Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com. It is home of the ambitious upstart. It’s the place where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses.
The thing about entrepreneurship is that, at least for me, ever since I became an entrepreneur, whenever I saw a homeless man in the street, I always thought one day that could be me and it would just scare me. In fact, even before I became an entrepreneur, when I was in school thinking this is the direction I want to go in, I thought, “I could be homeless. If not homeless, I could be on welfare. I could be… I don’t know, in real financial trouble.”
Today I’ve got a guest who started a company–he started blogging. He started creating YouTube videos. He started teaching. He started building up an audience and all the things you’re supposed to do, all the things they tell you, “If you do that, you will actually fine your tribe. You will build a successful company.” He did it. And then he went on food stamps. This fear that I had actually became his reality, as much as he didn’t want it. He went in kicking and screaming. We’ll find out why he had to kick and scream and what got him to finally do it.
But he went on food stamps and he stuck with it and he kept on growing and today he built a business that’s basically a content business that’s doing phenomenally well. I’ve been looking at his comments, looking for trolls, looking to see who’s angry. People like you, Graham.
Graham: Not everybody.
Andrew: Not everybody. Yeah. You publish on YouTube. You’re definitely calling out people who don’t like you and giving them a platform.
Graham: Absolutely.
Andrew: But a lot of them do and I’ve been watching as they follow along with your videos and actually show the results in the comments. It’s impressive. I invited Graham here who you just heard to talk about how he built this company. His name is Graham Cochrane. He is the founder of The Recording Revolution. It’s a site dedicated to making better-sounding music in people’s home studios. He teaches them how to make a home studio. He inspires them to create music and over the last month, you actually worked with people to create and publish and distribute their first song.
Graham: Yeah. It was either their first song for many of them or they’ve been meaning to do an album this year. I want to get around to writing some songs and so we just made it a 30-day challenge to write, record, mix and share digitally a song in 30 days.
Andrew: Yeah. I liked how you presented too. You said, “We don’t have to push it to force ourselves to have a whole album. Let’s just start with one and then we can build on it as the year progresses.”
All right. We’ll hear his story and how did it thanks to two sponsors. The first is a hosting company that will help you create your content site instantly, really simply instantly is not an exaggeration. It’s called HostGator. I’ll tell you guys more about them later. And if you need a developer, I’ll tell you more about why you should call Toptal.
But first, Graham, it’s good to have you on here.
Graham: Hey, it’s an honor to be here, man. I’ve been excited about this.
Andrew: Before we get into what you did, what did you do just before you started this company, the job that you eventually lost?
Graham: I started working for another startup. It was actually in the financial services area. I was employee number one. We had a great idea in theory but didn’t know how to run in this business. After five months or so, the money wasn’t there. We ran out of funding. My boss said, “Hey, man, I’ve got to close up shop.
Andrew: I looked at the first version of The Recording Revolution, the website. It was just a blog. The first post you did on there, do you remember what it was?
Graham: Oh yeah. It was how to have a home studio for $500.
Andrew: And it was because of something that your friends had been asking you. What were they asking you?
Graham: Yeah. All my friends, they’re a lot like me. They’re musicians first and then they want to start recording some of their own music, maybe to demo, maybe just to song write. They don’t want to become audio engineers. They’re just musicians. But they’re always asking me because I’ve been recording for years they’d say, “Graham, okay, what do I need to buy?”
The internet will tell them, it tells everyone to buy a lot of stuff. There are trolls out there that tell you you need a certain level of microphone or computer or audio interface or whatever to do any quality work and it’s a bunch of baloney. I was always trying to help my friends from spending too much money. I had so many conversations, people over for dinner a bunch of times and I was walking through the exact same setup basically over the years, “You need this microphone, this, this and this mic stand.”
$500 was the total that would take them to go from having no way to record themselves to having a functional, quality little home studio where they could, if they put in the effort, churn out their own recordings and mixes that sound really good. So, that’s old advice I was giving my friends for about five or ten years.
Andrew: What did your wife say to you when you kept saying that over and over again?
Graham: This whole thing was her idea. She didn’t realize it at the time, but she said, “Why don’t you just write this stuff down, put it on a website somewhere so that you can email your friends to that blog post instead of having them–I love your friends, I love having them over, bus you’re having people over all the time and you’re saying the exact same thing. Could we make this more efficient?” My wife is super-efficient.
So, that was literally the idea, “Okay, I’ll post up the gear list.” And then I realized they don’t know how to use it. So, I was going to write a few articles about how to use it, some tips on recording and mixing and maybe it would be 12 articles and then it would just float out there.
Andrew: So, I have friends who have created these one-article things for people who keep asking the same question. Morgan Friedman in Argentina, everyone asks him the same questions about Argentina, things like how do you get a taxi in Argentina, how do you dial the phone. He just created one doc that he will email anyone that comes to Argentina and starts asking questions.
Graham: That’s great.
Andrew: My friend Shane gets asked the question over and over again, “How do you raise money?” So, for people who he thinks really have a good chance, he’ll send him this one secret doc. So, I’ve seen people create these one-pagers. But multiple articles seems like you really had something more and mind than just sharing with a friend, no?
Graham: It’s funny if you ask it though. I didn’t really think about it like that. I thought if I’m going to do something, I want to do it well. I figured there’s more than just that one post. There are definitely a handful of things. I was thinking sure, this could help my friends, but if it lives on to eternity until the internet collapses, maybe some other people would stumble across it and it might help them. It would be complete.
So, they would go, “Okay, I know what to get, how to use it, a philosophy to apply to it,” and then they could go and do the things that they want to do, which is make great sounding music. That was literally all I thought it would be because I didn’t think I had anything else to say.
Andrew: And was there any vision in mind for business out of this or for throwing some ads on the site?
Graham: So, I didn’t realize you were supposed to put ads on your site. I didn’t realize that was a way to make money. So, no, there was no vision. That was something I didn’t do until like three years in was get an ad on my website. But what I thought it was really going to be once I lost the job was maybe if I spend some time blogging, it might generate some interest in my freelancing side of things because I record bands, I mix bands.
So, I thought for some reason that the overlapping interest might show me as a credible expert, I know what I’m talking about and maybe ironically it might get me some clients. That was my only thought, that it might lead to freelance work. That was it.
Andrew: I’m seeing the old post, I think it’s the $300 starter studio is what you wrote.
Graham: That was a new one. I got it even cheaper a couple years later.
Andrew: I see. Okay. Was the site originally on TheRecordingRevolution.com or something else?
Graham: Originally it was on my personal site. It was GrahamCochrane.com, where I had my freelance stuff, my portfolio and then it had a blog on there.
Andrew: I see. That’s why she said, “You’ve got this blog there. Just go throw it on there and start linking people to it.” I see. Did you have much WordPress experience? I see these sites were just built on WordPress.
Graham: No. I literally started when I came up with the name, The Recording Revolution, and thought, “Maybe I should make some more content for this.” I heard about WordPress because it was free. So, I bought the domain. I had tutorials and watched some and realized they had free templates on the WordPress.org site. So, I was like, “Okay.” I picked one that looked okay. I had no logo. I just typed, “The Recording Revolution” and the header up top and I just started blogging.
