71: From Art Teacher to $2.6M Empire: A Creative Entrepreneur's Journey
Ever wondered how to turn your creative skills into a thriving business? This week's episode features Kira McCoy, who did exactly that – transforming her passion for art into a multi-million dollar creative empire, selling products that average just $10 each.
Kira shares her fascinating journey from teaching art in high school to building a business that spans digital courses, physical products, and subscription boxes. She's refreshingly honest about her path, including the various side hustles she tackled along the way (like piercing ears!) before finding her sweet spot in the creative business world.
You'll learn:
Why starting with your audience is crucial before launching any product
How to test and validate your creative ideas before going all-in
The smart way to build multiple income streams without burning out
Simple strategies for getting meaningful feedback from your community
Tips for growing your creative business one step at a time
This episode is perfect for artists, crafters, and creative entrepreneurs who want to build a sustainable business without losing the joy in their creative work. Kira's practical advice and encouraging approach will leave you feeling inspired and equipped with actionable steps to move forward.
Got a friend who's building a creative business? Share this episode with them – they'll thank you for it!
Mentioned in this episode:
Where to find Kira: https://createalong.com
Key Takeaways:
[00:00:40] Kira's journey from crafting with her mother to becoming an art teacher and eventually a creative entrepreneur
[05:09] The pivotal moment when Kira's first online course generated six figures in a month
[09:27] Understanding why "audience is king and monetizing that audience is the queen" of your business
[14:11] How Kira transformed her digital course success into a thriving physical product line
[18:19] Practical tips for using "this or that" posts to gather valuable audience feedback
From Art Teacher to Creative Empire: How Kira McCoy Built a Multi-Million Dollar Creative Business
In the ever-evolving landscape of creative entrepreneurship, some stories stand out as beacons of inspiration and practical wisdom. Kira McCoy's journey from art teacher to successful creative business owner is one such tale, demonstrating how passion, strategic thinking, and a deep understanding of audience needs can lead to extraordinary success.
The Journey Begins: From Classroom to Digital Creator
Like many creative entrepreneurs, Kira's story begins with a foundation in education. As an art teacher with a natural affinity for technology, she found herself at the intersection of creativity and digital innovation. Her early ventures into podcasting and YouTube content creation, specifically focused on polymer clay through her channel "Polymer Clay TV," laid the groundwork for what would become a flourishing business empire.
What sets Kira's story apart is her ability to recognize and seize opportunities. When she launched her first online course in collaboration with 24 international instructors, she didn't just dip her toes in the water – she created a comprehensive digital experience that generated six figures in its first month. This success became the launching pad for Create Along, marking her transition from educator to full-fledged creative entrepreneur.
Building an Empire: One Product at a Time
One of the most remarkable aspects of Kira's business approach is her methodical expansion strategy. Rather than rushing to launch multiple products simultaneously, she emphasizes the importance of starting small and scaling thoughtfully. Her business evolution from digital products to physical items wasn't random – it was driven by careful attention to her audience's needs and preferences.
"People buy the artist before they buy the art," Kira explains, highlighting the crucial role of authentic connection in business growth. This philosophy has guided her development of multiple revenue streams, from digital courses and magazines to physical products and subscription boxes. Today, her business boasts an impressive $2.6 million in sales from products averaging just $10 each, proving that success doesn't always require high-ticket items.
The Power of Audience Connection
At the heart of Kira's business philosophy lies a powerful truth: "Audience is king and monetizing that audience is the queen." Her approach to audience building focuses on genuine engagement rather than just accumulating followers. She advocates for active interaction through simple yet effective methods like "this or that" posts, which provide valuable insights into audience preferences while fostering community engagement.
Balancing Growth and Sustainability
Perhaps one of the most valuable lessons from Kira's journey is her emphasis on sustainable growth. While she's successfully built multiple income streams – including a subscription box service, a magazine, and a creative club – she stresses the importance of launching one initiative at a time. "It is very possible to have an empire filled with all of the things that you want to provide and give to the world," she notes, "but you can run yourself a little bit into overwhelm if you try to do them all at once."
Key Lessons for Creative Entrepreneurs
For aspiring creative entrepreneurs, Kira's journey offers several crucial insights:
Start with audience building and engage authentically with your community
Test small offerings before scaling to larger products or services
Pay attention to what your audience actually wants to buy, not just what they say they want
Focus on completing one product or initiative before moving on to the next
Don't be afraid to evolve your business model based on audience feedback and market response
Looking Forward
Today, Kira's creative empire continues to thrive through her website createalong.com, where she offers various opportunities for artists and creators to learn and grow. Her success story serves as a testament to the potential of creative entrepreneurship when approached with both passion and strategy.
