Sales Skills: How Joe Gilder Turned A Sales Job Into A Thriving Audio Career

This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode 69

the six 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 of the six figure home studio podcast. I'm here with my cohost Chris and we have a special guest for you today. But first, Chris, let's chat a little bit because we just got back from the winter wonderland that is Yosemite in February. Oh yes. And I don't know about you, but I had a heck of good time.

I also had a heck of a good time. We didn't die, which don't tell your fiancée or my wife was somewhat of a feat of awesomeness because we, at one point I was definitely up to my neck and snow on the side of a mountain. Yeah, in like a full blizzard feeling really manly and it was great. I was the old slow, Chubby guy in our group.

You were last place in every physical part of that trip, but it was so much fun. I said No. I mean my cardiovascular health needs some work, but once we got like more up to the switchbacks. Yeah, I actually

you guys had to catch up with me

why? It's because we put you in the front of the crowds so we wouldn't have to wait on you. But I want to say one thing and that is you missed the best part. When the trail ended, the snow was packed down enough to where like we could step on it without going up to our waists on the main trail most of the time. Most of the time, yeah. But then there was the part where the trail ended and we just forged ahead with, we borrowed some pink snow shoes from some girl who was out on the trail and we just forged ahead in like five, six foot snow. And we got to the point where we are on the edge of a cliff of like a 300 foot drop and their trees were bending over the trail. So we actually had to go around these trees out over the ledge, not knowing if it's just snow that's packed up over the edge or if there's anything below us or anything.

And eventually I stepped over the edge and my foot hit nothing and my other foot's up on the ledge and I was in the snow shoes and my ankles were like kind of twist it up and I was like, I'm going to kill myself. So I had a friend pull me back up with like this, you know, thousands of feet below us at Yosemite. And we just said, okay, we're done. We're done. So if my fiance's listen to the story, she will hate me to yell at me. But we're getting married in like 10 days now, so I'm still alive. We made it back home safely. So

yeah, it was really fun. I think maybe the mountain was humongous. It was very tall. I would say the peak of the mountain was like negative three db they can afford maybe.

God, I hate you so much Chris. That was the litter, the worst dad, Joe man ever come out of here. You literally prepared for that. I prepared for that. I never prepared. Well let's bring on our guest here cause I have nothing to say to you at this point and I clearly don't want to talk about this anymore. So today's guest is a man by the name of Joe Gilder. Chris, why don't you tell our audience a little bit about Joe Gilder if they're not familiar with him and his work. Yeah, so Joe,

a audio engineer, musician, Youtuber, extraordinary. He's well known. You probably know who he is. We met about a year and a half ago at summer NAM and eight Hattie B's at fancy recording studios and it was lovely and he's awesome. He's an incredible guy. So I'm super excited to have him on the show. And this is sort of selfish for me. Like I mentioned a few episodes back, I'm working on youtube stuff myself. I'm terrified of making youtube videos. And I think the scariest thing about making content, making videos that are like about what you do for a living is to do a good job. You have to be yourself. And Joe is like the king at this. He just seems to effortlessly be himself. So Ladies and gentlemen, Joe Gilder. Joe, how you doing man? I'm really good. Thanks for having me on. It's a pleasure having you on man. We are super pumped.

So when we met, I had such a good time hanging out with you and remember we were sitting outside Vance pals studio and Barry Hill and Nashville eaten Hattie B's and having a good old time and watching famous people walk by. And uh, I was like, oh man, like Brian Hood. Yeah, I need to be this guy's friend. But dude, Joe, to start me and tell us your story. Tell us how you got to be this youtube audio music celebrity guy. Wow. Okay. So I grew up in Mississippi. I'm a southern boy and started writing songs when I was a teenager. Decided I wanted to be a rock star. Cool. Which seemed like a good idea at the time. Proceeded to discover recording. Really got into it. Really liked it. Ended up up here near Nashville to study audio and recording and just with the intention of being a rock star and just record my own stuff and then realized I really liked all the technical nerdy stuff, the production stuff.

Being on the other side of the glass is really as much fun, if not more fun than being the musician. So I fell in love with that. Worked at Sweetwater for a few years, up in the cold, bitter north and sold gear and learn more things. And were you a sales rep at Sweetwater? Yeah. Did sales there for about three years. Nice. So I wonder if any of our listeners were part of your group of people that you called regularly to check in on. You never know because we made them phone calls. Yes, you did. A lot of them. Even already, I'm learning more about you and that makes so much sense of why your videos are so good because you have so much sales experience. Yeah, that was a big part of it. Learn how to teach over the phone in order to sell something. But it's still kind of all the same. You're educating people and here it is. That's the information I was looking for. Joe, thanks for coming on.

No, that's awesome. That makes so much sense. Like, so my dad is this really, really, really good salesman. When I was growing up, I was like five years old and we live in Columbus, Ohio and the Buckeyes as the local football team and everyone's obsessed with them. And Oh, come on. You know, you're from Alabama. That's what it is. So we, um, kind of derailing this here, but I promise there's a point to this story. We found a bunch of Buckeyes at a park one time. This is so weird. A buck as I got a little weird brown, poisonous nut. It's like the weirdest mascot choice ever. But anyways, you make him into necklaces and you wear them to football games for some really ridiculous reasons. So we made a bunch of necklaces, went to an Ohio state football game, I'm like five. And we're gonna try to sell them.

And they were five bucks a piece. And it was like a major moment in my life where like we were like, okay, let's do this. And I was like, wait, what? I don't sell. How do you do that? And so my dad, we had a dowel rod with all these necklaces on it and he picked it up and you walked into like the middle of the flow of traffic and he went a buck on necklaces. Yeah. And immediately sold a Buckeye necklace. And I was like, what? That's amazing. So I got the dowel rod and like walked up these two old ladies and was like, hi, would you like to buy some Buckeye necklaces? And they did. I sold to Buckeye necklaces and it like changed my life. And there's something about the way you carry yourself like that. My Dad is similar to that, like he's been a salesman for years.

And I see that in you and it makes total sense that you had that experience at Sweetwater because Sweetwater has got it had the best sales team on earth as far as audio gear goes as far as training. And like every sales rep that I've ever interacted with like has social skills and isn't this like weird nerdy guy? But I was just trying to tell you, you reminded me of my dad in the nicest possible way. And that was a long way to do it. So you were selling it Sweetwater, that obviously was super helpful to you and then you eventually transitioned to Nashville. Tell us about that.

Yeah, we always wanted to, we couldn't stay in the Midwest. I don't think so. And my wife's from here, so we were trying to figure out a way to get back here. And while I was at Sweetwater, so you're, it's a sales job, right? So you're talking to people, helping them out, but then you want to sell them something. So after you've sold it to them and they want to know how do I set up a reverb track? That's cool. I can maybe tell you real quick, but I should probably get on to selling the next thing. Right? I can't sit there and teach you how to use all this stuff. I just sold you. It's just not in the cards. So that's kind of started me down the path of, well I could make a website with some articles and maybe a few videos to answer just common questions people have so that way I can go sell stuff and I can say, hey, go check out this video I made and I can explain it once and have that do the work for me over and over again. So that was kind of the initial, Matt, I love to write, I love to create. So it was, there was that, that was a big part of it too. But that was kind of the initial need that I saw. Okay. People keep asking me the same questions. Let me answer him so I don't have to always answered them in person.

That's cool. And you and Graham Cochran are real close, right?

Yeah, we both kind of started the same, almost the exact same within a few months of each other. So yeah, we've been buddies for a long time.

