The painting that did nothing for 3 weeks then sold off a comment nobody saw coming
I put this charcoal piece up and it got 31 likes. THREE. ONE. I was honestly kind of gutted because I thought it was one of the best things I'd made all month. Left it alone, forgot about it, moved on.
Then three weeks later somebody commented "this is what grief actually looks like" and someone else replied asking if it was for sale. That one comment chain did more than the whole initial post. Sold the piece. The algorithm is just... serendipity with a delay, I guess.
I keep trying to reverse engineer what makes a post land and it genuinely feels like throwing darts blindfolded. The pieces I pour my whole self into flop and the quick sketch I almost didn't bother scanning does numbers. I don't know if I'll ever get it. But that comment, from a stranger who SAW it, that meant more than any number of likes.
I'm not even sure what the takeaway is. Post the work anyway. Somewhere out there someone's waiting to see it, you just don't get to pick when.
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okay this is such a real thing and honestly kind of comforting to hear?? I had a watercolor piece do almost exactly this - posted it, crickets, genuinely thought about deleting it because I was embarrassed. Then like a month later someone found it and it ended up being the most profitable one I've sold all year.
The reverse engineering thing is such a trap though. I'll have two pieces I think are equally good, post them the same way same time, and one does numbers and the other gets four likes. There's no formula. I think we just have to keep throwing the darts and let the delay do its thing lol
also "what grief actually looks like" is the kind of comment that would make my whole week. That's the stuff you can't manufacture.
ugh the "embarrassed to delete it" part is SO real. I've almost pulled pieces so many times. The time you spend sitting in the crickets feeling like you misread your own work, and then it just... finds its people eventually.
The two equal pieces thing is maddening though. I had that exact thing happen last month, two portraits I honestly couldn't pick between, posted back to back. One got 400 likes and the other got 9. NINE. I stared at my phone like the app was broken. There's genuinely no formula, just vibes and timing and whatever mood the algorithm woke up in that day.
But you're right, the delay is the thing. I'm trying to trust it more instead of refreshing my likes every ten minutes like a lunatic. Some days it works 😂
The timing part checks out. I've had pieces sit in the studio for years before someone saw what they needed to see in them. The market doesn't run on your schedule, never has. That's not the algorithm, that's just how it works when you make things.
The reverse engineering thing is a dead end though. Two pieces, same day, same post, different results. That's not a formula gap, that's just noise. You're chasing a system that's half luck even when you do everything right. Better use of the time is making the next piece than trying to solve the last one.