For those looking to follow in her footsteps, Kira's parting advice is both practical and encouraging: "You probably won't have every single thing that you put out there become a raving success in one day. You know it takes time to build everything." This reminder that success is a journey, not a destination, perfectly encapsulates the realistic yet optimistic approach that has defined her path to success.
Whether you're just starting your creative business journey or looking to expand your existing enterprise, Kira's story offers a blueprint for building a sustainable, profitable creative business while staying true to your artistic vision and values.
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Transcript:
[00:00:00] Welcome to the HobbyScool podcast. Whether you're a seasoned hobbyist or just getting started, HobbyScool is the perfect place to learn something new. My name is Dr. Destini Copp and I'm your host of the podcast. But before we jump into our episode for today, The only thing I ask is that if you enjoyed the episode, please share with a friend and give us an honest review on your favorite podcast platform.
This helps us get out the content to more people. I also want to invite you to get on our wait list for our next HobbyScool podcast. Online Learning Summit. These are free to attend and you can find the link to join at hobbyscool. com, which is also in our podcast show notes. Now sit back, relax, and enjoy the episode.
And my [00:01:00] special guest today is Kira McCoy. Kira is a creative entrepreneur, artist, and five time best selling author. She is the visionary behind a flourishing art and craft online empire. She's dedicated to sparking creativity and fostering entrepreneur and personal triumphs. And Kira, I am super excited to chat with you today and dig into everything that you're doing But before we get into the questions that I have for you, can you tell the good audience just a little bit more about you and how you help people?
Well, thank you so much, Destini, for having me here. I am an artist and a teacher by vocation. So when I was little, my mother was a crafter and she taught me how to make all kinds of things. And we would make crafts to go to craft shows and sell them. And Christmas bazaars at the church and all that fun stuff.
By the time I, was a senior in high school, [00:02:00] I had kind of finished high school, right? I had a lot of time in my schedule to take whatever classes I wanted. I took almost all art classes during that last year of school. In talking with my teachers and my parents and everything, I decided that I would go to college to become an art teacher.
And that was, I made not lightly because my dad. Was also a teacher and he had taught biology and I had a scientific mind. So I kind of, when I went to school, it was like, should I teach art or science? And I picked art, which turned out to be, a difficult road. You know, there are only one or two art teachers in every school and it was hard for me to get a position.
And I ended up having to do lots of other things, including working in marketing construction. I was an accountant for a while. Years I did all of the side hustle gig jobs that artists sometimes need to do to continue to, pursue [00:03:00] their passions, right? So then in 2006, after I had graduated college in 1995, I saw a local position cause I had always been watching the, the job boards and stuff for something I could do at a school and they had a position listed that was for, Someone who knew Adobe Photoshop, who could do video, who knew how to do podcasting and was also a certified teacher.
And I called the Broward County district that day. And I said, I think you wrote this job description for me because I had been. Podcasting and I haven't, I had an iTunes podcast and YouTubing since 2000, like 2006, I started that. And. I knew how to do all of those things and I was a certified teacher and I said, who else do you know who has all of these qualifications.
So I was hired by Broward County [00:04:00] to do videography and podcasting for the teachers and to film best practices in the classroom. And two years later they said, well, you know, this position is ending. We're so sorry to tell you you're going to have to go teach in a classroom. And they were, everybody kind of had long faces cause they didn't want to go teach.
But I was like, yes, finally I get my foot in the door and I got to go be a high school teacher. And in a very technology heavy school and I discovered that I just had this innate ability to understand tech. And I did all kinds of trainings for Google classrooms and Google collaboration.
And at the same time I was continuing my YouTube channel, which was all about polymer clay. It's called polymer clay TV. And I was starting to develop my own. product line, a small product line at the time. I really wasn't monetizing very much of anything. I just had this like dream and I had a business partner at the time and we were just [00:05:00] podcasting about polymer clay.
Very fun. But in 2013, we wrote a book called polymer clay art jewelry. And then in 2014, I said, you know, people are starting to monetize and they're doing these things called summits. And I think I can do one. And we've interviewed everybody in polymer clay. We know everybody. So let's start calling people and see if they want to do one.
And we did. We had 24 people join my first, I wouldn't call it a summit. It was an online course, an online art retreat, and everybody contributed one class. I figured out how to get us all collaborating using Google Drive and Dropbox and all those types of softwares to collect everybody's classes because the teacher list was international.
