How To Build An Audio Career 100% Online From Anywhere In The World: With Austin Hull

This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode 59. I went from only making $800 and my biggest month as a hobbyist to my first month full time. I made like $3,500 bucks. So let me see if I can sum up your story here. Fulltime student, recently married, dabbling in music launch facebook group. Facebook group explodes all the facebook people hire you. You are full time and growing like crazy. Honestly. That's the whole story

studio podcast, the number one resource for running a profitable home recording studio. Now your host. Welcome back to another episode, so to

the six figure home studio podcast. I am your host Brian Hood and I'm here with my fiercely handsome, rugged caveman cohost, Chris Graham. Higher Dune today. Chris, I'm great man. How the heck are you? I'm doing awesome man. It's the day after Christmas here and I couldn't be more excited to have an episode that comes out of the day after Christmas. We had actually had to push this back because usually episodes coming on Tuesdays. Christmas is on a Tuesday today, so we said, and also new years is on a Tuesday, so we said we're pushing back the podcast one day for Wednesday for two weeks, so the 26th and then next week we'll come out the day after New Year's. That way people can get over their hangovers or whatever they have from new years and then get over their sugar. Highs from their Christmas vacations, sugar, sugar. Speaking of which, I'm going to have eight cakes I my wedding.

Oh yeah. Anyways, today's episode is an interesting one. This is something that we found in our facebook community, our very own six figure homes, video facebook community. I made a post on there about a month and a half ago asking the community if anyone had gotten their career started and was making a fulltime living strictly online, no local work, no starting their careers out locally and then going online and for anyone who doesn't really know my story and Chris's story, I started on my workout in North Alabama. I did all local and regional work than I did national work. Then I did international work and then I started to just only doing national international work and when I moved to mixing and mastering and Chris started local and then he pivoted to doing national international work with his work, but we both started locally and I was really. I still am under the impression that to give yourself the best shot you need to start local, then go regional, then go national, didn't go international in that order.

If you try to skip, it's going to make things more difficult. But our guest today, Austin has found a way to make it work. He is more than full time now. He's worked with, I want to say 300 clients in the last year or so, and these are all stemming from leads that he found online through one resource and let's clarify here. Not just one resource, but an unpaid resource. He's not paying for advertising. Oh yeah, that's true. And so I think that this interview is going to be an eyeopener for a lot of our community, and for those of you who are in maybe a city that doesn't really lend itself well to local and regional work, maybe you are in just a terrible city or terrible country

or somewhere that's just too far off the beaten path to get local clients. This is the episode for you. I want to pitch this about Austin. This is going to be a really rad episode and the thing that you guys need to keep in mind is that Austin could have lived in Antarctica with a satellite Internet connection and could still be full time and could have built his career from nothing up to full time with nothing but an internet connection in the middle of freaking nowhere. So yeah, this episode is going to be awesome. You guys are gonna. Love this. Austin is a force of nature and very impressive. We hope you guys enjoy it. So Austin, welcome to the podcast. So glad to have you on here, man. I think the best place to start is you kind of give us a background on your story, just give us how you got started, what you do and all that fun stuff.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, first off, you know, of course. Thank you for having me. Big Fan of the show. Been following it for awhile. Been following both of you guys personally for awhile, even outside of the show, but just a little bit about me. My Name's Austin Hall. I am 23 years old. I currently live in Orlando, Florida and I actually got into production when I was in high school. I was probably like 17, started getting really serious into it when I was 18. I started off in a metal like most people probably listening to the show actually, so I was in a local metal band and we were going and recording and there just wasn't a lot of people around us that either did really good work or just really honestly did work at all. So we would go to the same guy and we would get some demos done and they were fine.

Like we would release them every now and then, but it just got to be really, really expensive for, you know, a handful of 16, 17 year old kids. So we were just trying to save up money to go to like a big studio and do a big album. So I was like, you know what, let me kind of figure out how to record some demos at home just so if we go somewhere, if we book out, you know, a week with joey or weak with camera a week with you, you were actually one of our prospects, Brian. We were like, we want to have a bunch of stuff together to kind of have some ideas that way we go in prepared and we don't really want to pay twice for the same songs. And so I just got mixed craft which was I got like a free demo of it and then paid like the $60 for mixcraft.

And then I had this interface that I had gotten for Christmas when I was like 14 or 15 years old. It was like an old task amateur face that had like the Mike Bundle and the headphone bundle and it was absolute garbage and I just kind of started pulling all nighters with my band mates and when my friends at like 17 years old and we would literally take a line out from like the line six amp, we would take like an ox cable from the line out into the line end of our computer microphone and like we would just do everything we could with like one shot five samples and everything. And so it just kind of all started there. And I especially me, I fell in love with the process of just creating. I knew that most of the stuff I was doing at the time wasn't going to be able to be put out or definitely wasn't even, you know, quality.

But I just kind of fell in love with the actual process of writing and being able to write and kind of build on my own time. Because for me I had always needed bandmates. They kind of hear the song fully play out, but I was kind of capable of playing guitar. I played drums when I was younger. I was the singer of the band, so I was kind of able to put together a full record so once I kind of figured out the of a dot I was really able to like see the visions of the song myself. So I just worked on some demos for about a year with my band and then it came time to like actually move off and go to college. So I ended up leaving the band. No hard feelings. It was like a really, really clean split. Everybody kind of had to go their separate ways and once I got to college I was just still kind of rocking with a really, really basic setup.

I had like the pod farm little pod system. Is it the. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then I just had some samples that I bought here and there and I was still on mixcraft at the time and so I started getting better and better and better and better. And at the time I was just using a lot of, like the presets that everybody was selling. It was like circa 2012, 2013. So this was like metal, preset central, you know, everybody was using the same stuff. So it was starting to get okay. And Pensacola bands, like I said, didn't really have anybody close. It could do solid stuff, especially for like an affordable rate. So they all started kind of getting into demoing and after awhile they were like, you know what we're demoing at home and your stuff is just a bit better. So how about we pay you to just mix it and finalize it and maybe throw on your own guitar tone.

So I started doing that just like probably every metal producer. And then I did that for about a year, just taking like one project a month Kinda here. And they're just doing it for friends bands because I was long distance at this point. Never recorded anybody in person besides myself. And then after about a year of doing that in college, I was just got a little burnt out of metal. I had been doing it for four or five years at that point it was kind of the only thing I had done and I loved tons and tons of music outside of that genre. So I was like, well let me start playing around with like electronic music and like especially pop and R and b stuff. Justin Bieber was dropping some albums at the time that we're just like the fire collabs between like a pop and RNB mashed up.

And I was like, this is exactly what I want to do. So I just started kind of playing around with that and I wasn't really looking to like do it for a living or have clients or really anything like that. But I was like I'll just make a song for myself and if that turns out good, I'll release it. So I just kind of made it my spare time. The first song that I ever released as a producer, like a pop producer or whatever, and it was just called focus and I released it myself. And actually at the same time I was working at a bookstore to just kind of like pay my way through college and while I was working at the bookstore, we had a new guy start. His name was Grayson. He ended up becoming my best friend. We lived together for a little while.

