The Nathan Barry Show

[00:00:00] Nathan: You move to the south of France, you make $500,000 a year and does that on two hours a week of work, two hours alongside Oh, oh, okay. On, on a busy week. For my guest, Lars Tiger. Figure out the secret to getting unstuck as an artist and solving perfectionism once and for all

[00:00:17] Lars: volume is not necessarily a bad thing.

[00:00:19] Creators in general need to put a lot more content out there to, to have more fishing hooks in the ocean. If your lease a thousand songs, a hundred of those are gonna pay for everything. As your catalog grows, you get a stable, stable growth, right? And it stays stable afterwards. Instead of having this, I can now talk to my wife and say, let's plan that holiday in six months, because I know there's money coming in.

[00:00:42] For me. Volume equals stability.

[00:00:45] Nathan: What are some of the biggest insights that came from having thousands of data points compared to

[00:00:50] Lars: 12? Every artist these days, they are told to go on TikTok, make all this content. For most people, it doesn't really work that well. I didn't put any marketing out there at all.

[00:01:00] The first thing that probably shocked me the most was the fact that, wow, it's amazing.

[00:01:09] Nathan: Lars, I introduced you last night as a Norwegian music producer who has, uh, moved to the south of France, who makes $500,000 a year, almost entirely profit. And does that on two hours a week of work. Is that accurate?

[00:01:26] Lars: Yeah, that's pretty accurate actually. I would say two hours on the long side. That's Oh, oh, okay.

[00:01:32] On, on a busy week. Yeah. On a busy week. It's two hours.

[00:01:35] Nathan: Yeah. So you have one of the craziest stories, and I just wanna dive into this. Mm-hmm. Getting into your whole career in music, uh, how you've gone to create this massive library of songs and music out there that generates this income for you and so much more.

[00:01:51] But where, where do we start in unpacking where you are today and where you came from with the audience?

[00:01:56] Lars: Alright. Okay. So I think we should, um, probably start with the fact that I, I grew up in Norway. I, uh, was educated as a jazz pianist and then I. Got into engineering and you grew up on a

[00:02:07] Nathan: farm in Norway?

[00:02:08] Lars: I grew up on a farm in Norway and I built my first recording studio in my great-grandmother's old house. Okay. Without telling my parents, why not tell your parents? Because I was worried. I would say no. Okay.

[00:02:21] Nathan: Yeah, yeah. Ask

[00:02:21] Lars: for forgiveness, not permission. Yeah. It worked out in the end. Um, so, so I was sort of just going through all the different roles in the music industry.

[00:02:31] I was, um, I was a musician, I was a sound engineer, started writing songs with artists. Some of those songs got. You know, pretty popular as songs. And then the artists started getting emails and requests for, you know, can you come to this show? Can you do this thing? And they go, oh, no, no, no, no. Can you help me with this?

[00:02:49] I done all these emails. So then I became a, a manager. Okay. So I started managing artists and I became a music publisher. And then, uh, record labels. I've sort of just gone through all these steps in the music industry, and I did that for close to 30 years. Okay. I was a very traditional, um, music producer.

[00:03:08] I'd say Maybe that's the, yeah. Music producer, entrepreneur. And then in 2019, I'd been doing this for many, many years. Over and over, been traveling way too much. Um, I got sort of burnt out of it all, and then I decided that, you know what, um, I need a change. Um, so I quit everything in the music business. I bought a house in the south of France, um, and I had.

[00:03:36] A plan for how to do music, but in a very different way.

[00:03:41] Nathan: Okay.

[00:03:42] Lars: I had seen how it was getting harder and harder to get traction from the releases that I was releasing with artists. It felt like everything was just uphill. And I was thinking maybe, well, maybe it's my music and it, I mean, I'm just not in sync with the market anymore, but in general, um, it was like that for everyone else as well.

[00:04:03] Nathan: So everyone you're talking to were, yeah. They're spending all this time to craft

[00:04:07] Lars: the perfect track. Yeah. The perfect hook, all of that. And it was just way harder not working to get traction, uh, especially on the streaming platforms. And, um, so I decided that, okay, what I'm gonna do now and try to figure out what's wrong here, I'm gonna create.

[00:04:26] A lot of songs. I'm gonna sit down and do what I did when I was a kid. She's gonna play the piano for my grandmother. Mm-hmm. Really relaxing piano music. And I'm gonna record that. And then I'm just gonna release that without any promotion, any marketing or anything. I'm just gonna release it onto the streaming platforms under not my name.

[00:04:44] Just come up with an artist name for that. Okay. And I did that a thousand songs. Your first batch was a thousand. It was a thousand songs. And I made this plan. So here's how I did it. Got up in the morning, grabbed a glass of orange juice, walked out into the studio, sat down by the piano, and improvised.

[00:05:02] 'cause I was a jazz pianist. Mm-hmm. Right? It's all sit down improvisation. Yeah. I can just improvise. Uh, press record, record it, uh, like improvised for two, three minutes. Stop. Uh, okay. Mm-hmm. Next one, record. And I did that. So in one day, I'd, I'd record, you know, 40 or 50 tracks. Wow. Would you, would all of these would be production ready?

