Sharing our experience as Indipendent creators
A few fellow vendors asked us how our experience as indie creators is going. Since it’s hard to find this kind of information online, we decided to share our experience here.
We’re more than happy to offer some first-hand impressions and hope they’ll be useful!
This is, of course, just one team’s experience: we’re two artists sharing the workload, and what has worked (and it’s working) for us may not work for everyone. Still, this is an in-depth, behind the scene look at our journey so far and we hope it offers food for thought.
Premise
We decided to start publishing more indiependently in June 2025 for several reasons, the main being the need to regain control over our products, earnings and release schedule.
Since the high season for Daz Studio / 3d content is Autumn / Winter, we planned our full fledged launch for that period. This gave us some time to plan and prepare.
We realized that our biggest challenge would be visibility: how to actually reach people and be seen.
We explored several possible venues and ultimately decided to publish in as many stores as made sense. Rather than expecting people to come to us, we chose to go where people already are.
Choosing where to publish
After evaluating the most popular 3D marketplaces (as we decided we didn’t want to spend time building and maintaining our own storefront) and settled on: 3DShards, Renderhub, Artstation and Flipped Normals as well as a Patreon page.
For more in-depth info about these platforms, you can check our Stores page.
Our main criteria when choosing where to publish were two:
- No excessive content restrictions. as we want the freedom to publish mature content (in our case, artistic nudity).
- No content exclusivity, since we wanted to be present accross different stores as well as on our own space (Patreon).
At the same time we revamped our own website, launched a newsletter and offered an exclusive newsletter freebie to get people involved and stay in direct contact with us.
We also created a Patreon-exclusive freebie for subscribers. Our Patreon is 100% free to join and functions through individual post sales.
To increase visibility, we revived our DeviantArt account and started posting regularly again, This includes artworks, promotional images as well as blog entries to share the news. We rejoined the community in full force. To be honest it’s good to see the 3d online community still well and active on DeviantArt and we’re glad to be back!
We also regularly post on Renderhub’s gallery and on Daz3d’s gallery, when content fits their restrictions.
All of this, of course, was quite a workload, but we planned priorities and just tackled one thing at a time.
100% would do it again!
The Verdict
After a few months we can say: we’re happy.
Our stress have dropped to almost zero—while the good kind of stress, the kind that comes from wanting to create cool things, is back. We’re engaged and energized in our work at levels we hadn’t reached in years.
We are more productive and everything just keeps rolling. It feels great.
When it comes to store sales and overall success, RenderHub and 3DShards are our top picks.
3DShards
3DShards offers product testing, which is both a huge help and an invaluable resource—especially when you’re working independently, regardless of experience level (we have 20+ years). It also helps build trust with customers who may be hesitant to purchase from smaller outlets, inspiring confidence and transparency.
The store itself is fully fledged and it’s easy to setup products, bundles, and sales. Admins are just a message away. It’s run by committed, passionate creators, and it’s a friendly and welcoming community for vendors. They run contests and freebie events, and are a very productive group.
RenderHub
RenderHub is quite popular and benefits from steady traffic. The store is generally easy to manage, though it feels a bit clunky in certain areas—for example, sales can’t be stopped once they’re live, and they’re limited to a maximum of 10 days. That said, support has been responsive and helpful, often explaining limitations and offering workarounds.
RenderHub also features a popular gallery that likely helps drive traffic, and you can link your images directly to the products used in your artwork. They also run engaging contests throughout the year.
RenderHub is very lightly moderated and some customers may be put off by the IP-infringing content on the platform, so it’s important to actively build and maintain a good and trustworthy reputation.
Patreon
Patreon generates fewer sales for us, but we still feel it’s a good platform to have as an alternative to our own storefront. While it’s not as impactful sales-wise as the other sites, it helps grows our audience and reach.
Patreon offers very high royalties compared to most marketplaces, and it’s a widely used platform, meaning many users are already following other creators there.
Fun fact: although Patreon allows mature content, not all mature-flagged creators can access the store posts feature. We had to switch to a non-mature content account to get started.
Overall, Patreon was the hardest platform to understand and adapt to in terms of posting content, but we’re finally settled in.
Flipped Normals
FlippedNormals has lower sales, but the store is extremely easy to manage, so we’re sticking with it for now. We also appreciate the high royalty rates and the curated nature of the platform—vendors must be approved, which helps maintain a certain level of quality.
Artstation is not worth the time and we stopped publishing after the first release.
ArtStation is simply not worth the time for us, and we stopped publishing after our first release.
Just a small rant: how can a platform backed by a giant like Epic be this bad? Even as a buyer, the store lacks basic features. As a seller, setting up sales requires workarounds, and access to marketing tools is locked behind an ArtStation Pro subscription—which isn’t cheap. Worse still, using those marketing tools automatically opts you into ArtStation-run store-wide sales.
