You can start an art business with basically no money. All you really need is your art, your phone, and an internet connection. Maybe $100 if you really want to go all out. But that’s it.
If I had to start over and make my first $1,000, I wouldn’t waste my time building a website, designing a logo, or opening an Etsy shop. I’ve helped hundreds of artists go viral, fully fund their Kickstarters, sign $2,000 clients and go full-time, and the pattern I see over and over is that artists (especially in the beginning) make their business way too complicated. It ruins their profitability.
So here’s how I’d start from zero, and what I’d wait to pay for.
How much money do you need to start an art business?
Close to nothing. Here’s what the business I’d build costs to run at the very start:
Starting from zero
Everything runs on Instagram at first. You add costs once revenue can cover them.
That’s the whole trick. Don’t add expenses your revenue can’t sustain yet. (In the beginning, revenue is nonexistent, so that means don’t add many.)
Step 1: Make free content that makes people care
Short-form video is the cheapest, fastest place to start. I can ideate, script, film and edit a Reel in 20 minutes. (I’ve timed myself.) You don’t need fancy gear. You need decent lighting, halfway good audio, and ideally your face.
I’d post two to four videos a week about the story behind my work: what my creative practice means to me, why I paint what I paint, the symbolism in it, how I want someone to feel when they live with it. Not still photos with no context.
Customers long for story. They long for emotion and connection.
(The full version of this, step by step, is in how to sell art with no followers.)
Step 2: Sell in your stories (no website, no Etsy)
Instead of paying for a shop, I’d sell in my Instagram stories every single day. “Hey, I have this piece I just finished. Do you want to buy it? It costs this much. Just reply to me to purchase.”
Someone replies, I send them an invoice. Done.
A website adds friction right now. It takes time and money to build. No, thank you.
Step 3: Make each sale bigger (instead of buying more stuff)
When you don’t have money to spend on inventory, raising your average order value (AOV) is your best friend.
Would you rather sell 100 $10 things or 20 $50 things? I know the answer for me. It’s the 20.
Bundles are by far the single best way to raise AOV. A small original and a print. A print and a sticker. Your entire animal pin collection. Your customer already likes what you’re offering, so just give them an easy way to buy more of it. (More ideas in how to raise your average order value, or grab my free list of product ideas.)
Step 4: Spend only when it solves a real problem
Once money starts coming in, the temptation is to upgrade everything. I’ve done it. A trip to the art supply store for one tube of paint that turned into a dozen things I didn’t need. A piece of camera equipment that now sits in a dusty corner.
Before I buy anything for my business, I ask three questions:
- Does this solve a real problem I have right now? Not a hypothetical future problem. Not a nice-to-have.
- Is this a one-time cost, or does it raise my operating costs permanently? I really prefer one-time purchases.
- Can I pay for it without putting it on a credit card? Credit cards let you spend money you don’t have yet.
(My whole system for this is in the money rules I follow.)
What should you pay for first?
In the order I’d add them, once sales are coming in from stories:
- An email list. An email subscriber is about 40 times more valuable than an Instagram follower, and you own the list. (Email marketing for artists has everything.)
- A website, last. Once the DMs get overwhelming (people ghost you, people want to haggle), a website where the price is the price respects your time. Now you’ve got the revenue to make the monthly expense worth it.
We didn’t need an MBA or a bunch of fancy gear to get started.
You don’t need to be polished and perfect from the beginning. You need to start.
Where to go next
- The whole first-$1,000 plan, in order: how to sell art with no followers
- Figure out how many sales your goal actually takes: do the math on your art business, or use my free Creative Money Map
- Want the full picture in one place? The Creative Entrepreneur’s Workbook is 200 pages of business and marketing for artists, and 91 of them are worksheets.
Talk soon,