That's awesome. He was on the show a couple of months back and he mentioned sort of the same thing, like the initial idea, it was like I'm going to answer a question and get all the time once with a video. That's Rad man. So was that something you started sorta your youtube channel in while you're at Sweetwater and then eventually, yeah. Cool. What was it like, why did you lean all the way in on that? What happened there that inspired you to push,

you know, you get into something new, you kind of obsess about it. At least I do. So I just dove into it and it worked. Like it was getting some traction. People were finding it. People were, you try a million things and a lot of them don't work. This happened to be one that at least seemed like it has some potential to become something pretty valuable. So I just Kinda kept leaning into it and it wasn't like an overnight thing by any means, but it just turns out I had a knack for it and I, the first videos are horrible. You can go back and watch them. They are absolutely dreadful from my apartment. You just leave them on there? Oh yeah, they're still there. The first one I did was how to create a reverb track in pro tools. It was sitting in my apartment in Fort Wayne, Indiana with no acoustic treatment on the walls. Just you know, broke as a joke and I was like, all right, well I know how to do this. I'm going to teach this one thing. And the rest is somewhat history. But yeah,

I just like having mild videos on youtube so I can always go back and show people how bad I was and show them that there is indeed hope for you in the future. Because back then, my videos were so atrocious that any human you could pick up off the streets would have been better than me at making a video and to go from that to where I'm at now, I'm not incredible by any means, but I'm comfortable enough on camera and to not look like, yeah, I used to. So is that why you kind of leave your stuff on there? Yeah. For just posterity's sake.

Yeah, absolutely. It's like the same reason why I put, you know, an album I made 12 years ago, I leave it on iTunes because it's, you know, compared to what I'm doing right now, it's not nearly as good, but you know, it's a part of the story. It's part of the journey. It's kind of, to me it's encouraging to go back and hear how far I've come. But then also like you said, to say, hey, you're struggling. Yeah, everybody does. That's just, that's the part of learning a craft. It's normal.

I want to kind of paint the picture for people, why we're talking about youtube in particular and you mentioned it a second ago and that is you are able to just explain things one time and then you could send people back to that over and over and over and over again. And Chris and I have been kind of on this path to duplicate ourselves and we've done that on this podcast with you now that we have now of 69 episodes out and people across the world at any given time are listening to this podcast no matter what we're doing. And at the time this podcast airs, it's March 5th unless the podcast gets shuffled around for some reason, it's March 5th I am currently in Versailles on my honeymoon as you listen to this episode, and that is a powerful thing because I'm not actually working right now.

I am probably touring the palace of Versailles. I'm staying at the Waldorf Astoria with my now wife and I'm enjoying what someone told me last night was your living that great life. This is just a guy at a restaurant and I was talking about my bachelor party too and he said, you're living a great life and I want to just say that because I think our listeners think very linearly about the way they market themselves. They don't think about multiplying themselves and I think youtube is a very, very good way for any of our listeners to start multiplying their time so they're not out there fighting those battles one on one on one and I think you've done that Joe. I think you've done a great job of putting content online consistently, but at any given time as you are on this interview, people are out there watching your videos, building relationship with you.

Even if it's not your goal, at some point they will make some sort of transaction with you and I think that's going to be a very powerful thing in the for recording studios is to create some sort of content marketing platform. Whether it's a podcast like I've seen some of our community do, whether it's a youtube channel, which is what Chris is doing, what Graham Cochran has done, what you've done. I think there was a lot of power in that and I loved for the people that are maybe early on this journey or just about to begin this journey for you to kind of speak into what are the struggles that they are going to face as they're starting to build our youtube channel. Because I'm sure you are putting videos out there with very little traction at the beginning and maybe I'm wrong, but I know people will experience that. And how do you a get that initial seed of traction and B, fight the urge to stop when that initial traction isn't immediate.

Those are great questions. So for me, a lot of it was kind of building up excitement of kind of believing this is going to turn into something if I just keep kind of, you know, turning the flywheel to rip off Jim Collins. But at the same time, I had no clue this could go. I could give this two years and they come completely bomb. That's what I love about. If you ever read a lot of Seth Godin and he's all about like, what makes you a great artist or an entrepreneur is the fact that you do things that very well might not work. So if you can just accept that, hey, this may bomb, it's kind of liberating, doesn't take away the, oh, this scares the crap out of me. Parts still. But it frees you up a little bit to just try it and just put some stuff out there and give it some time.

Do you think that your sales experience has helped you a lot with that sort of attitude? Because you have to face failure time and time and time again every day.

Yeah. I wasn't the kid who had, you know, who was making the Buckeye necklaces and going and selling them, who just was naturally entrepreneur ish. That wasn't me. So really until I got that job was the first time I'd ever had to like earn a living. You know what I mean? Like if I don't sell, I don't make money. That's a rough place to be. But I tell everybody, if you can get a sales gig just for a little bit, at some point in your life,

it's super helpful because it teaches you,

oh, right, I got to actually perform. I can't just show up. I've got to actually create value. So yeah, absolutely. Between just the interaction with people that you don't know and learning how to connect with them and find a way to build a relationship to just learn how to explain and teach things in a way that people get a lot of. That was super, super helpful.

So back to your early days in Youtube, you'd put out some content you devoted, you said you were going to commit to two years of this, right?

Yeah.

And Chris Graham, you said you're committing to a year of this, right? Yep. Every week. Yup. And so at what point Joe did you hit the point where you start to see those efforts pay off?

It was sooner than I expected. Now this was 10 years ago. So Youtube's a different world for sure. So it may not be everybody's mileage will vary a little bit. But for me, I pretty early on because you know when you get into something and you start to watch everybody else who's talking about the thing you're into and the common advice was start an email list while you're doing the content. So I did that fairly early. So I had people getting on an email list and talking about that as a way to communicate more than just over Youtube and probably, let me think about it as launch my first video in April and then I actually sold something in like the following November as far as like creating a course to sell. So that was a very like tangible thing that happened and what I didn't expect, which is really applicable to your audience, is all the people who had contacted me to work with them.

And like one of my really close friends, he just found my website really liked me and said, hey, I'm making a record. Can I come track vocals at your house? He's in La and I'm in Nashville. Just totally creepy, random, weird. But like he contacted me while I was still working at Sweetwater. That's how far back we go. But lots of stuff like that, whether it's just mixing gigs or hey can you play guitar on this thing? But I wasn't even saying, hey come hire me to work on your stuff. It was just by creating the content and showing, hey, he kind of knows what he's talking about. People would like seek me out. I have to jump through hurdles almost cause I didn't make it very easy to say, hey could I pay you to do something for me?

And that's awesome. And I was hoping to get to that because that's been my experience so far with youtube and the podcast has been insane. Like I would say at this point, most of my customers listen to the podcast and there's like a, how did you hear about me on my form? When you book a project and it's just like every day it's looking for your arms through your podcast. And it's been really wild and really fun because when I work with these people, they already kind of know me. It's an easy conversation to start as opposed to like, I don't know anything about you and you don't know anything about me. And I would imagine one of the reasons that that worked so well for you as far as getting clients right off the bat is you're just like one of the most likable guys on camera.

