Arree Chung is an author, illustrator, designer and art director in the gaming industry, and founder of Storyteller Academy. In this episode, Arree and Daniel discuss a storytelling approach to branding, how to build one business that leverages another, and how Arree navigated failures and big breaks to become an illustrator and entrepreneur.

Use the resources that fit your needs:

• “In today’s world, you can study on YouTube, but you’re looking for the best information, and for the thriving community that supports you, so you grow together.”
• “The things that art school doesn’t prepare you for? I’d say it’s really business and marketing—I have so many friends that are artists and they all say that they wished they learned more business.”
• “The best way to learn business is to start doing it.”
• “We’re taught to get jobs, but not how to start a business or be entrepreneurial.”
• “The truth of business is that you not only need a great service or product, but you need a marketing machine that gets you out there and gets awareness. You have to have a process of making sales, consistently.”

On market research and branding:

• “I have always kept the rights to all my art, and at some point those can be licensed—you can grow a licensing strategy from the artwork that you make.”
• “Most artists want to focus on making art, but if you don’t focus on your channels 50% of the time, you’re not going to get enough traffic to close sales.”
• “Do things fast and experiment.”
• “A business plan is a roadmap, but you need to make sure it’s not just untested numbers on a spreadsheet.”
• “Ask your customer what their needs are, build solutions around that, and develop your business plan from those needs.”

How failure can condition you for success:

• “I learned about product/market fit—I thought there was a great business opportunity, but I learned otherwise by being in the market.”
• “In retrospect, I’ve learned the value of marketing and how to reach your target audience. I think my first business could have worked if I had more marketing experience and knew how to target customers better.”
• “One mistake I made is to try to develop too many [social] channels at the same time, and didn’t do a good job with any of them.”
• “Building a business is a lot of work, but it’s also a creative endeavor.”