 What's up everybody, once again, it's Brand Man, Sean and I'm back with another episode of Inside the Network where we share exclusive content from Inside of BrandManNetwork.com. And for this particular piece, I'm sharing a snippet from an interview that I've did with George Goodrich. Now George is a founder of Playlist Push, a playlist service that helps artists get on playlists, obviously to get those views. In this particular portion of the conversation, we're talking about just infrastructure, building out from a business standpoint, more from an entrepreneur than artist specific. But I'm going to break down how that still applies to you as an artist in your business after the fact. Let's get into it. Just from a sheer business perspective here, you talk about that bootstrapping versus having an investor and how they want you to scale so quickly. What has it been like? Have you had those moments? I know I have a business where it's like, I want this thing to grow fast. I'm trying to grow fast, but then certain things have to work out, work themselves out and then maybe a few months later, you're like, you know what? If we grew that fast, it probably would have killed us. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. I think my theory with art, not only artists, but with business is however fast you take off, that's as fast as you're going to drop off. If an artist comes out of nowhere and they just blast off and you have no idea who they are, but they're massive, they're going to drop usually pretty quick after that. I think that's the same thing with business. Whereas if you're an artist, if you're in the trenches, you start out DMing people on Instagram, that's literally how you start your music career to getting up to starting a tour and then really taking you years to build, it's going to take you a lot longer before you tail off. I think that's the same thing with business. We've grown at a nice, reasonable rate. I have friends that work at tech companies like, oh, you need to be doing these ads and you should be doing influencer marketing and you should be doing all these things. It's been nice to just that what we've done has worked. We've been growing at a slow pace, but it's worked for us and it's a lot easier for us to manage and slowly add in systems, hire new people if we need to instead of just jamming the gas pedal down for the sake of making as much money as we can. Got you. You look at any other playlist networks as competition doesn't have to even be a particular name, but is that a space where it feels like, hey, I got to be, these guys are there performing or is there even a way to engage with other playlists are doing? Yeah, for sure. I mean, there's a point in time. It's just happened recently. I start seeing a lot of ads come up for playlist companies or Spotify promotion, $25, $300, whatever. Usually crappy websites, you have no idea who's behind it or what's going on and we were kind of like freaking out like, oh man, we're seeing all these ads, we need to start running ads. And I'm like, well, really we don't because I think what happens is people will use those services that are being advertised for them and they don't get that great a result. And then they might dig a little bit deeper and say, okay, like what's a good company that can actually do this and then hopefully they find us. So by all those other companies running ads, it's just raising awareness to artists that, oh wow, this is a thing. I didn't know I could do this before. So I think it's actually in our benefit that we didn't go down that hole and say, oh wow, we should run ads because for all we know, those companies have like 10 clients, right? A month, if that, just because someone's running ads, it doesn't mean they're killing it. Usually it's the opposite. So I'm glad that we held off and didn't go down that rabbit hole to basically just follow all of those new companies. Right. It's funny you said that because working at a startup, that's when I really learned from really the CEO how you just never know what's going on behind the curtains for any other company. You can't over focus on the front. That was actually my first version of like, if people say you just see the highlights, I basically was getting that from a business perspective. Like that's what you see. Okay, it looks like they're killing it. They just dropped this bad ass article, whatever, but you got to keep moving on your own operation. So that our respect for that. What are you guys doing to get business by the way? So it's all referrals since y'all aren't so actively putting out the name. Yeah, I think a big part of it is just referrals, it's just word of mouth. People use it, they get results and then they tell their friends and I think the good thing about it is if people get results, it's directly related to the music. So if you have good music and you get results, those people usually know other people that have good music. So it kind of just like feeds off each other. So when people get results, they tell other people about it and yeah, I mean a lot of our business is just people introing me to, hey, this is my friend who's a manager or this is my friend who has a digital agency. So I mean, that's really been, I think the biggest thing is just word of mouth. Yeah, I mean, we have some good articles out there about Spotify and Playlist and things like that and those are all nice, but I think really the main driver is just people telling each other about it. Got you. All right, again, if you want to check out that entire interview, you can check it out on brandmannetwork.com. There's three things that I really want to make clear and just break down a little bit. So number one, he talked a lot about infrastructure, setting those systems in place as they do as a business and even deeper in the interview, he talks about systems for quality control, dealing with customers. There's so many different aspects and so many systems that