[00:05:26] Yeah. 'cause I mean, it was pretty simple. I mean, it was piano, a bit of reverb and effects on it. So it's sound and it gave you the, the right vibe. Mm-hmm. And I created an artwork for that and released it. And I did this over and over and over again. So I got to a thousand tracks. Okay. And then I stopped.

[00:05:44] 'cause then I let it sit for three months. Um, just to see what happens. What happens if you don't, like, if you release music and you just don't do anything and you do it sort of faceless, what, how is the algorithm, the whole market? How is it gonna respond? Right? Mm-hmm. Because I, I thought that if I could get that answer back, then I could take that info and then go in on what worked.

[00:06:11] That's basically what I did. And I did that for three and a half years. So first due to a

[00:06:16] Nathan: thousand. How long, how long did that take? I think two tracks a day. That's only 20 days.

[00:06:21] Lars: Yeah,

[00:06:21] Nathan: exactly. Is that really what it was?

[00:06:23] Lars: Yeah. Yeah. So it was very, very, um, it was a lot of hard work in the beginning, but then it was also super strategic.

[00:06:31] Um, so I started getting feedback from the market and I just used this info to really maximize mm-hmm. The ROI on every hour I put in. Um, and this might be provocative to a lot of artists and people that are like, well, what are you, you are destroying the arts and all that. Um, but I need to know what happens if I just do this and just cold release it without any,

[00:06:59] Nathan: because you're in this world where you're saying, okay, we are going to perfectly craft a.

[00:07:04] The song, the image for the artist. Mm-hmm. You know, who's behind it, the story behind it, all of this. Then we're gonna have the perfect launch plan to put it out there. Mm-hmm. And everything's gonna come together. And then we have this chance at making a hit.

[00:07:16] Lars: Yeah, exactly. And I mean, and you now going complete opposite.

[00:07:18] I wanna do the complete opposite. 'cause the, the thing that I've been doing for so many years was we would go in and we would write a song with an artist and we'd probably spend, let's say a month on each single that we released. Mm-hmm. Um, and then after that, when we polished that thing for a month, then we would add a lot of money in marketing on top of it.

[00:07:36] Right. And a lot of time and effort. So the risk on each release was just actually kind of insane. Right. If you think about it. So I thought, what's the total opposite of that? And that's where I came to this. Oh, that's fascinating. Experiment. I

[00:07:50] Nathan: mean, I always think about, Charlie Munger talks about, you know, he says invert always invert.

[00:07:55] You know? And so that's what you're doing where you're saying, okay, here's one end of the spectrum. Absolutely. And then you're like, let's go to the

[00:08:00] Lars: complete opposite. Yeah. And there's also this other factor, I think I wanna draw this out on the board. Are you okay with that? Yeah, let's do it. Okay, cool.

[00:08:09] Alright, so releasing a lot of volume. Mm-hmm. Right? Uh, and to every artist out there, I just wanna say, try to like be open to this idea. There is this thing, quality versus volume, right? Okay. Quantity, quality, quantity. And I started thinking when I did this, what is quality? Because if we'd spent 30 days on a song, you'd think that we polished it to a hundred percent.

[00:08:35] Right. And we thought, you know, as professionals we thought this is where the bar is, this is a hundred percent quality. Right. Okay. So I'm gonna put a line here. That's a hundred percent full quality. Okay. Then with the same thing, if my mom were to say, what is a hundred percent, let's go back to my piano songs.

[00:09:05] What is a hundred percent to her? Is a hundred percent to her the same as my a hundred percent as a creator, uh, as a professional? No, it's probably not. Because she would actually think that what I thought was, you know, 80% on this line, 80%, she would probably think that, well, this is a hundred percent to her.

[00:09:28] Right. You know, so this is whole this, this whole thing on what is a hundred percent in terms of quality on music and art. It's really hard to put a fine answer on that. Right? So I started thinking, what if instead of then spending a month. Polishing something to what I thought was a hundred percent, what if I stopped at 80%?

[00:09:51] Okay. And maybe made a bet on that at least 80%, maybe more of the audience would agree that 80% is a hundred percent. Okay. That would be like top quality and this, so this would give the value they needed. Right? Because I knew that actually in terms of budget time getting from 80% to a hundred percent in music production, that's where you spend most of the time.

[00:10:18] All the time. Yeah. You're talking about like the 80

[00:10:19] Nathan: 20 rule in practice, right? Yes. So, and so that's saying that 80%, uh, like getting 80% of there takes 20% of the time. Mm-hmm. Or 80% of results comes from 20% of the effort. And then if you, you invert it, then you're like to get that last bit to close the gap between this 80% and you're a hundred percent is gonna take a huge amount of time.

[00:10:41] Yeah.

[00:10:42] Lars: It is. So then I started thinking, okay, for 80% stuff, the stuff that I think is 80%, I can do 10 times, a hundred times, 200 times more content. Okay. 'cause it's way quicker to do that. And that's what I did. So when I did those first a thousand tracks, I had this number in my head, you know what, 80% is good enough, done, release it, and then just look at the data afterwards that you get back.

