Transcripts
1. Introduction: I remember when we
released our first asset, it went viral
overnight and we just saw the sale skyrocket. It
was really cool to see. Hi. My name is Madison Erwin. I'm a 3D animator. I've worked for studios such
as Sony, Marvel, Ember Lab. I also have a studio with
my friends where we create and sell digital assets
called Wonderwell Studios. In this class, we're
going to cover a multitude of things
relating to how to get your 3D asset from
development all the way to a final product that you're selling and
marketing online. Selling 3D assets opens
up a whole new world. There's so many different
options that can be an additive benefit to your already existing
career in animation. We're going to explore the
different marketplaces, see where can I even sell
my 3D assets that I create. We're going to go into
a little bit about how do I make these assets.
Do I do it myself? Do I do it collaboratively? We're also going to
discover how to market your assets correctly and how to build a brand
presence for yourself. You should take this
class if you're a freelance animator and you're just looking to
make some more money on the side or maybe you have a full fledged career
where you're working full time in a studio
and you just want a side hustle that offers
you more creative freedom. At the end of the day,
when you're working for your own business and you're
working with friends, you're really seeing
a lot of yourself and your own artistic
vision show through in the final product that you
create and I find that so exciting. Let's go
ahead and get started.
2. Getting Started: Welcome to the class. I'm so excited to walk you
through and teach you everything that I know
and have learned through trial and error about
digital marketplaces. I have my own business with a bunch of my
friends that we call Wonderwell Studios where we make digital assets for animators, a lot of rigged characters
and some props as well. We had a lot of trial and
error through that of learning how to have a
business, how to build a brand, how to have a whole
collaborative animation-based 3D
driven thing that we wanted to make an actual
business instead of just a side hustle with us just playing
around after work. This is something
that I wanted to be able to explain in a class. To be able to give
you some good tips and tricks of things
that we learned, what we were good at, what
we failed at so that way you can go forth and build your
own 3D asset business. It's good for anyone, whether you're a beginner or
you're a seasoned pro, you're going to be able to
take something away from this class and have
a lot more clarity on what even is the world of 3D marketplaces
and asset selling. The thing about asset market
places and selling 3D assets online is you need to know what the market
is out there for it. Knowing that before
you make your plan for making a 3D asset is
going to help you, and definitely bump you
up in terms of hey, you know what you're
creating, you know there's a need for it out there
and it's going to help your assets sell
a lot easier than you just trying to fling something at the
wall on Hopi sticks. You also need to know
how to structure your 3D business because you may not know that
there's different options. You can have a whole group
and maybe you can make a higher performing
asset because you all come from different backgrounds and have different skill sets. Or maybe you want soul, creative freedom over whatever you're making
and you don't want anyone else's opinions
and you really want this to be on your
time and your schedule, then maybe a solo career in
3D asset making is for you. It's important to
know the differences. It's important to know the pros and cons of each of those. It's also really important
to know your asset's done, it's posted, now, what? There needs to be
something after, so there needs to
be a marketing, so be your own
marketing department. We need to know how to
brand things and how to show up as a presence
online rather it's on social media or on our whatever digital domain is that we're selling
our assets on. We need to look cohesive and we need to be as
a unified brand. If you don't market,
nobody's going to buy it. But in this class, I'm going to walk you through two
different things. One, we're going to
do research missions. Also we're going to be doing
a lot of journaling prompts, so reflecting on these things, figuring out our own plans for what do I want
out of doing this? Do I want to do the solo? Is creative freedom
important to me or is having fun with my friends
doing a side hustle, the most important thing to me? We're going to
narrow those things down and you're
going to write those all out so that way
you're going to have a reference to be
able to go back to, and be able to plan forward
for the future ahead. All you're going to need for
this class is a journal, a pen, and an
Internet connection. Let's dive in, meet me in the next lesson and we're going to talk about marketplaces.
