Starting a business is hard.

So when you are just getting started, especially if you are in the art market, I’d recommend you start out as a side hustle while you still have your day job.

That’s exactly what I did. I was working in the Kitchen/bath design industry full time, and my hobby was photography. I started creating and figuring out my side business on the nights and weekends. I built it all by myself and without incurring any debt or taking out any loans.

I’ll admit – that is probably the longer, and maybe even the harder way to build a business. My website would have looked ten times better from day one if I had paid someone else to build it – but I didn’t have $10k or more for someone to build me an e-commerce site – so I set about doing it myself.

I find that the most valuable thing I’ve done – because now, I can run and build my own websites as I need without paying someone else to do it or maintain them. I save thousands of dollars every year now because I learned this skill in the beginning.

The longer route – is also beneficial because it gives you time to make all your mistakes before you have a huge audience to witness them. And believe me… YOU ARE GOING TO MAKE MISTAKES. I think I made them all… TWICE. So better to learn and get them behind you at the beginning instead of when you have a huge audience you risk losing.

I also like the slightly longer route for financial reasons. It allowed me to build up all the facets of my business over time – allowing me to self-finance things as I needed them instead of going into debt and risking financial ruin if my business failed. I am still debt free as a business to this day.

Staying debt free allows me the freedom to work full-time from home on my business without the added stress of huge bills hanging over my head. It allows me to be more creative in my day to day activities. To follow what inspires me. Which – to be honest – is what we all hope for in our career don’t we? To be able to do what we want, when we want to.

Starting out as a side hustle allows you the financial freedom of having money to pay your bills while you work on your creative pursuits. The more joy you get from your art, building up your art business, and not having to worry about where the money is coming from to pay bills – will allow you to build up a much better, more stable business from the beginning.

The reason so many businesses fail early on is because everyone thinks the internet is this magical place – where if they put out a product – everyone will rush to buy it. But what they don’t stop to think about – is who is “everyone”?

They didn’t bother building up their business, their trust, their expertise, or their audience before they put out a product and then they wonder what went wrong and why did no one buy.

I took a workshop on memberships this year since I have a membership. I like to take classes every year to learn new things and new ways to do the things I already do. And in this class – there are probably more than half of them – that don’t have a business or audience at all to start out.

Several of them have built the memberships now from the things they learned in the class and launched. Now I’m seeing some very disappointed postings in our group about not having any members join after the launch.

It is a harsh reality to face – but if you haven’t built up an audience – then you will not have any sales.

Another harsh reality to face – is even if you have an audience – you are only to convert a small percentage of them into sales at any given time.

I have a friend in a similar business as mine who thought if she built a membership – she could expect at least half of her email list to buy into the membership. She thought if she had 3000 on her email list – then she’d probably have at least 1500 members.

That would be an awesome income every month don’t you think? But the reality is you can only expect less than 1/2 of 1% percent to convert. Maybe 1%-2% if you have a really active engaged audience and more if you are a unicorn.

So if you think of all the hard work it takes to build out a membership – you would be excited if your sales were 1/2 of your list, and you expected 1500 people – but really pissed if in reality you only had 30 people sign up. Talk about a reality check that smacks you in the face!

The internet isn’t some magical place that supplies you with an endless amount of people, who don’t know who you are, shaking their money at you at a moments notice. You still have to figure out how to run a good business and how to build up an audience. 

Things aren’t going to go as fast as you want and the money isn’t going to be rolling in from day one.

It just doesn’t work that way.

You need to adjust your expectations so that you don’t give up the first year when you think you failed.

So start small and grow as a side hustle to your regular job.

Try to stay debt free in your business and self-finance where you can.

Grow your offerings, your business, and your customer base over time.

Because it takes time to grow an audience.

Do one thing every single day to grow your business.

All the little things add up to big things over time.

This gives you the time you are going to need to build up your audience and establish trust.

Then when you have something to sell – you have people to sell it to.