[00:11:08] Uh, and obviously that worked because I got a lot of data back saying that number one, one out of 10 songs would get a lot more traction to the others. Mm-hmm. Why? Was it because of the quality of that song? Or was it simply because the algorithm and the way it works on social media, on streaming platforms?

[00:11:29] Mm. That were just random? A little bit. So what it told me is that, okay, if you release a thousand, uh, a thousand songs, a hundred of those. Are gonna pay for everything that they, they're the ones that you can really rely on for the future. And, and what happens is that I sort of compare to my grandfather.

[00:11:50] He was a fisherman, right? When he was going out to do some fishing, would he then put out one hook into the ocean? No, he wouldn't, obviously he would put out 10, 20 Right. To get the fish. Right. Um, so I thought, you know what, maybe at the end of the day, if I, if I create 80% results, my 80%, but what the market actually might think is a hundred percent giving them enough value.

[00:12:16] If I do that enough, if I do a lot of that, putting 25,000, you know, fishing hooks into the ocean, right? I just did the simple math based on those first thousand songs and then I scaled it to 25,000. And the answer is very close to the math I did in the beginning. I knew that okay, 80%, 80% of these, or 90% of these songs, uh, are not gonna do much.

[00:12:44] But the remaining 10% of what I put out is gonna make everything worth it. Wow. That's amazing. And for me, uh, it just flipped everything. Because you have to remember that I've been educated as a jazz pianist. I was spending years in, in the recording studio, creating songs, polishing songs. So I was all about quality.

[00:13:04] Mm-hmm. This flipped things on its head for me a little bit. Yeah. In the beginning I was like, do I even tell people about this? 'cause it's kind of like taking away the credibility that I have as, as a creator. Mm-hmm. But then what happened is, maybe you've heard the, the, the story of the pottery professor who split his class in two.

[00:13:23] Yes. Yeah. Tell the story though. Yeah. So, so there's a pottery professor here. He splits his class in two, and he tells one half of the class that, okay, you guys, for the next month, you're gonna spend all your time creating one perfect pot. Perfect. And afterwards, I'm gonna tell you what I think about it, you'll be judged purely on the quality of that one piece.

[00:13:44] Yeah, exactly. And then, then the, the other half of the class, he said, you are just gonna produce as many pots as you can. And afterwards, I'm gonna judge you on how many you made and the quality that he made, right? Mm-hmm. And obviously, I thought until I did this, that going for like quality on one thing, Polish, polish, polish was the way to go.

[00:14:06] But what happens is that when you do things over and over and over again, the quality on these things, the 80% slowly climbs to a hundred percent, right? Yeah. 'cause it's not a true a hundred percent. It's your a hundred percent. Exactly. And that's the way it is with arts, music, all of that. So as I did this over and over and over again, my thousandths track was way better than the first one.

[00:14:33] Oh, interesting. Even though it came after a 30 year career. Yeah. In music it did, because I perfected how to do this. I created this creator flywheel that I used to create all this content. Mm-hmm. So I had the same process going over and over again, and slowly the quality climbed to a hundred percent.

[00:14:52] Mm-hmm. So if I sit down now and I go, I'm gonna polish this piece for a month, I don't think I would make something that would be better that way. Spending all that time. Right.

[00:15:04] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:15:05] Lars: Um, and I, okay. So, so how can people relate to this? Um, I think for artists over the span of a career, a music artist, they release 200, 250 tracks Okay.

[00:15:18] Over their career. Right. If you look at, um, uh, we talked about Britney Spears last night. Yeah. Britney Spears released around 200 tracks, I think over the career. Um, Taylor Swift released. 400 tracks ish. Uh, until this point she's probably, yeah. She's one of the most prolific Yeah. People. And she's gonna, those she's read way more.

[00:15:39] Right. Yep. I took it to an extreme though, of course. Um, but the thing is, volume is something that people need to think about. Volume is not necessarily a bad thing. Mm-hmm. Creators in general need to put a lot more content out there to, to have more fishing hooks in the ocean. 'cause you have to realize that with ai, right?

[00:16:03] With ai people say, well, the only way to win over AI is with quality. Mm-hmm. I don't agree. Right. That's, I like, before doing this, I would absolutely agree to that. Now I don't anymore.

[00:16:18] Nathan: Well, so what I'm thinking about in that is everyone says, you know, they put quality. They put them on a, a spectrum, right?

[00:16:25] Mm-hmm. And then we've got quantity mm-hmm. Over here. And so we're saying, Hey, where do you wanna live in this spectrum? Are you about quality or, or quantity? Mm-hmm. Like, make a decision as a creator. Mm-hmm. You know? And what you're saying is choose quantity

[00:16:41] Lars: because quantity leads to to quality. Exactly.

[00:16:45] And that flips everything on its head. Right. Because then number one, when you start realizing I need to create a lot of content, then you start just, you stop being afraid of getting yourself out there. 'cause you realize I just have to go, just have to go. Right. And then I have to trust the process that it's gonna get better as I do this over and over again.

[00:17:05] So, 'cause that's the problem with a lot of creators. They just, they're they're standing still and they're just polishing. Polishing. 'cause they're so worried what people are gonna say.

