How I earned my first 1k$ as a creative

Recently I crossed my first 1k $ in sales on gumroad

The majority of artists and creatives have the dream to monetize their passion. And for most this dreams seems very far away.

In this little post I want to show you that this dream is actually more achievable than you think it is.

Every sale on the internet is the same. If you know how to make one little sale with your creative products or services - you also can achieve 100 sales and so on.

But who am I?

I always found it interesting to start different creative ventures:

Back in 2018 I e.g. designed Tshirts and tried to sell them via print on demand.

I even made a few sales, but found little success in it - considering how low the margins are through print on demand.

I also tried a few more creative ventures (trying to sell on ebay, another T-shirt brand, but all of these things failed)

But then there was a turning point for me:

2019 - shortly before the pandemic I bought a 50$ graphic tablet to develop my digital art skills.

During this time I heavily listened to a lot of podcasts about social media marketing - because I found this idea to reach people for free over the internet fascinating.

So shortly after that I started my own artpage on Instagram.

Because I was so heavily interested in social media marketing I daily figured out ways to gain and leverage new attention.

That's why it didn't took me long to reach my first thousands of followers (I think I reached 4k followers in 6-7 months or so)

Because I was growing so fast I also got a lot of questions from other artists about marketing.

That's when I also started to create content about this topic.

And shortly after I noticed that I love art as a hobby - but personally I am even more passionate about marketing and helping other creatives with their ventures I rebranded my page to Teezy.V2 where I mainly give advice and motivate creatives.

Created my first product

Because I always got the same questions and saw that artists are doing the same mistakes over and over again I decided to create my eBook "F#CK The Algorithm"

(This btw isn't a pitch for this book, I have lots of free valuable advice on my social media)

Back to the story: Due to imposter syndrom and perfectionism (which I think we all creatives suffer from) it took me ~1 year to finish the book.

I ofc also needed to register a business and was heavily scared about this step - but I really can calm you down and have to say that this is much easier and less scary than you think it is.

With this eBook I earned my first 1k dollar and it really is an amazing feeling to know you help creatives with your product while even getting paid for it.

It also is quite easy to get sales if you have a community because a) You don't have to burn any money in ads and b) You created a product especially made for the problem your community has.

What you can lean from this:

What you should take away from this post is the following:

If you want to earn money as an artist or as a creative it's always the best to create a product which you can scale.

You only can do a limited amount of commissions per month, because your time is limited.

However a product you need to create once and can sell it infinite times per day.

So the real actionplan to make a living from your passion is the following:

Slowly but surely build a community of like minded creatives.

Find out their problems - while you build your community this actually becomes obvious since people might start asking you the same questions over and over again:

"What brushes do you use?" -> sell your brushpack.

"How did you learn to draw so well" -> record your answer as a videocourse and sell it.

"Can you teach me to draw?" -> private patreon community.

The key is to really just create an awesome product. If the value of your product heavily exceeds the price it becomes a no brainer for your community to buy from you.

We obviously know that "building your audience" is the hardest part, so if you want more advice check out my Twitter - feel free to DM me your questions there too.

Also feel free to ask my anything in the comments, I really am trying to give as much value as possible and won't pitch you anything.