The Business Concept You NEED for Your Art Business
What is the simplest, easiest art that you can create to see if people are interested in what you might offer? This is called “a minimum viable product”. It's a corporate business term, but don’t let that turn you off!
Something I've been learning as I'm on this journey of running a creative business, is that the same level of creativity I put into my art is also required in how I run my business. When it's just me making art, I only have to please myself. But if we want to sell art, we need to strategic and thoughtful and creative about how we approach it. Sometimes we are so ambitious that we put so much work into an idea that we're just SURE is going to work, and then we are crushed when it flops. But we can test a smaller version of your idea first with your audience to see if they're into it. That is the heart of the minimum viable product and I want to unpack that today!
If you've been following me for any length of time, you'll know that I think people should specialize on a type of art that they can become known by. I suggest people make a series of this focused style of work. If you can create collection of art, it will greatly aid your efforts to sell more. People often ask, how many pieces should I make? How big should they be? How much should they cost? And I would say, make your art, especially a new concept, with the smallest viable product in mind.
Don't make giant oil paintings that take 6 months to make and 6 months to dry. Make small watercolors that you can complete in one hour. Then make 20. Then show them to your audience via social or real-life exhibitions or your website. See how the audience responds. Are you able to sell any? And the work might flop or it might succeed or it might be a combination, but either way you'll end up with some information to know what to focus on next.
If you spend 2 years making giant oil paintings and they flop, you'll have a ton of sunk cost and time and it could paralyze future movement. You want to be able to send out some concepts and get feedback FAST so you know how to proceed.
The minimum viable product cannot be just ONE artwork. You won't be able to get enough information because that is not an adequate sample size. You need much more than one, and less than 2 years worth. This will be highly variable based on the time you spend in the studio and your style of work, but it is absolutely essential to make these calculations for your business if you want to succeed. My personal opinion is that you need at least 10 works in a series, but I prefer even more to really get a sense of whether you will have market success.
Need help pricing the work you’re making? Get my Pricing Your Art Made Easy worksheet!