[00:17:12] Nathan: So they Right, they're the, the student in the pottery class, you say, okay, I'm gonna be judged at the end of this month or whatever time period based on how good this pod is.

[00:17:21] So they spend all this time getting it perfect. And the other student is like, I'm just judged on how many I make. Yeah. So like, oh, that was bad. That was bad. Oh, but I figured out how to throw this a little bit. Yeah. Better. I figured out this little thing. And you iterate.

[00:17:34] Lars: So you turn more into a little factory for yourself.

[00:17:37] Uhhuh. Um, and it's interesting. It, to me it's, it changed everything. 'cause there's another aspect of this. In the music world, when I had, you know, let's say I had over a year had 12 releases, 12 songs spent a month in each. Yep. What would happen with the, the income graph then is, um, I would have like, if there became hits, right?

[00:18:03] It would like, there would come mountains like this of income, growing, number of streams, and then would fade out Okay. Like that. And it wouldn't go all the way down to zero in terms of stream to income we're higher, but not by a lot. Exactly. Um, but what happens, and then the next one would probably go here and then another one wouldn't go do as good.

[00:18:23] So whatever. But if you start, you know, releasing 25,000 tracks or you don't have to do that many, right? What happens is that your income graph now consists of all these tiny little drops. Yeah. The risk is spread out over so much more content. So instead of having these spikes going up and down, an income stream asset creator that you can't trust.

[00:18:45] What happens is as your catalog grows slowly, you get a stable, stable growth. Right? And it stays stable afterwards. 'cause the risk is spread out over all these phishing hooks, all these tracks, all these content. So now instead of having this, I can now talk to my wife and say, you know what, let's plan that holiday in six months because I know there's money coming in.

[00:19:12] Right. And for a lot of creators and

[00:19:13] Nathan: musicians, because this is stacked up and we've got, you know, there's a few tracks there, there's a few more here. These are all building on itself and some are working, some aren't doing anything. And

[00:19:25] Lars: yeah, I mean, over here I rely on 12 tracks.

[00:19:27] Nathan: Mm-hmm.

[00:19:28] Lars: Down here way more so the risk gets spread out over all these, um, these multitude of o tracks and Okay.

[00:19:38] And that changes everything as well. 'cause. When you start getting volume. Mm-hmm. If, if you're a music creator or some other type of creator, you start getting volume. If I look at the streaming platforms in the world over the last five years, they've been slowly growing because they're opening in a new country.

[00:19:54] A new country, and they're growing. And so is my music catalog. Hmm. It's actually, it's climbing. So when, um, when I started maybe like only 50% of the countries in the world had streaming platforms, for example, now we're up to like 70%. And because it's all spread out, I have this huge catalog and suddenly I grow with them.

[00:20:18] Mm-hmm. 'cause suddenly there's a lot more users coming in and they start finding my fishing hooks. Well, one thing

[00:20:25] Nathan: I'm really curious as you talk about platforms is what's the breakdown of revenue? That you're getting first maybe what are the platforms? And then

[00:20:32] Lars: break

[00:20:32] Nathan: 10 revenue

[00:20:33] Lars: from each. So yeah. So that's another side of it as well.

[00:20:35] But, um, you'd think that Spotify was the big one. Yeah, but it's, it's written, for me, it's, Spotify is somewhere between 15 and 20%. Okay. Of the income. Apple Music is way bigger, so that's around 50%. And then because in the world there are, you know, hundreds of smaller streaming, uh, services, especially in Asia.

[00:20:56] So they then account for the rest. Okay. And that's these two, like before doing this way, working as a music industry, we're so focused on Spotify, especially in Europe. Yeah. So focused on Spotify. That's the only thing we care about. We want things released and we want them. We just pray for them to, to put our music on their

[00:21:18] Nathan: playlist because you telling an artist, Hey, uh, we're not doing very well on Spotify, but uh, on all these obscure platforms you've never heard of in all these other countries, we're actually doing okay.

[00:21:28] Yeah. And the artist is like, I, I don't care. My credibility is based off Yeah, exactly.

[00:21:32] Lars: These two. But these, this is also very interesting markets, but it only works because remember before I did have this amount of tracks, I only had like 12 data points that I could look at, right? So for me, when I looked at these 12 data points a year, these things were so small that I was like, well, I'm just not gonna care about that at all.

[00:21:55] I don't do anything with that. But when you get volume, suddenly all these small little things they mount up to be pretty substantial. Right. So, so volume changes also your perspective on how you look at things.

[00:22:09] Nathan: Because the amount of, yeah, the amount of data that you can have from that is fascinating.

[00:22:13] What are some of the biggest insights that came from having tens of thousands of data points, or maybe even the first thousand compared to

[00:22:20] Lars: 12? So, I mean, the, the first thing that probably shocked me the most was the fact that over here, the old way of doing things, we would, you know, we would spend so much time and money on marketing and promotion.

[00:22:33] Mm-hmm. Thinking that that would drive sales. And I mean, every artist these days love it or hate it, but they are told to go on TikTok, make all these content and Right, we're gonna put some ads in it. You're gonna get on these TV shows and it's gonna work. But the fact is that for most people, it doesn't really work that well.