I've recorded tons and tons of stuff for him now. But when he started he didn't really have any kind of career in music and he was really just trying to like get into it and I was trying to get into it. So I was like, look, I'll record you for free. You can put it out if you want. You don't have to put it out. It doesn't really bother me any way. I just need somebody to record it besides myself. And so right around the time of me doing my stuff and me doing his stuff, I was just getting a little frustrated because coming from the metal background, there was so many communities that we could be in. You know, there were the groups, there were the forums on gear, sluts, all of those places that were youtube channels. Everybody was starting to have like their instructional stuff come out.

I was like, this is amazing, but none of this really pertains to me anymore. And it was a little frustrating because every time I would look up something for pop it was just like the cheesiest most generic, like 90 sounding Max Martin pop stuff. It was just so dated and it was just. I was not a fan of it at all, so I was like, there's not really anybody to learn from, so I like maybe I'll just make my own group and just invite some people from the middle group that I know we're kind of interested and we can at least get some discussions going and kind of share educational references and sources and stuff like that. So I made the group and for a couple months there was probably only a couple hundred of us in there and we would just shared demos back and forth, share blog posts, stuff like that.

Nothing crazy. In the meantime, I was working on stuff for myself and stuff for Grayson and as the group started growing I would just post the demos that I was working on that nobody hired me to do. I was just making them for fun and the more I started posting the stuff that I was working on, people would come into the group and the more people that would come into the group while I was working on stuff, they would start offering to pay me either to mix or to write or to produce or anything. So all of these things were kind of like brewing at the same time. It's Kinda like how a tornado forms and you've got like a wind coming from one direction and a wind coming from the other direction. So I had me working on content and then people funneling into the group and they kind of just met and started circling after a little while.

And so it honestly grew super, super organically. The group ended up being my biggest kind of stronghold in terms of going full time. So as I was kind of working with grace and I'm working with a couple of artists here and there, I wasn't really making tons of money from it. I was in college, I was on scholarships and I had a full time job. So music was really unlike the back burner for me. It was Kinda just like and when you can, if you can't, not a big deal. I was just doing it for fun and just the more and more people started paying me and just offering to collab and stuff like that. And finally I was like, you know what, like I work at a bookstore, I'm not making that much money. I mostly live off of my scholarships. My wife had scholarship, she was working full time and I kinda just sat down with her one night and a local studio kind of offered me to just come and basically work for them and they paid very, very little bit.

I was like, can we afford to do this? And she's like, yeah, give it a shot for a month. So I went and worked with them for a month, got paid, barely any money, but it was kind of a cool learning experience to just see what running a full time music business kind of works like. And so I was like, fine, I think that I can do it. So I left there after that month and I had been out of barns for about a month and April 20th of 2016 was kind of like when I was for sure, like I'm doing this myself going forward. So I was like I only need to make $1,300 this month because that's all I would have made a barnes and at this point I'd probably made 800 bucks in one month from two mixes and like a production. So I was like okay, I've got some clients that I can dip into, just message them, see if anybody needs help, get a bunch of content going on the group and maybe I'll just pull some eyes.

So my first month I did that. And then also that's where Daniel gromit, who's my current business partner and make pop music and ftme kind of reached out to me because he saw the group and he saw what I was doing and he's from Nashville and he's kind of got a background in like the online music stuff. Yeah, I know Danny, I didn't know you were associated with him. Yeah. So Daniel is actually the co owner of all of the businesses that we have. So he kind of just reached out to me and he was like, Yo, I see the path you're going down and I don't think you realize what a big commodity the group is because at this point we were probably like 2000 members. But it was really active at the time. So I was like, uh, yeah dude, like it's just a facebook group at school.

Like I tried to put content up there when I can and he was like, I saw your posts that you're wanting to go full time and I have some tips for maybe creating like secondary income for you if you'd be down to here. So I booked a call with him, he started telling me about like selling sample packs and stuff like that. So I was like, you know what, I'll make a sample pack, sold the sample bag my first month of being full time and that did actually really, really well in the group. So I had like a couple months of just being full time in the group, kind of like Cherry picking stuff as I wanted it here and there. And finally Dan kind of reached out to me and he was like, Hey, would you be down to kind of merge all of our companies together and really work on like make pop music as a brand because at this time it wasn't branded, it was just a facebook group.

It was just, you know, pop producers and songwriters. He was like, we can brand it and we'll keep it to where it's mostly focused on other people, like get still other people's conversations. It's not going to be like you're a group or my group or accompany group or anything like that. But we can at least start like passively working on a brand. So like we'll get some brand recognition and I was like sure, like whatever. At this point I was like I have nothing to lose. He's got a couple companies he's offering me a stake in and at this point it's just a facebook group that I haven't monetized and I'm not really utilizing. I was like a 20 year old kid. I had no idea what I was doing. It was just kind of like an accident that I stumbled upon. So then honestly like as soon as he joined, we really started like doubling down on content, just kind of figured out like an upload schedule for content on there.

And once we started uploading everyday for a couple of months, the group started growing and growing and growing. And so the last benchmark that I kind of remember because somebody just posted on the group last week, his last week they posted a throwback from 2017 the same day. So it was like a year and a week ago and the group is at 5,000 members today. The group is at 17,400 and we're at an active rate of like, I want to say like 74, 75 percent in there. There's like 12,000 active members at any given time. So yeah, it's crazy. And I think that the biggest thing is that like we've never really tried to run the facebook group, like a business group. Like you know, we see Joey Sturgis run his group and it does insanely well because he has all of his projects. We see you run the six figure homes studio group.

It does well because people already know you at the point that I made the group and even at this point pop is so big. I'm still kind of a nobody. So like it's much better if I brand it. So everybody else is kind of getting stuff out of it and then I can just kind of like passively sift myself into there and kind of become the authority figures. So we've just been able to kind of maneuver that and make the group for the people and we're starting to, you know, have some products where if people want to support, they can support. If people want to check out more stuff, more paid content, they can do that. But honestly just like passively building that group and then just posting and posting and posting and their engine, just like word of mouth. I just tried to do good work with as many people as I possibly can.

I try to keep my rates affordable but also fair to me and it's just been kind of like a concoction that I never really planned from the start, but I've kind of just paid attention to as it happened and I kind of take it one step at a time and just make sure to analyze it as much as I possibly can because it's really easy to try to predict the future and something not happen. And then all of that time planning it just kind of crumbles and is also really easy to get. So stuck in your own wave that you're not really paying attention to what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong, and then you either fizzle out or you just completely pop and burnout. So it's been a lot of trial and error. It's still a relatively new group. I'm still a relatively new producer, have been full time now for about two and a half years and I've been producing now for about four and a half years, so I have no complaints.

