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From Starving Artist to Fastlane(ish)

A detailed account of a Fastlane process...

Chapas

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Long time, no see my fellow fastlaners.

First of all, this progress thread is not about me. It is about my wife. Fortunately, she is not starving that much as I have a decent paid marketing/sales job, but now it is time for her to make some dough!

I have previously had my own progress thread in here: EXECUTION - From 0 to Freedom in 3 Months

That thread gave me so much motivation and inspiration - especially your advice and support was a daily dose of motivation for me.

I have put my own venture on hold for quite some time now. I am in a position at my "slowlane" job right now that makes it hard for me to pursue my own venture (contract, legalities and stuff). So I thought to myself; why not make my wife somewhat of a fastlaner? Or at least grow her income to a point where she can help support our lifestyle?

About a year ago I created another thread in here: Ideas to Monetize My Wife's Drawing Skills

The advice you guys gave us was invaluable. As it happens often, life took us in other directions, and after a struggling 2019, we are now finally in a position to focus on creating a business again and implementing some of the ideas.

What a specifically remember from the thread is two of you were suggesting that we should combine her drawing skills with a few other skills - inspired by Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert. While my wife is an amazing artist (I truly believe that), there are a lot of amazing artists around. Yet, This is what she was born to do (cliché i know). This means that she does not have that many other relevant skills she can combine it with such as writing, marketing or sales. Add the fact that she just started learning English 6 months ago, and it already does not look like the perfect recipe to succeed in this game. So what do we do from here?

We combine her skills with my skills!

Why we haven't done that before is beyond my understanding. My creativity and insane ideas, experience with marketing and sales as well as my way with words (especially in my native language) combined with her awesome drawing skills = a pretty decent recipe to succeed I believe.

While she has been drawing the old-school way with pencils, markers and watercolours her whole life, we finally had the opportunity to invest in an Ipad Pro for her this year. She is quickly picking up the digital way of drawing and this is what we mainly will focus on in the future.

So what is the plan?

Like always, I have to many ideas in my mind. I believe that they all have some kind of potential, therefore, I plan to split-test them all in order to see which one(s) we should go with. So far she has just sporadically been drawing 2-3 portraits a month from random requests through Instagram or my personal network, and now we want to make her work much more scalable.

I already failed once with my goal-setting for a progress thread in here, however, I am ready to fail again if that is what it takes. Better try and fail, than to not try at all!

Inspired by the amazing and inspiring thread of @GuitarManDan I will add numbers below that I will update as much as possible.

2020 Revenue Tracker: $250 Revenue / $20,000 Goal

Passive Income Tracker: $0 Per Month / $2000 Goal

I hope some of you might be inspired by this thread - I will try to update it as much as possible.

Will make a post in the next coming days about the projects I will be split-testing. For now, I will just post some of the different stuff she has been drawing in the last year.

Wish you all a successful year my friends!

IMG_4923.JPGIMG_9706.JPGIMG-20200129-WA0012.jpgIMG-20200129-WA0006.jpgIMG-20190909-WA0032.jpgIMG-20200202-WA0007.jpgimage-10-02-20-08-19-2.jpegimage-10-02-20-08-19.jpegimage-10-02-20-08-19-1.jpeg
 
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Chapas

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So I promised to make a short post about the different projects and strategies we want to pursue to reach our goal. Some of them more simple than others.

Project 1: LinkedIn

In my 'slowlane' job I have really learned how invaluable LinkedIn is for B2B, and I am slowly starting to reap the rewards from it.

Since my wife is from a country that are not very fond of LinkedIn, and her professional network is quite small, we need to build her a network from scratch on LinkedIn. Building a network of like-minded people in her industry and potential prospects in the B2B sector is key. No sales pitches here, just purely networking and exploring opportunities.