[00:22:51] There are a few like viral videos and stuff like that that leads to some sort of, uh, streaming action. But for most, the marketing doesn't really make much sense. And that's what sort of got underlined here by doing this. I didn't put any marketing out there at all. Right. You made it a clean experiment.

[00:23:12] Yeah, it was just a clean experiment. I put it out there and I wanted to see what happens if I'm just a hundred percent hands off passive. Um, so that, that's, that's number one. That was a big thing for me. 'cause then if you can remove the marketing thing mm-hmm. And, and you don't trust it that much. Even if I was then working with like a more traditional artist, I would think about this in a very different way when I was launching that new artist.

[00:23:37] 'cause then I'd go, you know what, instead of just focusing on that one song that you're gonna release in three months and the next ep, what if we made a plan where actually we're gonna get way more content out there? Um, that also changes it quite a bit.

[00:23:54] Nathan: Is there an in-between of these worlds that if someone Yeah.

[00:23:58] Not one

[00:23:58] Lars: should do Yeah. Taylor Swift doesn't have to, you know, create 25,000 songs.

[00:24:02] Nathan: Right. And she's an extreme outlier. Yeah. Like, let's talk about, let's say there's an artist Mm. That, uh, really cares about each of the tracks that they're doing. Yeah. They're, you know, the lyrics and the vocals that they're recording over it and all of that.

[00:24:16] Um, how should they be thinking about the lessons from the long tail and quality versus quantity?

[00:24:22] Lars: So I was part of starting a school in Norway called Limpy, where we, uh, invited 45, um, talents from all over the world, and we educate them on a one year program where we teach them how to write hit songs, basically.

[00:24:36] Yeah. And what I'd seen from doing that for a couple of years, and I look at these students and how they do it, is that most of them have a hard time. Creating stable income because they, yeah, they lean to the old school model. So what I've been teaching them and others is that, you know what, if you think about it in a different way, you put together a strategy where, you know, let's say within the next five years, you're gonna release 200 songs instead.

[00:25:06] That's number one. Um, and you're gonna start thinking like this. You're not gonna be afraid of volume. Yeah. 'cause what happens for most music creators is that one outta 10 songs get released. So they don't write 10 songs, one of them gets released, the rest remains stuck in a hard drive never to see the light of day.

[00:25:24] So we're gonna find ways where we can look through those songs and make sure that they get released with a decent value. Mm-hmm. Without that hurting you as an artist. Right. So I try to find, um, when I tell, you know, I. Normal artists like this, not just like people like me shooting for insane volume.

[00:25:46] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:25:47] Lars: I tell 'em that, um, you're not gonna have to do what I did, but you need to find a way to get more of your work out. You can't spend as many days and hours, you know, on your computer creating something, and then the next day, ah, scrap it and then move on to the next. You need to have a higher ROI on your creative outputs, you're saying Release more, release more music, and find a way to create more music so you can climb for like a higher production speed and doing it over and over again.

[00:26:19] You're gonna get your high production speed to give an output of closer to a hundred percent. Mm-hmm.

[00:26:23] Nathan: I'm thinking a lot about how this applies in other industries. Hmm. Like, you hear about these authors who, uh. Or like a book that comes out of nowhere. Mm-hmm. You know, maybe it's a romance novel or something else that like, released on Kindle and you're like, wow, like this took off.

[00:26:39] It did really well. Mm-hmm. And the, the author is a no one. It's the, the first book they wrote. And then, you know, three years later as they put out the second and the third in that volume or something, it eventually comes out like, oh, this person's actually, this well-known other author, and they wanted to try out a new idea, switch to a different genre, you know, and they didn't wanna risk their overall brand and they wanted their work to stand on its own.

[00:27:05] Yeah. And so they just said, I can invent a person, I can write under a pen name. Right. That has been a thing for, you know, a thousand years. Yeah. Uh, and so they were able to try out something totally new. Test quantity without any risk themselves. I mean, that's what you did. Yeah. Right. Where you didn't release.

[00:27:23] Yeah. This start, this experiment was not under Yeah.

[00:27:26] Lars: I, I do it even with, um, business ideas. I try to get, you know, um, new ideas out in the market as fast as possible. Then I try to learn from what I get back, the data I get back, does it work, does it not work? And then I pick the ones that I think I can scale.

[00:27:46] I I build on those when I scrap the rest. Mm-hmm. Right. So there's that sense of it all. Like imagine if you, um, it's not like I'm gonna take down 90% of the catalog load that I have, but in theory I could do that. I could remove things that don't really work. Right. Would the audience care? Maybe not. Maybe they wouldn't.

[00:28:08] So there's something about just going out there as a creator and, and maximizing your efforts and, and actually do. For me it was. I love creating music. That's what it mm-hmm. That's what it comes down to. But I've been working under this kind of restricted model where you have to polish, Polish, polish before you release anything.

[00:28:25] And when I moved down to France and I changed my lifestyle, I just wanted to go back to Lars, the music creator who likes, you know, playing the piano and just then I just released it out there. So there's something about just getting to, if you love creating, then create and put it in front of people and see what happens.

