This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode 82

whoa.

Listening to the sixth figure home studio podcast, the number one resource for running a profitable home recording studio. Now your host, Brian Hood and Chris Graham. Welcome back to another episode,

the six figure home studio podcast. I am your host Brian Hood and I'm here with my bald and beautiful purple shirted cohost as always, Chris the man. Graham, how are you doing day Chris? What would you do if I showed up without a purple shirt on? I don't know. I actually in your honor, I showed up with a purple shirt on today as well. I have the exact shirt that you have. I just don't have as good a lighting, but no one can see us anyways right now, so they just have to trust that have a purple shirt on. Is it an American apparel? Try Blend medium. Let's not talk about it. That's free advertising. I don't do free advertising for people. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. We don't really do any advertising. Who are you wearing, Chris? Oh Man. Brian, how are you sir?

I'm doing pretty good. My Dude. Just trudging along man. As always, I've got a trudging trudging along. Is that like trudging? Is that a southern word? I don't fucking know, Dude. I've never heard that. There's like trudging along and trotting along at the same as tracking the Brian Hood word. I have a new word y'all. This is great.

Oh man, that's amazing. I've been doing demos for file pass and by the time this episode airs we will have probably opened up more early access spots, so if you're on the email list, you haven't heard from me yet, you will probably hear something for the file pass early access stuff very soon. Look at how similar are lives are. I just started doing Beta testing for bounce Butler like four hours ago. Yeah, we're on similar trajectories right now. Yeah, it was crazy. I've just started doing like remote testing where I would give people that software that lets them bounce unlimited files while they're not there in any door. It was this amazing moment of like seeing this person's eyes get really, really big. Yeah, that's they had the Aha moment. Yeah. It was like all of a sudden pro tools is like, we were using protools for this test, but it was like

woo

and started doing all these, hey, that's a cool sound I should make on the podcast. Never again.

Yeah. It's like I was going to say, no one in the world is going to agree with you on that. It sounds like something from star wars as we're going to start talking to each other like that. Boom, boom, boom, boom. That's terrible. Droid voice. I can't go as high as you. That's it. That's literally as high as I can go. I just don't have the range that you have Chris. That's as high as I can go, man. I'm sorry. You guys are welcome. Which is funny because you have a deeper voice than I do on the podcast, but you can go way higher than me.

Well, I used to be a professional singer for lack of a better term. Don't go look for my music please.

I've never thought of that. I want to hear your music, dude.

Uh,

I don't know. I don't think. Um, but hey, what are we talking about today? Brian? What did change the subject, dude? Okay. We can actually get an episode today. I am going to find your music online at some point though.

I'll bring you a cassette tape. I mean CD, I mean

a track. Whenever you go on like one of your long rants during the episode today, I'm going to be googling, Oh, good Lord Ram Music or you're gonna be on youtube somewhere. I'm going to find you. Don't worry about it. Today's episode is all about creating your customer Avatar. If you listen back to episode number

81 [inaudible] Bryan, whoo, whoo. What's an Avatar? You probably don't know. Most people don't know what an Avatar is. I didn't know until a couple years ago.

Well, if you'd shut up, I tell people, okay. I feel for it. If you listen back to set number 81 and 82 which I highly recommend you go listen to before this episode we talked about how to get more website traffic and then how to turn that traffic into customers on your website. This is a very, very crucial part of the process. It's about identifying your perfect customer so that you can go find your perfect customer. That basically sums it up. That's as easily as I can say, is that's creating a customer Avatar,

cloning your perfect customer, getting yeah. You know, multiplicity. That movie where it's just all of a sudden there's just so many perfect customers really like, oh there's so many of you. I get to do what I want for a living. Yay. As a mastering engineer, I work on a lot of projects for a lot of people. And the reason for that, it's not breaking, it's the nature of mastering. It doesn't take that long to master record compared to do preproduction recording, producing, mixing. Like if you're doing all the things, you're a producer. There's a lot of time involved in this. And most genres it's less than some, more than others. And so one of the things I've gotten to do as a mastering engineer is since I've worked with people all over the world and you know, thousands of people at this point, you know, I've worked with people that are Australian of word to people that are Indian, have worked with people that are Hawaiian.