We had people from all over the world teaching at this thing. And when I put it up for sale, I followed my mentors, like lessons to the [00:06:00] tee. And we sold that first class. We went from making no money to making six figures in a month. So that's kind of how create along got launched with this thing that was called polymer clay adventure.
And since then we've, morphed into so many different product lines and I have a subscription box I've been doing since 2017 and I've written many books. I have an Amazon store, a top 1 percent Etsy store, a Shopify, and I've made. 2. 6 that average 10 a pop. So I love all of that. And I love that you've had your hands in a lot of different things in that, that is going to make for a very interesting discussion today, because I definitely want to dig in and learn a little bit more here, but for everybody who's listening, we have a lot of creative people out there who [00:07:00] Are thinking about kind of dipping their toes into entrepreneurships or maybe a side hustle or figuring out how they can make money from their creative passions.
What would you say to them if they are just trying to explore this? Okay. Exploring the idea of what exactly do you want your lifestyle to be? Because I can tell you my business started as mostly digital products and has changed into mostly physical products.
So. The physical product end of my business does tie me to packing and shipping and needing to be in one location. Whereas when you have a digital business, you are more sort of, the laptop nomad type idea that people have that you could work from anywhere, work from a coffee shop. So that's the first thing I would really sit down and ask myself, how can you translate what you're passionate about [00:08:00] to fit your lifestyle that you're looking to have.
And I know that your presentation for the upcoming summit that we have, which is Monica monetize your craft party. You focus on building income streams by asking your audience what they want. Can you share a little bit more about this approach and why it works so well for creative entrepreneurs like all of us are.
Sure. So a lot of the time we have loads of ideas. Right? Ideas are not usually the problem for us. Creatives have so many downloads and so many ideas. The issue becomes the idea that just because you have an idea doesn't mean that people will want to buy it. So asking for feedback from your audience, even if your audience is, you know, 20 people in a Facebook group, or 100 people following [00:09:00] you on Instagram or wherever you are, right?
The feedback at least points you in the direction towards what people are saying that they would like more of. I will say, of course, that doesn't necessarily mean they'll come flocking to buy it because we are in a world with a lot of choices. And sometimes people say they want something, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to purchase it.
But asking first to the people who are following you and invested in you, I think gives you a good basis for where to point your ideas. So walk us through the process of getting feedback from our audience. Maybe we've been growing on YouTube, or maybe it's Instagram, like you mentioned, I know some people were on Tik TOK, how would we go about, I guess, just walk us through the process of how would we go about gathering information from them?
Audience is king and monetizing that audience is [00:10:00] the queen of your business. So you need to have an audience. The audience comes first and they need to find a way to really connect with you because people buy the artist before they buy the art. They're buying into you. And I would caution you not to be shy to use whatever method works for you to get your story out there.
And get people engaging with you because just because they're following and lurking doesn't necessarily mean that they are very engaged. So you want to have calls to action in your content that include, you know, drop me comments, like, and share, just get your people doing something with the content that you put out there.
Then you can start by selling small things, a few things, not every single thing you ever thought of to sell. Because once you have created something that's relatively stable, where you know that if you offer [00:11:00] something for sale, someone's going to purchase it, then you can work on monetizing in larger ways.
Then you start doing surveys, start doing more launching a product line, as opposed to just launching or offering small things. For example, one of my first things that I sold was bird earrings because I love birds, I love making jewelry, I like sculpting, and it was an interesting route to finding my bestseller.
I had all this colorful stuff and I would just kind of throw things out there and see what people would buy. And I eventually gained a following of people who liked this. the bird earrings, but then I started doing raven wings because I just love crows and ravens. And now, because I've got this audience of people following me who like the Corvids for lack of a better term, right?
They like the blackbirds. That's the only thing that sells and I don't even have to market them anymore. They just [00:12:00] sell because I amassed an audience. I paid attention to what they were buying and I just kept offering them more of that. Particular thing until I honed in on the one thing that they will buy no matter what.
So it's a process. Some people get lucky. Tick tock can push you to, you know, a million views on something, but views don't necessarily mean buyers and you need to figure out. Exactly what it is that people want to buy and make those small offers. And when you find the one, then, you know, you've got a winner and you can sell that.
Over and over again because you've got a bunch of people who like you and like what you do and they want the thing. It really is about testing and tweaking and testing and tweaking and that's kind of what you're, pointing us to there.
So I like what you said there. And I want to just kind of take a step back and ask you a little bit more about your journey because you originally started selling digital products, and then you moved into [00:13:00] physical products. So tell us a little bit more about that transition and why you made that transition.
