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The Top 20 Tools For Running Your Own Six Figure Home Studio
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Section 1. Build your Brand
This is your chance to make a great first impression. The goal here is to brand yourself as a high-end service… NOT a cheap, dime-a-dozen, basic home studio. Think through how you want to be perceived by your potential customers, and make sure your branding reflects that. Do you want to be a $1,000 Ford Pinto, or do you want to be a $2,500,000 Bugatti Veyron?
99 Designs
Get A New Logo
The #1 reason I recommend this site over hiring a random designer is because you get to see dozens of design ideas before you ever pay. The way this site works is you pay a flat fee, set the design guidelines, then designers submit their logo designs for your approval. If you hate them all, you get a full refund. If you see one you like, the fee goes to that designer.
Moo
Print Your Business Cards
While business cards don't make sense for all businesses, they're a necessary evil if you're ever physically near your ideal customers. This is a quick, easy way to exchange contact info in a professional way.
Section 2: Build Your Website
This is an extension of your branding. A terrible-looking website screams “I'm an amateur looking to make a quick buck,” wile a professional-looking website will build confidence with your clients. This is your chance to show off your portfolio, give everyone the info they need before they hire you, and give them a way to contact you when they're ready.
Wix
Build A New Website
There are a million different ways you can build your website. This is the tool I recommend, and the tool I used in my free website creation course. The reason you NEED a website is because people are going to google you any time someone recommends you. The #2 source of traffic for my own studio is Google, and 99% of that traffic is from people searching for me or my studio specifically.
Google Analytics
Study Your Website Visitor's Behavior
This sounds creepier than it actually is, so here's a non-creepy way to think about this. If you had a brick-and-mortar men's clothing store, wouldn't you want some data on what happens when someone enters your store? Do they enter, then immediately leave? How long do they stay inside your store? How many times do each section of your store get visited? Which section is the most popular? ALL of these things matter to your income, and all of these thing can be tracked on your website. Google Analytics is the solution.
Section 3. Get More Clients
When it comes to getting more clients, there are three things you can do to increase the likelihood that you'll be the one they hire.
1. Stand out from your competitors by doing things they aren't willing or able to do. The most-effective form of this is something I call The High-Class Proposal.
2. Follow up relentlessly for at least 60 days. To start, be sure to check out my 60-day follow-up guide, where I show you the process I use with every client. After you've read that, the two CRM tools below will make that entire process a breeze.
3. Be available to answer questions as quickly as possible. The final tool in this section will allow you you to live chat with anyone who's on your website.
Better Proposals
Impress Your Customers
A proposal is a great way to outline every single aspect of a project, from pricing, to what's included, to what's NOT included, what the timeline will be, and what the next steps are.
Instead of simply sending an ugly copy/paste email to your client, the High-Class Proposal is a much more effective method. If you want a dead-simple way to “wow” your customers, this is it.
Pipedrive CRM
Manage Your Customer Relationships
When you start sending out 10+ quotes/proposals per month, a CRM (customer relationship management software) becomes a necessity. There is no easier way to track follow-up reminders, set up email templates (for follow ups, NOT proposals), see when/if they've opened your emails, and keep track of which stage the client is in.
The best part about Pipedrive, specifically, is that they have a 30-day free trial with no credit card required. This is the CRM I use in my own business.
Close CRM
Manage Your Customer Relationships: Option 2
This is another option for CRM. I used it years ago and loved it. I still recommend it to people all the time, which is why it's on this list.
If phone/video calls are an important part of your sales process, this will be a much better CRM for you since it integrates with Zoom video chat and a business phone number.
Tawk To
Live chat with your website visitors
Let's say someone visits your website, but they have a question you failed to answer on the site? In most cases, you just lost a customer. This is why offering “live chat” on your website is just table stakes these days.
Now someone can ask a question directly on this live chat widget, and it will go straight to your phone for a real-time conversation. The best part? It's 100% free.
Section 4: Get Your Finances In Order
This is the boring-but-necessary part of being a business owner. Once you start making over ~$1,000 per year (or your local currency's equivalent), then you'll be needing some sort of bookkeeping software. Here are two great options:
USA and UK Only
Godaddy Bookeeping
This is what I've used for 6+ years (before Godaddy acquired it). I personally hate Godaddy as a company, but this project is fantastic. It integrates with your bank, you PayPal account, your Stripe.com account, and offers a solid invoicing tool. It also makes taxes a breeze for your accountant.
USA, EU, UK, CA, AU
Quickbooks Online
This is the industry standard when it comes to online boookkeeping software. I've never used it, but it's an option for all of the non-US/UK people.
Section 5. Get Paid
Up to this point, you've put SO much work into getting a client, this is NOT the time to screw things up. You'll want to make this as simple for them as possible. The less friction, the better.