[00:28:43] But most people tend to be nervous about the results, thinking that I'm just gonna get criticized and it's not gonna work. But it's so valuable to go in for say, three months and just produce, produce, produce, release, get it out there and see what sticks. 'cause I mean, the data thing, the data points that you get back, you learn so much from that.

[00:29:02] Nathan: Yeah. Let's talk about the revenue side a little bit more. So this breakdown, right? We did a percentage breakdown, but that does the music streaming royalties, is that what equals the $500,000 a year? Yeah. So if we totaled up the, the money coming from all of this, that is 500,000 a year. Yeah. And I mean, that's, that's incredible.

[00:29:26] Lars: Yeah. I think, I mean, one thing is the number that is incredible, but the stability of it is, it, it is what really changed my life, right? Because it's, it's wildly predictable. I can trust this, this thing, I mean, it's been going on for years now. I can trust this cashflow so I can make plans and I can create more content.

[00:29:45] Right. I can find other ways to use that money flying, for example, you know, very expensive. We, we both love airplanes. Yeah. But like, so, so it's, it's, it is a, it's an income stream that I can, that I can trust. So for me, I say volume equals stability. Mm-hmm. Uh, if you go for, I'm just gonna produce the quality, right.

[00:30:06] It's gonna lead to instability for most people. I mean, that's an important point. Write that down. Yeah. And stability when it comes to your financial situation and your income. That's the thing that changes how well you sleep, how happy your spouse is, and all these other lifestyle and life quality things.

[00:30:29] So stability is way more important than you think. 'cause there are so many people, you know, I was so worried over money. Mm-hmm. So many years working as a music creator in like in this traditional way. But it's, I mean, of course I was, 'cause it had

[00:30:42] Nathan: this really unstable, right. And then if your next hit or your next song is not a hit and it does this instead Yeah.

[00:30:51] Then right.

[00:30:53] Lars: Then you have real, real problem, then I have a problem. You know, that affects everything in my life. So there are so many things about really rethinking your idea around volume. Mm-hmm. Quantity qual quality. I mean, it's so easy to just go with. Quality is the way to go. Mm-hmm. But I would say people need to rethink that in their types of business.

[00:31:14] Maybe you need to send a lot more emails. Maybe you need to, to find other ways, uh, where your creative output is getting out in the market, and then look at that data and learn from it. I think, um, a lot of people can, this, this is gonna open their minds to, to new, um, income streams. They can look at their income streams in different way in terms of maybe this thing that I just sort of neglected is the thing that I really have to go hard in on 'cause it's way more stable than this other thing.

[00:31:43] Nathan: Okay. This is fascinating, but there's one thing that I wanna know as a person who's scaling businesses, how do you turn 500,000 into a million? And how do we scale from there? So kind of conversation to sit down for probably. Yeah.

[00:31:58] Lars: Alright. So yeah. How do you scale that kind of model? Um. First, I think people should understand that yes, I put out 25,000 tracks.

[00:32:09] Mm-hmm. A lot of them I took down 'cause it didn't make much sense to leave them out there. There are costs related to having them on there and like what, what kind of costs? More like, uh, distribution costs and stuff like that. Okay. But also the clutter out there. Right. So I removed quite a bit of it, but still like a thousand, 10,000.

[00:32:30] How many did you take down? So I took down about seven, 8,000. So now I have like 15, 16. 16 that are actually out there. Yeah. That is out there. And

[00:32:39] Nathan: what, what were you seeing in those tracks that you took down?

[00:32:42] Lars: They just weren't getting plays. They weren't getting any plays at all. Mm-hmm. And so then telling me that, okay, if the algorithm has ignored your track for a very long time, it's gonna keep ignoring it, it's gonna keep it in the dark.

[00:32:57] Yeah. Yeah. So I took it

[00:32:58] Nathan: down. What, what did you notice between the tracks that. Got, got plays and you know, trended in some way versus the ones that got nothing.

[00:33:06] Lars: I'd say in general, the main thing is that in every track, everything you put out there need to provide value to an audience, right? And maybe some of these tracks didn't provide that value.

[00:33:18] Maybe that was part of it. The other thing is the algorithm not picking it up, but in general, these tracks that are now up there that deliver some sort of value to the audience. Uh, for the piano tracks. Maybe it's giving them, you know, the relaxing feeling that they're looking for. Um, but in general, I'd say as long as they serve some sort of value to the audience, then they're worth staying up there.

[00:33:44] And then they keep generating, uh, money. But how do you scale from here? Does like doubling going from half a million dollars to a million, does that mean I have to make 50,000 tracks in total? Right. Um, that's what I'm working on now. 'cause. Yes. To some extent that's actually true. You need to put a lot more work out there,

[00:34:05] Nathan: but Right.

[00:34:06] You don't, it sounds like you don't feel like you're hitting diminishing returns as far as like, oh, I've saturated the market. Mm-hmm. Or there's not enough listeners out there for the market is

[00:34:15] Lars: huge. Yeah. So it's not really about that. It's, it's more the fact that, um, do I want to go in mm-hmm. And do the same thing over again?