You start to get a feel for how different people in different genres respond to you and how different people from different parts of the world respond to you. And you start to figure out, oh my gosh, when I'm working with this specific type of person, I make a lot of money per hour compared to if I work with this type of person, I get whittled down and I'd make a lot less per hour. So a lot of figuring out how to grow your business when you're in a service industry like we are in the recordings community is figuring out this circle. There's like a venn diagram of identifying your perfect customer, Brian. It's your idea. You share this concentric circle thing. Yeah. So

before I get into this concentric circle thing, which is very important part of this entire process, I want to let our listeners know that I found Chris Graham singing, not alone. I know it's an old, old video with a nice, good video. Glad curtain behind him. That will be on our show notes page at [inaudible] dot com slash 82 if you want to see a video, a really bad low quality video of Chris Graham singing. Yeah, I haven't listened to it yet, but I'm excited about it now that's you're properly to go back to the customer Avatar and the concentric circles as you're talking about. So when it comes to creating a customer Avatar, it's important first to identify who your perfect customer is in your mind, and I tell people to do this. The easiest way to do this is if you can go back and look at your past customers and look at those customers through the Lens of the 80 20 principle.

If you want more information on what the heck the 80 20 principle is, we have an entire episode about it back on episode 45 of the podcast and I really, really recommend people go back and listen to it if they haven't. If you don't know the 80 20 principle is like, dude, stop. It's game changer. Complete game changer. Long story short, 80% of the results comes from 20% of the effort to put it into the perspective of what are talking about here, which is identifying your perfect customer, look at the your past customers and find those who took the least amount of time, who made the most amount of money and gave you the most amount of satisfaction and then find the concentric circles between those three. Is there a one or two customers that have all three of those things? Share because sometimes you're going to find some that you know they have two of those three things.

Maybe they took a little bit of time and they give you a lot of satisfaction, but you didn't make a lot of money or they give you a lot of satisfaction. You made a lot of money, but they also took a ton of time. Let me clarify here to what we're looking at as a venn diagram. You've got three circles. One represents, didn't take that much time to represent, made a lot of money, and three is you get a lot of satisfaction where these three circles all overlap. That's your sweet spot. Yeah. I think I used the wrong words. Concentric circles mean something else. Yeah, but I've learned was googling concentric circles and I was so far out. You know what? You teed me up the wrong way. You said something about concentric circles and that's why I went down that rabbit hole. Oh No, I didn't. I literally, okay, hold on. Hold on. I have a poster upstairs that I bought with money, which is a big deal for me of all the possible venn diagrams you can have with five different circles. I'm obsessed with Venn diagrams. The record will show who's right here. You can rewind. Someone will tell us in the Facebook comments in our community who's right here. Oh boy.

Brian, it's your idea. You share this concentric circle thing. Future. Brian here. Just wanted to take a second to point out the fact that I was right. We can all laugh at Chris and now back to our episode. Oh, I need to do is make sure everyone's on the same page here. I'm going to back up find the customers that share the most qualities between lease amount of time, most amount of money, most of my dissatisfaction. Find those customers that have the most amount of those three qualities or whatever qualities you personally desire and that is your perfect customer Avatar. What gets dicey here is if you don't have a lot of past customers or anyone you would consider a perfect customer, or if you have no past customers, this is what you and I kinda got stuck on before the episode when we were outlining this is what do we tell those who don't have enough customers yet to really have a quote perfect customer if their ideal customer is merely hypothetical.

Yeah, that's a challenging thing. If you have not worked with a bunch of people, my advice would be to do the smallest projects that you possibly can for the largest number of people so that you can get more experience working with people, that you can flex your social muscles here. And I think that's important because typically what happens, and this is, I mean I'm, here we go again, preaching to myself from 16 years ago. There we go. What I used to do was work with one person for months at a time, producing their records from the ground up and I didn't get a whole lot of feel for what the different types of musicians in the genre that I was working in were like, or for the different sort of personality ticks to spot and be like, oh, this person is a ghoster. Probably like everything else is obsolete if they often ghost.

Yeah. So there is, just to clarify, this is very close to the conversation about niching down, but it's not the same as choosing a niche. So just to clarify, Chris Graham, mastering his niche is the mastering niche. He works with all sorts of clients of all shapes and sizes and all ages and income levels, but he only works with mastering, so he's an itch down by service. Whereas I mix and master heavy music, so I'm like double niched. But you have avatars within your niche and that's where the real differentiator is. It's finding the type of person that you're trying to advertise to or trying to get to your website because if you try to appeal to everyone, you appeal to no one. And this is where the avatar comes into play. Because think about this. If I asked you what kind of customer do you work with and you say, I will record any kind of band, well, where do you find any kind of band?