Andrew: I see. The theme was the LightWord theme, one of the freebies that came out at the time.
Graham: Oh, yes.
Andrew: You remember it.
Graham: I had that for almost two years.
Andrew: So, no experience doing this stuff. You suddenly put it out. You get fired. Do you at that point think, “I need a job” at all?
Graham: Oh, for sure. I thought I would burn through my savings for a few months and by then I would have landed a few job. I was freelancing and going through savings. I lasted three months, which was great, but I figured it was in between until I got enough [inaudible 00:09:15].
Andrew: Why didn’t you get a job?
Graham: Why didn’t I?
Andrew: You seem like a good, smart guy. Why wouldn’t someone hire you?
Graham: There are two problems. One, it was 2009 in the US. That was a really rough time. I had just moved to Florida. Florida, specifically in Tampa was a very depressed work environment. There were really no jobs. There was a plethora of jobs that were call center, “If you have a high school diploma, we’ll hire you. If you have above that, we’re not even going to talk to you because we’re not going to pay you enough.” I was getting turned down for basic jobs. So, it was a bad time.
And then too, I didn’t really want another job. I struggled with that even before that job that collapsed. I had worked at a software company in the audio department for like three years. It was a cool place to work, cool company. But I was one of those guys that felt like I’m not supposed to be behind a desk, but I never was confident enough or entrepreneurial enough that I knew of to be like, “I’ll start my own thing.” I was too afraid of that.
So, I was in between that I don’t like having a day job, but I do because I like being responsible. We just had our first baby. I’m married. I want to make sure to pay the bills. So, I had this weird opportunity to blog and freelance and then I thought maybe the freelancing would pick up enough to where I didn’t have to get a job. It was kind of my dream.
Andrew: Okay.
Graham: So, maybe that’s why I didn’t actively seek much beyond my initial few opportunities.
Andrew: Food stamps–what was the conversation like around the house that led to that?
Graham: It was a lot of denial there. There was a lot of, “We’re not that bad off. Food stamps are for other kinds of people,” was the way my brain thought. My wife had a friend. Her husband lost his job in the construction business and was out for a long, long time. They had applied for food stamps and she was saying it’s an incredible benefit. The amount of grocery money it helps us with is incredible. You should at least apply.
My wife asked me and I just couldn’t go there mentally because to me that would be signally failure. At the time, I’m a 26-year old guy. I was like, “Look, I’m a college graduate. I’ve held jobs for three or four years out of college. I saved up to buy a house. I’m a responsible American citizen. I shouldn’t be here.” So, that would signal weakness to me or failure. I was afraid of what people would think. I was embarrassed.
So, I was in denial. I was like, “No, we’re not that bad.” But we literally had no money coming in. I’m trying to freelance when I got gigs. My wife is a photographer. She tried to freelance when she had gigs. She was at home nursing a baby. It wasn’t going to happen. It was a rough thing for me to swallow.
Andrew: So, she pushed you to it. You did it.
Graham: My wife doesn’t push me. She’s a good woman. But she just kept bringing it up and I love her enough and hopefully I’m humble enough to know when she’s right. I was like, “Let’s just try.” We qualified and as soon as it started to come in, it was a huge help. So, I stopped getting angry about it and instead I felt like, “Okay, if there’s any way these people out there,” this was 2010 now, “I know there are people out there that have these blogs and they make a living…” I had read “The 4-Hour Workweek” by good old Tim Ferriss and I returned it to the bookstore because it seemed like a fantasy to me.
I knew that those people were out there. I just didn’t think it was for me. I started to dig into it a little bit more and dream a little bit, “Is it possible to make some money that combined with my freelance would maybe pay the bills?” So, I treated that as my day job and I went in 9:00 to 5:00 in my office and just started to create content.
Andrew: Home office, just sat there working. The first thing you sold, was it that 30-part series?
Graham: The first thing I sold was a course teaching a piece of software we use to record called Pro Tools. It’s kind of like the Photoshop of the recording world. That was the only thing I could think I could make because at the time I was making YouTube videos. Then they would only let me make 15-minute long videos.
But I wanted to teach this whole piece of software. But it would have taken me three or four hours to explain everything. I thought that would be a million YouTube videos. Then it dawned on me, “What if I just shot the videos and made them for purchase and then people could just download them and skip YouTube.” They’d probably be worth some money. They were long, thorough.
That was like an experiment where I just shot the videos, put them up on a sales page with a PayPal button. I remember going to my grandfather’s funeral in Seattle. After the funeral I had some time just open my laptop and check email and there was that, “You’ve got payment,” from PayPal thing that in and I was like, “What was that from? Did I sell something on eBay?” Then I click on it and I’m like, “That’s that video course I made.”
All they got was like a little .zip file, downloaded the videos. Somebody paid me $45 or whatever it was back then for this first little course. That was like, “There’s money in my bank account for this digital thing, this information I conveyed. As long as they hate it, then I did something great. Couldn’t I rinse and repeat this in the future?
Andrew: And you could and you did and you kept on growing and that’s what I want to find out how you did today. But I’m curious about how you knew that Pro Tools is the first thing you should create a how to video series on and what did you even know what to put into it? So, let’s start with that. How did you pick the topic?
Graham: I picked that topic because it’s a piece of software that a lot of people in our industry use. So, it’s kind of like the predominant tool that people are using. And I know from interacting with people in real life, my friends and I starting to get some comments from people on the website and YouTube that they had questions about Pro Tools in particular, “How do you do this in Pro Tools.” “I bought the software, but I don’t know how to do this or that.”
I realized what I thought were really simple things, because I’ve been using it for many, many years, were stumbling blocks for people getting in the way of them making music. So, I thought, “Man, if I just…” I’ve taught Pro Tools to my friends. They literally sit down with me at my desk. We pour coffee and in three or four hours we’re going through it and I’m just trying to make them feel comfortable like, “Hey, man, this is all this window does. This is what all this window is.”
To me, it was a friendly way to get people comfortable enough with what they see on the screen so they can just go and make the music they want. I just wanted to give that experience to these people that were just as confused.
Andrew: Weren’t there other Pro Tools courses already at the time? I’m looking now on Google. There were a bunch.
Graham: There were tons.
Andrew: There were? How did you know what you had to offer was so much better or different or worth signing up for some other reason?
Graham: I didn’t know. I didn’t know for sure, but I purchased some of the Pro Tools courses. I have Pro Tools books. I went to audio school and learned Pro Tools. To be honest, most of those courses are really boring.
Andrew: What did you do to make yours interesting then?
Graham: Just not be boring like those guys. Those guys in those videos to me, although they convey correct information and if you distill it its’ really helpful, to me, it was like pulling teeth. It was like going to the dentist. They were like boring. They sounded bored. They sounded like an old professor that didn’t really want to be in class that day or they were just reading a script and I hate that when I’m learning a tutorial and I can tell they’re reading a script.