You're, it's like you're a buddy. And I would imagine like when I first started watching your videos, it was just like, I feel like I know this guy and that I feel like I know him goes a long way when you're trying to build a relationship and you haven't even met the person yet when they want to record, you might be one of the people that they trust the most in the field just because they've watched your videos or listen to your material or whatever it happens to be. So I think that's super interesting and I love what Brian was saying earlier about like we're recording the podcast right now, but guaranteed there are people out there watching your videos thinking about like, oh I want to have him mix my record or I want it, I'm going to buy this course. And he made her all I want, you know, when a track vocals, his house, you know, whatever it happens to be. So walk us through that process. Like what did that look like as far as customers starting to just show up out of the woodwork when you started to make these videos? When was that? In this process?

It was early cause we moved to Nashville kind of in August of that year. And so I had already like that my buddy who had ended up doing vocals and mixing and mixing the record form that would that happen within the first couple of months of starting the channel, he found me wow. Somehow really liked me and we connected and that kind of thing. And like Graham Cochran's that same way. He would leave comments on my blog asking questions. And then one day his handle change from Graham cochrane.com to the recording revolution.com and I clicked over and at first I was thinking, oh no, a competitor. But then I was like Dang it, I really liked this guy. So we became friends and we did a podcast for several years together and that led to doing a bunch of other stuff together. So that was all literally through creating content.

So I feel like one thing I want to put out there is, I'm not saying you need to go make a thing that teaches people how to mix or how to record. You certainly can. And there's plenty of room for that. But I think at the same time just putting out anything somehow demonstrates what you're good at and what you do. You can't right now see the implications of the connections and things that'll happen. Just like me meeting you guys kind of randomly cause I know Ledge and ledge, you know this weird connections and now we're doing a podcast together, which again is maybe a smaller thing but you know, who knows what we're going to do in the future. It's just, it's a piece of that whole putting yourself out there. Bit that I'm sure you guys talk about a lot.

You mentioned earlier that your mileage might vary when you're starting your youtube channel, especially nowadays when it's 2019 now and you were starting a youtube channel back in 2010 but I think people need to have the self awareness to understand where their strengths lie. And we talked about an episode 62 how to fix your stagnant income by asking yourself six hard questions where we really dive into trying to realize if you're doing the right thing or not. And so youtube is not going to be for everybody, but I think a lot of people have a similar story you where they got into audio, not because they had visions of being this massive producer, although that does happen. Most of them were just really interested in music. They loved making music and then they want to learn how to record music. And so that sort of approach, I think if they are a musician and they're trying to learn how to have a successful music career, that approach does lend itself well to starting to teach things as you learn it.

Because if you're going to create a youtube channel, especially early on in your career, you're not going to know everything. And I don't know if you do this as well Joe, but I see a lot of youtube channels they teach as they learn just just in time information. They learned something and so they teach it to their audience and that's a really great way to build a channel. So I think our audience, a lot of people listening right now have enough knowledge when it comes to creating content to start a youtube channel, even if they're just learning a little bit at a time and teaching a little bit at a time. Is that Kinda how you got your start Joe?

Absolutely. When I started, when I was trying to figure out what the thing was going to be called a new, I'd never been like the Nashville, like pro engineer working on major label releases. So I knew those guys weren't going to be my audience and that Kinda just honed it down to I've been making records in my home studio for years. So let me just start there and I'll talk about that cause that's something I can talk about cause that's what I do. I'm not going to branch out into reviewing equipment and stuff that I don't really have any business doing. And so that was, I just kept it small and I was, at the time I was making like my kind of my first full length album that I've made of my own stuff. That was the father and the material to okay I learned this, then we'll talk about this. Okay this happened, this sucked, this was horrible and here's, you know, kind of lessons from that on top of this stuff I already knew because I'd, it's been a few years doing this stuff. I still don't think I'm an expert. I just feel like I'm a guy who makes music at home and I've managed to make it sound pretty good and I've managed to get better over the years and I bet there are people who want to do the same thing.

That's awesome man. I think one of the things that you do that I'm the most jealous of is that you have found a way to, it appears very easily, very comfortably make content, which has put you out there in a major way. You know, like you think about, let me back up here. So one of the biggest things that we preach on this podcast is that there's a lie in our industry, in the music industry, and that lie is if you build it, they will come. Hmm. Just like be passionate, do your thing, and then just sit back and the world owes you to show up.

Well, by the way, real quick, I want to say that lie, we've been talking about it as far as a recording studio since the beginning of this podcast, but that light goes for everything, including a youtube channel. Absolutely. Just because you build a youtube channel does not mean people will come to it. So just keep that in mind. Yeah, and I think what's so interesting about this is from the perspective of like let's go back in time, 10 years you're starting to make videos and you know, you're probably working 40 50 hours a week, something like that. And you make a video and in that video gets watched by people for a hundred hours total and you make another video and that gets watched for 110 hours total amongst all the people that are watching it. And that's crazy because right now, this week, because of all the content you have out there, you're probably going to work more than a thousand hours, but you're only going to be there for like some of it.

Yeah. And that's interesting. I think that's the power of content. And I mean I tell you, it was like a turning point in my life when we had Graham Cochran on the show. He said something crazy. He said with an audience, anything is possible. And you mentioned that, you kind of hinted at that earlier of like when you start to make content, when you start to put in like a hundred hours a week because your contents out there working for you 200300400 hours a week, that you don't have to be there for, that opens crazy doors and you can't possibly anticipate like what lies behind those doors and what doors will even be. And speaking on behalf of Brian and myself, that's been the case for us with this podcast of like it's just been like, Whoa, I had no idea. Like how many awesome friends we would get to make. Yeah. Just because we talking to Mike once a week. So can you kind of talk about like what's some of the benefits are for you going through the path of building this youtube channel and this online presence as you've had a lawyer, some of the unexpected benefits that you've seen so far?

Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned friendships and that was a surprising one. I didn't think I would meet anyone and I've met so many people, like all of you. I wouldn't have met you if I hadn't had a youtube channel or whatever, but like I go through and like a buddy of mine, like the guy from La will be in town to hang out and people say, well how did you meet? And you have to say well on the Internet, like that's, I have so many friends that I met on the lid. Shaw, he lives in Nashville. I didn't know him. We just, our paths had never crossed but we met because he was doing recordings of your rock stars and I was doing a home studio corner. Like just so many things like that. Yeah, the relationships is a big one. Again, like I said earlier, I didn't expect to get so much work for the studio that was never even like Graham will tell you he, that was his intention to create a channel so you can drum up business for the studio.

I wasn't even that smart. I just wanted to make a bunch of content and maybe you're making ebook one day, like that was as big as I could think. Didn't think anybody would hire the guy who's teaching them to also do the work. That didn't make sense to me, but apparently that makes a lot of sense because they say, okay, he's better at mixing than I am right now. I'm going to hire him to mix this project while I'm still learning how to do it. So that was pretty surprising. Yeah, those would be the two big ones. The relationships and then the unexpected kind of client projects that come out of it.

I, there's probably a third

unexpected one that I'd like you to talk about a little bit now and that is dealing mixes. First of all, did you expect that to come or was that kind of a preplanned thing and kind of tell our audience about what that is? Yeah, so I don't know if Graham mentioned it at all, but he and I, we met each other on the Internet. I had been doing a podcast by myself. I was listening to a few that had two hosts, you know, like all the smart people do. And so I said, Graham, we need to do it. Let's do a podcast together because people are tired of hearing me talk to myself. So we started this simply recording podcasts. We did roughly monthly and did probably 60 or so episodes and we did it for a few years and then from that we did a couple of workshops here in Nashville and then I just one day my wife and I were watching that show chopped on the food network where they all get the same ingredients and they have to cook basically different stuff using the same ingredients.