3. Exploring Digital Marketplaces : We are about to dive
into the world of digital assets and digital
marketplaces specifically. It's important to know what
the differences are about digital marketplaces
because there are quite a few out there. But today we're going
to cover three of them that are my favorites
that I've personally used the most and
the one that I also sell on with my
studio, Wonderwll. For this I'm going to need my ipad to be able
to do some research. One of the first
digital marketplaces that we're going to
be talking about and one that's near and dear
to my heart because I used it when I was
teaching myself animation, used it a lot through
school. This is Sketchfab. Sketchfab is
relatively known for having the most free
assets for use. That's why students like to use it a lot because
we don't have to pay. As you can see, there's lots of different
types of assets. There's all different genres. You can say, oh, show me
only animated things, show me only
downloadable things. On sketchfab, You'll see in the upper right
hand corner it says, oh, this is a symbol for, this is downloadable,
it's a free asset. When you see the dollar sign, it's something that
you have to pay for, so you can see different
things about it. This one is being
sold and you can have access to future versions
support from sellers. It just really depends
on each seller what parameters they want to put on their asset for
people to purchase. This is a good example of someone's charging
for this asset. They've created it themselves. It's a low poly asset. This might be good
for a game design, this might be good for
student projects of animation where you don't want
something super heavy and high poly
in your scene. But it's light, it
still looks super cute, it's textured, it's
surrender ready. These are great types of assets to have because they're
super versatile, they're not a
specific character, they're not fan art of something else that's
already licensed. This is just generic pastry,
stylized pastry collection. This can fit a lot
of different prompts if you want to make your
own assets like this, things to look out for is okay, so this is obviously
just one asset. This is an example, something
randomly we just pulled up, but you're going to want to
look at what's the price. You might think, okay, I
really want to do this, but this is my competition, and let's just use this
one asset as an example. They're selling this for $50 Maybe I want to
sell mine for 30. Maybe it's a little bit more
stylized than even this is. You're undercutting
and selling it for less because that
was going to get more attraction
and attract a lot more like students or
people that want to pay less for something
and maybe don't want to pay $50 for pastries. Or what you could
do is say, hey, I'm going to pay $60 for mine, but mine are a lot
more detailed, maybe they're lower poly, but they are more stylized. Maybe you're hitting
a certain niche. You're looking at all these
different variables that you can balance together to be able to find where
you could fit in. The next digital
marketplace that we're going to look at is TurboSquid. TurboSquid is very
similar to Sketchfab. Models for professionals is
the tag line of TurboSquid. They have a lot more
professional assets, for lack of a better
way to say it. TurboSquid, in my opinion, usually has a lot
more expensive assets and a lot more detailed assets. If I'm wanting to find
something that's more stylized like those pastries
we just saw on Sketchfab. Usually I'm going to go to Sketchfab to try to find those. That's not saying that TurboSquid doesn't
have these things, but TurboSquid is a little bit more oriented
towards people that are working in the
effects or doing things that need to
be highly detailed, high poly, lots of sets,
there's lots of scans. This could also be
used for video games if you're doing like a
high vidility video game. Lots of different
environments too. TurboSquid is a lot
bigger, in my opinion, for selling environment
assets versus sketchfab. TurboSquid usually has a
lot higher quality assets that are a lot more in depth. Obviously that's going to take
a lot longer of a time to make and it could take a lot
longer of a time to sell. But usually they do sell for a lot higher of a
price point because they have so many features in our game ready,
they've been tested. They go through
strenuous development so that way it can justify
the higher price point. But just keep that in mind, if you're thinking about
making these assets, you need to realize TurboSquid
is probably going to be more catered to a
bigger production. The next digital
marketplace we're going to go into is Gumroad a place that's near and dear to my
heart because this is where we sell our digital
assets for Wonderwll. I think the biggest
difference with Gumroad is Gumroad
almost acts like a back end website to your own storefront with
Sketchfab, TurboSquid. Usually there's
like a gallery of like you can just explore, you can search, you
can do that as well. On Gumroad, as you can see, the address is
wonderworlltudios.gumroad.com. It's almost acting
like the back end and being the host
to your storefront, rather than you
just posting it on Sketchfab and TurboSquid.