The answer is I guess anywhere. And if the answer is anywhere, how hard is it to market to those people? It sounds like it's easy, but do you know how expensive it is to market to everyone? Everywhere. Oh Geez. Yeah. That's like the most expensive way to market. But the more specific you can make your customer Avatar, the more easily you'll be able to reach those people because birds of a feather flock together, and if you can find those birds of a feather, they're all flocking together. It's easier to get in with one type of Avatar. It's easier to target one type of Avatar if you're doing blog articles, if you're doing podcast episodes, if you're doing paid advertising, the more specific you can be, the better off you're going to be in, the cheapest going to be to reach those people.

Not only that, if you can figure out where these birds of a feather flock together, these birds of a feather talk together and when one of them says, oh my gosh, I started working with this producer. Oh my gosh, I've got my song mixed by this mixed engineer. Oh my gosh, I got my song mastered by Cruise Graham, but Chris Graham mastery. Then all the sudden all those other birds start to say, oh, I'm going to check him out, and if it's a perfect pocket of customers, that's really cool. Here's the flip side though. If you find the wrong customer Avatar, we're going to call this the Anti Avatar and we'll talk about this a lot more later in the show and all the sudden all the bad avatars that are terrible fit for you. If only they start coming to you and you start saying yes to all of them, you get trapped in this like anti Avatar zone of like, crap, I hate my life. All my projects stink but I need money and I'm saying yes to all the wrong people.

Yeah, you can get stuck with the Avatar you don't want, but it's just as powerful to create an Avatar you never want to work with as it is to create an Avatar that you do want to work with. Because if you know who you don't want to work with, with some of the stuff we're going to talk about today when we start talking about mapping these things out, you can just as easily avoid those that you don't want to work with as you can attract those that you do and to work with.

Yeah. Well, one of the things I would say here is it's really, really, really important that you guys grasp. If you don't already, most of you probably do that. Certain types of customers will make you way more money per hour than other types of customers. You can be in one niche. Those, let's say for you Brian, you are in you mix and master heavy music. Within heavy music. There are certain types of customers where you can make hundreds of dollars per hour, probably

other types of customers that are just going to bleed you dry. I would agree with you Chris. So let's move into this. Let's just pretend that you've identified your ideal customer. You've identified that type of person. Now we need to clone that person and this is where the customer avatar comes in because when you can figure out all of these specific details about your ideal customer, you now have what we call an Avatar. This is the type of person that anytime you write a headline on your website or anytime you write an email or a blog article or you create a podcast episode or a youtube video or anytime you write a Facebook ad or a Google ad, you are writing it to speak to an appeal to that perfect customer Avatar and if you have that person in mind, the more you can flesh out this fictional, perfect character, which is usually a mix of a bunch of different people, but the more specific you can make that cloned person, the easier it's going to be to find and attract people like that because you're speaking a language, you're speaking words that that type of person wants to hear and this is really, this is like the crux of marketing here.

If you can't get this right, you will be doomed to fail and if you can get this right, it is so much easier to succeed.

Totally. Here's one of the funny kind of caveats of this thing. I think for a lot of our younger listeners, if you are 22 years old and you are trying to figure out how to do this audio thing for living, you probably only know other 2122 and 23 year olds. That's sort of the way our culture works. If you're in a situation like that, a lot of people would consider that a tricky avatar if that's your key demographic. It's tricky because one, people of this age don't have much money to spend and two, they're generally flakier

than the rest of society. It can be. I will say I've had a lot of success with that age group in my career, so I think it's, you have to be more careful in some circumstances, but I think that if you were good at spotting those red flags, which if you go back episode number 16 where we talk about how to avoid nightmare clients by watching for red flags, if you can get good about spotting red flags, I really think any age group, any demographic can work. Again, I would never try to dissuade someone from focusing on a target demographic, especially if they're part of that target demographic because I recorded a lot of bands that age group and I mixed a lot of bands in that age group and you know, that was years and years and years ago, but I was part of the age group so it was just, it was easy to appeal versus those people going to like some 45 year old where it may not be as relatable for them.

Yeah, it can rub both ways. If you are 45 and going after 22 year olds to record them, then uh, then yeah, that could rub a certain way. That could be way outside of your customer Avatar or if you're 22 going after a 45 year olds or if you're 2100 after 22 year olds. There's a lot of different ways this could rub. And the point of this episode guys is not that we're going to give you the recipe. The point of this episode is that we're going to give you ingredients and methods and options and that you figured out your own recipe that you can not. I really want to make sure you guys understand this. You can not just be like, oh, here's our ideal customer Avatar. Oh, somebody signed to Sony records. Okay, cool. That's the goal. You have to figure out where your majors are.