That's why I've always believed you should be more concerned about getting paid than you should be about avoiding processing fees. Here are 3 tools that will help you collect payments no matter where your customers are located.
Stripe
Credit Card Payments
Stripe.com is the poster child of small business credit card processing. The make it super easy for apps to integrate with them, so most apps that accept payments will integrate with Stipe (including several tools from this list). The only thing you need to do is create a free account. From there, you can link it to any of the other apps that offer Stripe support. This makes it incredibly easy for your customers to pay their invoices via credit card.
Paypal
PayPal Payments
Chances are, you already have a PayPal account. Love them or hate them, they're the standard for payments in our industry. Very few people seem to know about this, but PayPal also has a free invoicing tool that allows your customers to pay via PayPal OR via credit/debit card.
GoCardless
Bank Transfers
I didn't realize this until I built an app of my own, but a lot of Europe does NOT use credit/debit cards for payments. If you want a cheap, easy way to accept bank transfers for your business, GoCardless is gaining in popularity.
The cool thing about them (other than only having a 1% fee as opposed to the standard 2.9% fee) is that they have a recurring billing option. If your clients pay you a set monthly fee, then this is perfect for you.
Section 6: File-Sharing and Backups
Every studio on earth requires so some of file sharing tool. Every studio on earth SHOULD be using an automated backup tool. Here are a few options that should work for 99.9% of studios in the world.
Filepass
File Sharing Built For The Audio Industry
This is THE BEST app for sending mixes/masters to clients. Not only does Filepass offer lossless streaming (meaning your client is actually streaming the full-quality WAV file you uploaded), they also have time-stamped comments that allow you to easily collected revisions.
The cherry on top is the optional Paywall feature that locks their download behind a credit card form. They can stream and comment to their heart's content, but they can't download their files until they pay.
Dropbox
Session Collaboration Made Easy
Dropbox isn't the best app for sending mixes/masters to your clients for review (that honor goes to Filepass). What Dropbox IS great at is collaboration on DAW sessions. If you have an assistant, or you're doing any sort of session collaboration, you can save sessions to your Dropbox folder for near real-time updates. I use this for mix prep with my assistant. He sets up all of my mixing sessions, saves it to dropbox, and I can simply open the session and immediately start mixing.
Backblaze
Automatically Back Up ALL of Your Files
I'll make this simple for you. If you aren't automatically backing up your files at least once per day then you need to sign up for this now. For $6/mo, you can have the peace of mind knowing that you'll never lose much if you ever lose a hard drive. Take it from someone who lost THOUSANDS of dollars from a lost session in 2011… $6/mo is a small price to pay for this sort of backup option. That one lost session would have paid for more than 50 years worth of Backblaze.
Section 7. Increase Your Efficiency
These four tools are all about saving you time. The goal is to spend LESS time doing tedious, soul-sucking, repetitive, low-value tasks, and MORE time doing high-value, high-dollar tasks that only you can do. These tools will all help you increase the dollars-per-hour you earn in your business.
Acuity Scheduling
Book More Calls And Eliminate "Calendar Tag"
If you set up a lot of meetings, this is 100% necessary. No more “Hey does Wednesday at 3pm work for you? No? What about Friday at 9am? Oh damn you missed my email? Ok let's try 3pm next Tuesday?” With Acuity, you can simply send a link and they can choose from set times that you've chosen as available. If you add anything to your calendar, it automatically knows to block out meetings for that time. One other cool feature is the ability to collect payments. You could use this to book studio time and collect payments if you wanted.
Bounce Butler
Hire An A.I. Assistant To Bounce Your Files
If you're a high-volume studio churning out hundreds of files per month, this will save your life. It will automatically bounce down all of your sessions for you. Stems, instrumentals, vocal up, vocal down, etc. This will save you TONS of time, as you'll never have to tediously bounce those sessions again.
Zapier
Automate More Tasks In Your Business
The vast majority of the apps in the world do NOT work together. The non-technical way to explain this is that they all speak their own languages. This tool (Zapier) is like a translator that allows one app to communicate with another app.
The reason this is amazing is because of the world of automation this opens up. One easy-to understand example is this: When someone pays their invoice through PayPal, you could get Zapier to send an Acuity link through your CRM so they can book studio time. Once they book studio time, you could get Zapier to tell your CRM to automatically send an onboarding questionaire to your customer so you have all of the necessary info to get started.
Notion
Notes, Spreadsheets, Checklists, and More
This free app is one of my favorites I've started using in the past year. Notion is like Evernote on steroids. Not only can you keep all of your session notes centralized, you can also build out entire project management system from one of their many free templates.
You can also build out entire S.O.P's (standard operating procedures) for your assistant(s) to follow. If you have processes you want people to follow, this is a fantastic way to centralize it all.
