Art by Li Xin
We’ve been working on SVSLearn for years now, and many podcast listeners are familiar with it -- it’s the premiere place on the internet to learn how to make a living as a children’s book illustrator, founded by working artists Jake Parker, Lee White, and Will Terry. But how did the company start? And what did we learn along the way? Turns out a lot of the lessons we learned building this business apply to lots of other artistically minded businesses, and can help you make money from your art. So let’s dive in and break down the 10 (technically 14!) best lessons we learned since starting SVSLearn.
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INTRO
Brian Lies was listening to Episode 47 and has given us a follow-up: his wife, who worked in corporate PR for 25 years, deserves a lot of the credit for coming up with the promotional ideas they used to hype the book up. The NPR coverage catapulted them to #2 on amazon within the hour it aired. They would give their books to their bookseller friends when they ran out of stock and then had the booksellers order books to the Lies’s house so that the sales counted as regular sales and not as sold-to-author copies. A crowd brings an even bigger crowd. This was a case of a lot of planning and preparation and a good deal of good luck -- if you’re prepared then you can take advantage of when lightning strikes.
Casey Neistadt’s NIKE commercial
Think outside the box and think how you can best leverage your strengths and abilities to promote your work.
This is the 50th episode! We stuck with it! The 100th episode will see a true celebration.
We love to hear from you guys, please send us show ideas, either in the comments for our youtube channel or at https://forum.svslearn.com/
10 LESSONS WE LEARNED FROM STARTING SVSLEARN.COM
This is the second recording of this podcast, because the original one didn’t relate very well to students. Let’s just answer -- how did SVSLearn start? Thanks Tom for the question!
These lessons could apply to any business related to art. We might have 10 or 12 lessons, enjoy the bonuses!
1. Start with the minimal viable product.
Not everything has to be perfect and up and running before you open your doors. SVS was ragtag and not fully perfected and organized when we opened, but it was still a product and still valuable. We have been refining it ever since.
Here’s what Jake meant when he said it: it comes from a book called Lean Startup -- some companies try to build out their business by perfecting each thing one by one, but the point of the lean startup is creating the minimum viable thing to get it out of the gate, and then slowly refine it over time into something better -- start with a skateboard, build it into a bike, a motorbike, and a car, as opposed to building a perfect wheel, then a perfect engine, etc. With SVSLearn, we made one class that we could make well, with a login page, membership features, and etc, and then built from there.Don’t let the fear of perfection stop you, some people get too scared and never launch. How do you know when you’re ready to launch? Launch small, then slightly bigger, and bigger, until you have experience to know when you’re ready.
FYRE FEST DOCUMENTARY #1 (NETFLIX)
FYRE FEST DOCUMENTARY #2 (HULU)
Don’t be like Fyre Fest, start small and work your way up to larger projects.
2. Don’t reinvent software that has been created and is available.
We knew we needed a website so we approached a capable software developer to make the site. He was building the site for about a year and a half and cost about $40k. There were better sites available, and Lee, upon joining, managed to find several different services that when frankensteined together, made a site that was good and functional.Counterpoint: Jake sat down and had lunch with the founder of Gumroad, Sahil Lavingia and his advice was to own your platform. You want to own it because you have full control of it. Maybe SVSLearn will transition to that? Anyone can code!Second Counterpoint: Play to your strengths, and hire on a developer instead of necessarily learning to code yourself.
Take what’s available and massage them to work for you rather than starting from scratch. Find your resources and a cost labor balance.
Bottom line: if SVS becomes large enough, we will have to build our own site.
3. Each partner in a partnership must bring different essential skills and abilities.
Some partnerships include people who are carrying 75% to 80% of the workload, which makes that person wonder why they are partnered with the other people in the group. SVS is good because each of the founders tends to fill the knowledge gaps of the others. It’s way more fun to start a business with somebody else and it’s way harder to do it on your own, even though the profits are higher. That’s how Lee joined SVSlearn, he wanted to do online classes but didn’t want to start from scratch, so he reached out to Will and asked to do a course, and then suggested that he partner or become competition. Lee really rounds out the offerings at SVS because his work is more design based, compared to Jake and Will.
