Redefining Success and Embracing Setbacks as a New Online Art Business Owner
The last thing any of us want to think about when we’re pursuing our dreams is failure. We are constantly hearing stories of people who gave up everything for success and it can start to feel like that level of sacrifice is what it takes to be successful or like you can never fail as long as you believe in yourself and take a huge leap of faith.
But does that mindset set us up for success or leave us vulnerable to unnecessary risk?
As scary as it is to talk about, failure can happen to anyone. But the more that we talk about it and plan for it, the easier it is to overcome.
Today, I want to talk about how to guarantee success when starting a new art business. I’m not revealing any secrets to hack the market and guarantee you’ll be an overnight millionaire, this will just be an honest and realistic conversation about emotionally and practically setting your business up for success by learning to pivot instead of giving up in the face of setbacks.
Table of Contents
Why Do Some Artists Fail?
The definition of failure is subjective and because it’s an uncomfortable topic, many of us don’t even know what we personally consider failure to be. Our definition of failure may come from comparing ourselves to others, taking on the beliefs of our parents, or listening to unrealistic advice about what it takes to be successful.
Not knowing what failure means to us can actually set us up for failure when starting a new business because we may give up too easily or sacrifice too much the first time we encounter a setback.
So before we talk about how to avoid it, let’s explore six reasons why new artists might feel like they’ve failed.
Comparison
The art industry is increasingly competitive and oversaturated and many new artists’ definitions of success and failure are based on comparison. We might look at artists with millions of followers making millions of dollars, posting daily on social media, finishing masterpieces every week, or constantly getting new opportunities and think we’ve failed if we can’t match their success.
Expecting Immediate Success
Whether our expectations of success are based on other creators’ or just our own unrealistic expectations, some artists new to starting an art business may fail because they’re unable to maintain momentum if they don’t see immediate revenue, follower, or engagement growth.
It can feel hard to keep churning out work and content when you have a small, stagnant, or unresponsive audience and sales don’t seem to increase no matter what you do. In order to avoid this, we have to find something to motivate us that’s not dependent on other people’s response to our work. It can be challenging but it can also set you up for perseverance and success.
Giving Up After Temporary Setbacks
Giving up too easily is a surefire way to guarantee your own failure. As we’ll talk about later, walking away from your business isn’t always a bad decision and doesn’t mean you’ve failed; but we may give up the first time we encounter the smallest temporary setback in our business if we haven’t thought critically about where to draw the line.
Even if you’ve planned every part of your business meticulously, none of that matters if you’re not able to stick with it. Which is why some incredibly talented, business-minded artists still end up with failed creative businesses.
Taking on Other's Definitions of Success
If your parents didn’t value art, you may always battle with the feeling of failure simply because you chose art over a more traditionally successful career path.
Or you might be on the opposite end of the spectrum, where you believe art can make you incredibly successful but your worth has become tied to things you didn’t initially care about like profit, marketability, or how many galleries your work has been shown in because of pressure from an art teacher or a YouTuber you like.
A lot of us carry the weight of other people’s expectations. If we actually thought about it, we might find that the pressure we put on ourselves to change or succeed isn’t even in line with what we truly want or believe.
Not Allowing Room to Adapt
While the last 4 all focus on reasons why new artists may quit, some artists may fail because they backed themselves into a corner and are no longer able to adapt their business.
Like I said in the intro, we’re fed a lot of stories about people sacrificing everything for success but when you’re starting a new business, it is crucial to leave yourself enough money, time, and resources to test and change things.
Not just for the success of your business but for your survival.
Underestimating Demand
There are two sides to underestimating demand: not being able to scale fast enough to keep up with demand, and underestimating the demands of starting a business. The product of both of these is burnout and the solution to both of these is figuring out what building a sustainable business means for you when you’re first starting out.
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You’ll notice that there’s nothing in this list like “some artists fail because they didn’t promote themselves on social media often enough” or “some fail because they didn’t create marketable work”. Those were left out intentionally because I don’t think things like that are required for every single artist. There is no singular path to success or failure. We’re all on our own little journeys here and everyone’s business is going to look different.
Pretty much no practical misstep in your business model will lead to failure if you still have room to adapt and the resilience to push through setbacks. You can always continue to change and improve your work, your content strategy, your production model, literally any part of your business. Quitting, backing yourself into a corner, and running out of resources are the only things I can think of that you can’t really push through.
I think it’s empowering to realize that almost no outside influence can bring our art businesses down unless we let them. We create our businesses, we create our art, and we create our definition of failure. It’s all in our hands and as long as we are protecting ourselves from risk, making smart decisions, remaining persistent, keeping a positive mindset, and finding fulfillment in our art, we really can’t fail.