Goal: 500 LinkedIn connections by the end of 2020
Steps to goal: Send personalized connection requests to 50 relevant people a week

Status:
0/2150 connection request sent
0/0 people connected
0/0 leads/opportunities created
$0 earned thanks to LinkedIn


Project 2: Custom Portraits

This is my favorite one, and probably the one where I see the most potential. I have a market I would consider myself quite of an expert in. This project has both the possibility of being a good side income without to much work, as well as it has the possibility of scaling to an almost passive income business with the right systems build in. Any of the two outcomes would be considered a success for me.

Realistic Goal: 20 orders a month by the end of 2020
Grant Cardone Goal: 100 orders a months by the end of 2020 (10X would be too optimistic, so we stick with 5X)
Steps to goal: Various marketing activities. Will update what works and what not.

Status:
0/180 orders
$0 earned

Project 3: B2C market

Same market, almost same target audience. I want to create a synergy between these projects, so they can help sell and market each other. The plan here is to create an online store aswell as to sign up to various sites such as Displate, Etsy etc. I will of course take some marketing effort to get people to buy my wife's art with so many awesome artists around. Fortunately, I live and breathe marketing, so I believe that we have a chance to make some passive income here.

Goal: $1000 a month by the end of 2020 combined from own site and affiliates such as Displate and Etsy.
Steps to goal: Create a bunch of awesome stuff for our target audience and then be as visible as possible on various sites and social media pages. And of course just hustle, hustle and hustle.

Status:
0 orders
$0 earned

I have two other projects in mind aswell. One is B2B, but it will be down prioritized at this moment due to the Corona virus, as it might affect my B2B target audience quite a bit. Other one is still on the drawing board, and will wait a little will that.

Wish you all a great hustle!
 

Entre Eyes

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So much potential my friend congrats. But no reason not to be making some revenue and you may also get an idea on how to expand...tshirts, logos, covers, coffee mugs etc.

Just do a search for hand drawn gigs on fiverr...some are alot more than $5 even over $100. :)
 

Chapas

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So much potential my friend congrats. But no reason not to be making some revenue and you may also get an idea on how to expand...tshirts, logos, covers, coffee mugs etc.

Just do a search for hand drawn gigs on fiverr...some are alot more than $5 even over $100. :)

Sorry for the late reply buddy. The corona-crisis has been my excuse to delay all projects. So have not even seen your reply before now :)

Finally got my shit together a week ago and now we are very close to launching an e-commerce store with her art. So I took your advice without even knowing it :)
 
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Chapas

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The corona-crisis slowed down my motivation the past couple of months (always blame it on everyone but yourself mentality...) But now we are finally doing progress.

Right now our focus will be on Project 3: B2C Market.

Last weekend we went to our public library who have amazing scanners and expensive Apple computers. Even though our country is wide-open despite of the corona-crisis, I have been reluctant to go anywhere public. Now I couldn't wait anymore, so Saturday we went to the library and scanned 12 of my wife's portraits. Since then we have been moving quite fast.

We are starting out with Print on Demand sourced through Printful. These days I have uploaded the designs, so we now have 110 SKU's on Shopify. This was probably the most boring part of it all. So happy that I am done with that, haha.

Have been working on the Shopify store and I am starting to like the result. The plans for the rest of the week is:

1. Finish the design of the Shopify store (almost done)
2. Finish the copywriting for the store (product description, about us page etc)
3. Order samples home to make sure we do not sell crap quality
4. Set up payment gateway (would probably be through PayPal in the beginning)
5. Create a give-away campaign on my wife's drawing Instagram profile (7000 loyal followers). Hopefully this can give us some quick followers on our new 'company page' and give us some data that we can use for further marketing.

So happy to be motivated and doing stuff again. Can't wait to keep you guys updated!
 

Chapas

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WE ARE FINALLY LIVE!

So we finally launched, and my wife now has her own e-commerce store. Wuhuuuu!

From 'idea' to launch in 2 weeks. This was my first time working with Shopify, and I must say that I love it. Some even I felt a little grey haired, but overall I really enjoyed the process and I am really satisfied with the final version of the site.

Now the fun part - Sales and Marketing!

Today we launched our first Facebook Ads targeted at the European market. 6 different ad campaigns for 2 geographical areas. Ad budget is small, so I need to do my best here.

