acquire this year? Very few artists can say how many customers they acquired last year. Could you answer that question as I asked you at the spur of the moment? How many new customers did you acquire last year? It's such an important metric because the whole thing is a numbers game. Let's assume that last year we acquired ten customers, and to keep the math simple, 10% of those are going to turn into collectors. So, you got one collector last year because you acquired ten new customers last year. That one collector is going to come back and purchase again and again and again. That's fantastic. Those are the greatest things that an art business could possibly have. But you acquired ten new customers, so you only have one collector. If you would have acquired 100 customers last year, you would have had ten collectors, 10% of 100, right? You realize that this new customer acquisition boils down to how many collectors you're left with at the end of it. Almost no one talks about that. Almost no one thinks about that. The smart artist realizes that this entire thing is just a numbers game, you guys. Number of new customers acquired is going to be predictive, is going to dictate how many collectors you are left with at the end of the year. What do most artists do? They don't think about this. They're not businesspeople. They don't have this equation in their head, and so they're not worried about how many new customers they acquire. They're selling the typical five to six to seven pieces a year, and they're like, this is great. Maybe next year I'll sell 15. You and I are here going, no, we need you to acquire as many new customers as possible because if you do that, you're going to end up with new collectors. It's number one why you cannot rely exclusively on selling through retail galleries or online marketplaces because, in either scenario, you have no idea who's purchasing your work, and you can't get them to come back and
purchase again. You don't have control of that. But number two, why your lineup and your pricing is so important. It is why Nick here is invested so heavily in ensuring every single Art Storefronts customer can sell every single solitary media type, POD, print on demand, and all of the various different merch types, POD, print on demand. Is that because we are huge fans of merch, and we love merch at the end of the day? Not necessarily. It is because those products make it significantly easier for our customers to acquire as many new customers as possible per year. The whole thing is just a strategic game. The more new customers that you acquire, the more collectors that you are going to have. Year over year, that business is going to keep grinding and growing. We had this whole last segment about do not quit. One of the primary reasons people quit is because when you sell the five to six pieces a year instead of the 50 to 60 to 70 to 100, which many of our customers are capable of doing now with the pricing and lineup dialed in, look what you're able to achieve. You have more momentum, you have more endorphin hits, you have more enthusiasm, more motivation to keep going and not quit because you're acquiring a much higher level of customers. You're having that many conversations with customers, and it is so critically important, and almost no one talks about it. No one ever gets into it. So, it is the number of new customers you acquired per year. What are you going to be able to do differently? Earlier, Nick, you were mentioning the custom artwork strategy, and that's a fantastic strategy. Again, we're going to put that one in the show notes. Why I mention it, I will also put in the show notes a really comprehensive guide on pricing that I wrote last year that's really good. If you haven't read it, you need to read it. I'll put it in the show notes. It'll clarify some of these things. But at the end of the day, the custom artwork strategy or how hard we encourage people to do commissions, one of the primary beneficiaries of that is just new customers that you're acquiring that you otherwise weren't, that you are going to potentially get switched on from their custom artwork to your current artwork to becoming collectors. The whole thing is just a business strategy at the end of the day that no one ever talks about. But anyway, I'm fired up about this metric per usual. I always rant about this and go ham on this, so I have to do it at the beginning of the year.
Nick Friend: There are so many correlations to what we've talked about today and what we've talked about previously on other podcasts. Just going back to covering your costs, there are so many artists that are, I'm not going to do this, I'm not going to do that, but they're not selling anything. They're not selling anything consistently, and they have all these rules that they're following. What ends up happening is they end up shutting down because, at the end of the day, you could sell custom artwork or a couple of merch items. Merch items will sell way more consistently because they're gift items, they're impulse items, they're things that somebody can buy on the spot. You don't need wall space. There are all those factors that are involved. If you sell a couple of merch items and they cover your costs of running the business, they cover your website costs, they cover your cost of marketing promotion, like however you're paying a marketer or however you're getting that done, dude, you're in a great spot. You are literally in a great spot. Your costs are covered. You're at break-even, essentially. Now you're just iterating on artwork, and you're building customers, and you're trying to figure out how to build this thing further. There are so many factors that are involved in that. I think the other thing I want to say, this is going to definitely be another topic of another podcast episode, but the word "collectors" I just don't like because I think it has the wrong psychology to it. What I prefer is "true fans." You're familiar with true fans. There's a great article, "100 True Fans," "A Thousand True Fans," you know that over the years. It's worth reading. We should get it in the show notes, and we'll definitely do an episode on this. Collectors, artists think of collectors, at least what I've seen with the 10,000 artists that we've got at Art Storefronts, I guess the way that I would explain it is it's like something that is going to magically happen to you. You're just going to get collectors. Oh, I want to get collectors. I want to get collectors. A collector is a true fan. They are an avid fan of you and your art. Creating a fan is a whole different deal in