It’s frustrating, and honestly a shame. When ArtStation first launched, it was revolutionary—finally offering professional creators a dedicated marketplace and it was a big step forward compared to Gumroad and the few alternatives available at the time.
Art and visibility
We feel that part of our success as creators comes from using Daz Studio for our own enjoyment and personal art, and then pouring that hands-on experience directly into our products.
Publishing our art more frequently—beyond promotional images—had been one of our goals for many years. We struggled with this for a long time, never quite able to find the time, but we’ve finally managed to get back on track. Another major perk of going indie for us.
When it comes to art galleries, DeviantArt has the largest audience and offers the strongest community tools and interaction. That said, it’s also worth posting on Renderhub and on Daz3d whenever possible (no nudity) to maintain visibility with those audiences. Daz3D, in particular, can be very important for reaching users who may not visit other platforms at all—although it’s hard to gauge how many exclusive buyers there also browse the gallery.
We’re still maintaining an up-to-date gallery and portfolio on ArtStation, as it was our main website for several years and we feel it’s still a solid, professional profile worth keeping current.
We also run an active Instagram, which is a great tool for previews and news posts—and, once again, it’s a place where people already are. We’re still figuring out how to grow the account, but it has a decent reach and, more importantly, it’s reaching the right people.
DeviantArt pleasantly surprised us. After practically abandoning it a few years back, when we revived our account we found a large and engaged community. We reconnected with old friends and quickly made new acquaintances. With all its highs and lows, it’s been a stimulating experience and far better than we expected.
Expectations and Reality
When we decided to go indie, we knew the first few months would be about laying foundations. We honestly did not expect much early on and were prepared to push through for at least a few month—six or even longer—before seeing any meaningful results..
We were happily surprised.
Our December turned out to be a solid month, and with only two sets of products, it performed better than we anticipated.
While RenderHub and 3DShards still take a significant cut of the profits (45% and 40% respectively), those percentages apply to prices we set, with discounts we control. That alone makes a huge difference when it comes to final numbers.
We also realized that while we had been staying in a sort of cocoon, the broader 3D world had expanded and moved forward on its own. Stepping back into it has been refreshing. There are people looking for unique, high-quality content—and who are happy to support creators directly.
Going indie was a big decision, and it required a lot of work (and the work isn’t done yet). Still, all of that effort has gone into building our own identity and audience, and that makes it worth the time we’ve invested.
Of course, every creator’s situation is different, and personal circumstances need to be taken into account. For us, we were at a crossroads: either find another way to offer our content, or step away from this market entirely. Selling exclusively through Daz3d was no longer sustainable, both financially and creatively
Let’s get to the core
If we went back in time we’d probably we’d probably make the same choices. We’re satisfied with this setup and with the foundation it’s created for our future.
That said, if we needed to be as focused and efficient as possible we’d say: let’s publish on 3DShards and RenderHub and post our images on DeviantArt, RenderHub and the Daz3d galleries to spread the word. That’s the core—the minimum setup you really need to make the indie adventure work.
Workload
Of course, our workload increased during these first few months, but at the same time, it became far less stressful.
And stress spoils everything..
We no longer had to despair if something took a little longer to complete or if we decided to add an extra feature. A delay simply meant releasing a few days later, not losing an entire month of income.
We also didn’t have to fine-tune or redo our images just because they didn’t match someone else’s taste.
We feel back in control of our work and our future, and we can manage our time more freely and happily. We can take the time to create the products we want to make, even if that means they take a bit longer. We’ve stopped rushing and we’ve stopped worrying.
We also started offering bundles, something we had avoided in the past because it wasn’t a sustainable model for us. Now that we have full control over pricing, bundles are viable and desirable.
It’s also worth saying how much it helped to be a team of two. While one of us focused on learning and handling practical matters—building and hosting a website, registering on different storefronts, and managing the required business information—the other could stay focused on creating and finalizing products for the launch of our indie journey. That balance made the uncertainty of a new venture easier to manage.
Challenges
The biggest challenge for us, personally, is reaching as many Daz Studio users as possible.
We’ve realized that so far we’ve connected with only a fraction of that audience, and even among users who already love our products, many are just now discovering that we’ve started publishing independently.
That’s something we need to work on, and for the time being our strategy is to keep publishing on Daz3D to maintain visibility.
The second part of our strategy is product-focused: offering compelling freebies and unique products—things that users will be curious about and that encourgage them to go looking for more. We can showcase these to some extent in our Daz promos, but we’re especially hoping they’ll be used and shared by users in their own renders, helping spread the word through art.