So what are the next steps?

1. Tomorrow I will share our new e-commerce venture with my personal network. Hopefully that can land the first sale, fingers crossed.
2. Keep analyzing and testing these FB Ads untill we hit the golden winner.
3. Leverage my wife's drawing Instagram profile with 7000 followers and create a giveaway campaign for them.
4. Run an Instagram campaign to the same giveaway campaign in order to create awareness and get more followers.
5. Update this thread as much as possible.

Exciting times ahead. It will be a hustle, but I have a good feeling about this one!
 

Chapas

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DAY 8 - Testing, testing and testing

So it has been 8 days since we launched the store. So far the status is:

0 products sold
1 custom portrait ordered
1 custom portrait in the pipeline

Products:


We have 3 different products. 2 of them with 12 designs each, while the third one has 14 designs. I started out with FB & IG Ads only for the last product with 14 designs. So far I have spent around 100 euros on ads with 0 sales showing.

My takeaways so far:

- I totally screwed up in the first 3-4 days. I am branding our products as unique and exclusive on our site, and yet I started out my ad strategy with offering 20 % off on our products. After 3 days I thought to myself, what the heck are you doing and killed off the ads.
- I re-launched the ads without the 20 % discount, and my CPC is actually even better now.
- I have been testing with my relatively small budget, and looks like I might have found the best responsive market and target group for one of our products.
- I have been optimizing our site along the way, and still have a lot to learn and to optimize. I truly believe that we will have the first sale before 1st of June.

Next steps:

- Will finish optimizing the site these days. Inspired by another artist that really kills it with his branding.
- We just got some of our samples delivered last week. Quality is great! So this week we will need to make some product photos and a video we can launch with the ads.
- With our new visuals we will launch a give-away campaign for one of our other products. Here we can leverage my wife's Instagram profile with 7000 followers.
- Run FB ads and IG ads for the giveaway campaign in order to get people to participate and create awareness for our site.

Custom Portraits:

My wife does custom portraits as well, and this has primary been her only income source. This we need to continue with as well, even though this is not separating time from money.

My takeaways so far:

- By sharing our new site with my network on Facebook we didn't get any sales. However, we got 2 inquiries for custom portraits. One is closed, and another one is in the pipeline (all depends whether the wedding will happen or not due to the corona situation)
- We charge TO LITTLE. During the last 6 months we have almost doubled her prices on custom portraits. Still, each and every time I write someone the price and expect a rejection, people keep writing 'Wow. What a great price.". So now I realize that people are actually willing to pay MUCH more than we already charge. So prices will definitely be raised AGAIN.

Next steps:

- We need to create a section on our site for her custom portraits, while still sticking to the identity of our brand.
- We need to start running ads for her custom portraits. It has 2 benefits compared to our other products:
1. We KNOW our target group. We know who orders the portraits, we know for which occasions they want them and we know that people love her custom portraits.
2. We can spend MUCH more to acquire a customer. I think we can spend around 5-6 times more per conversion than with our products (and still leave enough profit margin that my wife does not have to work for peanuts)

Just a quick break-down of our first 8 days after the launch. Hopefully, the first product sale will come before the summer begins!

Btw, I feel like I am living in a parallel world right now. Negotiating 50-100,000 euro deals with some of the biggest companies in Europe from 9-5 at my daytime job and struggling to sell a 45 euro product to young women in the evenings, haha.

Have a great week of hustle my friends!
 
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Chapas

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DAY 11 - Custom Funnel Launched

There must be a quote somewhere out there by some smart dude saying 'that you need to stick what is working'. So that is what we will try to do now.

Killed off the the ads for our first product. The CPC were good, but no purchases at all. Will run some retargeting ads for the product and hopefully convert some of the lurkers. Still convinced that the product can do well, it is just not the right time for it.

Now It's Custom Time!

Why not stick with something that has worked for the last couple of years? Custom Portraits. People have ordered her Custom Portraits throughout the years without any marketing efforts whatsover from our side (except from organic building of her Instagram profile to 7000 followers).

