Artist’s Growth Stack

How to Grow as An Artist- Some Learnings

This week, I spent some time on my flight from Dubai to SF, learning how artists promote their work digitally, trying to come up with a heuristically good understanding of the best practices. I spend a lot of time helping silicon valley companies grow. This post is meant to take a little bit of that skillset and channel it into creative/artistic vision.

Perfection is your biggest enemy. Think about iteration, not about perfection.

1. Choose a Proper Name. 
2. Set up all your Marketing Channels in 10 minutes. 
3. Reachout to Customers. I made a guide. See below.Secure a Brand Name That Maximizes Your Chances of Winning. 

Use Panabee to brainstorm brand names and Knowem to validate whether the names are ‘free’ online. You also want to ask people of foreign descent to go to your site, if you see them spelling it wrong, then you may have chosen a ‘free’ name but a name that is too difficult to spell.

To become a halfway decent drummer, I’ve had to do hundreds of gigs and I’ve easily played over 3000 hours in front of people. It’s a mind-boggling amount of time to play in front of people. I’ll probably share more about how I perfected some of my bad drum techniques in another post.

Store Your Art on Dropbox

Dropbox- every piece of art or music, you should push into dropbox. You can make it autopush to the platforms below using http://ifttt.com. 

1. instagram 
2. tumblr 
3. facebook 
4. twitter 
5. pinterest 

Platforms that involve your signup and posting. 

1. Share your work on the Art Subreddit.  Music Subreddit.  
2. Share your work on DeviantArt / Soundcloud 

In Store – 

1. Once you get ~20 pieces of art, do a pop-up-show. Use StoreFront.  or get a manager. Do live shows! 
2. Also secure a Square reader so you can accept payments. Ask for tips with hashtags or retweets. The publicity itself is worth more to you at this stage as you grind it out.

How to Make Money Doing Art/Music

Companies have no idea they can use art or music as a channel to reach customers. Make it obvious. Sell them on the vision. 

If I could draw quirky pictures of animals or record custom songs…. a lot is viable.

I’d email CEO’s like this.

Hey CEO of toy company,

I’ve been making quirky animal pictures for the past X years. It’s my niche and I love doing it. Using my chalk art in New York City, near your headquarters, would be a great brand building exercise and help you sell more plush elephant animals. I attached some of my art work and here’s a link to my instagram profile (instagram.com/myquirkyanimalartpictures)

Got time for a 5 minute phone call?

Cheers.

Kumar