4. Know/Learn your audience.
We started by launching online classes, but then realized that the whole world was watching, and that live sessions don’t work for people around the world. You have to listen to your customers and see what the problems are, and plug the holes in the dam as you go forward. Look and see how people are using your product and try and respond to that.One of the early classes had 7 or 8 US students and everyone else was from around the world, taking the class at 3am or 4am. This was when we realized we had to adapt to the needs of the students.If you’re making something for a fanbase, you should listen to a majority of your fans. Don’t listen to individual fans picking your work apart, but listen to the group because they can often diagnose the problems they have.
Because the world is getting smaller because of ecommerce, sometimes customers can have extremely high and unfair expectations on things like shipping times. Jake often just responds that he is a single individual shipping handcrafted artisanal goods, and that part of buying that kind of product is having to wait at times. The same thing happens with SVSLearn.com courses. Fans that know you as a person often give you more leeway, it’s almost always the strangers that see you as an abstract that complain and have unfairly high shipping expectations.
5. Forums can create a vibrant community.
We operated for years without a forum or anything like that, and as soon as we opened that up, people started contributing and posting regularly. The forums are largely self-regulating.
Being able to talk to your customers has never been easier. The forums not only provide feedback, they also create a sense of community around illustration. Develop a community around your business.
Whatever you can do to pull people off of social media and have them communicate with you directly, or in a manner that is more intimate, you will have a better experience. You don’t have to fight the algorithm or random people interfering.
6. Offer a sample or a discount of your product.
SVSLearn offered a free trial originally. SVS will never offer a discount or a sale on a subscription, same as Apple -- once you offer discounts, you teach your customer base to wait for sales all the time. If you create a standard deal, don’t deviate from that. Don’t hurt your customers by offering a deeper price cut when your early adopters paid a full price.
Anything you do, you train people -- if you have people who are early adopters, you need to offer them perks to make that experience better for them, not just giving them the product earlier. You need to avoid training people to think that they can hang around for a long time and get the product for cheaper.
To get around that, there is a free 7 day trial for SVSLearn, which is not unusual for platforms like SVSLearn.
Lee’s print business offers free shipping which has led to a huge increase in business. He didn’t factor it into the product price and kept the prices the same, which made it feel like a good kickback.
Offering a free sample, like a downloadable PDF or something like that, gets people interested. Doing that in exchange for an email is a great way to build a customer base.
7. Great artists don’t always make great teachers.
The five points of a great teacher:
They have mastered their craft.
Good speaking skills.
Proficient at technology.
Good web presence.
Love teaching.
You can always tell if someone will be a good teacher if, at the end of the demo, they are looking to help the student learn rather than just impress them with their skills.
Will and Jake once interviewed someone to teach a class and the individual focused more on how great they were as an artist rather than what they could offer students, and their eventual course had a lower view count than most of their other videos.
Teaching is a great way to make a supplemental income, but remember to start at the level of your students. Don’t skip steps or do something next level because that’s not how you teach students. Don’t expect your students to be able to just perform at your level either.
It’s important to make sure you explain the thought process behind your work as you teach.
8. Starting a company is expensive. Know your margins.
You get to keep a tiny fraction of what your company makes each year.
The first class Jake and Will taught together, SVS was not even on their radar. They made a children’s book class and sold seats, and that was that. There were no expenses at all.
When they started SVSlearn, the amount of money that they got to keep went way way down. The margin is the difference between the expenses and the income. It pays to know what your margin is. Lots of Kickstarters get thwarted by that.
To be fair, SVSLearn has hired and built a team so it’s not necessary for Will, Jake and Lee to be experts in everything. Scaling a business is not cheap. Look at all the costs involved and try to share costs where possible. Reduce your risk as much as possible. Anything you can try for free is good. Don’t spend money on launching a product if you can’t even get people to like it on social media.
If something is working and you’re getting traction, it can cost money to make money. A lot of things cost money upfront but they can make your work easier down the line. Make sure you know how many prints you need to sell to pay off your printer and so on -- check if it’s worthwhile to pay for equipment based on your earning potential.
A restaurant would never say they are unwilling to invest in ovens or cooking materials, but artists do that all the time. People spend tons of money on their education but are unwilling to spend $500 on postcards or anything like that. Normal businesses have startup costs and that’s part of it. Consider yourself a normal business and plan for those startup costs.