You have to figure out where your unfair advantages are for your business. You've got to know what your niche is and then you can start to figure out, wow, I do really well when I record this type of band and all of a sudden like my hourly goes way up. One of the problems I think, and this is probably for a different episode, is that many people have absolutely no idea what their hourly is. They don't track anything and as a result they don't know that other than I like working on this type of project or I don't like working in this type of project. They don't grasp that, oh, this type of project, while it's maybe my fourth favorite type of project to work on makes me four times per hour. What other projects do and you're talking about your earnings per hour. Yes. In order to figure out what your ideal customer Avatar is, you have to have some idea about what customers you're making the most with

and I want to specify for those of you who charge a flat hourly fee, you know what your hourly pay is. True. Chris is referring to anyone who does a project based pricing, which I highly encourage. Yeah, hopefully it's all you. Yeah. If you're past the beginning phase, you need to get away from hourly pricing as soon as you can and I don't know if we have an episode on that. If we don't, that's a really good episode for the next episode. I'll put it in our notes. Yeah, there you go. But if we've talked about in the past, it was too long ago for me to remember it now. So can you give our listeners kind of an example of a customer Avatar?

So an ideal customer Avatar. There's a great book called the Pumpkin plan and it's basically about

everything we're talking about. This is like of all books, that's one of my most recommended books for any studio or any freelancer is the pumpkin plan. It's like such an awesome book for exactly what we're talking about today. 80 20 principle customer Avatar's getting rid of those who are not serving your business and finding more of those that are serving your business and that you can honestly serve better yourself. Anyways, go back to what you're saying Chris. As far as an example, customer Avatar.

I'm going to tell a funny story from Pumpkin plan and about the book itself. I'm going to try to say the guy's name who wrote it. Mike [inaudible]. Mike McAlary woods. I guess it's not that difficult. There we go. Well, am I going to Cabo? It's, I shouldn't let you say it though, cause I had been really fun to be here. How you want to set some look, I'm the MCO. Mike reached out to me a long, long time ago because he saw that I had, he somehow could filter through Amazon buyers or people that have reviewed books until they're like, wow, this guy has reviewed like three dozen business books. He must read lots of business books. And he emailed me and was like, Hey, I just wrote this book. It's called Pumpkin plan. I'd love to send it to you for free. And if you like you please write a review.

And I was like, yeah, that sounds awesome. And he sent it to me and I just felt like the coolest kid in school and I read it. It was a great book. There's a great book. Yeah. And so in his book he talks about avatars and one of the examples he uses is trader Joe's. Trader Joe's is a grocery store that sells extremely delicious food. When trader Joe's is trying to decide if they want to come out with a new type of salsa or a new food product, what they do is they think about their customer Avatar. Their customer Avatar is an out of work adjunct college professor who drives a beat up Volvo station wagon, and when they say, hmm, should we come out with this new salsa? They just say, well, what would the out of work adjunct college professor who drives a beat up Volvo station wagon like it, yes, he would love this. We'll then let sell it, which by the way, they

typically would give an Avatar in name, which I highly encourage you to do because you will a lot of times have multiple avatars. I guarantee you trader Joe's, that's not their only avatar.

Yeah, you're probably right. But to me, that part of the book really blew my mind to think about, wow, that really is an easy way to think about like, well, how should we write our marketing copy? What should our website look like? Should we offer this service or not? Does your ideal customer Avatar won it? Would your ideal customer Avatar by that every decision you make should be aimed at this ideal customer where if you're like, oh my gosh, if I got 50 of these guys a year, I'd be killing it. I'd be happy. I'd be well paid, I could grow my business. So every decision should be focused on winning that person's business and every effort that you make in marketing should be on finding more of those avatars. So let's just, let's just

say you have identified your customer Avatar. You have a great person or a mix of multiple people that you've worked with in the past. What are some things you need to figure out or write down? I really encourage people to write down about this customer Avatar to start mapping it out so it's getting out of their head onto paper, onto Evernote or onto Google doc, getting out into the world so they can actually start studying it and revising it because this will change over time. What are some things that people should to figure out about their customer Avatar?

Well, there's three different types of Oh graphics that we're going to talk about, demographics, geographics, and psychographics.

Okay, let's start from the top down because those get progressively, or the first two are super easy. The third one is where, where we can have a an entirely different podcasts. About the third one. Yeah. So demographics, let's talk about demographics first. When it comes to a recording studio or a mixing engineer and mastering your career when it comes to a studios Avatar, what sort of demographics that we're looking at here?