Andrew: I hate that too. You still need a process for making it interesting or some hook for making it interesting. Is there something that you learned back then that you can pass on to us? Frankly, I even want to make my interviews more interesting all the time. I have this box right here I’ve been meaning to include in the interview. Someone mailed me–this came from Jim Verzino. I was thinking, “Maybe I should be opening it up within the interview.” That could be something that would make it more interesting.
We’re always looking for stuff to make our content more interesting. What did you do back then, not today when you’re really good and you’ve got editing chops and lighting chops, but what did you do back then? I will open this box up later. I’m curious about it.
Graham: Now I want to know what’s inside.
Andrew: Right.
Graham: All I figured I had back then, Andrew–again, these videos weren’t even on camera. They were just screen grabs from the computer. So, it was very easy. I didn’t own a camera. I didn’t own any lighting. I figured the only thing I have to offer these people is the way that I think about the subject matter.
I’m not a super-technical, high-level thinker when it comes to this craft because I’m more of an artist than I am the engineer side. I figured I know from hanging out with my friends that I teach this stuff to that come over to dinner, I know that I had to convey this material to them in a way they understand. It’s friendly and it’s engaging and I skipped the boring parts and I get to the stuff that’s the most actionable and helpful to them.
So, I had some real world experiences doing that with a handful of friends over the years that I figured compared to the videos I see online, I can present them information in a more helpful manner where I think people would actually want to watch the whole thing because it’s at least pleasant and I’m friendly and I’d make it not and intense thing. And maybe, more important thing would then watch it and then implement it and go, “Wow, that helped,” which makes them feel like there was even more value there because they saw results.
Andrew: I remember interviewing Ramit Sethi before he had any of his online courses. I know you took his course on how to create a course, which is why I’m bringing him up.
Graham: Yeah.
Andrew: I had him on before he had any of those courses that looked so polish and so well done and had so much information in them. I think at the time was just one eBook that he sold for just $5. I remember saying, “Do you want me to talk about it?” Before the interview, he basically dismissed it and I didn’t understand why. I thought this is something he should be proud of. But I can see now in retrospect that he’d already moved beyond that eBook. Even though he hadn’t created his first course, he knew it was time to move on to the next thing and that’s why he wasn’t so eager to promote that one $5 or $10 thing.
The reason I’m bringing him up is it seems like the first one doesn’t have to be that great. It doesn’t have to be better than anyone else’s. It doesn’t have to be better quality material that doesn’t exist anywhere else, it just has to be. If someone likes the work that you’re doing for free and kind of digs you, they might want to pay extra to get a little more of your style because they’ve connected with you. Fair?
Graham: Absolutely. In fact, that is still my selling point today. Although, I think that I present material in a way that is more helpful than some, if not most, training out there, my real selling point to people is, “Look, you’ve watched my YouTube videos. I make them for free. There’s no commitment. You can watch hundreds of videos and extract all that information and never pay me a dime. In fact, most people don’t pay me anything. So, you have plenty of opportunity to see–do I teach in a way that is relevant to you? Do you like the way I teach? Do you like the results I’m getting?”
It’s like a test. We’ve had like a test relationship. So, I say like if you like my free stuff, then you’re really going to like my paid stuff because it’s more of that. That’s easy for people to go, “I don’t like this free stuff. Why would I buy it?” Then they leave or, “Dude, that ten-minute video on make a kick drum sound awesome was amazing. I imagine his full course on recording a whole band would be super valuable.” That’s how I try to transition people over to paid customers.
Andrew: Yeah. “I just dig the guy’s style. I want more of that style.”
Graham: Yeah. Exactly.
Andrew: Cool. I want to ask you about your revenues before I forget, but first, let me do the first of two sponsorship messages. It’s for a company called HostGator. Graham, you and I just talked about how you started out with a simple webpage, started teaching people for free, built up an audience and then when you had something to sell, you got your first customer while you were away at your grandfather’s funeral.
That essentially is the story that we hear over and over again. If you have nothing else, if you’re on welfare, if you’re on food stamps, you can still put up a website. You can still teach the one thing that you know maybe a little better than everyone else. If you’re not an expert in it, I’ve found that people kind of prefer it. They don’t want the expert who’s going to feel out of touch. They want the person who’s just a few steps ahead of them because that’s where they want to go.
So, if there’s a topic out there that someone listening to us feels a little bit of comfort with–we’re not saying you have an expertise–create a website right now. Do it on Bluehost–excuse me, Bluehost–Bluehost and HostGator are owned by the same company, so I don’t feel too bad saying it. Did you know that?
Graham: No, I didn’t even know that.
Andrew: Yeah. People email me and they say, “What about Bluehost? What about this?” They’re owned by the same company. These guys at HostGator are now gathering up the world.
Graham: That’s awesome.
Andrew: Go to HostGator, the gator company, frankly because they’re gobbling up the world and number two because if you go to HostGator.com/Mixergy, you will get 30% off for starting out. You can do it in a couple of different ways. One is use their standard package really cheap, really effective, good support and that will cost–I don’t like to throw out prices because I don’t know what anyone who’s listening to us will have. I will say that it starts from $4.87 a month.
But if you want a dedicated host, dedicated experience, they’ve got that for you too. If you want to host something other than WordPress, they’ve got that for you too. They have a 45-day money back guarantee. So, if you don’t love it, you don’t have to stay signed up with them. If you already have a hosting company and you want to switch, they make it really easy for you to go to HostGator. So, if you’re listening to us, you like what Graham has been doing, just go to HostGator.com/Mixergy and get started yourself.
Graham: A little thought on that as well–I was on the free economy hosting from iHost for the first four years of my business until they crashed me because I was doing too much data and I was already doing a six-figure business on the same hosting plan that a grandma blogging in Arkansas was doing. You can use the free one for as long as possible and still make a good living.
Andrew: Does anyone even offer free hosting under your own domain anymore?
Graham: It was probably free when I did the first package, but it was probably like $5 to $10 a month was what my package was.
Andrew: Yeah. There’s like the super inexpensive stuff.
Graham: Yeah. Exactly. Maybe you’re talking $60 a year, maybe, out the door to present anything. That’s all I knew. I didn’t even know private servers existed until they said, “You have to move because you’re doing too much bandwidth.
Andrew: Yeah. At some point, you might want to go to a bigger package. I see actually now that there are people who are seeing that Automatic, the company behind WordPress is creating these thousands of dollars a month packages of just WordPress, dedicated WordPress hosting so there are a lot of other companies doing it for hundreds of dollars a month dedicated WordPress hosting meaning that you get all kinds of backups that you get, virus protection, etc.
So, HostGator looked at all these people getting all this business from dedicated WordPress hosting and said, “We’ll do it too. It doesn’t really cost that much to do dedicated WordPress hosting.” So now they do dedicated WordPress hosting too.
So, anyone who’s listening to us that says, “I want dedicated WordPress hosting. I want them to do the backups. I want them to do the virus protection.” I got a virus on Mixergy’s WordPress site. It’s really painful. You can just go to HostGator and they’ll set you up with one of those packages too and they’re really good. I urge you guys to check them out and I’m glad they’re sponsoring.