[00:34:24] Because I, I took it to an extreme. I don't expect anyone to do that again. But the data I got from that was kind of educating.

[00:34:32] Nathan: Do you have a higher hit rate on, I, maybe we shouldn't use the word hit, but, but success rate Mm. On your tracks now versus the first thousand. Absolutely. Absolutely. What are you doing differently?

[00:34:43] Lars: So, number one, I go from 80% to a hundred percent in quality. Right? Yep. You did the reps. Yeah. And you know how to do it better. So, so now I can get to results way faster. Mm-hmm. And I know what, what, what works and what doesn't work. Um, so that just, that changes everything, right? Because then you, you know what the audience wants, right?

[00:35:02] And you can, you can feed them more of that. But I'd say, how do you double it? I, I would probably now spend more time on each track and really polish the things that I know works that the audience wants. But at the same time, I wouldn't stretch that too far where I go into my old model of like spending too much time on each track.

[00:35:25] So it's always a balance, right? Um, but that's sort of where I am right now. How do I scale it and do I wanna do the work that it takes to do that? Or do I just, you know, enjoy life the way it is

[00:35:38] Nathan: Now? One thing that I'm wondering is, are there other platforms? Like, can you. Uh, you know, go for YouTube ad revenue and add a video component to all of these so that, you know, you can so many people listen to music on YouTube.

[00:35:51] Lars: Yeah. So that's what I've, I mean, you've told me this and gave me that idea. So, so I've started building, uh, a YouTube channel where I released this content and try to provide value through YouTube as well to, to, uh, to an audience. And obviously there are other platforms as well. You can, you can look at apps like you can create an app for this kind of content and try to see if you can make a business out of that.

[00:36:13] So I'm looking into these other ways of monetizing the same content instead of necessarily having to create more

[00:36:23] Nathan: content. Right, right. On one hand, you and I spend time in very similar ways. We have, uh, similar hobbies of creating content online, uh, woodworking, gardens, uh, flying, you know, all of those things.

[00:36:36] But I. I'm on this one end of the spectrum where I'm spending a huge amount of time trying to build, uh, a very large company. Mm-hmm. And you are spending your time, uh, very thoughtfully and deliberately of like, okay, how do I maximize these systems? Mm-hmm. You, like, you're act like Tim Ferriss's four hour workweek.

[00:36:54] Mm-hmm. You know, you're actually living that out and you're saying, eh, actually you're kind of working twice as hard as necessary, or twice as much as necessary. Yeah. What has you on that end of the spectrum of wanting to say, you know, how do I get these outsized returns with the least amount of time input as possible?

[00:37:10] Lars: This is the question that I sort of think about quite a bit for myself, and I discuss it with my wife over and over again. How do we make sure that we live purposeful lives, but at the same time feel like we're doing something valuable? And, you know, 'cause part of me wants to just go in and just scale this.

[00:37:29] Just like go hard. Yeah. And, and just take it to where I can take it. But then there's also the other side of me, it was like. I love my life right now. You know, I get to wake up not being stressed over money. I get to wake up and have breakfast with my kids. I can play with 'em in the garden and I can go into the studio whenever I want to and, and, and live that life.

[00:37:54] 'cause when you get to this stage, I've sort of hit a ceiling where I'm working alone now, meaning I have a hundred percent control of my life. Right. Um, and do I want to do the opposite, which is building a team? Mm-hmm. We had a discussion about this because I'm so worried about hiring someone. Uh, and I know that maybe I should hire someone that could help me now and help grow this and help monetize the existing catalog even better.

[00:38:29] Um. But there's something in me that goes, oh, that's gonna take away a bit of my control in my life, so maybe I should just stay here and enjoy this. And there's no correct or wrong answer here. Um, but it's something that I spend a lot of energy thinking about. Yeah. When you decided to build a company, you have a quite large team now.

[00:38:51] Yep. What's, what's your thought on that? Like, did you ever, did you ever have this point where you stopped and like, wait, do I wanna take it even further? Or do I wanna like, stay here and be cool?

[00:39:05] Nathan: Well, so in 2012 there was a lot of conversation around like solopreneur, uh, single person companies, all of that.

[00:39:14] Mm-hmm. And a good friend of mine, Josh Kaufman, who wrote the book, the Personal MBA, I think is one of the best at this. Mm-hmm. Right. Where he made a lot of business decisions. Around how do I make sure that I don't have obligations on an ongoing basis? Mm. He's like, I'm a writer, I and a writer and a researcher.

[00:39:30] Mm. He's like, I wanna be able to spend all of my time doing that. I don't want meetings. I don't want, uh, team management. I don't want OKRs, you know, any of these like, uh, corporate business things. And so people would tell him, like, Josh, why don't you, uh, you know, if you were to sell your book through your own website instead of through Amazon and Audible and others, you could recoup more margin.

[00:39:54] And he is like, yeah, but then I'd have customer support. Right. And someone would have to do that. And so at every time he's making this decision based on how does he generate, um, you know, really meaningful income, the personal MBA has sold, uh, I think over 1 million copies. Yeah. Fantastic book story. It's done, done so, so well.