Well, when I was 14 years old, I used to spend a lot of time on AOL instant messenger. And when you would meet somebody, they would say a slash s slash l age, sex location, that's demographic. So you might find that you do really well with dudes and that you're awful with girls, or you might find that you're really great with girls and awful with dudes. You might find that people that are local to you or really great, or you might find that people from the south are really, really great. Plus geographics though, isn't it? Oh yeah, you got me. Yeah. Do you want to cut that out and Redo it all or, or you can just mock me incessantly. I'm just going to keep mocking you. Okay. That's nice. I got to backup and redefine this. So Age, sex, location is what people would ask when you meet somebody in a chat room when you're 14 years old and age and sex would generally be your demographics. So would political stance coming to this play? Yeah, yeah, it would.

Education level, income level. These are all part of demographics, right? It's not just physical attributes, right?

Absolutely. Yeah. So you might find that you do really well with Democrats or you might find that you did really well with Republicans. You may or may not be one yourself, but you might find that there's just something about a workflow or something about vision or something about communication styles that is a little bit easier for you. Or you might find that it's really, really easy to meet a band who shares political views with you if you are like a left wing or right wing or libertarian, whatever. And to be able to just embrace that and use it as an opportunity to get into a conversation with them.

Make sure we don't do here is when you start mapping out demographics, geographics, which we'll get to in a second, and psychographics as we get into this, it can be really easy to just put a whole bunch of pointless facts down about this perspective person. So my advice is to always keep it as simple as possible and to write basically a story about this person and start putting some of these things in it. Just make sure you don't get too crazy about mapping this stuff out. Just take a couple bullet points for each of these things, demographics, geographics and psychographics and then start to create some sort of story for your avatar. Try to put them in a real world scenario. This just makes it easier for me to know that like if I write copy, my avatar is a like a band dude who has a day job at like game stop and he's in a band who has had some success.

We might x number of plays on Spotify in his band has done three or four songs in the past. They've self produced, their mixes are terrible and they're looking to kind of take it to the next level. They make you know, maybe eight to $10 an hour each band member and they're looking for a way to put a more professional mix out. And so when I'm building out my website, my marketing copy, when I'm thinking about my pricing, I'm taking all these things into account and I have this more mapped out in a file somewhere. But I try to make this as real of a person as possible. And this person is kind of a mix of myself. When I was in a band, it's a mix of some of my band guys that I've recorded who have gone on to be successful. And I'm trying to map out the type of person that I'm trying to attract to my studio. And if you can create a story of a person, then it's a lot easier to relate your copy to that person because they are real to you in your head. So as we're going through these things, start thinking through how to turn this into a person, not just a bunch of bullet points on a spreadsheet somewhere.

One of the things on our episode with Graham Cochran, I've been thinking so much about our episode with him and just the stuff he teaches because I've been listening to this podcast, my favorite podcast right now, and one of the things he said to us when we interviewed him was he talked about how when he launched his business recording revolution that he had been teaching friends of his how to record in their home studios and it as he made videos, he made those videos for his friends, for those exact people, and he lucked out and there were a lot more people like them out there that gravitated towards his content. He was able to do that and to be so relevant with his content because he had an Avatar in mind and these avatars were real people with real names that he knew well.

And just to take that a bit further, he now has tens of millions of views on his youtube channel and I can guarantee you he has fleshed out and change those avatars into a better avatar for his mass audience. And so he's talked about this. He has three buckets that he puts his content into and each one of those quote buckets is a different type of Avatar. So one is someone who is self producing their own music and they're just a fan of recording at home. One might be an aspiring according audio engineer, one might be another type of person. All three of those have different hopes, fears, desires, dreams, things they're looking to learn, they know certain things or to different skill level. And so they're all going to be different types of content. So every time that Graham Cochran creates a piece of content, it's serving one of those three people and he makes sure that none of those three people get starved out of his ecosystem. He makes sure he feeds all three of them equally. And how that comes back to us as audio engineers or audio professionals is that when we start

creating

Facebook ads or youtube ads or if we're going down the free marketing route, which would go back to the episode we did last week, episode 81 when we start talking about all the different types of ways to get people to come to your website. When you start exploring youtube videos for attracting your customer Avatar, you've got to have all of these things in mind and you've got has specific videos for specific types of in your target market and so again they avatar thing is just an easier way to do that so we got way off the beaten path. Chris, I just want to get back on track here.

Yeah, I think this is a great off the beaten path thing. I think we're helping people understand what a customer Avatar is and how important it is. Another really practical example would be if you've identified your ideal customer Avatar and they go on your website, will they like your portfolio?