So what if we would actually create a landing page solely focusing on converting clients for Custom Portraits and put some money into the marketing? Let's see how that will work out for us.

We have raised our original prices by 30-40 %. Might sound like a lot, but talking about pricing with clients for the past couple of years it is clear to me that she has been underpricing her self each and every time. So totally feel like this price can be justified. Still an absolutely ridiculous low price for a piece of art that we bring so many emotions and happiness for so many years.

What we also do is that we have up-sells on the portraits. Will tell more about that later if it will work. This is a win/win for us and for the customers.

I have narrowed down 5 different target groups I want to target for the Custom Funnel. My copy plays on emotions for each group. All I need is to make some better product photos. Will do that shortly.

What is the goal? My goal is for my wife to have at least 10 custom orders a month by the end of 2020. Optimistic? Maybe. Realistic? Definitely.

In this way she can spend 50 % of the profit on shopping, and I can burn 50 % of the profit on ads for our other products. Win/win situation, haha.

Now it is just all about testing until we find the right formula. I feel in a better place though than with the first product. With the first product we were shooting blindly at people, but here we KNOW our target group (or all 5 different ones of them). We know their desires. We know how to make them convert and give them a great customer experience.

Trading time for money by drawing portraits is maybe not fastlane, but I can assure you that my wife is the happiest person on earth while drawing.

Will keep you guys updated! :)
 

Chapas

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DAY 17 - Long Live Frustration

So I might just have killed all the plans that my wife ever had of a summer holiday. Not because I burned all our money, more because my randomly thought up tactic that was bound to fail actually worked beyond my belief. So no relaxing on the beach this summer, just portrait making, haha. Fortunately, she loves it, so don't believe she will burn out.

A little update. Sunday I was a little frustrated, even though I actually had no right in being so. In 2 weeks we have only spent the equivalent to 200 USD on FB ads, and if we take in account the 130 USD order for a custom portrait, then we are basically only 70 USD down. So I really had NO RIGHTS in being frustrated. But I was.

For some people frustration might lead to overeating and binge-watching Tiger King on Netflix while your business stands still. Fortunately, for me and many others in this amazing forum frustration can lead us to alternative, out-of-the-box thinking and crazy ideas that might not have seen the light if not for the frustration.

Sunday night I had one of them. Instagram and Influencers would always be our next big step, and somehow an unusual approach appeared in my mind and I decided to take action.

Overnight I made a list of 50-60 people I wanted to contact (a very special list). I cannot really reveal why this list is so special (it might not even be, but I thought this was really out-of-the-box thinking haha).

Was planning to expand the list even further the day after. But those plans had to be stopped immediately. Not because the list is bad, it is TOO GOOD! Yesterday, I wrote 8 people from my list and 4 of them replied! (I would never have expected a reply from these people to be honest).

The tactic was simple. A genuine, honest and no-pressure message about drawing a portrait for the people. We will do the portrait for free, but I didn't even write that due to the fact that these people do not care if things are free or not.

So some might think: Why are you so happy? Your wife is going to draw these portraits for free and you will not earn a single cent?

Fortunately, this forum taught me a different mindset. You gotta spend money (and time) to make money. My wife has been drawing portraits for free for basically her whole life. So fortunately her mindset understands the same thing as we do.

Nothing is certain yet with any of these. My wife might draw the portrait and they will never share it with the world. We don't know. Nobody knows.

What I know though is that we have so much to gain, and almost nothing to lose. These people replied that they loved my wife's art and even sent pictures and asked for advice on which one she would prefer to draw. I have a feeling that they will absolutely love their portrait!

Heck, I am going all in on this strategy now. We need 10-20 from this list over the summer. If just even ONE of them share's their portrait with the world, the effect will be massive. Might need to raise prices again then, haha.

So excited for my wife and sincerely hope that she is going to earn more money than me soon, haha.

Bonus info: All these people are from an industry I want to work with in a couple of years. So I am not opening doors for my wife now, I am opening doors for myself in the future as well.