We have planned a couple of very unique releases that should pique people’s interest and, ideally, drive more users to our indie stores.
Continuing to publish on Daz3d is another challenge.
Planning Daz releases has become increasingly difficult, both because we now prioritize our main releases, and because we’ve never been comfortable with long, delayed publishing timelines.
Right now, we can work on sneak peeks and marketing in parallel with the final stages of product development. That simply isn’t possible when a product is scheduled to release in a month—or 40 days. That kind of delayed frame of mind clashes with how we work.
We thrive on momentum: the excitement of finishing a product, adding the final touches, and immediately rolling into promo images, previews, and announcements.
After a week in a release queue, that energy starts to fade; after a month, we barely remember what we uploaded.
Finding time for everything is an ongoing challenge. While product creation remains the core of our workdays, many other tasks demand attention: promotional posts, website maintenance and expansion, creating freebies (something we had stopped doing and are genuinely happy to be doing again), writing blog posts, and—soon—producing useful YouTube videos, which we see as another strong way to drive traffic to our work.
We’ve considered hiring a virtual assistant, but ultimately most of what we do requires our direct, personal input—including product support—so for now, we just try and make the time for everything.
A Message of Encouragement
This message is for our fellow creators and vendors: be proud of yourselves—and believe in yourselves.
You, we, all of us, are the reason behind our own success.
Of course, there are people to thank along the way—supportive family members and friends—but beyond that, success is built on hard work and decision-making. Each of us learned the skills, chose to apply them, decided what to create, and took the time to make our work usable by hundreds of other people.
A storefront creates opportunity, yes—but it’s how you seize and use that opportunity that truly matters. A chisel and a rasp didn’t sculpt David on their own, to use a very humble comparison. 🙂
You have the skill, the talent, and the experience. And you know you can do it again—because you still have the most important tools you need: yourself. Focus on what made you succeed in the first place—your commitment, your perseverance, and your willpower.
We wish there was a hub for all Daz Studio indie creators
As mentioned earlier, reaching the full Daz Studio user base is challenging. While DeviantArt and RenderHub do a good job overall, we often wish there were a centralized hub—perhaps a dedicated subreddit or an Instagram repost account—for indie publishers. Right now, there’s no single place where users can discover all indie creators, browse their various stores, or even read a short biography about who they are.
Some creators sell exclusively through their own websites, others combine personal stores with platforms like RenderHub, FlippedNormals, and/or 3DShards, and some even publish under different names on Daz3D versus other marketplaces.
Creating a shared space to gather all indie creators is something we’d genuinely love to do ourselves, but at the moment, we simply don’t have the time to take on a project of that type. Perhaps in the near future!
That’s all for now—but if you have any questions that weren’t answered in this post, feel free to get in touch.
~Nurture Your Mind
Aeon Soul
~* Nurture Your Mind *~
Some of my earliest content was made by you for V3 as a freebie. It’s nice to hear you’re creating freebies again and more to the point enjoying the journey of creation again.Your post is inspiring.
I’m happy to read that! To be honest, at the time, that was the best way to both test the waters and get to be known.
Once we realized people were enjoying our freebie, we thought that perhaps this could become a job and tried launching something in the store.
Freebies are such a precious resource in so many ways.
New users can approach the hobby without having to spend money immediately.
People who are not familiar with our work can experience it first hand.
We can create something simple and quick that’s too small or limited to be a product and share it with those that enjoy what we do!
This was very inspiring to read. You wrote down a lot of hard but honest truths that many creators feel but rarely say out loud.
I really hope many vendors will read this and take strength and confidence from it. It would be great if more creators followed your example — it would be good for all of us, and for the community as a whole.
When we created 3DShards, our goal was exactly this: to build a curated, quality-focused place that represents both vendors and customers in a fair and respectful way. Reading posts like this confirms that we’re all moving in the right direction together.
It’s fair to offer and demand respect on both sides: customers deserves their money’s worth. Creator’s deserve to be paid for their work.
I do hope vendors are encourages to look around and find a better way, if the one they are following is not working out. We have already lost a lot of talent, in the sense that they stopped creating, because the market conditions weren’t good enough. When that happens we have to take matters into our own hands, or a lot of creators will just stop.
We aren’t going to build anything if we bury our heads in the send, the hard truths need to be confronted and we need to create a better way going forward.
I loved to read this post. You’re my heroes. So encouraging!
Keep doing what you do because you’re absolutely an Unicorn. Unique.
You are always too kind Fabi, but it’s much appreciated!
We are all unicorns, that’s the beauty or artists and creatives, there’s no two alike and each one contributes their own way.
And this niche world is full of artists, both creators and users, there’s so many, beautiful unicorns :D.