Starting a Business as an Artist

 

In this blog, I will take you through how I became an artist and started my business NEXXRT Studios.

My journey began with an unusual obsession with making new friends from a very young age. I made friends everywhere we moved—from Noakhali to Chandpur, and finally to Dhaka in 2014. Attending six different schools, I accumulated a lot of friends, some of whom are now my co-workers! In all my years of making friends and connections, I found my hidden talent of realizing one's true potential and how they could be managed to become the best of themselves. Despite having an excellent eye, I couldn't do anything about it at the time.

Fast forward to January 30th, 2023. I got a gift from my father, A really powerful computer which I insisted was necessary for my online classes. One day, a good friend of mine forced me into installing the 3D Software "Blender" and advised me to try giving digital art a go as I had decent hardware to support it. As usual, I forgot his advice the very next day and continued playing video games. Six months later, while in a competitive match of "Counter-Strike" he inquired if I ever gave his advice a try. Despite the obvious answer, I started to read the overwhelming manual that came with the software. After knowing what it fundamentally does, I immediately fell in love with it. Being able to create anything you can imagine felt like an infinite sandbox to play with. Being the sky was the limit, I started making stuff. Within four months of practice, I became very good at almost all the creative aspects of content creation such as Photography, Lighting, Cinematography, Storytelling, etc as well as 3D Modeling And texturing. I learned a few other software to better streamline the creation process. At the same time, I needed money to fuel my expensive hobby of building computers. Then I researched how to sell the skills I acquired over the past few months and discovered that I was heading towards the biggest entertainment industry in the world, video games. Which is basically an interactive 3D Creation. I already had a pretty efficient workflow so I started applying for contracts on Upwork and got a reply within a few hours. Started with hourly work for a company in the Netherlands. Then I started to promote my work on social media and got a few leads and jobs. I was paying taxes and making an outstanding amount of money but I knew it wasn't my final goal, That's when I first thought about opening my own business to sell the collective skill of a full team of artists. 

I gathered a few of my closest and most talented friends and pitched the idea of starting a new company. Initially hesitant to leave their freelancing work, they agreed after I suggested bringing their clients under our new company to offer a wider range of services. They reached out to their clients, and soon we set up our workspaces using online communication systems, bringing everything together under one virtual roof. In June 2024, four of us unofficially launched the company. Since I had zero knowledge about running a business, we appointed one of our senior friends as the Director, who organized the company into five departments, giving us control over the areas we were experts in. The amount of support we have received initially from our existing customers is massive, all thanks to our reputation and quality in our respective fields. As demand grew, so did our team. We currently have about 8 people in our small company and we are constantly hiring from our local talents. The company website and portfolio are still in the works and we are expected to launch officially in Q1 of 2025. 

Enough of the boring stuff, Let's finish with the numbers. For the first month, we took every job we got on the table and generated a total revenue of around USD 6000. Then we sat back and hired some helping hands and have been steadily maintaining a margin of USD 8,000. Of which, we all decided to invest a significant amount back in the company.