How To Succeed When Starting an Art Business
Redefine Failure
Don’t Rely on External Validation for Motivation
When I decided to re-launch Green Velvet after initially quitting back in 2022, I needed to be realistic about the fact that growth wouldn’t be instant. I needed to be okay with the vulnerability, embarrassment, criticism, and struggle that comes from putting yourself out there and trying something new.
Rather than letting this scare or discourage me, this allowed me to redefine what motivates me and focus more on internal fulfillment instead of external validation.
I didn’t choose to pursue art because I wanted Instagram followers. I chose to pursue art because I love art and I still love creating even when nobody sees what I make. So I chose to be motivated by my drive to create more, and my desire to live a slower life and help cultivate a more supportive and collaborative creative culture. It took a long time to get there though, and I’m planning on making a video about learning to love creating art again so feel free to subscribe if that interests you.
As long as I continue to enjoy art, I’m going to continue making art and if people want to buy it, that’s an added bonus. Metrics like revenue and follower count are how I monitor the health of my business but not my worth or my success.
Find Your Personal Definition of Failure
I think of success and failure as a scale. On one side is everything I put into my business, my time, money, effort, stress, anything I’m giving up to make this business happen. On the other side is everything I’m getting back, not just money but skills, improvement, personal fulfillment, knowledge, joy, community.
Take a second, pause this video, and think about what you put into your business, what you get back and most importantly, how much weight each of those things hold.
If it’s helpful, I’m going to put a little interactive worksheet together that you can use. You can redo this every few months just to take inventory of where you’re at and how you’re feeling about your business.
All you have to do is fill in a few things you are investing into your business. I put some examples here but this is not an exhaustive list and some of these might not be relevant to you. Then assign it a weight, this is a score of how important this investment is to you.
For example, my time is not very important to me. The time I spend working on art is time that I probably would have spent scrolling on my phone and I am happy to give that up so my “weight” for that item would be a 2. However, when it comes to money, I am very risk averse. If I invested a ton of money into my business it would weigh down the negative side of the scale to a point where it would be really hard for any amount of personal fulfillment or growth to even things back out. So my “weight” for that item would be a 7.
Then assign it an amount, so 1 would mean you are not currently investing much of that thing into your business. Like for me, I have been spending A LOT of time producing content, drawing, and working on new collections so my time investment amount would be like a 7 right now. But outside of the $2 a day I spend on Etsy ads, I’m not spending any money right now so my money amount would be a 1.
For the second section, choose a few things that you get back from your business, and score them in the same way.
Once you’ve filled this out you’ll get a little visualization of how much is on either side of your scale.
As long as I am getting more out of my business than I am giving up, I am succeeding. If there came a point where I was completely drained, unhappy, unfulfilled, and my financial future was in jeopardy because of my art business, and I couldn’t see any way to tip the scales back toward success; that would be my limit and it would be time to step away.
Knowing my limit helps me make more informed decisions and keeps me from giving up when I face setbacks. Now rather than feeling like I want to quit every time I face something slightly negative, I can think critically about whether my art business is still worth it to me and remind myself to keep going when I encounter obstacles.
Examine Your Expectations
If you often feel like you’ve failed, hold yourself to unrealistic standards, or expect unrealistic success out of your business, examine those thoughts. Are they actually aligned with your beliefs or are they expectations your parents held you to? Are you taking on someone else’s definition of success? Would you hold a friend or someone you admire to the same standards you hold yourself to?
I’m going to include some journal prompts in the same Google Sheet as that Scale Worksheet linked in the last section. Feel free to just fill in this sheet, or if you have a daily journal, you could just use this to guide your writing today.
Embrace a Growth Mindset
It sounds too simple to say that failure is a choice but in some cases, it really is that simple.
We have the power to see pretty much any situation as an opportunity for growth instead of failure. Even if you’ve hit the point where your scale is heavily weighted to the negative side and you step away from your business, you still don’t have to see that as failure. You can always recover, get back on your feet and try again and even if you don’t, you tried and learned something new which is still a success in my book.
Success is rarely ever immediate and every time you try something and it doesn’t work out, you’re one step closer to learning what works.
Think about it this way, if you knew nothing about art or business, but you posted your first ever piece of art online, it went viral, and you were an overnight success, you still wouldn’t know anything about art or business, you wouldn’t know how to sustain or reproduce that success, you would just know one thing that worked once.
If you worked at something for years and saw failure and success at varying levels, you now have experience and data to inform all your decisions. You can move forward in your business armed with the confidence that you truly understand what works and that is a real gift.