I thought that'd be so cool to have two people mix the same song with the same tracks and see how different they are. And she came up with the name dueling mixes and so I called Grandma, I was like, Hey, what if we did this thing like a monthly thing where we mix a new song, we both mix it and people get to kind of mix the song themselves and hear the difference between our two mixes. So in we decided, yeah, let's try it. And we just seemed to be this little thing that maybe might be cool one day and as soon as we launched it, a bunch of people wanting to join and it was kind of surprising. That was in 2012 so seven years later and I think later today or tomorrow I got to work on my mix for next month. Like that's, we've been, I think we're 77 mixes in so far, which is crazy.

That's awesome man. Walk us through how that works. It's just you and Graham competing each month or do you guys have like guests mix engineers take on the champs, that sort of thing? You know we had Ian Bird

come a couple of times to do like a guest mastering thing but not really guess mixers. Cause when we started there was nobody doing mixing tutorials. So like we knew a lot of mixed engineers but not folks that would do a video. So it was just kind of the two of us for a long time. But yeah, we both mixed the song. We post our mixes, we don't say whose is whose and they get to listen and it's just really interesting because you think, oh it's the same tracks. It'll probably sound pretty similar but it's pretty wild how different they can be just based on all the thousand decisions you have to make over the course of a mix. So that part of it's really interesting for people and then they obviously get the tracks too and they can see how they're mixed turns out and comparison against ours.

I love that. I love that that undercuts another lie that sort of in our like audio community amongst people that are kind of coming up and learning, which is like if you got all the best mix engineers in the world, they're all going to make the exact same mix of the song. They're all doing the same thing. It's two olderly false. This idea that each of them is going to do something different because it's art. They're going to present the song in a totally different way and it's going to connect with you emotionally in a different way. And it's so funny cause you see like, you know, we make fun of, you know, quote unquote gear sluts, like this sort of idea, this elitist, elitist. I don't know how to pronounce that. Somebody's elitist. You elitist this elitist mentality of like audio engineer's love to say actually it's supposed to be like, that's a thing. Nobody walked up to like Leonardo Davinci when he was painting the 16th Chapel and I was like,

actually you need

no, he's taking something out of like the depths of his soul and expressing himself and like the quality of the work is this reflection of can you help someone experience art in the way that you are inside that the thing you hear. That's such a cool concept to have two people's perspective of this is how I hear this song. Well this is how I hear this song. And I'm sure there were plenty of times when maybe it's every time. I don't know where you guys are both like, wow, both of these mixes are so good, but they're so different.

Yeah. And there are always people who prefer one or the other. It's never one clearly wins over the other. There's always people who prefer this treatment over that one. And you were saying about all mix engineers do the same thing. That's like saying I'll drummers do the same thing. You Take Neil Peart out of rush. Is it still rush press? You know what I mean? It's not because he has a thousand times, it's because of other factors,

but the thousand times help. It does help. Oh rush.

So I want to kind of move us back to the youtube thing because I think there's not a lot of guidance out there for specifically starting music related at youtube channels. I kind of want to get your input on if someone were starting a youtube channel today, and before I even get into this, I want to say that your goal should dictate what sort of content you're creating. So if your goal is to get people into your studio, your contents probably give me a lot different than what Joe is doing. Joe's unexpected byproduct was people hired him because they were learning in mixing from him and was building trust and then they ended up hiring him for certain aspects of the recording process. If your goal is singlemindedly to get clients into your studio, you're probably going to have a lot different content content that's relevant for a upstart in the artist's, someone that is learning how to book tour. Some of that is learning how to choose a producer or someone that is learning how to prepare for the studio, things that are common questions for your target audience. So with that in mind, I think establishing a goal first is the most important thing, but what are some other things along that vein that someone should consider before even starting a youtube channel? Joe?

I think for me, yes,

having a goal, but even I didn't have a goal. I just knew I wanted to make some videos and then maybe that would turn into something and now it's very different. Like I have very specific outcomes I'm trying to promote, like I've created courses and things like that. That's become a business. That's probably the other unexpected thing. I didn't really expect it to be a business. I thought it would be cool if it became one, but never thought it would. Um, but for me a lot of it is you got to go through a season of just make some stuff and then kind of circle back and see what worked and then rinse and repeat. It's super boring. And I honestly, probably the last two years I've done that, well the first several years I would just throw stuff out there and some of it work and some of it wouldn't.

And I would just move on and make something else that I wanted to make. And it worked okay. But I literally, I think I'd just about double my subscribers in the last two years by actually paying attention to what people were connecting with. Which one got the most views? This one that I thought would, or this one that I wasn't expecting to in that actually got a lot of traction. It doesn't mean you're completely slave to oh, what other people want. As much as you're making all stuff that you think is good. And valuable and that people will connect with, but you're never going to know until you put it out there. So I don't think you can lay out a plan that tells you the specifics of what to do until you've done some specifics for awhile and then go back and see what worked and start to kind of build on those successes.

There's a quote that I like, I think it's Mike Tyson, the setup, but it just says everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. Yup. And so I think one of the biggest parts of it is actually getting in the ring in the first place. So you committed two years to do this and you, because if maybe your past sales experience, you are a little more used to put yourself out there getting rejected. I think it had a lot to do with it. But you also, I think just getting it done period. Just getting it done done is better than perfect. That attitude in and of itself is what has led to at least the inklings of success and then what you have taken and run with it. So when you're looking at kind of the content that is maybe resonating, whether your viewers, what sort of things do you look, do you look at the stats? Do you just kind of get a gut feel and what kind of strategy do you have behind your posting?

It's a little bit of both. There's some gut feel just around the things that get more comments and interaction and engagement. If a lot of people just ask questions about a certain thing or just you can just kind of get a sense of, okay, when I go in this direction, people, maybe it doesn't get a lot of use, but it connects with people. So that's something to kind of put a pin in because that might not be the most popular thing I do. But I might get to go deeper with that crowd and that might lead to some really cool things. And then the other side is just what stuff is just getting more views just from the stats. And so I'll look at that and then kind of try to place, you know, the top 20% of videos in some sort of a category. Okay. What type of video was this and then kind of see, okay. It's really just of all the things I do and I've done lots of different types of videos. I've tried lots of member Gilder camp, try it, a lot of things. Some of which Gilder Cam was really popular with all my friends but not with people in the world. Anyway.

Got Her camera real quick.

Gilder Cam was, I got on this Casey Neistat kick and I was like I'm going to do a daily Vlog. And I was carrying the camera everywhere and they were fun. And it taught me a lot about video editing cause I used to just sit down and say something in front of a camera or whatever, but it just, it never got much traction as far as, it was very self absorbed. But it was still, it was a thing and I tried it, it was cool and it just didn't work. So for me, kind of figuring out, okay of like 10 years worth of data here, like the top 2% of videos and they're almost all falling into like maybe one or two categories. And so really leaning into that because that seems to be what's working and still leave room to try new things and experiment but kind of fallen back to the stuff that has proven to work well, if that makes sense.

Well you just brought up something super interesting about you did something that your friends loved that your audience was like I the people buying from you didn't go nuts for it, but the people you respected and like your peers went crazy for it. And there's something really interesting

there. There's a fork in the road I think for anyone getting into content creation where you could make content that would get you praise from your peers. So like if you're into, you know, a friend of mine is working on starting a youtube channel and he does a lot of composition for video games, makes, you know soundchecks or video games. He could go in one direction and make a channel that other video game composers would love, but that wouldn't necessarily land in a new video game gigs. He'd go another direction which is trying to serve his ideal customer and that would be totally different. His peers, his fellow video game composers might not think it was anything special. They might not like it at all. But you, I think what this is so interesting is you have served a really specific type of person. You've really made it your mission to serve them.