This is one of the things I teach my students all the time is once you've created your customer Avatar, put yourself in the mindset of that person and go analyze your website. Oh, there we go. From a very, very critical perspective. If I am trader Joe's out of job professor who wears sandals and smells like cheese or whatever that guy, the Avatar is. If I'm that guy and I go to trader Joe's website, does this website appealed to me? And you can put yourself in that person's shoes pretty well just from that weird description and know if their stuff speaks to him or not. Now that's probably a terrible example, but you understand what I'm saying is put yourself in your ideal customer avatar shoes and you'll start to see, does this speak to me and I can guarantee you right now I see the screen flashing on Chris's face. I'm guessing Chris is@chrisgrahammastering.com and he's looking through his side with his ideal avatar in mind and he's analyzing it from a critical eye. Now,

no, Brian, I'm reading the Bible. So one of the things that's I think interesting to me, and I'm not just trying to like work this in so I can say something Christiany on the podcast. No, this really, really applies. This is awesome. So one of the things that happens in the Bible has, at one point somebody asked Jesus like, dude, sum it up for me. And he's like, uh, doing to others as you have others do unto you the Golden Rule, right? You know, we've all heard this, we all grew up with this. We are these heard at one time in elementary school, even the teachers in a preach this crap. And so the doing to others as you have others doing to you is extremely important and powerful as a business owner when you have an avatar because you can imply doing to others as you'd have them do unto you.

If you can visualize this avatar and say, well, would Steve like what I've done to my webpage? Let me pretend I'm Steve and see if this is what Steve would want. It's this sort of empathy of identifying with your ideal customer and then doing the things that they would want as your marketing copy, as your website, as your Instagram account, as your Facebook page is your youtube channel, you name it. This empathy thing is the secret to figuring out how to get these people to like you. There's two opposites of that. One, I do whatever I want and to, I try to be everything to everyone. It's really hard to put that everything to everyone thing in your brain and to make anything that everyone will like.

Well, because in like everywhere else in the world, something that is attractive, one person is incredibly unattractive to another. And so if you're trying to appeal to everyone, you're still gonna piss big sections of people off in the world, but you're never going to really appeal to any of those people. And that's honestly, I say this all the time, but if you try to appeal to everyone, you appeal to no one. And that's exactly why. If you are trying to appeal to one type of music, it's going to be a massive turnoff to another type of music. One example would be if you're trying to appeal to Christian CCM artist, contemporary Christian music artists, and that is the Avatar you're trying to attract. It's going to naturally repel satanic death metal bands and vice versa. And so if you're trying to attract both of those types of artists, you're going to have to really water down your messaging so as to not offend either of them, but that's also going to have the effect of not really attracting either of them either.

And hopefully that really extreme example. It gives you an idea of what we mean here when it comes to understanding your avatar and being able to speak to that Avatar's unique needs and examples in my own business because I know my avatar really well and what they need. I know what sort of musical gear they want, what sort of musical gear they need. I know all the little special nuances that they have. And so when I'm speaking to them on my website or in an ad or in person or on the phone, I know what to say to them to make them trust me, that I can give them the best sound for their style of music. And someone who's doing country or rap or R and B or any other style of music, there's no way they can understand the heavy metal needs like I can. And that's because I understand not just my niche, but my avatar.

So case in point, this podcast, I heard about you, Brian there, a friend of mine, Mike Powers. Micah does a lot of pop punk, a lot of heavy stuff here in town. He's an incredible audio engineering, incredible mixer, incredible producer. And a good friend of mine, I've known him since he was a teenager. Mike had told me about your blog and then it registered, but I didn't check it out and then Bjorkman but the Dixon told me about your blog. I checked it out, you came to blammo. We became friends. And as we started the podcast, I basically, as we were coming up with ideas, I was like, would mica like this? That was it. That was like, would Micah like this?

So when we started off, Micah was your Avatar for the podcast? Yeah, a hundred percent hey Micah, that's great. You're the best brother. Hi Micah. Shout out buddy. That's great. I mean we could go on and on about this. Like we're kind of running at a time here, but like let's go through the graphics again because we have demographics, which is the first thing we talked about. We really went off the beaten path on that. We got geographics. So where's your customer located if they're not in a specific area, like you know, Huntsville, Alabama or Jackson, Mississippi. If they're not in one of like a specific city or specific state, they might be in a type of place. So they may be in an urban environment or they may be in a rural environment.

Yeah, well case in point, there's a guy that I just started doing business coaching with. I don't want to like put his stuff out here too much. So I identify him

be as cryptic as possible so that no one understands what you're talking about.

I'll be as cryptic as he has had a lot of success helping bands from a certain part of the world who want to sound like they are English speaking. Hmm. Interesting. And so his geographic is like, oh, it's these several countries right here that he goes after. That's a great example of him knowing like, wow, I make a lot of money when I'm working with this type of band from this part of the world.