We're just trying to build it. I'm trying to build my own brand, build a group, build my credits, just everything as fast as I can, but that's kind of where we're at now. So I think for a lot of people that listen to the podcast that are trying to go full time in audio, there story is totally the opposite of yours. It starts like yours, but if I'm hearing you correctly, what happened was you had a job, you started dabbling, you wanted to go full time, but instead of you trying to convince people to hire you, people tried to convince you to let them hire you. Exactly. Even at the time where I didn't have many clients, I had to be selective with who I worked with because as a full time college student, my time was valuable. My time was more valuable to me at the time than money.

Like I was a full time college student taking five classes. I worked a full time job at barnes and noble when I was still doing this just for a side money and then I also had a wife who was taking five classes and working full time and a retail job. So anytime that she was home I really wanted to spend with my wife. I mean that was 18 years old. I had just gotten married. I didn't want to piss away my home life within the first year and then anytime that she was at work that I was at home alone, I honestly just worked on music. I'll just sit on the couch. I had like no setup. I was just working on a old windows laptop. I literally worked on mixcraft until almost until I went full time. Like even my first handful of pop albums was made on mixcraft.

Dude, that's awesome. I switched to Cubase I think in February of 2016 and then I went full time in May of 2016. That's awesome. So let me see if I can sum up your story here. So fulltime student recently married like just recently super young, married, dabbling in music, launched facebook group. Facebook group explodes all the facebook people hire you. You are full time and growing like crazy. Honestly, that's the whole story. That's nuts. I haven't on my website and I have a whole video on make pot because I feel like people don't really believe me it is. It's crazy because I had somebody the other day I had a talk with them actually after I had to talk with you and kind of told my story and they were like, yeah, I checked your website and I watched the video but I wanted to hear from you just to make sure that they all seem consistent because it's weird to hear that.

Like that's really all it took and I was like, I think that the thing is like I see it a lot in the group is everybody tries to over analyze how to go full time and they try to have all these plans and plans are really, really nice and I think it does take planning and I think you need to know what you're doing on, you know, in terms of business and finances and scheduling and stuff like that. And in terms of just pure production. But I think that so many people want to go full time before they actually have a realistic idea of what it takes. They'll get one client and then we'll be like, cool, I can go full time. I probably had 10 or 15 clients that I worked with. I wouldn't say regularly but they would sprinkle in every couple months up kind of like on a cycle.

So I mean I was still making, you know, at least 500 to $800 a month just on side hustle. But I knew that as soon as I went full time and I was able to promote myself in the group and promote content and just kind of get my name out there, it would explode. I went from only making $800 and my biggest month as a hobbyist to my first month, full time. I made like $3,500 bucks in my first month. And to me that was unreal. Like that was unheard of money for a 20 year old kid that had just worked retail jobs and been a server before that. So it's crazy. This reminds me about our episode when we interviewed Graham Cochran, also Florida guy. He said something that I think blew. They blew my mind for sure. He said with an audience, anything is possible. Yeah. And that's really your story. You build an audience and you were able to turn that into a full time career. How many clients would you say you've worked with in the last year? Probably about $300. And what percentage of that has come from that facebook group directly from it or at least tie to the facebook group at all, tied to it in some way that there is some sort of 100 percent. Gees, I have not worked with a single client outside of it.

Yeah. I want to actually unpack some stuff here because you've just talked a lot in there. So many things that people are going to just breeze by if I don't unpack this. Yeah, for sure. Because immediately here's people's thoughts will, I don't have a group to to pull out those clients from. So I want to ask you a couple of things. First and foremost, you made a really good point and you say people underestimate how much work is going to take to go full time. They get one paid project and all of a sudden they think they can quit and they can't. And that leads to a lot of frustration for a lot of different people because they don't understand something called deal flow. They don't understand where these projects are going to come from the top of the funnel. Where is all this going to come from and your business, your top of funnel is your facebook group that you created, you facilitated the growth of, but now it actually let me go back.

You scratch your own itch to create that. You weren't just creating it with the grand aspirations of one day going full time and to Leech from it. You were taking your time and your effort to build a group to add value to the community because people, if you're not in metal or hardcore or some sort of heavy music, you don't understand the scene the way Austin and I do. It's a very tight knit community and all of the communities around metal, all the people that I see in that. It's just like this one common thing and I remember on tour like we used to go to hot topic. We'd stopped at the mall and we'd always go to hot topic because that's where all the other like metal kids hung out and if you had someone in black clothes you would all go talk to them because you were all the same. It's just this weird community and you just didn't see that in the pop community. So you've started a group called make pop music and was it called that the beginning?

Like I said, it was completely unbranded at the beginning it was just called like pop producers and songwriters. It didn't become make pop until Daniel stepped in.

Okay. But you scratched your own itch to kind of recreate that sense of community amongst pop producers and now this group is blown up to 17,000 people. So my question to you now is how do you actually go through the process of taking a community you built and turning it into paid work in pop music?

So I think a lot of the paid work that I get from the community just comes from not trying to flex my name so hard that I honestly like annoy the shit out of everybody that's in it because there are so many groups where they focus on somebody who honestly they could even do good work and they could even be a cool person, but they don't have any big credits. You know? That's the thing with the metal community that I was of talking to Chris off camera the other day and we were talking about how in the metal community there's a top 20 guys and everybody knows them and in the pop community, Yup. It's like that, but the top 20 guys are almost untouchable. You know, it's your Max Martin and Benny Blanco is, it's your [inaudible]. It's people like that who you'll never talk to you, you'll never have a relationship with.

You'll never understand. And there wasn't really that underground poc community. And so to be honest too, I was lonely. Like in college I had my wife, but when she wasn't there, like I had no friends here so I was like I'll just make the community to just have the community for friendship. And I think that people started seeing that so cool. And after a little while of just posting my stuff and kind of letting my work speak for itself, I'd never really asked for clients on there at all. I didn't promote myself. Even today, like if I'm kind of slow for the weekend, I want to book a project, I'll literally just take a cell phone video of my screen, be like, Oh, here's what I'm working on today for x, y, z comment, what you're all working on so that way I get to talk about myself, but then I'm giving other people an opportunity to talk about their self so that way people don't get annoying.

Like Austin's always talking about what he's doing, blah, blah blah, but when I post that I'm almost always going to get an handful of messages in my inbox of people offering to work with me and to pay me and it's just. I think it was kind of a mix of just creating such a chill environment in the group and then also just letting my work speak for itself instead of trying to just sell myself. It was a lot easier for me to sell the group instead of sell myself because the group had value and at the time I only had value to a really, really small amount of people. Say that again. That's an amazing take them to the thing about selling yourself or selling the group. Yeah, so at first I was a known name. I. It was hard for me to sell myself except for you know, maybe a handful of independent artists.

It needed me and my specific expertise. It's really easy for me to sell a group where there's a community of clients to pick from, of producers to work with, of artists to check out of label heads, to interact with. It's so easy for me to sell that and for me to promote that and for me to just kind of honestly get that atmosphere going where people want to join. Like there's so many people in the group that honestly it's probably never even opened a door and then there's also so many people in the group who are probably easily making over six figures a year and then we've even got like our handful of like a and rs in there. They kind of stay under the radar. We've got big writers and there the stay under the radar and if it was just a group based around me and my experiences, I don't think that they would all be there because there's going to be a group of people who think that what I have is unattainable and they'll never get that and so it's just a bummer to them and then there's a whole group of people that think that I'm just a kid who has no idea what he's doing and would not care.

