Part 7: A Short Story About A Big Thing

This is the seveth post in a series about how The Willa Workshops on willawanders.com came to be.

Part 7

The Influence of Instagram

At this point in the story I want to back it up a bit, because there’s something important that I need to mention.

Instagram has been integral to the story of this business, the Willa Workshops.

How and why it got to be that way is the subject of this installment.

From the day my slime-famous daughter Maya told me to start an Instagram account for my art, I have been basically addicted to Instagram.

It started with me finding all sorts of art inspiration rabbit holes to capture my attention. I was able to use the photography skills that I had honed during that decade of being a food blogger to take nice photos of my own art and then post them on Insta. I found art classes that I wanted to take, art challenges that I committed to, and art memberships that I wanted to spend real money on.

I started making “online art friends” that supported and encouraged each other on these journeys with our creative selves, many of whom I am still online friends with and active supporters of today. (I think I take these online support relationship far more seriously than other folk. It’s a weird quirk of my personality.)

I put in the time on Instagram. I pounded that pavement day in and day out because it was truly fun in those days and I got out of it as much as I put into it. It wasn’t a chore. It was really magical.

I was drinking from the art inspiration fire hose I mentioned earlier.

And I wasn’t even involved in the art community on Instagram during the really good times. I missed the early days, the heyday. The time when art accounts easily grew and grew and grew. I only came on in 2017. I missed the entire space between 2011 and 2017 when Instagram was at it’s best. I entered when there was already a Facebook that owned Instagram and algorithm hell.

But I had something that no one else had: a relentless daughter named Maya.

At this time, Maya was running her slime business from our basement and she had quite an Instagram following. And Maya wanted another cat.

Why she needed another pet was beyond me. We already had plenty of pets. But if there is one thing that you should know about Maya, it is that Maya gets what Maya wants.

That slime business she started in our home? I had put my foot down and given her a HARD NO on that . . . do you see my point?

So Maya wants another cat and I half jokingly say to her, “FINE! You can get another cat if you get me 15,000 followers on Instagram!”

At the time, maybe I had a few hundred followers.

And BOOM. Maya tells her hundreds of thousands of followers that her mom says she can get another cat if enough of her followers go and follow her mom . . . and within a few days, I had 9,000 followers (never got to to that 15K I mentioned, but that ended up being irrelevant).

Maya got the cat. His name is Romeo. Romi for short.

I’m telling you all this because I do think that it is one of the most important things to know about this success story: influence matters. And I got it in a funky way. I didn’t earn it . . . at first.

But what I did next made all the difference.

I became inspired by it. I wanted to earn that follower count. So I continued to push myself artistically and learn everything I could. I made art everyday because I loved it. I posted photos every day because that became part of the fun.

Those 9,000 teen age followers that Maya got me? They were all replaced over time with “real” followers who loved my art and found what I was doing inspiring.

And my follower count grew and grew. And this pushed me to keep going and going.

It also set my entire account up for success because it appeared like something cool was happening on my account way before it really was. And that made other people want to follow along too.

We are influenced by the numbers that we see on a screen. If something has 5 likes we are far less likely to also give it a like than if it has 1,500 likes. It’s just how human beings are wired. We are all connected to some energy and the snowball effect is real.

Instagram has since become, let’s just say, problematic.

Instead of being “great for artists” it has become a source of angst and pain for artists. It’s almost impossible to make the kind of connections and traction onn IG now that were once farily easily possible. I think this is an unfortunate bi-product of capitalism.

It’s just almost impossible to gain any kind of real traction on Instagram anymore. But like I said, I need to mention this part of the story because it is so fundamental to why Willa Workshops became a success story. Instagram gave me a platform with which to launch my first online course and then, a short time later, an even greater achievement: Fodder School.

I pray every day that Instagram goes back to what it used to be like, but we cannot hold our breath. We need to create new communities and new worlds where people feel valued and relevant like they used to on Insta. It shouldn’t be this hard or feel this bad.

To be continued . . .

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Well, this story just goes on and on. Glad you’re still with me! Please share your thoughts in the comments below.