Have a great day you awesome people!
 

Chapas

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DAY 23 - Hacking Facebook

A little update from us. We have had some stressed months, so we really took a long weekend in order to relax and freshen up our minds. We realized that this whole corona situation had taken the toll on us mentally, and really needed to get out of this mental state. Remember that corona hits even more people mentally, than physically. So don't keep it for yourself if you feel you mental state has taken damage during this epidemic. It is important to speak to someone about your problems. Remember that!

Anyways. My wife is now drawing a portrait for one of those people I was talking about earlier. If that person will share that portrait (think the change is 90 % that they will) and we then can use that photo as a reference for ads etc, then we can really strike gold here. If we can do it right, then we have the potential to get seen by millions of people (only if done right).

In the meantime I decided to play around with FB Ads for her Custom Portraits. After spending 200 USD without any sales for our products, I did not really have the highest expectations here. 15 (!) USD later I have to pause all the ads because they are working to well!

Basically the stats are following:

Ad Spend: 15 USD
Leads in total: 10
Hot leads: 2
Interesting leads: 4
Cold leads: 4
Possible collaboration:
1

Basically the best 15 USD I have ever spent. Except from Tinder Plus which helped me meet my wife, haha.

The two hot leads will probably be 'closed' in the next couple of days. They have agreed on the price and sent their ideas and pictures.But a lead in my opinion is never closed before the money is in my account, so so far I will just describe them as hot leads.

The interesting leads have asked about a price (I know our prices are reasonable, so some of them will most likely accept).

The cold leads I need to fight a bit more for and follow-up. If it is worth the effort of course. Otherwise, we will just find new ones.

The ads also led us to an Instagram model with 30K followers asking for collaboration. I don't think her followers are the ideal segment for our custom portraits, but I can see that we might be able to push some of other products on them. Think I could think of something creative here.

Basically I see my wife overtaking my income in 3-6 months if this trend will continue. This means that I hopefully can set her business on autopilot and finally start working on my own haha!

Wish you a great week friends. Enjoy the weather and the hustle!
 
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Chapas

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DAY 54 - Back From Vacation

Disappointed in myself for not updating this thread as often as I would like. The last months time have been spent on getting back to normal mental state, having a couple of small holiday trips as well as having a couple of business trips to neighbouring countries with my 'slowlane' job.

Now we are ready to go at full power again. Facebook Ads has been doing wonders, and now I need to figure out how to build a system so that we can print money.

Facebook Ads Update:

Spent: 24 USD
Impressions: 1813
Total Leads: 33
Sales: 2
Turnover: 315 USD
Profit: 270 USD
Very Hot Leads: 2
Possible Extra Turnover: 345 USD
Possible Extra Profit: 300 USD
Cost Per Lead: 0,75 USD
Cost Per Acquisition: 12 USD (with more leads in the pipeline)

Basically we spent 24 USD to make a profit of 270 USD. With the 2 extra potential deals that we could close in the nearest future - we spent 24 USD to make a profit of 570 USD. This is a very small sample of course - but I believe that we might have found our market here.

The biggest obstacle we have is that my wife only has 2 hands and only has 24 hours in a day like the rest of us. So we have 2 options; raise prices or find a system to automate some of the work. We probably will do both.

Will need to raise prices soon as we just sent a couple portrait for a 'famous' couple with 200K and 13.5 million followers on Instagram. They offered to take a photo of the portrait and them together, so this could lead to a massive demand, and great marketing material we can use later on.

Regarding the system, I think I have found a great plan. Will test it in the next coming weeks, and hopefully we can turn this into something that we can scale. My goals is 100 orders a month before 1st of October.

Most of all I am just happy that my wife is finally making some decent money on drawing her awesome portraits! :-D
 

Beerbread

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Good for your wife on going this route! This is very inspiring. With art, if you're getting a demand that your wife is getting overwhelmed, it's time to jack up your prices. Otherwise what kind of system are you doing?

Instagram followers are a mixed bag; you'll get a bunch of followers, but are they quality? At least it's satisfying to see your follower count go up though.
 