Where are you guys in revenue right now?
Graham: Let’s see… I think last year we just hit about just under $600,000.
Andrew: $600,000 a year. It’s still essentially the same business–the blog, the YouTube channel and you teaching people how to use tools and mics and everything, software and hardware, right?
Graham: Yeah, exactly.
Andrew: Phenomenal. All right. So, you get your first customer. What did you do to get more customers?
Graham: The same thing I do today. I create the world’s best free content in my niche. That’s my goal every week. So, more articles and more YouTube videos.
Andrew: I’m looking at what you did early on, on YouTube and you did something that you’re doing right now that I mentioned at the top of the interview. Six years ago you created the one-song one-month challenge, right?
Graham: Yeah.
Andrew: It feels like these monthly challenges work for you, otherwise you wouldn’t be repeating them. Do they?
Graham: Yeah. I’ve done a few different challenges. That one was the first real video series I did and nobody followed me back then. So, I thought it would be great to bring it back now that I have an audience because I still believe in the method. Then I’ve done one where I experimented with post frequency.
So, I decided instead of posting one video a week and a couple of articles a week, what if I did one video a day for an entire month? I did a series called “Five Minutes to a Better Mix.” It was just five minute videos, 31 day straight. That experiment the first time doubled my web traffic month over month.
Andrew: Going daily.
Graham: Going daily. So, I did it again the next year and it doubled web traffic again because it became a thing that people wanted to share. That’s the key, create shareable content. “There’s this guy on YouTube. He’s doing this thing all month long. There’s a video every day.” So, in my niche, it was on a good topic. I did it a third time. It grew a little bit, but it didn’t double the traffic again, it kind of was almost not much of a growth there.
So, I’ve experimented with that kind of stuff to get traffic, but now I’ve moved away from doing it to get traffic and more to where I think there’s a relevant challenge I could do, if I’m feeling like something like this would help my audience and I’m usually itching to do it–I do these challenges because I like them myself personally, otherwise they’re not really that authentic.
So, I try to do them if I think it will be helpful for them and me. I think people want a little more of a structure sometimes. I can’t do it all the time. It was exhausting this month. It was really successful and fun. But I’m going to do normal content for a few months. Maybe I’ll do something towards the end of the year. I’m not sure.
Andrew: It looks like the first ones were either you with one camera on you as you were playing guitar and teaching people how to record a guitar. That was the first one I saw on YouTube. The others are just you doing screencasts.
Graham: Yeah.
Andrew: On an old Mac. Are you using ScreenFlow even?
Graham: I didn’t even have ScreenFlow until two years ago. I used like Snapz Pro X or something.
Andrew: Yeah. You’re not even capturing your whole screen for some reason.
Graham: I didn’t know you could.
Andrew: When you say shareable, I don’t think of a 30-day set of videos as something I’d want to share. It feels like a big commitment to inflict on someone.
Graham: It’s in the positioning. If I say, “30 days of vides,” people go, “Ugh…” So, instead it’s called “Five Minutes to a Better Mix.” And the whole deal is if you just catch one of them, it’s only five minutes. Each little video is self-contained. It will help you. It’s just that one little video. So, you can skip a bunch of them or miss them or just stumble across day 13. I try to make each little video life-changing in some way. I want you to walk away and go, “Huh, that’s really cool. I will try that.” I don’t like teaser content. I don’t like light content. I really try to give my best content free.
You mentioned Ramit. It’s funny because I was doing that before I realized he was doing that. He’s very vocal about how good his free content is, as I think he should because he has a different model. He gives the best as opposed to giving light stuff to draw you in. So, I’ve always felt like if I stumble on YouTube and I see a guy’s video, I want it to be helpful. If it’s not helpful, I’m going to go somewhere else and building a loyal audience is more important than me making a buck so I want to give them really helpful free stuff.
Andrew: I see it’s a bunch of different experiments in the early days. You even did an interview with a drummer, Travis Whitmore. You did microphone reviews. You did these screencasts. It was just experimenting to see what’s going to hit. What are people going to share? What are they going to watch a lot? It looks like one of the first ones was the Bugera V5 review.
Graham: Oh yeah, guitar amp.
Andrew: That one finally got you into the hundreds of thousands where before that you were in the low thousands of views. And then you also did something that is an info marketer’s go to. You said, “Go over to my site and get the free eBook.” People would click over to your site and they’d give you their email address and then they’d get into your system, right?
Graham: That’s where the magic happens.
Andrew: The email list?
Graham: Yes.
Andrew: You say that a lot, even today. When I watched your videos in preparation for this interview, I saw that you said several times, “Go to my email list. That’s where I give my best stuff.”
Graham: Yes.
Andrew: Standard marketing, right?
Graham: For sure. It’s funny, Andrew, because I didn’t know anything about internet marketing when I started, but for some reason, I must have read something somewhere. When I started I knew, “I need to build an email list.” That’s all I knew. The first thing beyond the free videos I was making was spend time during my workday–because again, I’m going into my office from 9:00 to 5:00 getting paid nothing and hoping that my time was worthwhile and all the while really insecure about, “Should I just go get a job? Is this really dumb? Can I justify to my wife what I’m doing?”
During that time, one of the tasks I had was writing a really awesome mini-eBook that I would give away to get people to join my mailing list, even though I had no course, I had no product, I didn’t know what to offer, but I know if I ever wanted to do anything, I needed to have a mailing list. I’m grateful that I somehow knew that piece of information because I started from day one crafting something. It’s the same eBook I give away today. I’ve since added another video series to it. But I wrote it back in 2010 and I’ve been building the list ever since.
Andrew: You mentioned two years just now and you said the same thing to our producer several times. You told him that two years was the difficult period the first two years, what happened after two years that turned things around?
Graham: That’s a great question. The first year, I’m just creating content. I released two products in my first year and I maybe made like $5,000 that year, maybe. Year two, I started doing some of the same stuff. That’s when I started that first challenge, that 30 days of content in 2011, so my second year. That really helped traffic pickup.
It was that slow, slow growth. I also finally released a couple of courses that were on a better subject. I had people buying my first two courses in a subject that I knew people really wanted because I was actually scared to make that course because I didn’t think I was an expert enough to make a course on it.
But I finally just bit the bullet and shared everything I knew in this one subject matter. That’s what people really wanted. Between the traffic picking up a bit and that course being more popular, by the end of my second year and really in those last six months, revenue got to about, I think, $60,000 was my goal.
I was like if I can make a little bit more than I was making at my day job with a blog, I would be the happiest man alive, to me that would be amazing. I could stay home with my family, write about audio and make the same money I made in an office commuting every day.
Andrew: What was the second course?
Graham: The first course was Pro Tools. The second course was about producing vocals, how to get your vocals on a track to sound good.
Andrew: How did you know that would be what people would want?
Graham: That’s what people talk about?
Andrew: How? How can you tell what they’re talking about? What’s your process for figuring it out?