I'll say that word one more time to serve them and that's worked out really well for you. Gilder came was awesome. It was super cool, but it didn't serve the type of person that you were really going for so it didn't create a whole lot of results for you. So talk about that a little bit. This difference between, I think there's three kinds of items I've got floating around in my brain. There's doing what your peers want, doing what the people you want to serve want and in this other idea of just like doing what you're a nerd on, like the thing that you're like, aw man, I'm fine. I love that. So this is so cool. So you've got these three things floating around. How do you balance all three of these issues?

I think for a long time I just made what I wanted to make. So that was, I think this is interesting, therefore I'm going to make this. And occasionally that worked. But a lot of times it was almost ignoring what the people want or what was really connecting and serving like you said. And that was why it was such a kick in the ego when I finally realized I've been putting in so much work into this stupid blog and then it's just the people who already knew me liked it and thought it was cool and they keep asking for it to come back, but it was not moving any of the other needles that I need to move to continue kind of doing this. So it kind of circled back to, you know what? Yeah, I probably need to do something on how to mix drums again because I haven't talked about that in a while and people keep asking me about that. I'm not super excited about that because I'm tired of mixing drums or I've mixed a lot of drums this month, but that would probably serve well. So it's kind of a balance. Like I'll make some things that I think are really fun and interesting, but then I'll also try to circle back around to this is something that I think will serve the community well and let's just kind of lean into that too and maybe try to find a balance in there.

Fascinating. Well I think kind of diving into this, you know, I'm just looking you up on youtube to see where you're at subscriber wise. You are, let's see here, 16 away from 82,000 subscribers on youtube. And I'm kinda curious like I'm imagining what that would be like my crappy little channel. I'm still like in the mode of like, I'm just going to make what I think is cool because I know I'll never keep doing this unless I'm just talking about what it happened to be interested in at the time. Graham has been talking to me about this about eventually the plan is to start making the content that I know will show up in search results and we'll get shared and we'll, you know, scratch a different itch if you will. I think what's interesting about this conversation is I'm curious to hear with almost 82,000 subscribers, how many people do you turn away in a month that want you to do work for them that want to record with you or have you mix? Is there like a huge, massive number or is it not really a thing or what?

No, it's not a huge, massive, and again, it's kind of goes back to what Brian said earlier, especially the last couple of years. My agenda is, here's some content, go sign up for my email list and I'll give you something else for free with all an eye towards you can watch the free videos and that's great. We can be friends, but if you want to dive deeper and by something like a course that I've made or something that's available too, so it's all kind of pushing in that direction. That's why I don't have just tons and tons of people coming out and saying, Hey, would you mix my record or whatever. It's a, you know, a handful every week or so, but it's not a huge, huge thing, but it's probably most of it cause I'm not trying to push in that direction, if that makes sense.

I think there's a strategy around what you're doing that is pushing people in a specific direction, like you said, and your end goal is to get them into your funnels for your courses. It's not your end goal to get them into fill out a quote request or to go to your site to book a call with you or to come tour your studio. Those are none of your things and none of your videos are calling people to that action at the end. So talk about maybe some of the things you've learned over the years as far as in your videos that get people to take an action that you want them to take that pushes them further along that client journey. Because no matter where people are and they understand that in order to get to that next step, they need to take an action. So for me in my studio, that action is to fill out a form on the website for Chris. That next action is to, you know, maybe go purchase on this site or go fill out a form or book a call with him or you know, upload a test master. We all have these different things in our studios that are the next step. What are some things you've learned? It gets people on Youtube to get off of Youtube and to take that next step with you in that relationship.

That's such a dope question because for a long time I would just make good videos and then just kind of say Karma will come back and they will stumble their way over to my side and do what I want them to do. And I have some good data for this. So last year in January I went to Winter Nam and sat down with Graham cause we won't get to see each other in person the whole lot. And we just rapped about business for a long time. You kind of just consulted me on because stuff was kind of stagnant and wasn't going where I wanted it to go. And one of the things we kind of identified was I'm making all these videos but I'm not ever actually specifically asking them to do an action. It's kind of like, thanks for watching, I'm always here if you need me, you know the, the very passive sales guy, if here's my card, if you ever need a car or come on over, like it's just never going to work. So I started intentionally at the end of every video saying basically made a couple of free offer things dependent on different topics. So at the end of a video about recording vocals, I could say, go check on my recording cheat sheet. It's over at this website, go enter your email address. So for a year, at the end of every video I did that and I went from getting just a handful of flux email subscribers every month to get an a couple thousand just from that change.

That is massive.

The funny thing is I wasn't like Brian, I know you're so analytical and so like I would like to just a fraction of kind of your whatever that word is, just that intensity. But I didn't even know what I was getting because I just kind of doing my thing and when I went back and looked at it I realized oh I got 60 new email subscribers in December and then I got 2000 in January cause I started actually asking them to do something. And it's just, it's laughable. Yeah. You have to ask people to do what you want them to do and not everybody's going to do it, but they're not going to mind either cause you just provided a bunch of value for the last nine minutes and then you're saying, hey, by the way, here's a free thing. Or go book a call or go do a test master. Like it's funny, it's so simple.

The call to action, the CTA is, it's known in the marketing world is honestly, it's one of those things that I just don't understand really. It sounds so stupid and everyone's seen it in youtube videos smash that like button and you're just like rolling your eyes out in the back of your head. But there's a reason people do it is because it's effective for whatever reason. If you do not call someone to a specific action, whether it's on your website, whether it's in a Facebook message after a conversation, whether it's one on one, if you don't tell them to do a specific thing or ask them to do a specific thing, there is a much, much less chance that they will ever do that thing. And that's honestly a really good teaching moment for everyone here. Joe went from 60 subscribers in a month or whatever it was to 2000 a month just from calling people to a specific action.

Every single person listening to this can take this away as like one of those like, Hey, I just got my value from this podcast for the next year because if anyone starts to do this consistently, you're going to see your income's jumped dramatically just by calling people to action consistently throughout your career on every medium that you're on, whether it's youtube, whether it's Instagram videos, whether it's Instagram messages when you're talking to people, whether it's in conversations through text message or if you do a podcast calls to action are extremely important and just being candid and vulnerable here. We don't do a very good job with that on this podcast, Chris.

I know I've been thinking that honestly.

Yeah, but I mean it is what it is like done is better than perfect. But this call to action thing is one of those low hanging fruits that Joe has discovered. And honestly, where do you think you'd be now if he'd just been to this the entire time throughout your career?

Oh, don't you think at all? You know, wring my hands over that question about once a week. Yeah. It's what people do. Like I remember at Sweetwater, so you're on the sales floor with a hundred other sales guys and there's some guys who have great conversations and they don't sell anything. And you have the guys who don't know much, but they would outsell everybody cause they knew enough to do the job and then to ask for the sale. There were so many times where I would say, this guy's not going to buy. But then I'd say, so you want to buy that? And there'd be a pause, but yeah, let's go ahead and buy it. And if I hadn't said yes they would have gone and thought about it and then a guitar center ad would have come up and they would have never bought from me.

So, and there's a thousand more times that I didn't ask because I was a chicken. But in content it's so much easier cause there's not that you're not writing person with, you're not having to have that awkward eye contact after you asked the question. You just pop it on at the end of your video and it doesn't have to be this crazy thing. And I think when you were saying a call to actions are so important, people don't take that advice, which is really good advice and turn it into all I ever do is put out call to actions.