So if I just make it a community where everybody gets to share their experiences, it's so much easier for me to kind of invite that. Instead of just being like, Hey, let's come talk about me and focus on me. That's amazing. So let me kind of break this down in Lord of the ring terms nerd. Sorry guys. Oh God. Lord of the rings had been about Gandalf going around and saying, guys follow me. I'm gonna. Take the ring to more door and you can sort of be there and help. That would be a terrible movie. But instead, gandalf brought the team around himself and he assisted. He helped the other people be the heroes in the story. I don't know if you realize how good you are at this. Thank you. But you have Gandalf, this sucker. Thank you. I think that's where it all kind of ties back into just like genuine reasoning.

Like I literally did not make this group. I never expected to get a single pay client from the group at ever. It was never about that. And of course now you know, I'm not going to lie. I'm not going to sit here and act like I'm some like Messiah. Of course now it is about the money and I know that I can make the money from the group and I know that I'm comfortable. But I know that I can also do that without stepping on other people's toes. We have so many people on there get projects and you know, it's not like me and Dan have kind of set it up where were like, hey, only the admins can like pull clients here. Only the admins can post what they're working on. And it's a really, really fine line to where we stop everybody from spamming, but we still have to allow other people to share what they're doing.

Otherwise we're hypocrites. Yeah. So like we kind of always towed that line and I think that that's why people appreciate it as I actually know of a handful of people that weren't really empowered before they got into the group and they're actually full time now. So it's created a full time income, four handfuls of people and it's made a supplemental income for so, so, so many people. And because it was never really about me or about Dan or about any of the admins are mods. It's always just been about like let's get a community going and there's so many things we want to do in the future where we make, you know, maybe like a whole different network for people to connect with off of facebook that we can kind of focus on. But for right now, the facebook group is a lot of effort to run and I think that I owe it to myself and to everybody else in there to just keep the value up as much as we possibly can.

Question, have you read the book, the go giver? I have not. You don't need to read it, but everybody else should read that book. You're living it. Thank you. That is Super Rad. I have a question. You mentioned a pivotal point in the community's growth being when you finally said, okay, we're going to actually buckle down and produce content for this. We're going to do it every single day. Talk about what that looked like. What did that entail? What sort of content? What were you actually putting into this in order to grow the community to where it's at? Yeah, it's a super good question because I see a lot of people in the community try to build their own communities and it kind of fizzles out and it stays at like 100 members forever. So for us, we were kind of casually growing because I think we were early in the pop community of doing this.

So we had that initial organic growth that was pretty easy for us to be completely honest. But when it really started changing was when we started releasing sample packs pretty regularly. And then on top of that we had daily content for several months and what we would do, we had an upload schedule and we made it public and we kind of shied away from it after a little while just because it got so big and so overwhelming. But we were doing. I'll try to remember exactly what everyday was. But like Monday was like mixed grip Monday where we would start a thread and you can post your mix and I would go live for hour and I would create them or whatever. Tuesday was tip Tuesday, so I would give like a one paragraph quick tip. Wednesday was what's up Wednesday? So that was where I would post a screen cap or like a video of whatever I was doing that day.

And then it would allow you to kind of share what you were doing that day. Then we had tutorial Thursday where we would upload a full tutorial on Youtube and just link that in the group and then we had feature Friday where we have. We still do a lot of these actually to feature Friday was where we had to make pop music playlist and I would post something that came out that week that I had worked on and then I would allow everybody in the comments to post the spotify link so we can get that on the community playlist. And then Saturday was sample Saturday where we would give away 10 free samples every Saturday that we're just different unique ones that I created that week for fun. And then Sunday was serum Sunday so we would give away like five different presets every Sunday. And we did that for several months and we've changed some of the days around like instead of serum Sunday for a little while we were doing like song analysis Sunday where we are breaking down like top forty cents.

But we just kind of kept that pace going for a couple months and then we kind of broke away from the everyday content just because all the admins and everybody got a little busy and the group started being really self sustaining so we didn't really have to pump it full of content because the more that we were kind of generating conversation, people then came to start their own conversations and once people started their own conversations, I think they started getting those relationships with those clients and those benefits from it. So I think as soon as somebody starts to see the benefit of like you putting in the effort and the community and you're getting that back, it starts to really self regulate. So now it's really as easy as like all we have to do is make sure it's not just overflowing with spam and that nobody's being a complete asshole to each other.

And that's really it. Like at this point I could probably never posted again and there will be plenty of content on there for everybody forever. Wow. It's weird. It's such a cycle. Yeah, that definitely makes me think about the six figure student community on facebook. We don't do any of this. Maybe we should. It's different too though because you'll have a very specific, you know, you have your podcast and you have your programs and everything like that. Everybody knows why they're there. It's a lot more branded towards you and people were there to see you. So like remake pop music. I was like sometimes it's slow around here like we need some conversation going so I had to make it about the community so it was really easy for us to make that curated content where I could kind of like use the opportunity to flex myself a little bit and you know, promote myself passively to clients, but then let everybody flex also.

So if someone were listening right now and they just said, hey, maybe we missed the boat on starting your own community. Or even say they know there's a community that needs to be created in their niche. What would you say to that person that needs to either get themselves established in a community that's already there? So there are a familiar face or to establish their own community. What would you say to that type of person?

I would say that I think that the key is that you definitely want to make sure that you're not the only one benefiting. If you can make a community where other people can come and they can thrive, it's going to grow a lot easier than if you make a community to funnel it all into yourself. If you want to just funnel stuff into yourself, I think there is a lot easier way to take a lot less effort and allow you to promote yourself a lot better than a facebook community. My business partner, Daniel, he's kind of my mentor. He has this thought. I really, really agree with him that like everybody's got their one thing that kind of contributes them being able to go full time. So for me it was a facebook community that I've stumbled across for Daniel. He started killing it with his company, the songwriting team, because they just locked down some really, really good Google Seo.

So all of his leads came from just google searches of songwriting and then uh, one of our friends mark, he just got on the instagram train and just started really, really nailing it with like indie pop artists on instagram. So that's where he gets like 90 percent of his clients now. And so like for all of us, it's so crazy because we all can make a really, really similar income and none of us kind of step on each other's market are on each other's toes, but we all kind of know where it lies and we're all cool to like venture into each other's stuff. Like I have my website and of course I optimize my seo and of course I'm on instagram and of course mark's in the group and he's got his businesses and stuff like that. But you have to know your main workhorse so you can know what to pump your time into.

So like for y'all right now it's definitely like the podcast and the courses and stuff like that and you know that. So that's your thing. But for most young guys, they don't really know what that one thing is going to be and I think I was lucky enough, blessed and grateful to just kind of stumbled upon it. But. And so you kind of find it, try a bunch of things. But I think that you have to give a bunch of things a lot of time because if I would've started this group and after a couple of weeks, but like this is stupid, like there's 40 people in here, why am I even doing this? It would have never grown. But like those 40 people mattered and then the 400 people matter then the 40,000 people mattered. Now the 17,000 people matter. And I think that if you're wanting to go full time developing that game plan and kind of finding your niche market is key.

