A few weeks ago, Joseph (a member of the Creative Accelerator) came to me with a question. He’d just left his job, and he has four months of financial runway.
“What would you do if you were me, Kelsey?” he asked. “How would you scale your business and go full time in just four months?”
Here’s my answer.
How I’d help this dark fantasy artist scale to $10K/month in 4 months
Joseph has a relatively established business in terms of infrastructure. He has a website up and running, a whole suite of products (like prints, enamel pins, hoodies, tapestries), and plenty of experience selling in person.
But with only ~3,400 followers on Instagram, this is a pretty ambitious goal.
But… exactly how ambitious is it?
The first thing I’d do is run the numbers.
Using just a little bit of math, we can actually reverse engineer exactly how often Joseph would have to post to achieve his goal.
This is INCREDIBLY valuable math to do. (I put all of my art business math in one place in do the math on your art business.)
First things first, we need to know a few numbers:
- How many views are we getting on socials every month?
- How much revenue are we bringing in?
- And how much revenue do we WANT to bring in?
With just those numbers, we can calculate exactly how often we need to post. Let me walk you through it with some placeholder numbers.
Let’s say Joseph is getting about 10,000 views on socials every month, brings in around $200 in revenue, and WANTS to bring in $10K.
Dividing the $200 in revenue by the 10,000 views gives us Joseph’s revenue per view. In our case, that’s a whopping $0.02.
Don’t spend it all in one place!
But… okay. If we want to make $10K, how many views might we need?
To figure that out, we take our revenue goal and divide it by our revenue per view. So 10,000 / .02 = 500,000.
As-is, Joseph would need 500,000 views to make $10K.
Next, I’d find the levers I can move.
There are actually a bunch of low-hanging fruit we can pick to make this math a ton easier for ourselves. In reality, we likely won’t need anywhere close to 500,000 views to make this work.
Here’s what I’d take a look at:
- Have we made buying from us as easy as possible? I like setting up Manychat automations that link someone directly to a specific product in my shop to boost conversion rates.
- Does Joseph have his checkout flow optimized, with things like order bumps and upsells shown at checkout? Anything we can do to increase average order value should help here.
- Is Joseph pitching his work enough? Does he have enough CTAs in enough places?
I’ve seen people 3-5X their monthly revenue by implementing those easy fixes.
If Joseph did this, he could easily increase his monthly revenue to over $1000/month. That would lower the views that he’d need from 500,000 to as low as only 100,000.
But even with all of this, we realized Joseph would have to post DAILY to meet his goals.
There was just no way around it.
The math was indisputable.
Even if Joseph did all of the above and TRIPLED the value a single view had to his business, because he’s only getting maybe 2,000 views per Reel, he’d have to post 60+ a month.
That’s two a day.
So then our conversation shifted to figuring out the systems he’d need in place to post daily without ever burning out or running out of ideas…
I ended up making a video going over my entire plan for Joseph, so give it a watch!
All my love,