Manage Risks
I think there are two sides to avoiding failure. There’s the emotional side which we just talked about. This protects us from feeling like we’ve failed and subsequently protects us from giving up too easily, by giving us the perspective and resilience to push through failure.
But is there a way we can avoid failure altogether? I think there is, but it’s not the glamorous secret to success that we might want to hear. In my opinion, the only way to avoid failure is to manage risk so we always have enough room to pivot rather than hit a dead end.
We are fed a lot of really romanticized stories of successful people who gave up everything to invest in their dream. In the stories we hear about, it works out for them and that’s awesome. But I can’t help thinking that for every success story we hear about, there are probably way more people who gave up everything, never found success and weren’t able to get their lives back on track.
In my opinion, when you’re first starting out, you should make decisions that you will stand by no matter what the future holds. To put it another way, don’t invest anything into your business that you would need back in order to comfortably survive.
This isn’t to say you should expect failure or fear investing anything into your business. But no matter how comfortable you are with risk, it’s smart to think critically about how much you are actually able to invest into a business with an uncertain future.
Managing risk does 3 things. It takes the pressure off so you are not depending on immediate success for your survival. It allows you to grow slowly which lets you make informed decisions about where to pivot rather than face burnout or dead ends. And it minimizes the chance that you’ll end up resenting your passion because your business became unsustainable.
Let me give a few examples and we can use the third page in this worksheet as a guide. Let’s say you just started a photography business and you haven’t booked a wedding yet. You really want a new lens for your camera because you’re convinced that’s why you’ve never booked a wedding. The lens is $2,000 which is all the money you have right now and you know if you bought it, you wouldn’t have enough in your account to pay rent next month. You decide it’s okay though, because if you book a wedding, the couple’s deposit would cover your rent so you buy the lens. But a month goes by, you didn’t book a wedding in time and now you can’t afford rent.
In this scenario, you’ve put a lot of pressure on yourself to succeed quickly. You’re taking on a $2,000 financial risk and you’ve essentially given yourself a month to grow your new photography business. It’s reasonable to make this type of investment when you know you’ll only need to book 1 $4,000 wedding to make your money back but you’re also risking your ability to pay rent, and in a way, the sustainability of your business. Because if you can’t comfortably survive if you can’t pay your rent, so you will likely have to find another source of income other than photography to quickly catch back up financially.
If you managed your risk and started slowly by shooting smaller gigs with existing gear, or asking local photographers for second shooting or associate shooting opportunities, you could save up the money to buy the lens once you can actually comfortably afford it and up still achieving what you set out to achieve. But by doing it this way, you end up with a more sustainable business model where you have more control and there is far less pressure to immediately succeed. So in the case, the risk is not worth it.
For another example, let’s say you watched a YouTube video about people who made a ton of money selling art on Etsy. You love your 9-5 job but you’re so confident that you can double your salary by selling art so you quit.
In this scenario, let’s say your salary is $70,000 and you don’t think you could comfortably live on less than that. Not only are you risking that amount of money, you’re also risking the opportunity to continue a career path you love for a new career that you don’t yet know if you’ll like. Let’s say you sell paintings for $40 a piece and they take you weeks to make. With the expectation you set to make back your salary within a year, you would need to sell 1,750 paintings in your first year. Which in my opinion is not reasonable.
Let’s say instead, you started small with your business while staying at your 9-5. Sure this means you would have less time to devote to your art in the beginning but it also allows you to see what it’s actually like to run a business and make a career out of art. This gives you time to see what you like, test out different business models and mediums, and make an informed decision about whether you want to stay at your 9-5, and keep art as a hobby, do art part-time, or eventually take the leap and make art your full time career once you’ve built up an audience and know how to run a business that’s sustainable for you.
Last one. Let’s say you really want to buy equipment to scale up your T-shirt printing business. You started out printing your linocuts onto shirts by hand until you started selling enough that you really needed a printing press to keep up with orders. You found a local print shop that has open studio days once a week and you were able to use their printing press for free for awhile but now your orders have ramped up, you’ve made enough to afford a printing press. Your current resources wouldn’t get you the same result as owning a printing press because having access to a press every day allows you to get orders out much faster than you would have been able to by hand or once a week at the studio. The equipment is $6,000 but because you’re paying for it with the money you’ve already made from selling shirts, you don’t have to make that money back immediately. You sell your shirts for $45 because there’s already a demand for them and you know you could sell 133 shirts to offset the cost of the equipment, which given that you could comfortably do without that money for 3 years means you only need to sell 4 a month to reach that goal.