And I think you have to be realistic. Like it'd be nice for me to be like, yeah, I could go get a publishing deal with some anr at some label and I could just write in a studio forever with artists. But like a do I want to do that? And B, how realistic is that? There's 100,000 other producers out there right now emailing warner brother records that are never going to get a message back. So like for me, I was kind of telling Chris this off camera the other day, like this facebook group is not my end goal working with 300 independent artists a year. That's not my end goal. These are all just things that I'm kind of using to get to my end goal. So like of course I want to be writing massive record where I can write, you know, four or five records a year, call it done and then just work on other kind of like library music, licensing stuff.

I want to be able to focus more on the make pop music community and the FTI and kind of getting passive income and courses and stuff are those. I don't want to be in this daily grind forever, but I've kind of developed a business plan and a game plan so I can utilize that to kind of be able to afford to invest the time and the money that takes the real, real, real big shots that, you know, you never have to work another job in your entire life. And I think just realizing that and being realistic about it as huge besides like just being bright eyed and bushy tailed and being like, yeah, I'm going to go get a massive record deal and I'm gonna make $100,000 on one record because it's not just going to happen like that. Yeah, I mean that's amazing. So when I first started getting into business and my master in business really took off, I was hanging out a lot with a family of dentists. These were really successful people, hundreds of employees really well read and knew what it meant to be an entrepreneur and will never forget. This is a long, weird story that I don't think I've

told them the podcast before, but we were living in one of their houses and they lived like one house over and they were letting us stay rent free in their house while we purchased our own house. I'll never forget looking out my back window one day and mark the Dad. He's got all these kids and he's hanging out on a Wednesday afternoon with his kids at the pool and there was this mind blowing moment of like, what the heck is he doing? I thought he was successful. Why is he hanging out with his kids on a Wednesday afternoon and the pool and it like blew my mind. I like stopped and stared awkwardly, but what was amazing when I would hang out with mark and his wife, Shane, is they would recommend business books and they would talk to me about business strategy and they've talked to me about just the entrepreneurial spirit and what was mind blowing to me was how much I could learn from the dentist industry that I could apply to the mastery and industry.

And my point here is that you took something that was really kicking butt in the hardcore community, hardcore, heavy metal, you know, whatever kind of a metal, whatever you wanna call it. Those are all fair. Yeah. So you know, you look at the urm guys, they have built an incredible community. They are absolutely doing something amazing and there's other people sort of in that heavy genre that are doing similar things as far as I can tell, but I don't see anyone. But you doing it in any other genres. I'm sure they're out there. I'm sure I just don't know about them. But what's amazing was that you spotted something in one little part of the market and you said, wow, that's amazing. Could I transplant that somewhere else? And whether you did that intentionally or unintentionally is still did it. And there's a big take home for, you know, for us listening to the podcast that if you in a particular niche that's really crowded, you know, heavy genres, you know, that's a very crowded niche. But it's mature. The industry is very mature there and you took something and you emulated it in a different niche, frankly. Would you rather have a successful hardcore community or successful pop community just from the standpoint of like business size.

I'll take a crack at that. He mentioned that there's the top 20 metal guys that everyone knows and that's because those are probably the only 20 guys in metal that are making any significant amount of money. However, in the pop world, the top 20 guys in that world are making far and above what any of us metal guys. Hundreds of millions. Yeah, and there are a slew of no name guys you've never heard of who are making a very substantial full time living, doing pop under the radar and for that I would say I'd rather the pop scene for the longterm if I were starting over today, that's where I would be.

Hmm. That's amazing. Well, I think country is sort of similar to pop.

You could say that for any major genre it's just a little harder to get started. So Austin, I do have a question here. If you were starting over from scratch right now and you were trying to break into the pop scene, what would your next steps be?

Are you talking about if I hadn't already created the group or say somebody else did the exact same thing I did?

Yeah, you're a nobody. You just graduated from high school or you're just graduated from college. You don't really have any relationships. You're stuck in a city that's maybe not great for doing pop music. Maybe you're in Reno, Nevada, for example. I'm gonna. Throw that to you under the bus. Let's say you work at borders bookstore this time. Sarah, what are your next steps in 2019? What do you do?

First of all, it's just make music that I love. You know, I didn't make any single dollar until I probably had 100 songs just sitting on my hard drive that nobody ever heard. Nobody ever will hear from now on. They don't even exist anymore. Making music was always a hobby and a passion for me. I made the music because I want to and that's a big thing that I see in my community a lot and I've seen it especially in like the music business communities as everybody now is chasing a quick dollar. So like for me I think I started so young it was never really about the money and I did music at a time in my life where I didn't need the money from music. So even when I was in a band when I was 17 years old, it was never about the money.

We would go play a show for 50 bucks and we would, you know, pay, we would lose money on gas and stuff, going to play a show just because we loved it. And so like if I was doing it now, I would hope that I still got into it for the right reasons and just made demos because I wanted to and just got into it because I loved it. And then honestly, if nothing had been created by this point, which other than make pop, I honestly haven't seen too much happened except for some spin offs and stuff from it. I would probably either make a youtube channel because youtube is huge right now. Youtube is much bigger than it was when I first started, you know, several years ago or some kind of like instagram or snapchat or some kind of facebook group. And like at this point in time, social media is our biggest aspect.

I'm definitely a people person. I love talking to people. I love doing stuff like this, but I was telling Chris kind of before the thing. Being a producer from home is ideal for me because I live in an apartment. I have a wife, I was doing a million other things when I went full time and I love being able to work on my own time and send it to clients and kind of be back and forth. Like that's why I can make the money I make and that's why I can keep my rates low and that's why I can work with 300 people a year is because instead of having one artist in my studio every day, I can have four projects on my plate and knock them all out in the same half amount of time. So for me, I positioned it so even when I went full time, I had all my backup plans.

Like I was still on scholarships. I knew that I could go back to my job. I knew that I had a couple of clients that I could dip into and be like, Hey, do you need anything? I'll do it for a cheaper rate this month. And so for me it was never super super stressful. There's definitely been months where I've like at the end of the month been like, okay, well I definitely need to book a handful of clients by the end of the month. But I think never really making it completely about the money and never stressing it out has been huge for me to still make music that I love because working with so many artists every year, it honestly does get exhausting and ideas and you start to run thin from time to time and just being able to kind of step back and have the community to fall back on or just like take a couple of days off and make some videos.

Like I spent the first half of this week just making content for our program, fti. And then I'm also making a series for a company called Sonic Academy and being able to step back now and do things like that is huge for me. So I had a blog post a little while ago where I talked about like offering multiple services because there's two camps of thought. Like either you become a master of one and that's the only thing you do or you do a lot of things and you do them well and you kind of dip in. So I chose to do the a lot of things and do them as well as possible just because like I've always been kind of like a fix it man. I like to be a problem solver. So for me I began recording because I needed to record demos and then I needed to mix those demos and then I needed to master those demos and then I needed to know how to record myself singing and so like one thing has led to another and I think they all funneled into each other for me and it probably would have been the same had I started today.