9. Focus on what you’re best at.
When SVSLearn first started, lots of different classes were on offer, including a ZBrush class. It was a great class but didn’t fit with the mission of SVSLearn. You want to narrow down your niche really specifically when you start off and get really good at it. SVSLearn focused down as being the best place on the internet for children’s books. We’re also considering moving into comic books and graphic novels, but children’s books come first.
It’s fine doing five different things at some point but you won’t find success by starting out that way. You need to focus down and nail something from the very start and then branch out from there. Don’t spread yourself too thin.
The foundations course came about because we wanted to make sure everyone was on the same page when getting ready to work on children’s books.
10. Learn from your customers.
We learned that a lot of students were powerwatching classes, it didn’t appear that a lot of them were learning the information, rather they were just listening to the classes without taking the classes.
We couldn’t predict that students would binge watch classes. The takeaway was that it’s not possible to know exactly how your customers will use your product. Weird sized prints are harder to frame, something that Lee learned running his print shop, so now all his work is in the standard print sizes.
Lee used to send JPGs alone to his clients but then learned that if he included a write up and his reasoning in a PDF, he would receive fewer notes and had a much higher acceptance rate. He had to look at how the customers were using his work and then reiterate based on that.
Most entrepreneurs cannot get out of their own way and their own ego to actually listen to their customers. Listen to complaints, don’t get offended, and eat it up and be thankful for the criticisms. Then implement those changes.
11. Understand your specific business challenges.
Running an online school from 3 different cities presents technology challenges. Somebody might drop out or have bad internet or bad audio.
What is your unfair advantage and what is your unfair liability? If you know those things going into it you will have a much better time.
Eg: Unfair advantage could be you have great connections, unfair liability is you have insomnia so you’re tired all day. You can leverage both of these things and take them into account to make your business work.
Other examples: Someone might be really good in front of a camera, so their options could include starting a Youtube channel. Liabilities could be health problems, financial situations, living situations, etc. Everyone has advantages and liabilities, just know what they are when going into it.
12. It’s never too late to have a plan.
You should definitely have a plan at some point, the earlier the better. A lot of SVS’s growing pains came from not having a business plan. If there was a solid plan, there would have been more growth in the start. Don’t beat yourself up too much, though -- if you come to your business through serendipity or piecemeal, you can still start a plan.
13. If you go into a business with other people, get a contract down.
Even if it’s a poorly written one, make sure you have one. Some business relationships go south and not having a contract can be really dicey. A contract is just an agreement that everyone knows what is happening. Hiring an attorney and getting an operating agreement cost the company $5k at the start but it was worthwhile.
Lee had a home studio and rented half of his studio to another illustrator (David Hohn). They wrote up a contract even though Lee thought it was unnecessary, but then they realized that, if Lee’s house flooded and all the equipment were damaged, there would need to be someone held liable. Disaster scenarios are valuable for figuring out contracts. It’s important to be prepared for anything and everything.
Lawyers are good because they have seen everything and heard of everything so they can be prepared for these things and help you be ready. Stuff happens all the time.
14. BONUS: Don’t call it a school unless you’re accredited.
The word school can’t be used in the state of Michigan unless you’re accredited. SVSLearn does not want to be accredited because there is a lot more overhead and work needed, which makes everything more expensive for customers. We let the classes and the student portfolios speak for themselves. And that’s what matters ultimately in the real world -- whether you can do the work, and if you’re easy to get along with and punctual. People want at least two of those but three are more ideal.
SUMMARY
Have a plan when you start out, and don’t be paralyzed by perfection.
Expect startup costs, they come with any business.
Be obsessed with your customer. Learn what they have to say and iterate around them.
Find your niche and understand your specific challenges.
Make sure you have a contract!
LINKS
Jake Parker: mrjakeparker.com. Instagram: @jakeparker, Youtube: JakeParker44
Will Terry: willterry.com. Instagram: @willterryart, Youtube: WillTerryArt
Lee White: leewhiteillustration.com. Instagram: @leewhiteillo
Alex Sugg: alexsugg.com
Aaron Painter: painterdraws.com. Instagram: @painterdraws
Daniel Tu: danieltu.co.
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If you want to be a part of the discussion and have your voice heard, join us at forum.svslearn.com.