We have our own brand. As you can see, this is our own page of everything
that we sell currently. This is Leo, our baby. The first one that we came
out with was Leo for Maya. This is a little animation test that I did with him
when we first started. Leo has different rigs
for different softwares. That's a great way to be able to market your assets just thinking
about who's using this, what markets can I
tap into by making this asset for another
type of software? That's what we did with Leo. One thing that I really like about Gumroad and the
reason that we chose Gumroad is the fact that you can really have a hands on
approach to licensing. Sketchfab, TurboSquid, all
the others kind of have their own generic
licensing and you can check a box
and basically say, oh, people can use my product in creative projects but they
can't make money from it. Or you can say, hey, you
can only use this in a student film or
for student work, but you can't make any money
from it outside of that. Or you can say, yeah, you
can use it for any purposes, you can make money, et cetera. It doesn't matter. The specific thing
that we did with Leo and why we went with Gumroad is we can offer different licenses. That's what you can
see here on the side. We have a personal license
that's just pretty standard. We also put in terms
of use for those. Noncommercial
personal license that could be used for
personal shots, short film, school assignments. Then you can also say, hey, an instructor's license. If you're going
to teach a class, if you're getting
paid to do demos, you have a stream like
you should probably get an instructor's license. We have small workshop licenses, so if you have five
to ten students that you're teaching at a time. Then if you want a
full school license, it's $3,000 for a school license so that way you're
teaching an entire school. You're giving Leo to whoever's
entering your school. This is a way to give people
the option to be honest. That doesn't mean you're
still going to have people that should have gotten a school license and got a
personal license instead. But it just gives them
more of an option to like, hey, here's what our
terms and conditions are. But when you get
good reviews too, that's a big thing about selling three D assets is
reviews can be great. They can make or break
your assets sometimes. It gives you good feedback of what people want,
what they don't. The better your reviews
do, the more interactions people have with your asset
downloads, et cetera. Now what I would like
you to do is to go ahead and go and research. I want you to research
these digital marketplaces. I want you just to go poke
around and just see what the differences are and why you like some and why you
don't like others. I want you to meet me in
the next lesson and we're going to talk about how to
build an asset strategy.
4. Structuring Your Business: I'm going to teach
you in this lesson, how to structure your business. Starting an entire business from scratch is a huge endeavor, so you want to be able to
know upfront what am I doing? What am I getting
into? Who's involved? That's why it's so important
to plan these things out first before you dive head first and to structure
in your own business. Important thing to question and weigh the pros and cons is, are you going to
be doing this solo or are you going to do
this as a collapse, or are you going to
have this whole studio? If you're working solo,
everything falls on you. At the end of the
day, you're the one having to make sure
everything gets done. You only have your own opinion. You can ask outside people, but you're going to
have to do every step in this asset creation, from branding to
marketing to modeling, to everything in between. That all falls on
you, and that's a huge responsibility to take. But some people love it,
some people hate it, so you just really have to know what you like
and what you don't. Now, working with the colab, it's awesome because you
have all your friends, you're getting to rif ideas
off each other constantly, you're getting a lot
wider of a scope. You can also deal with a lot bigger of a project because
you have more people. But you also are going
to have to deal with the fact that it's not your product at the
end of the day, it's the whole group, and
so people are going to have conflicting ideas and
conflicting creative visions. You're going to have
to take compromises on things you want to have in the product and
things you don't. Some people are going
to fight against you, you have to learn to be able
to deal with that as well. While it's great in terms of you have this big
collaborative spirit, you're going to be able to rift back and forth and have
all those good things, you also are going to
have the cons as well, so each one has
its pros and cons. You have a big vision of something that you