Oh yeah. Never.

I just fill up my Twitter and Instagram feed with cold studio called Studio called book the studio. That's not it. It's a, if you took it like percentage wise it's like a quarter of a percent of the time spent in the video. It's 99% on value and then that action at the end, I'm asking for something and I'm not asking for money, I'm just asking for them to get something for free in exchange for an email. So like having some of those steps in place because not everybody's going to do it, but they will if you ask, but they probably won't if he just assume they're going to find it on their own, they will not find it on their own.

Well, let me bring that home for some of our audience. So I know some of your thinking like email, email list. Who Cares about that? What would I do with that? Well, let me sort of paint a picture for you. I'm not going to ask Joe how big his email list is, but let's look at his youtube channel. He's got almost 82,000 subscribers, I would guess his email list is totally tens and tens and tens of thousands of people. Let's say Joe decided he wanted to build a studio in his backyard and he hired some audio engineers to help him do that and then he opened up his phone and he typed out an email. It said, Hey, I'm booking recording sessions at Gilder studio in the backyard of the guild home. He would book that Sucker for a year in advance with an email from his phone with typos in it. It would be ridiculous.

It would be absolutely difficult to deal with the demand and the responses to that email because Joe has built this amazing audience and he has served and helped so many people and then ask them for just a simple, hey, can I have your email address if Joe loses everything, but he keeps his email list. Joe Can push a button and get clients on demand. I would bet Joe, that if you sat down with your phone right now that you could have a client at your house in 20 minutes or less, like think about the craziness of that and Joe's Nashville, I'm not exaggerating. I fully believe that if Joe wanted to client in 20 minutes at his house, Joe could make that happen just with an email.

I want to touch on that and I also want to touch on what Joe said. Joe makes the most important point aside from the call to action that I talked about. Don't just go around and doing calls to action. Don't just go around trying to get people to book calls with your book studio time or whatever. There is a lot of value that comes first and if you go back and listen to episode number 46 or we talked to Graham Cochran about his youtube channel, his entire philosophy is add value, add value, add value, the go giver philosophy. And if Joe wasn't like that, then his call to action would not be pulling in 2000 people a month into his mailing list. So just understand that the value has to be added and creating content as an extraordinary way to add to people because it's answering questions that they genuinely need to answer.

And the result is it's a lot easier for people to take that next step because you've already built trust with them. But Chris is also making a very good point here but that, and it goes back to what Graham said, well if you have an audience, anything is possible. And I tend to agree with Chris, maybe not 20 minutes, maybe an hour, but seriously in a very quick amount of time. Yeah, traffic sucks a little bit around here. You know, very quickly Joe could take advantage of it and if he's not careful, he could overrun his list with this stuff and he could ruin the relationship he has. But right now he has built up so much value first. He has so much reciprocity built up with his email list that he could take advantage of it if you wanted to. I don't think he ever would, but he could. So that's why Chris is saying this mailing list thing is so important is because it is basically stored value, much like currency, which is very dangerous game to play if you start going down that rabbit hole too far.

Well, I talk about on the podcast all the time, like I'm preaching it myself from 10 years ago. One of the reasons I want to have you on and wanted to talk and pick your brain as I'm saying these things, but I'm preaching to myself right now. This idea like what you're talking about, you know the call to action at the end of the youtube video is interesting because I think that most of us struggle with imposter syndrome. We're terrified that someone's going to be like, oh you suck at some point and if someone's watched a youtube video that you've made for nine minutes, there's still watching. They liked you. Everyone that has stuck around, even in the podcast at this point, there's probably not even one guy that's like, I hate these guys, but I'm just going to keep on listening because I have nothing better to do.

You know? So like you got to think about like the filter, the content is it's filtering out anyone that doesn't love you, they're going to go do something else and most people aren't going to troll you about this and they're certainly not going to like do something to get back at you because you asked can I give you something for free? Just your email and the little box thing. He, so I'm like preaching to myself right now because I'm still scared of this. Like youtube scares the crap out of me. I don't know why, but making videos and putting it out there, it's just a little bit, I have to look at myself when I'm editing them and that's scary to like confront the reality that I'm less of a man than I think I am. I totally get that. Yeah, this is cool and I think inspiring for our audience to serve first and foremost by making content because you can multiply yourself, which is amazing.

Like that in itself is mindblowing. But then this idea of like asking for an email address in exchange for giving them something free. Talk about the Freebie, you're giving away something for free. How do you come up with that? What are some examples of stuff that may be our audience could give away for free in exchange for growing their email list? What do you do on your side for the mastering? I've got two things. So Graham has coached me on a new thing. We do something called the mix Polish quiz, and it's like a personality test or you answer a bunch of questions and it's like, ah, okay. This probably what you struggle with and you might consider doing this. Yeah. The big free thing that I do is do a free sample master. So somebody goes in the website and they send me a song, I master a sample for free. I sent it back and we have a conversation from there and that often turns into, you know, a lifelong relationship where I'm mastering records for years for them.

Yeah. Well, the first time I saw that I loved it because you're giving something that is in kind to the thing that you want to sell. So you're not saying like, I'll give you a Starbucks gift card for sign up to my email list cause then you'll just get a bunch of grandmas who scour the Internet for Free Gift Cards. You know what I mean? You're actually giving something that is valuable to the person that you potentially may want to have as a client at some point. And I think it's going to be different for everybody. So for me, I want to teach people stuff. So I give them these smaller kind of PDFs that dig into a specific topic they might be interested in like mixing or recording. Um, and so that that fits in line. If somebody is interested in that, they're probably interested in some of the other stuff that I have as well.

And I think the big thing for me is just because you're giving something away for free doesn't mean it's valuable. And so you still have to sell people on the free thing. Like I'll get people that, hey, I put a post on Craig's list, it said free recording session. Nobody took it up. Like well yeah cause it's not free. I still have to go take a day off work and come over to your place and then it might still sound awful because I don't know you at all. So like what you're asking is actually really costly for me to come do your quote unquote free session or like the musician who's like, oh you can get a free download of my song if you sign up to my email list. Well yeah, but I can listen to your song for free in other ways too. Like I can remember the last time I downloaded something and sinked it up to my phone, you know what I mean? That's not valuable anymore. So thinking about things that are actually valuable that people would actually want and maybe pay for and then find a way that works that you can give that away for free in exchange for something else, like a subscription Nora email address and things like that.

It's a powerful stuff. Like I'm very keenly aware that I have a lot to learn about this, about like how do you come up with something. So the mastering sample thing works great. I got a ton of customers off of that and it's grown my business a lot. But at the same time, if I have like a week where it's like, oh that were a little too well this week, too many [inaudible] okay, I'll be late to dinner every night this week. It's intense. But what you're doing with like giving away, you know, we'll talk about the free stuff that you give away.

Yeah, so the two primary ones, there's five step mix guide where I walk them through kind of the five phases of mixing that I go through. And another one is a recording cheat sheet that's just literally, I had this idea of doing a print newsletter once upon a time, which was a horrible idea. I'm glad I didn't do it, but that was the first issue. I wrote this big long 12 page thing. It never turned in anything, so I turned it into a free thing to give away all my email list. So those are the two main ones. And then another one, I've got a series of mixed through videos on youtube called mixed together. So you can watch the videos for free and if you want it the tracks you to enter your email address and then I'll send you an email with the tracks. So three different things that people seem to want. And so at the end of whatever video of it's about mixing us pitch the mixing thing, if it's about recording a pitch, the recording thing probably should do one about just producing or something like that. But that's what they are for me and it seems to work okay.