It's just like one, one problem comes up, I fix it. If I can't fix it and I'm in a position to pay somebody to do it, I'll do it. If I'm not in a position to pay somebody, he'll do it to the best of my ability and I'll just keep learning as I go. That's awesome. Let me ask you a couple questions here just to let people kind of get a better picture of how much ass you're kicking. So what percentage of your clients have ever come to your place? Maybe half a percent. Half a percent grace and the person that I've normally been, the only other person to record didn't really pay. He is my best friend. We'd kind of just write stuff and party a little bit and just hang out. The only people that have ever actually come to me to track, we're a group that I did called strangelove and actually produce other songs from a distance.

They just flew down and track them for a couple of days. That's the only client that I've ever worked with in person ever. Awesome. Next question. What would you say, and this is a little bit more behind the scenes for you, what would you say your average project size is? From a dollar amount? It all depends. I personally do a per project quote, so I like to kind of see what the project needs instead of doing a fixed rate, like if I'm going to do a mix, I need to know is it 15 tracks or is it 200? Because if it's 15 tracks, I'm not going to charge you the same as if it's 200, so generally I can do a mix for around 400 bucks, mix and master and that's a pretty comfortable middle ground. That's like a general quote that I give unless the projects at extenuating circumstances and then for full production like writing and stuff like that.

So you know to write a top line to fully produce a song to mix and master that's normally going to go from anywhere from like 1500 on the lower end to 2000 and then upwards of 2000 if there's going to be like a lot of editing or a lot of revisions or stuff like that. So I would say on average about $400 for a Mexican, probably 17 or $1,800 for like a full production package. That's awesome. We'll follow up. Question with that. How long would you say a mixing project takes for you? Is it a day? Is it a week? Is it a month? From the time that I send the invoice to the time that they get the final files, it's normally a couple days, but from the time that I throw the stems and the door for them to get their first mix, that's 90 percent. They're probably two hours.

Awesome man. Well that's cool. And as far as production, same question. What's the typical sort of like are you working on month long projects are week long project? What's that look like? So I like to get stuff done as fast as the artist wants to. That kind of for me keeps my workflow go and then I can book as many people as possible. I don't really book up in advance. Like if you were to message me today and offered to pay me for a project, I'd be able to fit you in as soon as I get back from my family situation at the end of the weekend. So I'm somebody messages me too, you know they fill out my entry form and they want to work with me on producing. We book a call whenever they're available and then from the time that call is booked, I send the contract that invoice, everything's handled and then normally they get a draft.

I like to do drafts in increments. That way I don't spend an entire day working on something that they don't like any of. So normally what I'll do is I'll draft up through the end of the first quarter, so I'll go like intro verse, Chorus, chorus, if we're going with a similar kind of song structure and format and normally I'll knock that out within two or three days of getting their invoice back. So they've got that and that probably takes me two to four hours depending on how in depth I make it. Then if I get the green light I just go back and wrap up the song. That's probably another two to four hour session and then we just revise from there. So like in general I did a song for myself actually, so it was a little easier and less time consuming. But I did a song red rum about two months ago for myself that I ended up releasing and that'll happen in one day.

So I sat down in the morning. I was like, I don't have any work to do. I don't really feel like breaking up the camera. I'm just going to write something for myself today because I need to clear my thoughts. I sat down, wrote the whole thing, produced the whole thing mixed and mastered the whole thing. No revisions. I think I started like 10:00 AM and I finished by 6:00 PM and then that was what went up on itunes. So for me, fully written makes mastered everything like that. Probably about eight hours of actual project time. And then just all the admin work on top of that. I've got a follow up question to this. You said you did about 300 projects or so or work with 300 artists or so in the last year. What are some tools you're using to organize all of this? Both collaboration with these online projects if you're using any tools for that.

And uh, as far as customer relationship management, if you're using any tools for that? Yeah, for sure. So I'm probably not as organized as I should be. I kind of live in organized chaos. Luckily I've got my wife working with me now, so she's actually helping with a lot of the admin work. But for me the starting system is I always have to keep my facebook messages open because running the group people might not get to my site and they might not fill out my form. So a lot of the time I'm getting a facebook message. If I do, I'll either send them to my website where I just send them to a form I use just like a woohoo form and it's, you know, name, what do you need, what's the budget you've allowed, tell me more about your project, etc. I get that filled out.

I messaged him back with a calendly link. that's where they'll set up all of the, like have a phone call or a skype or something like that. Then once the cowling lincoln set up, it just kind of syncs to all my google calendars and everything. Like that, I'll make a note also, I actually keep an excel spreadsheet going so I've tried a couple of things like trello and like monday and stuff like that. For me, I just honestly keep a spreadsheet going on google sheets. That way I can access it on my phone or on a tablet or on the laptop or my desktop. And so I have a couple sections. I have a section of active projects at the moment that I'm working on. I have a section of projects that are just kind of on hold but I'm waiting to hear back on and then I have a section for potential clients that I need to just either reach back out to or kind of follow up with or you know, send an invoice or something like that.

And so actually I can pop into the community. Whenever this podcast comes out I can kind of share my simply I've given out then make pop music community before just in case anybody wants something like that. Cool. But so as soon as the call is booked in and know that it's going, I put them on the project. Everybody's, you know, of course, organized by name, raTe project when they paid the invoice by linkedin boys when the last payments do, et cetera, et cetera, and then I've just got a project note section where I basically say what point the project is on, but that's basically it. All invoices are sent through paypal and let's say request something else, like a cash app or a square or something like that, but normally pay pal for like 99 percent of my payments. What else do I use? Dropbox.

Everything goes back to them and dropbox just because it's the easiest and they allow the most storage that I found and so other than that, just in terms of like actually talking about revisions and stuff like that. Clients always have my emails and my phone number so if they want to shoot me a text with a list of revisions or call me or email me, that's all fine. I've also done this in the past, especially if it's like a group of people like a band or like a musical group of multiple artists. I'll start a google document. That way everybody can kind of fill it out in real time. That way while I'm going through the revisions, I can just highlight and check off and then when I send it back I'll just make another line revision to. They can write their revisions once it's done.

Stems are printed, sent through dropbox, final invoices sent through paypal contracts are just filled out and then I just had them sign them and I just filed them away. My hard drive, it's really, really minimal. I don't really pay for any like automated programs at the moment. I probably could and organize a little better, but now that I've got my wife working with me it makes it just a little bit easier and not so time consuming, but that's really how I started doing it from the start and to be honest, just working with like 30 clients any at any given time. I've always Thought about automating it, but then I'm like then I have to switch everything over. Then I have to get used to doing it on a new system, so I'm like, you know what? I'm not missing deadlines. I'm not screwing up projects.