That's interesting. That's something I would've never thought of. Like the reason like we can give you the ingredients, but we can't give you the recipe is because you can take these things and do so much with it. And again, it can get overwhelming for good reason because it's hard to do. It's hard to do well, but let's get into the third one. Psychographics, graphics. We don't have much time here to really dig into this one, but psychographics. Can you give me an a nutshell what psychographics are?

Second graphics is the way that they think and it's what they're thinking. It's their emotions. It's all the things that are going on in their mind. They could be part of a certain demographic. You could have two people part of the same demographic and the same geographic with totally different psychographics. One of them who'd be like really, really fame focused. Oh, I need to get this song done. Oh, I can we get famous. I'm going to be on the voice and then I'm going to be a rockstar and then another could be like, man, I'm just really exact same style of music is the other guy, but yeah, I just want to get this right. I want to take my time. That's a psychographic. There are so many different types of psychographics. We could list them for the next 24 hours. The most important I think is how ready are they to buy? If you go out and you're doing cold customer outreach and you don't know this, I could graphic of the type of customer you're reaching out to. Their second graphic might be that I want to record a record next year. We'll congratulations. You just wasted a bunch of time on customers that may or may not flesh out a year from now.

You want to know a quick tip on that on cold outreach. So I'm gonna give this nothing to do with this episode, but it kind of gets them to that. Are they ready to buy conversation faster is if you're doing cold outreach, just ask them as quickly as possible early on. Try to get to the question, are you working on any new music right now? Brilliant. That gives you so much information and there's so much more to teach on that, but I'm just going to say that's it. I'll give you more maybe in another episode

that's a Golden Nugget of Austin. There's somebody right now, just press pause and it's like writing it down and then they pressed unpause and they heard me say that and they're like, whoa, weird. I see you Steve taking notes and your Honda Civic hatchback way he go, Steve, we believe in you.

Yeah, Reginald there's one Reginald listening to probably. All right, so let's move on. So are they ready to buy or not? That's a psychographic is very important. What else are there that are very important?

There are certain types of artists that insist on only releasing their own songs, songs that they have written. If you pitch them other people's songs, it's not going to go well. That's a psychographic issue. On the other hand, there are people who only record other people's songs and if you say, oh, what kind of songs have you written? Then all of a sudden they're like, oh gosh, do you not respect me because I don't write my own songs? Ooo, that's a good example. Like for the longest talking, for

most of my career and in probably only until the last four or five years or so, and the heavy metal world, everyone wrote their own songs and it was like shunned and frowned upon if you didn't write your own music in the metal world. Now I know more and more and more of these massive metal bands that have songwriters that are ghost writing for them and it's really interesting to watch. So that's kind of a shift in segregate suffix in an in an entire industry that if you didn't notice it, you couldn't take advantage of it and you might push people away. So it's like these are really important things to take note of. His bias is like that they were really biased against songwriting and now they're all about it.

Or another example could be they're really biased against the like v drums, fake electronic pads.

Yeah, that's another bias is real drums versus program drums or those, like you said, the Pad v drums or whatever. Those are certain biases that if you don't understand those things, and I'll give you an example. If you're a studio photos have v drums in them and your ideal customer Avatar is opposed to that. You've pushed them away before you've even had a chance to talk to them. They see that photo. You should just take the phone off your site and then let them know that you can book a real studio and do real drums anytime. But if you don't know that about your ideal customer or if you haven't figured out an ideal customer, you didn't know that was pushing them away in the first place. So that's why this stuff is so powerful.

Yeah, I mean, case in point, when I was a professional musician, if I went on a website and I saw v drums deal breaker, I don't care about anything. If they had v drums back in the day, that was just like an absolute, absolutely not. I will not. If they think those are cool on out, not that they're bad, but for my style of music, it was just not applicable. All right. Any other kind of second graphics worth talking about before we wrap this episode up? Well, I would say this, it's often easiest to do business with people who have a similar cycle graphic to you than it is to do people with a different second graphic to you. So back to what I said before about you know, politics. If you're a liberal, you're probably gonna have an easier time working with the liberals. If you're a libertarian, you're going to have an easier time getting into conversations with people if you are, I mean, case in point, Christian music versus not Christian music. Your religion is a psychographic. Not to oversimplify here, but you're probably gonna have an easier time working with people that you have stuff in common with because you're going to be able to relate with the messaging of their songs and you just got to keep all this stuff in mind.

I'd actually put religions under demographics, but I would put religious biases under psychographics.

