Ask HN: Best way to grow an arts startup? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best way to grow an arts startup?

37 pointssheepybloke19 comments

I'm working with a team who are working on a professional ballet company, focusing mainly on performances. They are a couple years in and are looking to step up to the next level. What are some of the best ways to grow the company? More generally, what are some growth hacks from the startup world that work for art organizations?

Thanks!

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You don't need growth hacks, you need an actual marketing plan. To come up with that you need to figure out your target audience. In the tech world it is common for companies to market to people who don't actually provide them with revenue. For instance, a typical SaaS company might target developers. Developers rarely have direct say in expenditure. The goal might be to get enough developers interested in a technology that they just get some street cred. The SaaS company then tries to land some big clients with salespeople who say "our adoption rates are huge". The money happens at a much different level than direct from consumer, which is what a ballet company would want.

A lot of tech companies spend a huge amount of marketing effort getting people to use something that is FREE. Seems weird, doesn't it?

But, what you are probably asking for are some guerilla marketing/free PR/social media tricks. Lots of blogs cover that.

Try video. Words about ballet might not be effective getting people in the door. Short looping gifs or <60 sec videos would probably get better engagement on Facebook and Instagram. Skip Twitter and Google AdWords.

1. subscriptions

2. subscriptions

3. tiered pricing

You need people paying you regularly, not just a-la-carte. And to attract the best patrons (aka customers) you need to sell them experiences (aka features) that people on lower plans don't have access too. Think artist events, special performances, travel, etc.

Focus on engagement. Your "product" might be performances, but there are a ton of ways to create a more intimate connection (and gain fans or find revenue streams) beyond those few performances. Simple things like have an Instagram/Twitter/newsletter with pics from practice, new members, challenges, etc. Create a narrative out of the ballet company so that the performances are the payoff for fans. Look at how bigger, more established arts communities handle this, like symphonies.

Find and talk to people who have(done) what you want.

HN is not the best place to find that sort of thing.

I would research other entertainment companies/individuals similar to the team you working with.

Building your own newsletter should sit at the heart of any digital comms. Social media as the layer above with copious video and photography, but always having the call to action to sign up for the newsletter. You should “own” your audience contact details, rather than optimise for followers on proprietary networks that you need to continually pay to reach.

You should also own your own payment gateway, be that for patronage or content subscriptions or ticket selling. Luckily with a little bit of upfront effort this is easy to do with something like Stripe and will set you up for long term financial independence and viability.

A lot of old-media organisations have found some success in selling "access", you might also be able to find subscription-paying patrons who get special privileges beyond the casual audience member: attending rehearsals, going backstage after shows, or even attending classes themselves to get closer to the action.

There's also good old-fashioned sponsorship — local brands or wealthy individuals who are happy to contribute to your mission in exchange for billing in your promotional materials and physical spaces.

HN probably not the right crowd for your organic growth. But +Post snippets of video on YouTube/Facebook +Do tutorials of difficult steps +Do teardowns /reviews of ballet in movies and other shows +Sell subscriptions( building something that can help here ) + Talk to the best in your niche of the arts and release as podcast + Engage ballet twitter

Almost all arts organizations are going to rely heavily on grants and development as their main funding sources. Trying to run a ballet company on ticket sales alone is going to be almost impossible. You need to develop a marketing plan to attract small donors and work with your leadership team to secure corporate donations and/or other large gifts.

Startup world - venture capital

Arts world - generous patron

Start Ups are about the new new thing. How will your ballet company be new? Even contemporary dance is not that new.

Why this is important is that the audience for the arts is quite stable, where startups are geared towards discovering new markets.

One idea could be looking at eXtended Reality and thinking if that can transform your ballet company into a new product.

Build community.

Make a business plan. Figure out who specifically your audience is and how you will reach them.

Consider making it non-profit. Then you can solicit donations.

Establish relationships with colleges. Set up pipelines of energized young people. Harness their useful but individually ephemeral participation.

Personally probably wouldn't follow HN'd advice on running a ballet company, I'd ask people who have run ballet companies.

Ballet is mired in tradition. Startups are all about changing the things that people never questioned. It's almost an oxymoron to try to run a professional ballet company as a startup - at some point you may have to pivot to not being a ballet company, and then you're no longer a professional ballet company.

Yeah... I'm bracing myself for a flood of really bad takes on this post.

I'm not entirely sure what OP's idea of a "startup" or "the next level", aside from taking a regular "small business" and turning it into a "slight-larger small business". However, one of my childhood dance teachers founded a small dance theater (http://toygunstheatre.com/) which seems to have grown in the past few years, so the later is not unheard of.

cirque du soleil might be a good case study

Which is in fact one of the case studies in the classic business strategy book, "Blue Ocean Strategy".

you're not just an arts startup, you're in the classical music business so that's 10000x harder, most tech based startups that enter that business fail because they cannot grow as a usual startup should. There is a company called IDAGIO that was founded probably around 2013, it relaunched multiple times, they played with the pricing from free to 5$/month to 10$/month to free again, they raised around 20 million dollars and employed 100 people, they bribed and paid journalists under and over the table to get every possible positive coverage possible for more than 2 years now, they bought facebook, twitter followers, they did everything including the dirtiest growth tactics any marketing pro would think of, and they are still struggling with growth.

It's a very tough business and needs extreme patience and shamelessness alike. My recommendation is to do partnerships with other arts companies or institutions related to your market, most of such partnerships are fake anyway, but can somehow give you some boost. That's at least what IDAGIO, the longest surviving classical music company has been doing so far, beside bribing journalists of course :D.

yes

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