Graham: The thing I’ve learned is that if you create a piece of content that helps somebody, they go, “Oh, that’s great. Maybe this guy can help me,” then they tell me all their problems in a blog comment, they email me, “Hey, Graham, I saw your video. I really liked it. I’ve got a question. I really struggled to get my vocals in a recording to sound like so and so or whatever. What I was seeing at the time without realizing was just patterns. I was seeing the same type of questions–
Andrew: In the comments?
Graham: In the comments and in emails coming back.
Andrew: So, you were asking them to email you back?
Graham: Oh yeah, I was invited, “Please, if you have questions, Let me know. Email me here I’m making myself available. Absolutely.”
Andrew: I see that in the early days. A lot of people will say, “Thanks for joining my mailing list. Hit reply and tell me what your biggest problem is.”
Graham: Oh, I love it.
Andrew: You did that. But the problem is you end up getting so much email coming in from people who have specific problems that you now have to write decent responses to, right? Otherwise, “Why did you ask me? You asked me to tell you a problem. Now I told you. Now you’re going to leave me high and dry?”
Graham: That was probably 70% of the work I did was emailing people back, having conversations, which does a couple things. It makes them feel valued. They’re getting engagement. They’re like, “Wow, there’s a guy that actually responded to me from this blog?” They become a little bit more loyal. I’m also learning things about my audience–what they like, what they don’t like. Are they beginners? Are they intermediate? Are they experts? Where do they live?
All kinds of stuff that I’m learning–I’m not really a data-cruncher. I don’t like to data mine. I’m not that technical. It just overwhelms me. You observe it through osmosis. I started to see, “Hey I probably should do an in-depth course on vocals because people seem to have a lot of questions about vocals.”
Andrew: But you would sit and write a response. So, if I emailed you at the time and said, “I need a good mic for podcasting,” and you’d never done podcasting before, would you still figure out how to help me?
Graham: I would go look on Sweetwater and I would say, “Hey, look, I honestly don’t do any podcasting, but these mics, in the price range, they’d probably be fine for you or you could try this.”
Andrew: That takes a good five, ten minutes to go look that up, right?
Graham: Yeah.
Andrew: And you would do that?
Graham: Yeah.
Andrew: And that’s what it takes, that work your face off, as Gary Vaynerchuk says, that’s what it takes in that period, that hustle period.
Graham: The beautiful thing is that’s all you can do. There are so many things you can’t control. I had literally no control over my business. I had no way to get people to my site.
Andrew: You could–you could spend that same amount of time creating a better video, spend that same amount of time creating a better lead magnet instead of the eBook that you had, creating a guest post on someone else’s site that would then bring people in. Why did you choose to do that, spend so much time responding?
Graham: I didn’t know to do all those other things.
Andrew: Do you think those other things are better?
Graham: It’s hard to know. If I had known about some of those other things, I might have implemented them sooner and it might have helped me grow faster sooner, for sure.
Andrew: Okay.
Graham: So, I think I’m a good example of someone that didn’t do all the right things. I only knew one trick and that was to make really good content and reply to people’s emails and have conversations with them.
Andrew: That’s it. The way you knew to make good content is by reading their emails.
Graham: Reading their emails and making content for people like myself and my friends. To this day, if I make a video or write an article, I ask myself, “Would this help my buddies?” So, I write it in that tone. I write it for those people in mind. I had people telling me what they want me to make and a lot of times I don’t make what they want me to make because it’s not really where I feel like my brand is supposed to go.
Andrew: Like what? What’s something that you don’t want to do even though they’re asking you for it?
Graham: I won’t review a lot of products. I only review products I actually own and have used for many, many years. So, I get solicited requests for reviews every day from manufacturers. “Hey, can we send you some speakers? Can we send you microphones to review?” I say no and a lot of people want me to review products that they’re thinking about buying because they want to know what I think about it, but I’m like, “I don’t use that product, so can I help you?” I’m not going to mess with it just to give you a thought.
So, I don’t do all the gear reviews people want and I don’t really talk about high-end audio equipment and I don’t recommend a lot of high-end audio equipment because it’s not even in my ethos. I personally don’t really live in that world or think it’s necessary. So, that goes against my entire positioning, which is really my personal opinion.
Andrew: How much is the mic that you’re talking to me on now?
Graham: This is actually built into an interface. It’s probably a $99 microphone.
Andrew: What do you mean built into an interface?
Graham: It’s this little Apogee audio interface. So, it has a microphone inside of it, so you don’t have to plug a microphone into it. It’s on USB.
Andrew: Oh, you’re talking about a USB mic.
Graham: Yeah, it’s basically a USB mic and it does a couple other tricks, but yeah.
Andrew: Okay. What’s it called?
Graham: The Apogee ONE.
Andrew: Apogee ONE–the fact that you keep saying the same things, you use the same software and over and over again you said actually makes you a little concerned about how interesting you could be. If you keep telling people to go for the cheap stuff instead of the new stuff over and over again, you said it affects your content quality.
Graham: I said that?
Andrew: Yeah. You told our producer that one of the things you were worried about was being something like a one-trick pony.
Graham: Yeah. In a way I am. Some of my readers or viewers will watch my stuff and after a while they’ll say, “You know what? I kind of get where Graham is going and he’s not going to go any further.” They might want to look into really premium audio convertors and speakers and things. So, they kind of have to move on from me. I’m perfectly okay with that because my goal is to service a certain type of person and serve them well.
Some people will stay in there forever because they need the reminder. They get lost. A lot of these people will come back because they got off-track thinking, “Yeah, I really do need a nice microphone. That’s going to be the difference maker,” then they’ll remember what Graham said. “He was right. It’s not the microphone.” They’ll come back and be refreshed by my simplicity, my minimalist mindset, which is all part of my ethos with the brand. They might come back for that.
Some people will move on. That’s okay. I get insecure over that too. I’m a human being. I want everyone to like my content always and stick around forever and think I’m super innovative when I’m just the same old guy that I’ve always been helping the same type of people in the same way.
Andrew: How do you keep coming up with new content when it’s the same message?
Graham: That’s the question. I literally thought I would only do this for six months max.
Andrew: You have the answers. That’s it.
Graham: I said it. Now, go do it. So, I’ve had to learn to be a content creator. I made a pact with myself never to create a piece of content that’s just filler, just because I need to have an article or YouTube video. I’m too stubborn for that because I wouldn’t respect myself and I can’t stand other blogs where it’s another top ten list of whatever and it’s not really fresh valuable information. That made it hard for me because I thought I would run out of ideas quickly.
What I discovered is I think about content creation totally differently. Now, if I’m recording a band, there maybe will have been some unique challenge on that section that I say, “This would be a great thing to share how I solve this one problem,” or this old thing I told you about last year came back into play in this new way in this session and it reminded me of this and I could teach the concept in a new way.
There’s a never-ending supply of content. I’ve been doing it six and a half years almost, which is insane to me because I thought I seriously would have run out. It’s shown as you do our craft and you’re in your niche and as you get good questions from people, you continually get a stream for fresh ideas.
Andrew: I used to work for Dale Carnegie. Dale Carnegie’s book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People” was written like 50 years ago, more than that, right? The ideas in it are timeless. One of them is–here’s a simplest one–the book gets more intense than this, but smile is one of them. So, if you’re teaching the class, how do you keep repeating smile? How do you make smile fresh?