I'm fascinated by this. Like my wheels are spinning right now. If I could give away free unmastered tracks and walk people through how to master them. And Ah, interesting.

That could be something in case that turns into your like helping other mastering engineers but also was thinking, if I'm thinking about hiring a mastering engineer, I wouldn't expect you to do a sample master anyway. So that's really cool. But I get how that's not sustainable long term. But if you gave me something where I could experience what it's like to be the client, whether it's a video that shows me, okay, this is what the client sent, they were nervous about this. This is what I did. Here's how the final thing turned out. Even just one case study of that, or a few that would set me at ease of like, okay, I don't know what the process looks like, so I'm hesitant to even contact the guy. But if he gives me something that shows me what that looks like and I can see that it was a happy ending, that'd be really, really cool.

Mastering.

Yeah. Probably don't know what mastering is. Still had a friend here recording this weekend. She said, so what's mastering again?

You know that thing Joe, that's freaking great man. So like one of the things I love about podcasting being a podcaster is I get free coaching out of it. Like it's like Joe knows what he's talking about and I'm like, oh my gosh, why didn't I think of that? Oh, I'm going to go do that tomorrow. Seriously tomorrow. Yeah. So I'm like, that's back to the thing we talked about before of like you can make the content that your friends love, makes it content that serves your audience or make the content that you just, you think is cool. So for me that was such a helpful piece of advice because I'm like, that is what the audience and I'm trying to attract would want that serves them as opposed to like my, let's talk about psychology and why it sucks to mix and why you hate yourself when you're done.

This is all good stuff, but like ultimately it's not a one to one match for somebody that's thinking about should I master this myself or should I hire Chris to do it? That's the thing I run into a lot of, even people like on really high level. Sometimes we'll run out of budget at the end they're like, I'll just do this myself and yes, I'm trying to figure out, Gosh, you've given me so many ideas. I'm like running out of words to say. I'm like thinking about all these things at the same time, but man, Joe, that's amazing. I'm definitely going to do that.

Well, like I tend to master my own stuff just because I run out of time. Yeah. And I like this is due tomorrow, I can't get this to anybody. If you could sell me on the eight reasons why it, and it's very self serving the say you know, eight reasons to hire a mastering engineer, but if you could tell me on when it makes sense to master it yourself. So I know you have no ulterior motive. Like that would be really interesting. I would kind of want to sign up for that so let me know when that's ready.

That was the last video I made last week. Oh love it. We've kind of really done a really good job of painting the picture of why building youtube channels such a great idea at scale is your time. It really adds value. It allows you to call people to take an action towards the next step or in relationship. But we both know that's not all sunshine

and rainbows. It can be a real slog. It especially long term if you're putting out consistent content. Can you talk about what you do to kind of get over the fact that it can get monotonous, you can lose that creative drive sometimes. You can sometimes feel like you just don't want to do with that week. How do you kind of get around that sort of negative spiral that could lead you to eventually just stopped doing the channel all together?

That's a great question because the first part is you will get the turds who just roam the Internet. Looking for people to just be mean to

youtube. Comments are honestly like assess poll. That is legendary amongst all content creators. It really is

like you'll be going along and you'll get a comment. You're fat. It's like what? I mean, nice burn bro, but he didn't like, anyway, I'd rather you say what's you're saying? Is it right because of this and this and this or you know, or whatever. Anyway, so for me to get excited about making videos and creating that content, because it is, it can be very much a grind. Usually I like to do things that excite me and then figure out ways to make content that will be valuable out of that. So I've released tons of music of my own music over the years and I use that as fodder for all sorts of different pieces of content, whether it's paid or on the youtube channel. So for me it's exciting, like I'm working on an IEP right now and just at a video this morning talking about prepping files from mixing and then I showed a couple of things that I just recorded a couple of days ago because it's exciting to say, hey, I just recorded this, listen to this, and then here's how I tune those background vocals and see how much better it sounds.

That kind of thing. So it's educational, but it's also scratches the narcissist itch second, like show something that I'm working on, but it's still valuable and it also keeps me excited to go see what people think about it and kind of, you know that I just posted a video, what are people going to say about it? 10 years later, I still have that if I'm making something that I'm proud of and excited about. So for me early on I realized I was making videos but it wasn't really making much music and it felt very disingenuous and there was a disconnect there. So I kind of decided I'm going to make sure I'm always making some music. So I always have, I'm not just pulling up a session being okay, what can I make up to talk about today? Instead I have all these ideas because I'm constantly doing the thing I want to do, which is make music and then on the back end of that fine and ways to make content out of that.

Was there any point where you almost just stop your channel or gave up or lost hope related to that? Cause I think anyone that's creating a youtube channel today is going to face the question of whether they should continue or not.

Yeah, I think so. We've talked about Graham a lot. I love Graham like a brother, but I also struggle with being jealous of how big his channel is. He's probably at close to I think 400,000 or something like that several times. It's a multiple of mine and it always has been from the beginning it was, and then one day I looked and was like, holy crap, he's just exploded and blot of his cause he's doing a lot of things right and he's just really good at it and he's been disciplined from the get go. And I've just been like videos, let's not really be intentional. Matt just started asking people for a call to action and like the last 18 months. So yeah, stuff that were having to kind of accept. We're getting all philosophical here, Chris, but except like who I am and the fact that I'm not going to be for everybody.

You know, we talked about rush earlier, the people who love rush, love rush, but Russia is it, you know, queen, like there's just a different level of popularity and and whatever. But there's probably room for all of them obviously. But just kind of coming to terms with I can serve my crowd and I don't have much of an influence over how big that crowd's going to be because I can't change who I am. Ultimately I can try to present the best version of myself. I can try to lean into my strengths, but kind of like Seth Goden says this might not work or my audience might just be this smaller group over here and my job is to serve them well and I don't have much control over that. So kind of learning to let go of that a little bit. But then also I imagine if you let go of that a little bit, like I said, I was hanging around thirty thousand thirty five thousand subscribers for like five years and then I finally started actually paying attention to what I was doing and trying to create value.

And now it's up just crossed over the 80 mark, which is still a compared to some people small compared to other people. They're like, oh my goodness, you have 80,000 subscribers. It's just a number. Does it really mean anything? So trying to just kind of do good work but not be wrapped up in getting my identity from the work. That's what everybody else deals with. Right. That's like the eternal struggle. But finding ways to give myself to the work without getting all my worth out of it. That's a constant thing. Well, I'm sure every single audio engineer listening is like

out too much truth, too much truth. And that's where I think the most notorious for that. It's like photographers, graphic designers and audio engineers tend to be like the professions that are the most like I am what I make. Yeah. And a little bit, you know there's a component there like you make what you make as a result of who you are. But yeah, I mean I think that's one of the things that's so scary about being in the arts is like you know that you put that out, you put a song out and every single man, woman and child on this planet, if they hear it, are going to have an opinion about your soul within a couple seconds of hearing it. And that's just really scary. I like to use the illustration when you're making art, whether that's mixing, whether that's you're a musician or whatever, it's kind of a little bit, this is going to be like weird.