This investment wouldn’t have been worth it a few years ago when you were only selling a few shirts a month for half the price. Not only did you not have the money to comfortably afford a press back then, you were keeping up just fine using the equipment at the print studio. But because you worked your way up to it, it’s a safe risk.
Again none of this is to say that you should expect failure, rather, in all three of these scenarios, managing risk, slowing down, and using what you already have sets you up for success rather than putting you in a position where you end up quitting or resenting your art business.
This mindset might mean you lose out on investments that may have helped you grow faster but as we’ll talk about in a second, I’m starting to realize that embracing slow growth has been more fulfilling and enjoyable than burning myself out trying to be a success as fast as possible or committing myself to something I don’t enjoy just because I’m trying to make an impulsive financial decision feel worth it.
Embrace Slow Growth
The first time I launched Green Velvet, I don’t think I had really thought critically about what I wanted to do or how I wanted to spend my time. I was planning on just saying yes to every opportunity that came my way because that would mean my business would grow faster.
This seems to be the way the creative industry is going.
I see a lot of advice about growing your art business as fast as possible no matter what it takes. Advice about making art for profitable niche audiences, even if it’s not the type of art you like or want to make. Advice that pushes this “quantity or quality” mindset and in my opinion kind of sacrifices creativity for the sake of consumerism. Advice that tells you you need to be posting on social media constantly and dumping money into ads so you’re just constantly showing up everywhere as often as possible.
It seems like artists in the age of overconsumption are growing so fast and then getting burned out because they didn’t have any sort of runway to test out whether they actually liked their art or their business before they had to fully commit to it. They just got the ball rolling toward profitability and now it’s rolling too fast to keep up with or change directions.
At the end of the day I have massive respect for artists no matter where they fall on the spectrum of making personal vs commercial art but I’m a big advocate for a creative industry that feels fulfilling.
So many of us saw art as a slower lifestyle that would allow us to escape a hustle-culture obsessed corporate life just to end up entering into a creative industry that feels just as obsessed with productivity, marketability, and output.
If I said yes to every opportunity, tapped into profitable niches that I have no personal connection to, or prioritized virality over authenticity for the sake of growing as fast as possible, at what point would my business feel like it’s in conflict with my brand or interests? Would I still feel like I had creative control or an artistic voice if I wasn’t thinking critically about whether my decisions aligned with my values?
Growing slowly means I have time to find my voice before I have thousands or hundreds of thousands of eyes on me and I am grateful for that. I have time to find my footing and my style, try new things, make mistakes, build up a portfolio I’m proud of, and establish a plan for how and where I want to grow.
The pace I’m at right now is the lifestyle I want and I hope I remember that every time I find myself wishing I could be successful faster. I don’t want to hustle, I want to create art everyday and build a community of people who also desire a creative and fulfilling life. I want to learn what it means to slow down and prioritize the things I genuinely love.
If that means I can quit my job and support myself fully with my art one day, awesome. If I don’t do Green Velvet forever, that’s fine too, I’ll still always love art and in some capacity, I’ll still always be an artist.
Separate Your Dream From Your Business
That brings me to my last point. What happens if you reach your limit? What happens if the risks of running your art business no longer outweigh the rewards? Do you give up on your dream or do you push through?
Once you start an art business, part of you stays an artist and part of you becomes a business owner and you have to separate your dream from your business.
The part of you that’s a business owner can run out of resources and has to make smart decisions backed by logic and data. This part of you has to know when to pivot or take a step back.
But the part of you that’s an artist never has to give up. You can push through anything and you will never hit a dead end because your talent and creativity are not finite resources.
Art, business, and marketing are all different skills. Some of the best artists in history were never commercial successes in their lifetimes. Your work may be incredible, your technical skills may be unbelievable, but your work might not be marketable or you might not enjoy all that goes into running a business. That’s okay.
You can always continue to make art. And if you are dead set on making money from it, you can always find a way to adapt your art business to prioritize the parts of running a business that you do enjoy and that you are good at, or outsource the parts of your business that you think you will never be good at.
If you’re just starting out, know that no matter what happens with your art business, you can never fail as an artist. While you should still always be mindful about risks you take and prioritize your safety and survival over success, you don’t have to fear failure and you never have to give up on your dreams.
At the end of the day, resilience is easy once we no longer connect our worth or value with the success of our businesses. We can be comfortable with any outcome once we’re mindful about the risks we take. We will always feel fulfilled once we focus on small victories rather than setbacks, stop comparing ourselves with others or bearing the weight of others expectations. And we never have to fear failure once we embrace the fact that slow growth and even failing just offer up new opportunities.