ARTERNAL Founder Sean Green: Solve for What Keeps People Up At Night

ARTERNAL CEO Sean Green has reimagined how art gallery owners operate, focusing less on processes and more on relationships. Images: Greyson Tarantino

The number one thing that keeps the art business awake at night is meeting new clients, which leads to driving the next art sale. It’s a relationships business and making those connections can’t be automated. But, as ARTERNAL CEO Sean Green has learned, just about everything else relating to their workflows can be.

So Green and his co-founders Steve Miller and Raymond Nguyen, have built ARTERNAL to remove the menial back-end work and give art dealers more time to nurture and strengthen their relationships. Though the back office space isn’t as glitzy and glamorous as the artwork, it is lucrative: There are 300,000 galleries and auction houses in the world and there are 300 international art fairs where gallery owners meet people and conduct business.

Here, Green—a new Trustee at the Orange County Museum of Art—discusses the problem he set out to solve, how a chance meeting with a gallery owner assistant was the key to customer adoption, and the best entrepreneurial lesson he learned from his mother.

Sean Green is freeing up art dealers from the menial work of their jobs.

How did ARTERNAL come to be?

In my research, I asked gallery owners how they organized all of their client contact information and what tools they used to store it. Two of the most common responses were their memory and a notebook. And then I would visit them in their galleries and I would see all of their Moleskines on their shelves—it was like a fire hazard. 

Some of the top dealers have a memory like an elephant. But your brain can only do so much. So I realized there was the opportunity to build them a client relationship management (CRM) tool integrated with a fresh take on inventory management automation to change and challenge how business gets done within the art world. 

How did they respond?

We designed a CRM and spent 10 to 12 months failing between 2015 and 2016. Gallery owners wouldn’t touch it. We needed to know why they weren’t engaging with it. 

We got to the point where I was sitting in an art gallery owner’s office in Chelsea, New York City, meeting with their assistant because the Sales Director had probably left to chase a sale. It turned out to be one of the most important meetings that we took and helped us to get to where we are today. Because that assistant was doing all the stuff that needed to automate and streamline communications. It was she who I needed to connect with, not the owners and directors. 

I looked at her desktop and it had cascading windows of boxes that she was typing into. I asked her what she was doing. She said writing personalized emails to their clients. Each had a similar copy, but there were different personalized anecdotes for each client, How is skiing in Aspen? Or, my cousin attended the same boarding school. It’s these little vivid scenes where you can’t mass email these things.

We realized that many art dealers were probably operating like this and we could help them optimize their entire workflow. The first tool we built was “bespoke email at scale”. You can send a personalized communication to your most valuable clients in preparation for a new exhibition or art fair, that feels genuine, but, with automation, now takes hours instead of days. 

So that was your way in? 

That was the catalyst that allowed them to adopt the platform and allowed us to grow to the product where we are today: CRM meets inventory management, improved sales workflows, and data and analytical tools to help you leverage information to drive business decisions. 

We're evolving into the first SaaS (Software as a Service), embedded FinTech solution in the art world. We are about to process the first bank wire as a tech startup in the art world. It’s a pretty big deal. 

Sean Green learned some of his biggest lessons about being an entrepreneur from his mother.

To get here, you had two pivots and three name changes. What have you learned as you zigged and zagged to get to the current version of ARTERNAL?

This space is incredibly relationship driven. There are only certain people who will play in it, and we had to learn how to engage with this specific group of people who buy and sell art. We have 100 auction houses and private dealers, as well as over 300 individual users on the platform.

The art dealers know a lot more about the space than you. How did you approach your conversations with them?

I spent a lot of time trying to understand what keeps art dealers up at night. Where was the friction? What parts of how they do business are they trying to remove? Sometimes when you’re so deep in something, it’s hard to have clarity. I came in with naive questions and a fresh set of eyes to pull apart what I saw as problems and design around them to create a new experience.

You’ve cited your mother as one of your entrepreneur role models. Tell us about her.

I was born in Jamaica and then we moved to Toronto. My mom babysat for a family at first, and they suggested she should try and start her own business. She ran a maid service and that family introduced her to other people in the area. My mom took it and ran with it. She put my sister and I through private school. She was the first entrepreneur I was ever around so I got to see that work ethic.

What have you learned from her?

One of the things she instilled within me is integrity. If you think about it as it relates to buildings and foundations, without structural integrity, a building fails. I think about that as we build our team today. Hire people with integrity, who understand that, if they carry their load, it makes everybody's load lighter.

ARTERNAL is part of the In/Visible Ventures portfolio of early stage startups and future forward entrepreneurs, which I invest in. Their aim is to improve outcomes, unlock creativity, and assist founders with the challenges of growing a company. If you’d like to read more from The Creative Factor—such as Morten Bonde’s story about reinventing himself as a LEGO Art Director while losing his sight or Edése Doret: Inside the Mind-Boggling World of Private Jet Design—sign up for our newsletter.