want to complete, where do you find the people? There's a lot of
different resources, there's all kinds of
different forms and discord servers are a great
place to find people. Also sometimes just messaging
people on Instagram, I know that's gotten great results with
us with Wonder Well, we've brought people on just
because we're like, hey, I saw your work on your art
page and it's incredible, would you want to work
with us with this? That's how we've got
a lot of the crew that we have now working
with our studios. That's a good way to find it,
really just reaching out. I think sometimes it's
super scary and daunting, especially if you really admire
the person's work or you yourself don't know much about the actual work that
they do specifically. Maybe you're a modeler and
you need to hire an animator, but you don't really know
much about animation, but just talking to them,
having a good rapport, that's a great thing
to be able to make those friendships and those
connections that networking. You're going to be
able to find like minded individuals that will share your creative
dream and your endeavor. Next up is branding yourself. I think it's really important, even if you're a solo artist, to brand yourself in a
way that's either as a studio or if you're going to brand yourself
and go the route of, I'm my name, doing this thing, make it a personality. Step back a little bit
from what you're doing, I feel like that's always more
relatable as an audience, to be able to see a brand behind the name and this personified character
rather than actually, it's just Madison, and here's what I ate for breakfast today. You creating this separation
between yourself, who you actually are,
your day to day life, and hey, this is the
things that I create. I create props for animators, and I make these things. Depending on if you're
doing solo or colab. If you're doing Colab,
that's obviously more important because it's not going to be one person's name to it. Like Wonder. Well, we all do it. There's like six,
seven of us now. I think there's even more,
so we all work together. Wonder Well was a lot
of back and forth, I think we literally had named our file structure
animation studio for a long time because we didn't have a
name or anything. Trying to figure out all these things to brand
yourself is really important because it levels up the
trust of the consumer. When I see an asset, when I see a brand saying, here's our stuff and
we are this studio, everything's very cohesive, all the thumbnails makes
sense, it doesn't seem messy, it seems very
creative and clean, that's always what you're going to want to click on first. Versus Madison Irwin
did this weird thing, and then there's
this other thing. Maybe they're great products, maybe they're even
the same products, but if they're not
clean and cohesive, it's going to be less
clickable than having a brand. And being out there as a brand. I would say if you're
branding yourself, you're trying to do this, three tips I'd give you is
find your voice as a brand. I would consider under
voice consistency. What is the general style you're trying to go?
How are you posting? Are you posting
consistently the same way? How do you appear?
Is the second one. Are you appearing
in a specific logo? Are you using one
asset that is now your poster child for
your digital marketplace? Leo is our baby now, and a lot of people
recognize us by Leo, so Leo's become
our icon in a way. I'd say a third one
is also just making sure that you're
not being too fake. I think a lot of
times people come from being solo
and then they try to put on this whole brand
and it just feels overdone. You just need to
make it realistic. Know your audience, make sure you're speaking
to your audience. If you're marketing
mostly towards professionals, be
very professional. If you're marketing
more towards students, really know your audience again, and maybe be a little
bit more playful. Maybe do some silly things that are going to get
people more interested, because a lot of times
it's a younger audience. Just knowing your
audience and being clean about it is
always a good strategy. Now I want you to go
away, go to your journal, and I want you to write down these things of how are you going to
structure your business? The first thing is
solo versus colab. Remember, these both
have pros and cons. The next thing is
where to find Colabs, and this is network,
network, Network. Be brave, get out
there, talk to people, you never know who you're going to run into and who
you're going to find. The third thing is how to
brand yourself, that is, how to find your voice, how
to speak to your audience, and how to find your
visual identity. I want you to go now and get your journal and write down how are you going to
structure your business. Then meet me in the next
lesson where we're going to talk about how you're
going to market these assets.