Chapas

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Good for your wife on going this route! This is very inspiring. With art, if you're getting a demand that your wife is getting overwhelmed, it's time to jack up your prices. Otherwise what kind of system are you doing?

Instagram followers are a mixed bag; you'll get a bunch of followers, but are they quality? At least it's satisfying to see your follower count go up though.

Thanks buddy! She is very happy - especially that she can now contribute to our household!

We will slowly start to jack up her prices. We just need to find the right target group for that, as the one we target now probably would not be able to afford those prices. But we learn as we go :)

Actually the system I was talking about is more meant to be for another business - also art related. Will tell more about it when I have tested it :)

Agree with that. We do not really care that much about the follower count going up, we care more about who will follow and see her portraits. Quality over quantity. This is why we have been focused on Instagram profiles who has rich and famous friends who might be able to buy a more expensive portrait.
 
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Chapas

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DAY 65 - July Is Sloooooooow

I always heard everyone say that the last week of June, whole of July and the first weeks of August are absolutely DEAD for business where we are from. Never put much thought to it, but this time realized that it is absolutely true. When we started running our SAME ADS again, they performed 8 (!!) times worse than in the beginning of June. I managed to tweak some of the ads though, so they perform a little better. But can't wait for people getting back from vacation and to their normal daily life, so our ads can run better :)

Revenue Update:

Ad Spend: 108 USD
Other Expenses: 195 USD
Revenue Through Ads: 661 USD
Revenue Through Referrals: 274 USD
Total Profit: 632 USD
Possible Extra Revenue (Pipeline): 841 USD

This is still peanuts, but it is nice to see that you actually can make money as an artist! And the more we test, the better we will get.

This was just a quick update. Have a lot of different ideas that I need to test out. Have an amazing week everyone :)
 

Chapas

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DAY 72 - Another Quiet Summer Week

It has been another quiet week. The next two weeks will be the same. This suits us fine as we are moving apartments this week, so if it had to be quiet at some point, then now it is the perfect time for that.

Ad Spend: 193 USD
Other Expenses: 300 USD
Revenue Through Ads: 931 USD
Revenue Through Referrals: 300 USD
Total Profit: 738 USD

What else is going on/interesting facts?


- First of all we are waiting for our Instagrammers to get home from a long vacation. Their portraits has arrived at the portier, and cannot wait for them to open them. This could be golden in terms of marketing for our custom portraits.

- Customer service is king! Most of our customers are already planning to order even more portraits, and tell us that they are already recommending my wife's skills to their friends and families. So always treat your customers right!

- Tested another art idea this week. Think I pretty much got it validated. The market is definitely there if done right. Managed to do 3 sales for a combined 270 USD - with the profit being 160 USD. I think the potential here could be great, so I just started building a new site for this, that I hopefully can launch sometime next month!

Have a great weekend folks. Will keep you updated when there is some new and interesting stuff going on :)
 

Chapas

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DAY 84 - Loving Happy Customers

- Customer service is king! Most of our customers are already planning to order even more portraits, and tell us that they are already recommending my wife's skills to their friends and families. So always treat your customers right!

Just wanted to quote something from my last post. This has turned out to be completely spot on. An initial customer through FB Ads started by ordering 1 portrait, and before she even received that one, she loved the photo of the portrait we sent her, that she ordered the second portrait instantly. We just shipped her two portraits to her yesterday.

This morning I wake up with a message from her that she wants to order 15 (15!!!!) new portraits as Christmas presents for her closest relatives and friends. Holy moly! What a great way to start the morning. Really hope she follows through with that order, but I cannot imagine that she doesn't. She has been a pleasure to communicate with and have instantly payed upfront for each portrait so far. Hands down my favourite customer so far!

Ad Spend: 296 USD
Revenue: 1522 USD
Total Profit: 960 USD
Very Hot Pipeline: 2725 USD
Warm Pipeline: 2195 USD

Looks like my wife is finally making some sort-of-living as an artist :)
 
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