I watched what the instructors would do. They would find someone who was doing it today, like George H.W. Bush, the senior George Bush was in office. He was driving through a motorcade and he had this bet with a friend of his about how he could make other people smile. His trick was he would just look at them in the eyes and smile and instantly they people would smile. If you do it to someone, they can’t help but do it, kind of like yawning.
So, that’s what I noticed they would do. They would either bring something in that was fairly topical and they would try not to be too newsy because if you talk about the current president or if you talk about recurring politics, it’s an issue for some people. Or they would bring it into their own lives. I can see what you’re doing is the same thing.
All right. I’ve been using this for an armrest. I’ll open this in a moment. This is from Jim. But first, let me talk about my second sponsor. Then I also want to find out what software you’re using. I want to find out about how you’re selling today, what’s changed. But firs the sponsor, it’s a company called Toptal. You’ve never heard of them, right?
Graham: No.
Andrew: In the software world, they’re getting better recognized but they’re still fairly unknown. They’re a little secret here. Here’s what happened. The founder of Toptal decided it’s tough–the biggest issue for software companies is hiring developers. It’s not even how to market. They apparently don’t need that. The software ideally will market itself, they think. So, it’s how do you hire developers?
So, he came up with this idea. What if instead of having somebody come to a company saying, “I have to hire a developer,” and that that company going out and looking for developers and placing ads and taking forever. What if it started the other way? What if he created a network of developers who were already vetted?
He spent some time screening them, spent some time testing them, spent some time checking them out and just had this network of people. Then when a company needs to hire a developer, they just come to him and he has a network of people already who have been tested and says, “Aha, I know the perfect person for you in our network.”
That’s the idea. I just had this–I’m smiling because I just had this great analogy. It’s like a brothel, like have all the women… No. I don’t want to say that. So, they have all these people, all these great developers. And if you’re looking for a project to be filled, you go to them and you say, “Here’s the project. Here’s what we’re looking for. We want someone who can think this way because here’s our quirky way of thinking at our company.”
Your rep at Toptal will go to their network of developers, pick the perfect person for you, make the introduction. If you’re happy, boom, you get to work together. If you’re not, they find you someone else. I’ve hired from them. You can get started with them within days. I think 48 hours later we were starting working with our developer.
Anyone out there who’s looking for a developer should go to Toptal.com/Mixergy because if you think I’m exaggerating about how good they are, you should know that they’ve got guarantee right there on Toptal.com/Mixergy. They will not charge you if you’re not happy. But they will personally pay out of their pockets for the developer. So, they’re taking a risk if you’re signing up with them that they know they’re going to make you happy. If not, they’re going to suffer the penalty of paying the developer. Go check them out.
Also if you go to Toptal.com/Mixergy, you’re going to see that they’re going to give you free developer time when you sign up, when you pay for developer time, they will match it and give you free developer time. Finally, if you want an introduction–I just made this yesterday to my buddy at Toptal–if you want an intro, just email me, Andrew@Mixergy.com and I’ll introduce you to my guy over at Toptal. I’m grateful to them for sponsoring.
All right. Let’s see what Jim sent over. Can you even see this on camera?
Graham: When you lift it up. There you go.
Andrew: Oh no, Jim. This is too much. I know what it is. I am a whiskey drinker.
Graham: Come on. Wow…
Andrew: Let’s see what he sent. Vermont whiskey–there’s a Vermont whiskey, Appalachian Gap. You know this place?
Graham: No. But I used to live in the Appalachian Mountains in Virginia.
Andrew: You did?
Graham: Yeah.
Andrew: Is this what it looked like?
Graham: It looked exactly like that without the logo.
Andrew: Really? I’ve read books about people who have hiked the Appalachian Trail at some point in my life with like a guard because I’m afraid of bears and murderers.
Graham: Sure. One of my buddies did it. But he had a really big beard, so I think that scared the animals.
Andrew: Grow the beard? Did he have a gun or something with him? I’d be so worried about someone hurting me.
Graham: Seriously. It’s a long trip.
Andrew: “I love what you’re doing with Mixergy. Given your roots are in New York City,” and they are, “I thought you’d enjoy a virtual weekend in Vermont via bottle of locally-made whiskey.” Thanks, Jim Verzino. His website is PushButtonThoughtLeader. I’m going to check out his personal site. Thanks, Jim.
Graham: That’s awesome.
Andrew: Fantastic.
Graham: You’ve got some good fans right there.
Andrew: Yeah. As a content maker, what do you think of this feature of me opening a box on camera?
Graham: I love it, for sure.
Andrew: What software do you use to sell? Now you’re no longer .zip filing stuff over.
Graham: So, now I’m on Kajabi.
Andrew: Kajabi? Now, someone will tell you–I’ve had the founders of Kajabi on and I’ve introduced a lot of people to Kajabi because of that interview. Still, people will say it’s another platform. Why not just do it on your own website. Why not install something on WordPress?
Graham: Yeah. I’ve got a membership site right now that is on WordPress with a bunch of plugins. I’m actually literally moving it over to the new version of Kajabi as we speak because things break. There are always things that need to be updated. We’ve had viruses. It’s just more stuff to manage, whereas Kajabi, for someone like me that’s not really a web person, it’s a tool that has allowed me to make beautiful courses and membership sites that are better user experiences for my customer that look like I know what I’m doing and it’s all hosted in the cloud and it’s easy for me to handle.
Andrew: Why not go with Udemy or one of those other platforms?
Graham: I probably never checked it out. I’m the kind of guy that hears about a thing and if I try it and it’s working, I just go with it.
Andrew: You don’t like to geek out on any of this stuff.
Graham: No.
Andrew: So, you went with Kajabi. You had a membership site on your site. Do you remember the plugins that you used for that?
Graham: There’s OptimizePress and there’s some wish list member, maybe. Me and my buddy put it together. He handled a lot of the plugins for like three or four years now.
Andrew: And now you’re moving that over to Kajabi.
Graham: Yeah.
Andrew: Before we get into other software, what’s in the membership?
Graham: So, the membership site is me and one of my buddies that we do together where it’s for mixing songs, how to practice and get good at mixing, finalizing your track. It’s a community where we all get the same track. So, if I recorded a band, I put up all the same multi-tracks. You can download the guitar parts, vocals and we can all mix the same song together.
When they login each month they see two guys who have already mixed this song and we actually have a competition of who mixed it better. They vote for Graham’s mix or they vote for Joe’s mix and they get to experience two people handling the same source material and what can they come up with and then they go and mix it themselves. We have tutorial trainings, a monthly coaching call, community there. It’s practice. It’s mentorship every month. It’s really cool.
Andrew: How do you do mentorship?
Graham: There’s like the coaching call where they literally can ask their own questions. We just direct everything to what they want to know about and also the access within the community. It’s a place where I’m more easily accessible. Like you said at the beginning that I could respond to every single email, that became one of my biggest hurdles three or four years in was the email load was massive.