5. Marketing Your Assets: Earlier we talked about
the who, what, where. Now we're at the were part of where are you
marketing these things? Where are you
putting your assets? Where are you going
to direct people to buy and purchase your assets? Our where for wonder. well was Gumroad. We're going to Gumroad
because we knew that's where we wanted to host our
digital marketplace. That's where we wanted
to have our assets. That's where we wanted
people to purchase them because it worked
the best for us. So Gumroad is where
we're directing people. The next place is where's your biggest target
audience going to be? For us, that was Instagram. We knew that our biggest
target audience was students, and usually students are
going to be on Instagram, especially if they
haven't really been in the workforce
at all yet. Maybe they're just
interested in 3D animation. Instagram has a ton of
artistic people on there. They have lots of artists,
lots of creators that are learning animation,
self taught Blender. So when we released
Leo in Blender, we knew we really wanted
to push that on Instagram a lot more because that's where a lot of the students are at. Then we have our
secondary where, and this is where else could
we try to reach audience? So for us, LinkedIn. LinkedIn was a great
place for us to be able to reach a little
bit wider of audience. We are still hitting
a lot of students and also professional animators
that had been around for a while and maybe wanted to do some personal shots and were
looking for a new 3D asset, a new character to be
able to animate with. This is important to have these three things that you know, where am I pointing people to? Where am I going to be doing my proprietary
sole marketing at? And then where am
I going to also do some secondary marketing. Gumroad for us was a
perfect place to be able to market the full
functionality of our products. Gumroad is where
we're showcasing, look at what all our rig can do. Look what our character can do. Look at the cool high tech
specs of our character. Gumroad, digital marketplaces, that's a place for
you to really utilize marketing your asset in
terms of technical ability, that's a great thing to show
off all the features you can't really show in an
Instagram or LinkedIn post. Gumroad is also really great because once people have
bought your product, they're in your
system, they're in your kind of marketing
email campaign. You can message them
again with sales, deals, different assets, new assets that come out that
you're posting about. The first thing with Gumroad
that's really important is we have tech specs,
we can show that off, we can market that and
also the email database; and we're not going
to be able to get those things through
Instagram or LinkedIn. Some of the main
benefits of Instagram are targeted ads.
That's a big one. They're relatively cheap and depending on the size
of your audience, they can really grow your
audience, which is great. More followers, more
eyes on your products, your work, and also
just visibility. A lot of times you can end up on the Instagram Explore page
and if something goes viral, someone shares it
enough, it goes crazy. Instagram is also a great
place to be able to link, direct access, your
digital marketplace that you've listed
your assets to sell. It has a great feed
right into people, not just seeing your work, not just seeing your assets, but being able to
click directly and go right to the source
where they can purchase it. The two key benefits
of LinkedIn are; there's a lot of industry
professionals on LinkedIn and people that are trying to get jobs, a lot of students. There's a lot of people
that will appreciate the very specific tech
things that you have. Instagram is more about
looking pretty and then LinkedIn's more about
showing professional uses. LinkedIn is a great
place to say, "Hey, you can use this asset to be
able to further your career by putting this
in your demo reel or using this in
your next project." Always remember whenever you're making a post on LinkedIn, links can be hyperlinked. So you can actually
put in a link directly to the product
on your Gumroad, Sketchfab, TurboSquid,
whatever you end up choosing. So it's a great way to be able to promote your products,
promote the tech, professional aspect, but also link people directly to
where they can purchase it. I wonder, these were our three things that
we really wanted to prioritize when it came
to marketing our assets. Now I want you to
go to your journal and find the three things
that are going to be different and
specialized towards your case of making 3D assets. The most important
thing to remember is, it's not a guessing game
when it comes to marketing. You can be very
specific and there's lots of tools and
lots of resources that you can research to be able to find out
what's the best way to maximize your marketing
so your asset can be seen by as many
people as possible.
6. Final Thoughts: Congratulations,
you have made it to the end of this class.
We have covered a lot. We have explored all the
different market places. We have decided how we're
going to structure a business. We've decided what
we're going to sell, and we've decided how are we going to market these assets. Now you should have a
journal full of ideas and strategies of how to build
your own 3D asset business. I hope you're really inspired
after taking this class. I know it sounds
like a ton of work, but it's so exciting and it's such a ton of
fun to be able to see your creations
come to life and people use them in
their own projects. Please share in the
project gallery what your business plan is. I'd love to see what
you're working on. Thank you so much for
taking this class. Congratulations
on completing it, and I will see you
in my next class.
Madison Erwin, Animator