Oh, that's a really interesting monetizing your audience story. I mean, in the very beginning with my first Etsy shop, I was selling jewelry and that was what I was making. And that's how I met my business partner on Etsy. And then we decided together that we would do this YouTube show and podcast. And then monetizing that became like, how can we make premium content?
And that's how we ended up with our book and our, our course. Once we had 1200 people in that course. It became a question of these people had opened their wallets to us and said, Yes, we like what you're offering. We're going to buy it. And then we had 1200 people saying, What else have you got?
And I being an artist and a techie and a nerd, [00:14:00] I said, well, how can I make something for polymer clay people? I had been doing all this research and I found a way to make a silkscreen. I had someone that I knew make me some samples and I fell in love with the process and started making silkscreens.
And that was our first product line. I sold thousands of silkscreens to people who wanted to put a pattern on their polymer clay. And it just kind of grew from there. They were buying silkscreens, well then they wanted rubber stamps, and then 3D printers were becoming a thing, and I started making cookie cutters, so it was Very classic.
I found the thing, which was the digital course that they wanted to buy. And then I started offering them, the audience, other things one at a time until now I have this fully fledged product line with a thousand things in it that they can buy to play with their polymer clay.
So I have a product shop. Then in 2017, I started a [00:15:00] magazine, which was digital. So I was doing monthly digital content and I still have that. It's now my creative clay club. So now I do have a nice blend of both types of products I like being in that spot where I don't have all my eggs in one basket.
And you have other offers out there too, like your subscription based products. I just want people to understand there's a lot of different ways that they can make money as a creative entrepreneur. And it doesn't have to be just in physical products. It doesn't have to be just in, you know, physical products or online courses or, you know, all that.
There's a lot of different ways you can monetize. And I think you are demonstrating that Yeah, I like to caution people. I do serve also as a business mentor. So, you know, I caution the creative mind. And if you noticed, I did say I launched each thing one at a time, [00:16:00] because it can become overwhelming to balance You know, a subscription box, a magazine, a creative club, a YouTube channel, you know, of course we have to do our social media.
So yes, it is very possible to have an empire filled with all of the things that you want to provide and give to the world. And I feel strongly that you can run yourself a little bit. into overwhelm if you try to do them all at once. What I always do is I try to find the thing that I know I can complete the fastest with, bring it to completion and feel whole and complete with that product, offer it to the world, see how it goes.
If I love it, I do more of it. And if I don't love it, I can adjust the trajectory kind of. Then decide what's the next project that I can bring to market and bring to completion, because when [00:17:00] you have a lot of stuff, that's just hanging out there. That's when your brain can get fried. So yes, I think that it's really a great idea to diversify, you need to look at everything you're doing and pull one thing out of your hat at a time and build the audience for that thing, sell it to them, and then continue to build upon your success. And not to get discouraged at all, because things take time. You probably won't have, Every single thing that you put out there become a raving success in one day.
You know, it takes time to build everything. And I definitely think that that is some really good advice is focused on one thing, master that. And, you know, before you move on to something else, right. Kira, any last minute tips for the, I really like the [00:18:00] idea of identifying what your audience is truly interested in rather than guessing.
I think that my biggest tip is to start asking. Start even just doing those this or that type of posts. I like doing those in my Facebook group. You know, I'll put up a picture of two things and just say this or that and get people to comment. Because it gives me a really good idea of what preferences are at the moment and which one everybody's going to vote for.
Sometimes it's not what I thought. So like I think the easiest way to start working this idea of asking your audience what they want is to come up with like your two best ideas that are different and just start doing this or that posts and just start getting some of that visual feedback. So Kira, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing all of your wonderful knowledge with us.
Can you let the audience know where they can find you? And [00:19:00] I believe you have a free gift for them also. Yes. So you can find me and get in touch with me at my main website, createalong. com. I am a mixed media polymer clay and jewelry artist and I paint, so there's a lot there for you if you're an artsy person, and my freebie for you is called from meh to magnetic.
It's a 20 minute social media makeover that I think will help if you're struggling a little bit about like what to post and what to say and how to start the story going about you and what you create so that you can connect to your audience. Perfect. And we will make sure that all of those links are in the show notes so they can check that out.
So Kira, thank you so much for joining me. I loved having this conversation with you. Oh, thanks, Destini.
Thank you so much for [00:20:00] listening today. Don't forget to sign up for the waitlist so you'll be the first to know when our next free HobbyScool online learning summit launches. The link is in the show notes for this episode or you can go to HobbyScool.com and that's HobbyScool with school without an H in it.
Talk soon.