So, I still to this day see almost every email but I can’t respond personally to every single one. If it’s like a customer need or a gear need, my assistant helps navigate, get those people what they need. But I have more connection not only in the email but now inside my members area where they can ask me, “Graham, what are you doing right now with this stuff? What do you think about this?” We do some mixed feedback and competitions. We give away gear every month. It’s more access as well.
Andrew: Is it like a chat community too where they get to talk to teach other?
Graham: Yeah, like forum based and then there’s a private Facebook group as well. Some people prefer that version.
Andrew: You do both a forum on your site and a Facebook group?
Graham: Yes.
Andrew: I’ve tried that and that gets a little complicated because people don’t know where to go and they end up not going anywhere.
Graham: Yeah. We started with the forum and then we had people that requested the Facebook group. So, we did it by request. Some people prefer just to do the Facebook because they’re already on their phone and they never go to the forum. So, it’s a way to see at least some of the members. Some do both. I’m in both. Some people hate Facebook.
Andrew: People hate Facebook with a passion. If they do, they hate it completely.
Graham: Yes.
Andrew: What else did you learn about getting people engaged in a community? You need to keep giving them a reason to come back into your forum, whatever platform you build it on.
Graham: Yeah. That’s hard. We implemented some stuff even recently to do a better job of that. One thing I haven’t done a great job of is featuring what other people are talking about. So, seeing conversations that other members have started and then featuring that to the whole list, emailing the whole community and saying, “Hey, there’s a great conversation happening now at X, Y and Z where someone is talking about X, Y and Z. You should really check it out.”
That’s something that I’ve seen other people do really well. I was like, “That’s a great idea.” Because people want to be recognized, community is it. That’s the reason we started the membership site because everything I was doing, even selling, although it was helping people was very much linear and static, “Here’s content. Anybody can go use it.”
But there wasn’t a lot of feedback and everyone is working alone in their own studio and they don’t get out. When I started recording, you could go to a studio and hang out with human beings. I was like sweeping the floors and pouring coffee, but you could interact with the band and the other people and the engineers.
Andrew: Now you can’t do that.
Graham: You can’t do that anymore. No one is doing it. You’re all at home by yourselves. I was like, “We need to create a place at least where every month we’re engaging or every week you’re talking with other people that share the same problems you have or pointing them to a great tool you’re using or sharing your music and getting feedback con it and that’s a huge reason why we started that.”
Andrew: What’s your best way of getting new subscribers?
Graham: Creating content.
Andrew: How does that lead into people getting into your membership?
Graham: So, my system is real simple. I crate articles and YouTube videos on topics that I think will help people that they think they want. And then people get on Google and YouTube like, “My guitar sounded crappy. My mix doesn’t sound like a Taylor Swift song. Why is that?” They get on and they’re looking for information.
My stuff will start to pop up on Google and YouTube because I have so much content there on so many different subjects. They click on it. If the content is good and they like it, then I always either at the end on the article somewhere or at the end of the video, I’m always encouraging people to join the mailing list as often as I can. Basically if you like this you will like more free stuff here.
Andrew: So, it’s just a funnel, a clear funnel. I see it everywhere. “Want my best free training? Join my mailing list and get exclusive content instantly.” You enter your email address. You hit join. You get that course you mentioned earlier, get the eBook. And then at some point within the sequence is when you sell them on the membership?
Graham: Exactly. I sell them on almost everything I have. They immediately get a little mini-course that’s not even advertised. It starts the next day or something. It’s a five-part series teaching them how to do something I didn’t even promise. So, they’re getting more added value. At the end of that, I let them know about a whole course I have that has even more value. But it’s a paid course. But if they like this stuff, you’ve got to check this out. I’ve got testimonials and people love it and it’s been around for a while.
So, that’s when I’m hoping that percentage of them will say, “Dude, he’s giving me so much valuable stuff for free. I can’t even wait to see what his pad stuff is. I do a risk-free trial. If you don’t like it, I’ll give you your money back. If it doesn’t help you, I don’t want to take your money. I’m hoping that a percentage buys.
Andrew: What software do you use to send out your emails?
Graham: I’m on Mailchimp.
Andrew: Mailchimp–just simple Mailchimp? It doesn’t do much marketing automation. So, it means that you have sequence of emails that goes out. Everyone gets sold the same the same thing at the same point in the sequence.
Graham: Correct.
Andrew: How did you learn how to write the emails to sell and how to sequence them out?
Graham: First I just wrote them. I was like, “Hey, here’s this thing. I’ve read articles about best practices for email auto-responders and there’s so much difference of opinion there. At one point, I read a guy that was like, “You shouldn’t sell soon at all. You should really build a long relationship with him.
So, I changed my funnel to be weeks and weeks, maybe two or three weeks of maybe checking in and then I presented a product. Then I studied people that say the opposite, like you should sell within the first week. So, I shifted to that. I’ve seen more value in that, actually, selling sooner and more often as long as I’m adding free stuff.
Andrew: You just keep testing it.
Graham: I’ve tested it, but don’t even test that much. I’ve done a couple of things. I’m like, “That really worked,” then I stick with it until it’s broken or I get a great idea to try something else. I’m very boring. I haven’t changed much. Mailchimp was something that I heard about.
I think someone told me about AWeber about Mailchimp and Mailchimp had a picture of a monkey that looked really funny and I said, “These people are probably pretty cool,” and I’m not very technical, so I went with the monkey. Because that’s what I’ve had for six years, I haven’t changed. There are tools out there that do more elaborate stuff with segmenting and all that stuff.
Andrew: I saw that you used Mailchimp in your BuiltWith page. BuiltWith.com shows me the software you’re using. The other weird thing I saw was are you using GoDaddy for your email?
Graham: Yeah.
Andrew: You are?
Graham: It goes through there, but it goes to a Gmail account I have.
Andrew: Because you could just have it directly to Gmail, but you probably hosted your site with GoDaddy or bought your domain with GoDaddy and just stuck with that.
Graham: It was the way I set it up six years ago and I don’t want to change it because it will be like a big hassle for me or maybe it won’t but I’m just afraid it will.
Andrew: I get it. You’re not a very technical person. I can see that. You’re not going to geek out on different software that you can use. What about the team? You kind of started mentioning the team. Who’s there?
Graham: It’s really just me and an assistant that does about ten hours of work a week from me mostly in my email.
Andrew: Going through your email?
Graham: He kind of sifts through my email, takes care of all the customer service, refunds, if people want to know about products, and then if there are emails that are just hate mail that there’s nothing redeeming about it, he probably puts it away so I don’t ever see it. Then he responds to people who send nice emails to say, “Hey, thanks for the kind words. I’ll leave it for graham to check out and then I always respond to them.” He just sifts through and labels things for me.
Andrew: Just your Gmail?
Graham: Just my Gmail. Yeah.
Andrew: We asked you what did you to celebrate your success. What did you get? This is the first time we ever heard anyone say this. You told our producer a babysitter. Why was that so memorable that you actually remember to tell the producer of an interview show about that?