This works for me, so even if it's not ideal, I'm a do it. That's the thing is like almost nothing I do is probably really ideal. It's all very run and gun, all very makeshift because that's what I've done from the very, very start and so like that's just all I need is just like the actual google documents, the contract, the invoice through paypal, and then honestly, even if I didn't have all the calendly and hats and stuff like that, I'd probably fine. I'm kind of struck by something here. Austin, your speed at turning stuff out, even your own music to be like, I'm going to do a song in a day and turn it out and I'm okay with what anyone thinks about me as a resuLt of that song. Even right now, like your alarm went off. Some people, oh gosh, his alarm went off during the podcast.

Whatever. I admire that you are so focused on the finish line that you're willing to drop the stuff that doesn't matter and that's something I could use more of in my life. You know, I get fixated on. I just sent out a big email to my list and it took me like five days. God, yeah. Did you sent me like 10 different versions of the same damn email? It was so annoying. Just send it. Yeah. So like I struggle with that. I'm just like, uh, it's not perfect. It's not perfect. There's a great quote by john lasseter and he says, we don't finish films. We released them. Bingo. Bingo. You seem to be amazing at that and that I think is a big reason why you were having so much success is that you are okay moving fast and you don't about taking it personal and beating yourself up and absolutely being like it's a type of egotism to just obsess about the details of the type of ecosystem that I struggle with.

I don't know. I'm struck by your ability to do that at such a young age. I know exactly where it came from so I can wait on that really quickly do it. So when I started I would obsess and obsess with like I noticed that like the mix would get 90 percent done and it started really when I started mixing the mix or the song would get 90 percent done in a couple of hours and I would spend freaking weeks revising it, nitpicking it, and by the time it got to the end I'm like, that sounds like garbage, like mixed one was better. And so I've started to say like, especially as I've gotten more comfortable with my monitors and my room and my workflow and the plugins that I use is like I still like to venture out. I still like to try new things.

I'm not stuck in my ways or anything like that, but at the same time I know what works and I know what to do with it. So I've kind of made a pretty automated system where I can still pump out a really, really good quality product that I'm proud of. That's the thing. If a song takes nine hours for me to be proud of it, it'll take nine hours. If it takes an hour for me to be proud of it, it'll take an hour. I kind of get to a threshold where I do this kind of like cost and reward time audit where I'm like, even with mixing, so I just did a full tutorial for the fte, my thing and it was a two hour series and I was like, you know what, there's not going to be a lot of automation in this. There's not going to be like a lot of really, really nitpicky details.

I'm not going to like go through the icu with point one db like. Because at the end of the day that's not what the listener here. We need big picture things. So like when I started to mix, if it's 200 tracks, I start with my groups. I get the drums all working together as a group. Then I get the sense of working altogether as a group than the vocals working altogether as a group and then that's where I'll start to kind of tweak. But I've noticed that like if you focus too much on the small details, everything kind of loses cohesive, at least for me, everything kind of starts to lose cohesiveness and you start to lose track of the overall picture. And I noticed that Like I'll spend two hours getting a really, really solid mix and then I'll spend six hours making it maybe half a percent better.

If it gets better, sometImes it gets worse and for me at least until I've got projects that can afford to pay me for eight hours of mixing and we call it that and I can only book one mixing project a day or a week or whatever. I have to be able to kind of. I feel bad for saying make sacrifices because I don't want people to think that like I sacrificed my quality. But I mean at some point realistically you sacrifice just a little bit. But for the time that I gain and for the way that I'm able to keep my rates now I tell clients, I'm like, would you rather me charge you three times the amount and work on your song more in it? Sound one percent different or would you rather pay this rate and get a song that you're still insanely proud of them?

Literally maybe one out of every thousand people will know the difference between the two mixes and I've noticed that like I was spending so much time doing all that stuff that really did not matter at the end and so like for me it's just like trust my gut. I'm pretty confident in my skills at this point. Throw it down. If it works, it works. I always come back to it the next day just to make sure that like I was lucid when I was creating it, but if I come back and it and it all checks out and I'm good to go, then I'm fine with that. I'm cool with just calling it. What if it didn't want to can take that lesson away in their own business, whether it's in mixing or mastering your tracking or editing or producing or if it's just looking at your business as a whole.

It's always the 80 slash 20 principle that that thing follows us everywhere. Austin, if people want to connect with you, where can they find out more about you and chat with you? Yeah, absolutely. So you can always find me on the make pop music group. You know, I'd love to have some of you from this group. I know we've got a bunch of people actually from our group and your group, so If you're, you know, if you want a cool community to just come hang out with and you know, even promote yourself just a little tiny bit, feel free to come into the make pop music community. We'd love to have you. Other than that, if you want to check out me personally, you can always check out my website, www dot [inaudible] dot com and you can find examples of my work there. I've got a spotify playlist that you can kind of check if you want to hear some more stuff. But yeah, other than that, I mean reaching out to me either on facebook, just at austin holes, just my personal profiles. Totally fine. And you can always email me also@austinataustinhold.com. But yeah, that's really where you can find me if you ever need me. I'm also in the six figure home studio group, so if you need me, just tag me in there now. Pop up as soon as I can

and I'm really taken aback by his ability to

excellent and give. I know I'm cussing more and more and more on the podcast. I'm aware of this, but his ability to give zero fucks, his ability to just drive towards his goals and not get mired in fixated on stuff where he's going to beat, I don't think often beats himself up at all. He seems to be missing that part of his brain and I wish I was missing that part of my brain. It's the 80 slash 20 principle on crack. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. I'M thinking about this about like I need to be better friends with this guy. I could learn a lot about the mental health that it takes to say no to the small stuff. So you can say yes to the bigger stuff. Yeah. Like having an alarm set to go off in the middle of a podcast or thousands of people in order to make a call that's going to push his business for it.

That takes a whole different level of discipline that maybe you and I don't have, or actually I don't discipline but sacrifice because maybe this podcast turns into work for him, but at the end of the day it's not as business to do podcasts, so it's one of those. It's one oF those boundaries that you kind of have to admire. He has a type of courage that I don't know that I've ever encountered before. I sure as shit didn't have that at 24, I'm be honest with. You know, what's freaking me out is that my experience with 24 year olds is usually like, ugh. Like no offense to anybody that's young. I was that way too. But there's, there's usually this fixation. I always thought when I was young that older people in their late twenties and thirties and forties, we're really uptight, but now that I'm in my mid thirties, I'm like, dude, man, 19 year olds are the most uptight people on earth. They have so much fomo. They are so fixated on what other people think about them and austin is refreshingly immune to that and I've been working hard on myself

to have a similar outlook on life, to be able to say no to the small stuff so I can say yes to the big stuff and I'm really impressed with this kid. I think one of the biggest takeaways other than just his attitude and approach towards business and his ability to perhaps understand the 80 slash 20 principle better than anyone else in the world his age is he created his own lead source and that's something we didn't really get to discuss in the episode, but he created his own lead source from scratch and this is something that actually you have done as well. You just did it in a different way. He mentioned mark. That's my friend mark eckert. He mentioned doing it through instagram. I wondered if that was him. Okay. Yeah. Same guy and so all of us have created our own lead sources, but they all look different and that's the thing that people have to really understand is your lead source, your unfair advantage.