Oh yeah. We're going way off the beaten path there. We can talk for hours about that after we finish this episode. I know, I know. I know. This is a very complex thing, very, we've given you plenty of content

enough for you to sit down and start to figure out your customer Avatar. If you are unsure or you get stuck, this is where our Facebook community comes in handy. Just go to the six figure home studio.com/community and there are people in there that can help you really think through who your customer Avatar is. I actually go back to episode number 17 where we talked about the five stages of a successful recording career. Go back and listen to episode, but stage one is where you're in yes mode. You're saying yes to every type of project you can get if you're in yes mode right now, if you're in Stage one of your studio career, you probably don't have enough experience or past clients to really come up with a solid customer Avatar, so don't really get discouraged if you can't do this really well yet. You can come up with a kind of a loosely based customer Avatar, even if you are your own customer Avatar, that helps but just don't get overwhelmed from this stuff.

Yeah, you shouldn't get overwhelmed. What you should do is you should say, Oh wow, this is important, powerful stuff. I can imagine how this would work. I need to go do research to figure out who my customer Avatar is. If on the other hand you are thinking, oh my gosh, my customer Avatar is Steve. Steve's my perfect customer. Oh my gosh. I need to figure out how to clone Steve. I'm pulling this right out of the Pumpkin plan by Mike. What's his last name? Brian tried out. See if you get it mid. Sure. Come to me then Mitch. Nope. Try again. My magic. Mike [inaudible], Mike McAlary wits McCalla what's there it is. Mike metalloids says, one of the best things you can do to clone your customer Avatar is to hang out, ask out for lunch, your best customer, your ideal customer Avatar and straight up ask them if they have friends just like them. That's it.

The less creepy way of asking that question. As you say, do you know of any bands like you that are recording new music soon or working on new music? If you can ask a more specific question. They know their friends. If their friends are recording or writing new music or preparing to go in the studio. That's the golden question for referrals from your ideal customers.

Yeah, it is the golden ticket. If you can figure out how to get your ideal customer to tell you like, oh yeah, you know, I'm always on a x, Y,Z , a website.com it's like a message board for everyone like me and with bands like me and that's where all they're all on there. When you get that sort of feedback and you say, oh my gosh, you mean to tell me there's a website with hundreds of bands in the exact same genre as you, and that genre is my niche. I didn't even know about that. Oh my gosh, that's huge. Now you know where you can go to a target rich environment somewhere where it's like virtually everybody, there is an ideal customer for you. If you can figure that out, almost all of your business growth problems has been solved and you have new problems and really good problems at this point and you can mail us a check. Yeah, and you can buy bounce Butler and file pass@bouncebutlerdotcomandfilepast.call. Aw,

okay. And we're done.

One last thing Brian did mention our Facebook community. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, even if you're like, man, I don't really like Facebook. Facebook's dumb. It's toxic. You're absolutely right. Facebook is dumb. It's terribly toxic. However, there's a corner of Facebook called the six figure homes studio community that is extremely awesome. People don't tear each other down there. People encourage each other, people build friendships and people get inspired to grow businesses and it's an awesome place to hang out.

So check that out. The six figure and streety community on Facebook, it's like the only thing I do on Facebook is hanging out in there. Me Too. I actually have a chrome extension called news feed eradicator to completely deletes my news feed on Facebook and just puts a productivity quote there. Wow. And so I can't even see my news feed on Facebook anymore, which is fantastic. I highly recommend that I'm a download that. Yeah, do it right now. And then I go in and participate in the community and I would just wanted to mention, you talked about how nontoxic it is. I think we've maybe band two people out of like the 5,000 plus members that we have right now. Yeah, I've given two warnings ever and it's gone well both times. It's a really awesome community. So go do that right now. Why are you still listening this podcast? Just go do it. Let's go join the community right now. Go, go right now.

Go [inaudible].

So that is it for this episode at the six figure home studio podcast. Hope you enjoyed that one. Next week's episode is all about following up. And just to give you a little teaser of what I mean, about half of my income from my studio comes from following up with a band. So someone has reached out to me for a quote or a price and then I'll send them a price or a quote or proposal and then I will not hear back from them. And so I follow up with them and I do it again and again and again and again and I keep doing it. And next week we're going to talk about how to do this, what you should say in these followups, and how 50% of my income comes from followups. And this really means that if you are not following up aggressively, you may be missing out on half of the potential income you could be making. So next week's episode could literally double your income if you listen and execute on what we talk about. So I think that's a good enough teaser for next week. That'll come out bright and early next Tuesday morning at 6:00 AM cannot wait for you to hear that one until next time. Thanks so much for listening and happy hustling.