the way that you market yourself, the way that you market your art, all of it. It's not this just passive thing. That doesn't mean that it's never been a passive thing. Sometimes it is a passive thing. It's just more rare. The people that we see that are getting true collector-level business, like the people we mentioned before, Jonah Allen, Meg Knapp, BG, and many others, these people are fans. I'll tell you this too, the people that I collect artwork from, it's very few. You can count it on one hand, Pat. I am a fan. I am a fan. It's not that their art is the best art in the world; it's why I buy it. It's because they're a part of it, and I'm buying them. 50% of the art piece is the artist, or sorry, 50% of the sale is usually the artist, and the other half is the subject matter and your emotional connection. We talk about this all the time. It's that other part that's a big deal. Usually, what with people who are not selling versus people who are selling is the people who are selling are actually trying to serve a customer, and the other people are not. It's literally as simple as that. They're releasing this artwork to the public. They're like, I've got this great work, I've got this great photography, but nobody's buying it. What customer are you actually serving? Have you even talked to them? Have you just talked to one person? How can I make your life better today? I think you are a person that would like my artwork. You like elephants. I've got elephants. What can I do with elephants that's going to make someone like you want to buy a painting of it? Show me some pictures. Show me something like you love them. Would you hang one on your wall? What if they all say no? Maybe they all say no, but then, but what if they start showing you some pictures, and you're like, oh my gosh, I could totally do this, but I've never even thought of doing elephants that way. I've always been thinking of them this way, right? Serve a customer. If you ever want to have a fan, then you're going to have to make them amazingly happy. That's a very important concept. It's not this esoteric collector that's just going to randomly pop out of the woods, out of the corner of the country or the world. You're going to have to turn that person into a fan. So, I think it's very important to be thinking about it that way. As you're thinking about the metric of acquiring customers, your fans are going to want to buy these merch items. I have sets of coasters of their artwork. I have books. I know you do too, like coffee table books, calendars, things like that. Collectors are going to love those types of things, or I should say fans like those things. You know what else, Pat, that's so important to talk about? There are a lot of fans that also can't afford your artwork or maybe aren't ready to buy it yet. They want those items. They want to be a fan. They want to own something from you, and they might be your most vocal people on social media or in word of mouth or whatever it is. Give them, throw them a bone. Let them be a part of your world, your experience. Even if you only do it occasionally and you don't even offer them regularly on your website, but you offer them once a quarter or twice a year, and you have some really cool items, let your followers be fans. Don't be afraid of that. Understand that this is all part of the process of building your business.
Patrick Shanahan: This just goes right back to the avatar that I was talking about earlier, which is why I bang it like a drum. It's so easy to be an artist and gloss over these fundamental business things like they don't apply to you, but they do apply to you. If you start taking them seriously, your business is going to start growing in a more healthy, organic, robust fashion. In order to have a collector, in order to have a true fan, you have to start with a purchase. In order to get a third purchase, you have to get the second purchase. It's a critical metric to an art of photography business, and I see so many that are breaking these rules. They're making it difficult to buy with high price points, with lineups that are out of whack. Then their marketing message reaches someone, and they're like, I really like this person, I just can't afford that right now. Boom, they're gone. Once they are gone, you've lost them. That's it. So, when you're able to make the sale, you get a beachhead into their world. You have the opportunity of an open door in which you can romance them into becoming a true fan, romance them into becoming a collector. Ultimately, at the end of the day, everyone has their own timeline for when that may happen. Some will be more receptive to it than others, but none of that takes place if you don't get the first sale. So, you've got to get that first sale, and
that is what winds back to this number of new customers acquired is so important. A lot of times I'll hear artists say, well, I'm modeling my business after such and such, and such doesn't do that. They cite some unicorn that's one of the top contemporary artists in the world. You can't model your business after these unicorn stories of these one folks that make it.
Nick Friend: Yeah, I'm modeling my game after Kobe Bryant's. I'm modeling my investment strategy after Warren Buffett, right?
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, that's just not how it goes. So, you just have to be smart about it. I'm here to tell you, like you said earlier, that all of these things connect. Call it an endorphin or dopamine hit you get, call it the encouragement, the motivation that you get. You and I have both been on several entrepreneurial journeys. When you're at your lowest and you acquire one customer and you get one positive feedback, it's like the gas tank is full for another two months, just motoring, and you're not...
Nick Friend: Absolutely, yes.
Patrick Shanahan: Take that win, you know what I mean? I'll have this article on the show notes about pricing. I'll obviously be talking about it more and more all year long. I really want everyone to get to the end of the year of 2024 and be able to two, three, four, five x the number of new customers that they acquired last year. You know what a great way to do that is? Get your stuff in order and get your Valentine's Day sale in the water. What's the next one after that, Nick? The next one?
Nick Friend: What's the next one after?
Patrick Shanahan: Keep going every month, and we'll just keep pushing and pushing. So, on that note, great episode. Thanks for joining us, and hope to see you guys soon.
Nick Friend: Thanks, everyone. See you on the next one.
Patrick Shanahan: Thanks.