Graham: To me, I felt like I achieved something that was impossible. I really didn’t think it was going to happen. To me that goal was to hit the $60,000 mark, kind of the income replacement goal. That was my only dream. I thought if I could hit it for the rest of my life, I’d be a happy man.
I remember hitting that and saying, “Babe, we need to get a babysitter and we need to go out to dinner, buy whatever we want just once,” just to mark this thing that I started that I didn’t have any confidence in. In fact, really in the early years, I felt very strongly that I was supposed to do this. I’m a Christian. So, I’m a man of faith. So, I felt this was what God was leading me to do. That was about all I felt.
I didn’t have a good vision. I didn’t see how you could monetize the site. It was a very painful process that I felt supposed to do this but I don’t see how it’s going to work. My wife was very supportive because she didn’t freak out either. She said, “I kind of feel the same way. I feel that god is saying you’re supposed to do this, but we don’t know how it’s going to happen.” So, there was so much uncertainty of just, “I think it will work. I hope it will work. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
When it finally happened and it dawned on me, we crossed $60,000 this year, that’s more than I made in my previous two jobs combined in a year from blogging about audio recording–it wasn’t like fitness or how to make money or whatever the big ones are. I just remember getting a babysitter and eating at a really good restaurant and having fun and being like, “This is the craziest thing I’ve ever done that I never thought I was going to do.”
Andrew: And then you went a little crazier and you went to CarMax.
Graham: Yeah, and bought a car.
Andrew: What state are you in?
Graham: Florida.
Andrew: Yeah, CarMax is big there. CarMax was bigger in Southern California. I don’t see many here. And what did you do?
Graham: The car one was after I had a big promo that I didn’t think was going to do very well and it did like phenomenally well. I had old, old cars. I don’t personally believe in debt, so I was just trying to save up for a crappy replacement for my crappy car. I made so much money in this promo in like one weekend. I was like, “I think I can go buy a car with this.” We went to CarMax on date night. We had a babysitter. We went to CarMax and bought a car and came back. That was what we did on date night. That was awesome. That was probably like in year three or four.
Andrew: That’s fantastic. You mentioned a promo. I guess occasionally you do promos too. So, does more of your revenue come in from the sequence of emails that you send out or from launches or promos you do?
Graham: The sequence.
Andrew: The sequence?
Graham: Yeah.
Andrew: It took us forever to work on our funnel and I still don’t love it. You’ve got yours nailed and that’s where the revenue is largely coming from. So, you have predictable revenue. You know if you get 1,000 emails tomorrow, you know roughly how many of them are going to convert into customers.
Graham: Basically. Yeah.
Andrew: What’s your number one thing for retaining customers after they buy? Don’t say good content. I know that’s implied.
Graham: Retaining customers… Coming back for other courses or the members?
Andrew: Both. Start with one and go to the other.
Graham: I don’t think about retaining customers for the one-off courses. I hope that my courses are good enough that if it helped them as they see that I have other courses–get some of that like, “Oh, I bought your mixing course and I saw you came out with this new recording course and I assumed it’s got to be good.”
Andrew: Okay.
Graham: I just hope–I guess I hope, that’s my strategy–the membership site is the trickier one because literally they’re paying every month. So, I’m finding how money months do people tend to stick around? Where’s the value for them to keep coming back. We’d tried to continue to tinker and tweak to give them reason to come back every month. I’m not perfect about them, we’re doing a lot more testing there.
Andrew: I really just like your whole attitude here. You’re right. You’re not dealing with any businesses that should generate revenue. Frankly, if you and I sat down and you said, “I want to go after musicians.” I have to tell you, musicians have no money. And they’re not going to take much money. If you want them to buy, you might want to tell them they’re going to get really rich if they create the right music and tell stories about how Beyoncé started out really a bad singer but got a good mi and that changed her career.
Graham: Yes.
Andrew: That’s not even on your site anywhere. You’re not a horrible marketer. You’re good. You’re clear. Everything makes sense. Anyone who’s going to go to TheRecordingRevolution.com will see the homepage is very clear. It says what you’re doing, but it also doesn’t guide people to the latest blog post or tries to get them into your system or finding the perfect thing for them. So, you’re thinking clearly about this, but you’re not like aggressive selling at all. Here you are, you’ve built up your business. It’s here and it’s on YouTube. You’ve got a quarter-million subscribers, I saw.
Graham: Yeah.
Andrew: Somewhere around there. You’re getting close to them at this point. It’s just great to have you on here to tell the story of how you built it up.
Graham: I’m honored to be on here and again, I hope the people that listen in, if they’re starting out, I hope they can see that in my niche, it’s the randomest of niches. But there are enough people out there and that’s the beautiful thing about what we do, Andrew, is there’s access to the entire world.
So, the weirdest niche that you have–you have a bigger pool to draw from and if you engage in a way that you stand out from anybody else and you have a unique message to share, there should be enough people out there for you to make a decent living doing this. It’s been a crazy ride for me.
Andrew: Yeah. One of the interesting interviews that I first did when I started Mixergy was about a guy who said he sold like $60,000 worth of a hummingbird eBook because there are people–I forget the exact bird because I’m not a bird guy, but there are people who are really into it and they wanted to learn about these freaking birds, so that’s what he did.
All right. That’s on the site for–how can someone find it? Let’s see if I can find the guy’s name fast… EBook on birds made half a million dollars, Bob Dunlap. I remember meeting this guy at a conference and I was hustling to find guests to come on Mixergy at the time. This was back when I started, 2008. He told me this story. I said, “You’ve got to come. Let’s do this.” He came and did that interview.
I recommend anyone who’s listening to this to check that interview out. We also have a few courses on how to create your first course, taught by people who have actually done it. Anyone who’s interested in more should check those out. Also, I know, graham, you were really influenced by Bob Berg, his book, “The Go-Giver.”
Graham: Yes.
Andrew: He did a course on Mxiergy. Anyone who wants to see a different entrepreneurship, a more giving, more caring attitude, Bob as a person, beyond the book–you never know what the guy who wrote the book is going to be like. He could be real jerk and wrote a book on how to be a great guy. Bob is not. We screwed up on the way we articulated a few things on the site. He was so considerate about it. He sent me a thank you card after the interview was done. It’s like, “Who does all that stuff?”
Graham: Wow.
Andrew: Anyway, really good guy. I can see why you were so influenced by him. Anyone who’s listening to us should go check that out. Frankly, the number one place they should go is TheRecordingRevoluiton.com and to your YouTube channel.
Graham: Absolutely.
Andrew: Check out more about you. Cool. Finally, if you forgot, our two sponsors are Toptal and HostGator. I’m grateful to them. I’m grateful to this new bottle of whiskey that I’m going to get to try. Thank you so much, Jim. And please, if you like this interview, tell your friends to subscribe, help them out. If they are not intruded to podcasting and many of your friends are not yet, you’re going to blow their minds by sowing them how good podcasting is. Open up the app for them and why not also add on Mixergy for them so they can check out these interviews too.
Thank you, Graham
Graham: My pleasure. Thank you, Andrew.
Andrew: You bet. Thank you all for being a part of it. Think you Horarr for the introduction. Bye everyone.