Your unfair advantage is gonna look different than everyone else's. Chris's unfair advantages is ridiculous. Ability to create profitable paid advertising funnels on google and youtube. That is chris's lead source and he's better at that than anyone else I know austin's is his facebook group. He created that from scratch and has grown to over 17,000 people and still growing and that brings him a nearly endless supply of leads for his business and if it doesn't directly come from that, then it comes from a referral that he got from a client that he got from that. So that's just unfair advantage. Mark's the same way. He put all his eggs in the instagram basket and he built his instagram following and gets a lot of work through that. So really if you're lisTening to this, where is your lead source going to be from? At the end of the day, it has to come from somewhere, it has to come from something or someone and you have to put In the work no matter what.

You put in a lot of effort and work building your google ads empire. Austin put a lot of work into building his facebook group, empire march, put a lot of work in his instagram. I've put a lot of work into facebook, facebook ads and facebook community and this podcast as well as you have and my word of mouth just from my past clients and so there's no easy button for this. This takes work no matter what you do. The cool part is he just did this without any imperson interactions with these people. It was 100 percent online, which is I think the coolest part. Unreal and I know many times when I'm listening to a podcast, my eyes will glaze over because I'm usually multitask. Listen to a podcast, and sometimes I'll miss the really, really good stuff. For those of you that are, their eyes are glazed over, you're doing something else and you're not totally paying attention.

The last like three minutes of the podcast with some of the best that we've had in the podcast. Brian just broke it down and delivered so many nuggets of truth. Gosh, I wish I knew that when I was, you know, 24 years old or 20 years old or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. I mean I just. It took me a long time and nobody was spoon feed me this stuff. YeAh. This is just top of mind for me because I recently finished up the home studIo startup course. When you're starting your studio out, you still have to think about this exact same stuff that austin has already figured out. You have to think of where are all my leads coming from and then how am I turning those leads into paid customers and then how much of those customers paying me. Those are the three big things you have to figure out

and when you actually run the numbers, which I created a spreadsheet to do this. If you're in the home studio startup course, there's actually a spreadsheet I created that walks you through what these numbers actually look like. It will blow your mind how many leads, how many people you have to talk to, how many leads you have to generate in order to create any real revenue. it will blow your mind and people massively underestimate how much work this will take, so take this as advice. If you're not in the chorus, this is my free advice to you. Start to look at the real numbers in your business and start to extrapolate that out over the long term and see what is going to take as far as actually generating leads for stable income because that's the key to making this work full time as a stable income, stable lead source.

Otherwise you're going to have this roller coaster ride that's not going to be very fun. Yeah, I'm really glad we had authored on the show. This is such an important topic that's not just applicable to us as studio owners or is mastering engineers and mixing engineers. If you're a photographer, if you're a graphic designer, if you're an illustrator, no matter what you're doing, if you're doing that freelance life, you have to have that stable lead generation mechanism. If you don't, you're going to have massive ups and downs, massive ups and downs, and every single freelancer I've ever met in my life that went out of busIness that had to throw in the towel and go and get a real job. It happens to a huge percentage of them. It all comes back to not having that stable lead generation mechanism, not having something where you're like, well, I know I'm going to be in touch with where I'm going to contact or I'm going to at least be top of mine for thousands of people.

Yeah, and austin created his own with a facebook community, but he also mentioned, if you weren't listening, I'll repeat it. He mentioned that he has other producers in that community. They have gone full tIme from the connections they made in the leads they got from that facebook group, so you don't have to go create your own if there's not one out there and go create it, but otherwise just find one that's in your niche or has your ideal clients in it and start participating. Start being part of a damn community. You start building relationships. This is a relationship business, so if you can't put in the work to build the relationships, you can't expect your business to flourish, period, full stop. End of story. That is so important. We've seen people in our facebook community that have asked questions like, I always kind of feel weird about this when someone posts like a text message conversation with their client in the community and it's usually something along the lines of like, if you've done this, no shame here, but you'll see people that are like, hey, like they go immediately for the kill.

They meet abandoned. They're immediately like, I'm want to produce your record. And then bands like, uh, no. And then they're like asking for advice and it's like, well, it's like walking up to somebody and just kissing them like it's not appropriate. And what austin has done is totally the opposite of that. I love what he talked about, how he built a community for the community, that his goal with the community was to have a community that wasn't anything other than that. His goal was to build relationships and to help a bunch of people just to go give her approach, go listen to the go giver or read it. Yeah. What austin does there is really something else and I really wish that his juju was something that the music industry as a whole would really embrace this sort of like let's lift other people up and let's help other people and you know, newsflash, that's what brian and I are trying to do at this exact second with this podcast.

We're trying to help people, and I haven't really mentioned this, but part of the beauty of doIng this podcast, it's like this is fun. If there was no benefit to me other than just getting to hang out with you and meet cool people, I would still do it, but the benefit for me with the podcast is definitely more than half of my customers come from the podcast now. That's awesome. It's sweet, but it's also fun because there's like a good conversation to have there about like we're talking about a past episode before the project or they're sharing how something we said on the podcast resonated with them so it comes back to that go-giver mentality of just trying to do good in this world and you know, we've danced around It but like I'm a christian, but there's this karma aspect that's at play in the business world and the good that you put out into the world comes back to you and that might be just the nature of social media are.

There might be some like spiritual aspect of that. I think that's just built into humans. The reciprocity effect is what they call it and I think that's exactly what's at play here. And if people go straight for the kill, they've built no reciprocity, have done nothing for that person. They just say, hey, pay me. That goes against everything humanity is about and that's why it doesn't work. Yeah. Well I think ultimately I'm going to go again, full nerd. Sorry. Not scifi phi this time, but more like anthropology and so the idea here is that for science things, and you can agree or disagree with this, I would tend to agree that humans were hunter gatherers for like millions of years and that we only accidentally figured out what it meant to be modern humans. It is a teeny tiny percent of our existence as humans. And so you gotta think about in a hunter gatherer community, what would you be all about?

Like what are we naturally wired for and what we're naturally wired for is partnerships is building relationships with people where there's mutual benefit. Like, hey, we're going to go try to kill this woolly mammoth. Who should we bring? We'll bring a hug because he's a team player and bring uber because he's also a team player, but you know that other guy over there, he's not a team player. he's going to take a bunch for himself. He's going to try to lIke sneak off with some of the meat. We're naturally wired to be suspicious of that. Yeah. The lone wolf does not last long in that scenario, unfortunately. So if you are a lone wolf, you can survive today, but you're not going to thrive today. Good stuff. Yeah. So I think about this stuff all the time of trying to understand honestly, like college was a little bit of a train wreck for me as far as like the class is just didn't feel useful. But the anthropology classes, which is basically the study of culture before modern society, that stuff blew my mind and to this day I'm still like, really? Wow. That's fascinating. I thought that was just a store where shot anthropology now it's also one of the most useful of all sciences.