So brace yourself for the weird words they're going to have that are going to come out of my mouth. It's a little bit like making pornography except of all was the least expected words, expected word. I need you to back that up in some sort of valuable way for audience and not people are just turning. It was great having any lists as a listener of podcasts, but now we're just like, what? Thank you. May Have just proved your own point. I think we just got removed from iTunes. So let's say you do the George Costanza thing and you like get burlesque photos of yourself made, and it's, you know, you've got your tidy whities and you're on a velvet couch. If you put that picture on your Facebook profile, people are going to judge you. They're gonna be like, hmm man, he's hasn't been working out in the pex enough, a little flabby.

It was moobs or, wow, Ooh, what's that mole on his shoulder? And that's kind of gross, nasty. It's, it's raised, he should get that looked at like you're going to get judged. But when you put out a piece of art, and this is the cool thing about what you do, you're putting out art and teaching audio at the same time. These are two really terrifying things and the to serve each other. When you put out art, when you put it a song, it's this much more intimate thing about, and especially your songs [inaudible] these intimate, this is like my soul crying out type of thing. And when someone listens to that song, it's much more intimate than, oh, this could work out a little bit more as opposed to like, hmm, I'm not vibing with his soul and his essence. I just feel like he's not going to heaven. You know? That's what I feel like when I listened to his art and that's just so much more intense then making pornography. Okay. Sorry, I bit off a little more than I probably should have there, but I'm just trying to acknowledge like the intensity of the people that are listening to this podcast. You guys are probably making art in some way, shape or form. Hopefully. Yeah, that's scary moment of like,

oh, are they all going to laugh at me when I push the upload button?

Like whether that's music or whether that's the video or whatever. It all comes back to this like fear of, man, what are People gonna think of me? They're going to judge me in a really intense, deep level, especially if it's art as opposed to like no one looks at a picture of a pretty girl on Instagram and says, oh, I just don't think she's going to heaven. I don't like her soul. No one says that. They might be like, Ooh, I don't like her eyeshadow, but it's so much more intense to be making art and to risk the judgment of millions of faceless people.

So Joe, I just wanted to say thank you so much for taking your time to come on the podcast. Share your wisdom with our listeners. I know there's gonna be a lot of people that want to check your stuff out and maybe check out your music, check out your youtube channel, check out your cheat sheets and all those fun things. So where can people go to find out more about you? Joe, if you want to hear my music, go to whatever streaming platform you use and just search for my name Joe Gilder.

No, you

user for losers and if you want to see one of my call to actions, go to five step mixed.com and you can see how that works. Fill out your email address and I'll give you something for free. Boom, call to action. Yay. Is that number five step or is it spelled out five steps? I do believe both work, but I usually talk,

oh five five step mix. So that is it for this episode of the six figure home studio podcast. Chris, that was

a, that was a pretty good interview there. I think there's some, some really good nuggets. I honestly, the CTA thing alone is one of those things that I'm surprised we haven't really talked about more and it really, you're probably took that drastic of a difference, you know, 60 subscribers versus 2000 same amount of youtube traffic, San amount of videos he's putting out every month. But to see that massive of an upswing in email subscribers is a really good indication of how effective a good CTA can really be.

Yeah. I hope I'm not being selfish with Joe. Like we want to have people on the show that can blow everyone's mind. But I'd love to kind of lean into more guests that have expertise that I don't and that you don't. And Joe's a good example of like Joe is so uniquely talented with the way that he creates content. And you know, like I said, if Joe wanted to fill time slots in his studio, he would have the easiest time. Like there are only maybe a couple people in Nashville that could generate demand quicker than Joe could as a result of all the work Joe has put in. So that's super interesting and I fricking love that guy. He's just so likable. You meet him in, you're immediately like, I want him to be my friend. He's so good at that.

I want to call you out on something please. And that is this. You committed on stick.com two one video per week. And I stopped getting referee requests from you.

Okay, we haven't talked about this yet. I'm still doing one video a week, but stick for whatever reason, the interface didn't work well. It kinda crap the bed on me. And so I ended up canceling it. It's no indication of my commitment. I'm a Weirdo. I'm not nervous about not following through with this. I've told enough people,

they just told thousands of our listeners, I get it. But there needs to be a negative consequence when you miss. And so I was looking forward to that $20 going into a political thing you don't support every single time you forgot to upload a video that week. That was

thing was the, I would release a video and somehow I was like, that didn't set it up right or whatever. They were still billing me.

You have to send proof to your referee. I was your referee. You never sent me proof. Therefore, and the thing is it won't let me proactively go in and say he did this. You have to send in the proof whether it's a photo, whether it's a link or whatever, and then I have to say this is approved. He did his work. He will not be charged. Amen. And you just chose to give up instead of pull through. I'm just, I'm really ashamed of it. Brian, I'm sorry I let you down. Well, I get it. It's cool. But let's actually talk about something that we're excited about launching on the six figure homes, studio.com what is this, Chris, what are we trying to do here?

This is one of the most important things we have told to you guys maybe ever and just to kind of fill you in, I know many of you probably,

that's a big promise.

It is. Well, many of you guys listen to the podcast, you might not know anybody else will listen to the podcast. You're a classic audio engineer and that you have a man cave in your basement or in your barn, your spare bedroom and the podcast has been this encouraging thing where it's helped you get more clients and help you understand your industry better and we have a small favor to ask of you and it's for your own good. We need to know who you are. We need to know what you do because we want to serve you more. We want to have better interviews, we want to have better information where this podcast becomes even more valuable to you. Here's the problem, Brian and I talking to microphones every week and Brian does some editing in some makes any and he pushes a button and it uploads and it's kind of unreal for us.

After he does that, thousands and thousands of audio engineer's listened to it. We are growing at over 9% per month on average right now. So think about that. Every month there's 9% more downloads and the previous month on average. And we want to serve you guys as much as we can, but the podcast is growing so fast, it's been difficult for us to one, understand it and to sort of keep in mind how to serve you guys best. So we're going to do a census and this is really easy. It's just a questionnaire like who are you? What do you do? What are your goals? What are you struggling with? That sort of thing. If you fill it out, that is the best shot you have of us tailoring this podcast to your specific needs to make sense. So if you aren't in a position where we're like, maybe we assume that most people that listen to Nick's engineers and it turns out that there's a huge percentage of sound designers

or if what you did earlier, you assume that the huge percentage of our listeners are male, when in fact they could be female. Yeah, we don't know. Or that we have a larger percentage of females and we think this is where the census will help us. God, I hope so.

50 in the Facebook group. It's like 99% men.

Yeah, it is.

Okay, so here's all you have to do. Go to thethesixfigurehomestudio.com/survey or 6fhs.com/survey both go to the same page. There's a couple of questions on there. It's only gonna take you a couple minutes to fill out. And we want to get every single person that regularly listens to this podcast to fill it out. So we're going to continue to ask you guys to do that every episode for at least a while. This is huge because once we've done the survey and we can see, oh well it's 40% mix engineers in 10% mastering engineers and 50% producers, whatever, we can start to deliver better content. You guys, we want to lean into this podcast and help you as much as we possibly can. And to do that, we need to know who the frick you are, what you do and why you're listening.

So check out thesixfigurehomestudio.com/survey please. We're begging you. Fill that out. It's going to help us serve you better. Check out thesixfigurehomestudio.com/survey there is a link in the show notes, so if you don't know how podcasts work, there's like a dropdown where you can see information about this episode in whatever app you're in, whether that's youtube, Spotify, iTunes, whatever. There's a big link right there. thesixfigurehomestudio.com/survey click that. Please fill it out. It's gonna take you a few minutes. It's going to be awesome. It's going to help us help you.