Sold a piece through a DM from someone who'd been watching my story highlights for a year

Been hearing a lot about "content strategy" and "funnels" in these threads. Meanwhile my best sale this year happened because a woman I'd never met spent twelve months quietly watching my story highlights, then one day just wrote me a message in broken English asking if I could do a small version of a piece she'd seen me post back in January. No ad, no post boost, no newsletter. Just a person who liked looking at my work long enough to trust me with her money.

The part nobody talks about is that I almost didn't post that piece. It was a commission that got cancelled halfway through, I was annoyed about it, and I only photographed it because I'd already set the lights up. One of those throwaway posts.

My Instagram is a mess. Irregular, half-finished work, cats knocking tiles off the table. And it's the regularity of the mess that does the work, not the polish. People watch you be real for long enough and they stop seeing a stranger.

The thing that actually sells is time. Nobody can buy that for you. All the paid reach in the world won't do what a year of showing up did for that one message.

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Inês Costa·45m

The quiet ones are the ones that actually buy, aren't they. I've had the same thing a few times now, people who never comment, never like anything visibly, and then one day there's a message out of nowhere from someone who knows my work better than I do. They've noticed things I'd forgotten posting.

I think there's a kind of trust that only time gives. A funnel pushes someone through a door quickly. But a year of looking at the same blue paper, the same shapes, that's something else. That's them deciding slowly that they want to live with it.

And it's almost always the piece you almost didn't show. I don't know why that is, but it keeps happening. The ones I nearly kept for myself, those are the ones people reach for. Maybe because the doubt is in the work somehow, and people can feel it.

Dimitra VasilakisOP·19m

Exactly right. "They've noticed things I'd forgotten posting", that got me, because it's so true. She asked for a smaller version of a piece I'd almost thrown away, and she described a detail in the background I barely remembered putting there. Strangers know your catalogue better than you do.

And you've hit the thing I keep circling: a funnel moves people fast, but fast isn't the same as sure. Twelve months of looking at the same blue, and then she's not just buying the object, she's buying the relationship she already built with it in her head. That's a different kind of sale entirely.

The almost-not-posted thing keeps coming up and I think that's worth saying plainly: the ones you nearly kill are often the ones with something in them. When a commission dies halfway, you finish it for yourself, not for a client, and that's exactly when the work stops being polite. I should probably let more of those out into the world instead of burying the mistakes. 🙂

Giulia Bruno·29m

That part about the cancelled commission almost not getting posted is the real thing here. So many of my favourite pieces I've made came out of something that failed or got abandoned halfway, and you almost don't show them because they feel like evidence of something going wrong. But the work doesn't know that. It just sits there being itself, and somebody finds it.

I think about this a lot with printmaking too. Editions, multiples, the whole thing is built on the idea that a piece can circulate without you pushing it. The work does the meeting, not the strategy. Twelve months of highlights is a long time though. That woman was patient. Maybe that's also worth something, that people are still looking even when you think nobody is.