can be set in place and while growing quickly can kill you. And what that looks like is something that artists are familiar with. They've seen those artists blow up really quickly and the next thing you know, you don't hear about them because they don't have systems in place to capture the attention and funnel the attention towards something specific, right? That's what that same problem looks like as an artist. So the way you should approach things is always what system can I build because when I grow, when stuff scales and it starts to grow quickly, things start to break and things start to get exposed. The lack of systems will start to get exposed. If you want to grow past yourself, you're going to need some of those things in place and it's a mindset. So what I mean by that is there's things that you might already be doing, but if you approach them from a system building standpoint, then you'll put yourself in a better position to build infrastructure just for the sake of low. For example, you might be doing a lot of influencer campaigns, but if you're doing influencer campaigns, are you reaching out to random influencers or are you actually taking notes of as I go throughout these campaigns, I'm starting to see these people, my stuff performs well with and I need to pay that person again and as a matter of fact, I need to make sure I start to even develop a relationship with that person, even if it's just a business relationship from paying them again and again and again, they get used to me. So now I could put them in my normal system because I know I'll be able to get back out to them. Or am I going to actually get some influencers like build friends or really network where I know these people I can use repeatedly, whether it's just from doing business with them constantly and making sure you double down and list them and you use them as a part of every single media run you might do or marketing campaign you might do, or if it's really networking and building up those relationships that way, or maybe even having your own influencers, right? There's people who have that, right? They have a manager who has influencers. So now the artist can use those influencers. Another way that looks, that's a lot different than yo, I got this song and let me just go hit up all these pages and try to get up there or I'm starting from scratch every time. That's now a system that you have in place that helps your infrastructure and can make sure you get back out to a similar set of people, but also a similar engagement in a similar audience. That's one system, having systems when it comes to Facebook ads and building up that enough so you can actually know what the performance looks like. And that's nuance and we can get into that deeper later, but there's so many different systems you can put in place and there's a lot of things that you're already doing that could be translated into a true system and be built into your infrastructure if you set that in place. Email campaigns, all that kind of good stuff. Now, another thing he said that I want to touch on is just the fact that he's talked about not looking at competition and I even touched on that a little bit as well. That's just something that you got to remember, right? Okay, yes, competition exists. You don't have to be ignorant of it in terms of whatever you're doing business-wise or even artist-wise. There might be similar artists, but you can't just look at what other people are doing and let that affect you heavily, right? Thinking that they're winning because they got some look when you don't know what's going on behind scenes because people might be receiving you away and then you know what's going on behind scenes of you. So it's like, yeah, okay, I understand what you're saying. You think I'm awesome, but you know the real is going on behind your own curtains. Keep that in mind. Everybody has the same thing going on. There's always going to be in front of the scenes and behind the scenes and it's different. Don't get fooled by somebody else's in front of the scenes. But last and not least is the fact that George actually pointed out something that I think people don't put enough value in. And that's the fact that he said people with good music, right, will attract more people with good music for his business. That's what makes sense, right? So serving those people well and those people getting good results because the good people with good music are likely to get better results than the people without good music, right? And then those people saying, yo, I got a friend. I want to bring him in. That's the same model that you should look at for your friends, your fans. So many other aspects of life, but generally when we talk about an artist, when we look at the type of fans you're trying to bring in, right? You know what the best type of fan is for you. They're going to bring in more type of those people, right? That's the quality, understanding what good is for you because they know what their good customer looks like. You understanding what your good, your solid, ideal fan looks like is going to help those people come in, right? Of course, if you get yourself to the level where you're able to serve those people and actually make those people satisfied with whatever you got going on and actually turn that type of person into a fan because once you do that, again, they'll bring in more of those people. So really target, really hone in and understand that fan profile and put in that work to do so because there's a lot of value in it and it makes your life so much easier on the back end. Again, if you want to check out this entire interview, you can check it out on brandmannetwork.com. We help artists develop their brand and build their marketing infrastructure so they can grow their fan base. If you like this video, go ahead and like button if you like it. You might as well share it and if you're not subscribed, you know what to do. Hit that subscribe.