[00:40:14] Uh, but instead of maximizing revenue or profit. Um, in, in a vacuum. He's done it within the constraint of none of this can take my, my time on an ongoing basis. Hmm. So you and him are very similar in that on one hand, people on the internet talk about passive income and who generally and fairly accurately say passive income doesn't exist.

[00:40:34] Hmm. But there's this category of people that have said, no, no, no. I have very firm constraints in my life, uh, and I'm going to like actually create passive income, which you've out outlined here. Ton of work to make it happen upfront. But, but then it, it exists. So that 20 12, 20 13 timeframe, um, I thought about that a lot and I'm like, okay, I'm gonna run a very, uh, successful, profitable one person business.

[00:41:00] Mm. And I got that to about 300,000 a year in revenue. Now I was doing the sell direct to your audience. Mm-hmm. Um, uh, that sort of thing. But I still love, I had complete freedom and all of that. And what switched for me was in the process of building ConvertKit and you know, now Kit was realizing that I just had bigger and bigger ambitions that required a team to bring it to life.

[00:41:27] Mm-hmm. And then realizing a personality thing for me is that I actually enjoyed working with people more than I liked working alone. Okay.

[00:41:35] Lars: Yeah.

[00:41:36] Nathan: And so, and it wasn't, I think what I was doing is I was comparing the experience of working on a team where someone else called the shots and projecting that forward to what it would be like working on a team with me calling the shots that you were running.

[00:41:49] Yeah. And, uh, they're just not the same at all. Mm. Like on one hand it's way more stressful, um, you know, way more responsibility, but on the other it's, you get to bring an idea to life. Like the position that I'm in right now. Mm-hmm. I. I can reach out to and talk to pretty much any person that I want to.

[00:42:07] Mm. Uh, based on the network that Kit has, my personal network, all of that. If I have an idea that I think is worth testing or putting out there, then that can go out to, you know, thousands, tens of thousands of customers. Mm. And we can test it with a small group and scale it from there. I get to see it in use for a lot.

[00:42:27] And then if I have an idea that I wanna see at scale, well I can, I can tell five people, 10 people, 25 people, hey. Yeah. To work on it. Go bring this to life and get to see it. And so I have so, so much fun with that. Mm. And you know, in similar in this like quality versus quantity debate, there's not a right answer, it's just like, what's right for you?

[00:42:49] The type of business, the type of life you wanna build

[00:42:52] Lars: and all that. Yeah. I think I've been so impressed by how you, because I asked you, okay, so what are you doing today? And you, well, I was working from home, my home office. And I've been imagining you because you have this huge team. Like he's probably just sweating around in his office, going from meeting to meeting, just, but it sounds like you've managed to take the solopreneur thing that you had going in this, that type of lifestyle and just try to keep it that way as much as possible.

[00:43:19] So you are, you can work from home quite a bit, isn't that right? Yep. You do almost entirely. That's, that to me is something that, I mean, that's what I want to do. But do you feel like the fact that you have a team and a responsibility, I mean, is it draining in any way?

[00:43:35] Nathan: Yeah, uh, it definitely is like mm-hmm.

[00:43:37] There's a re you have a responsibility to provide the salaries of, you know, in my case, 92 people. Yeah. That's a lot of people. That's a lot of people. Mm-hmm. So there's, there's pros and cons to it in, in every way. I think that if I didn't have a, a project, you know, in a company and a mission that was like so clear to me that I needed to pursue.

[00:44:00] Then, you know, like I would be totally happy as the solo printer. Hmm. Um, but then there's just also something really special about like, being able to work on one thing and come back and, and this other thing that you had has moved along. Or because someone has done that, you're able to dream so much bigger because, you know, I've got a huge number of people that are way more talented than I am in all these different areas, bringing things to life.

[00:44:27] Mm-hmm. Um,

[00:44:30] Lars: I think that's interesting. I mean, again, it's something that I, I discuss and, and think about quite a bit is what is really the best way to live my life. Yeah. What is the best way moving forward? I've been helping, I mean, after doing this and sort of understanding a bit more about what I was doing and how I can make money from it by understanding which parts.

[00:44:55] In my business and what I do are actually the ones making money for me. And then mm-hmm. Really focusing on that. So cleaning up a lot of clutter in, you know, my, my creative process was really helpful, so I helped quite a few other people as well. And not just music creators, but other business people as well to sort of rebuild their lives where they look at, okay, what can I do?

[00:45:17] What is, what's my talent? What is it that makes the money for me today? Just by cleaning up their schedule, focusing on the thing that actually makes a difference. Right. And people have done the same thing that I've done. You know, like just quit there, um, normal routine and then simplify the life, but it, they end up making more money and working less.

[00:45:40] And to me it's like, well, how far do you take that? That's, I think that's where I'm now. 'cause I know, I mean, there's, there's a Norwegian, um, music creator, um, who've sort of done the same thing that I've done. But he's focused on YouTube. Mm-hmm. And the algorithm has been nice to him, meaning he's been smart as well, but he's making somewhere between five, no, sorry, four and $5 million a year.

[00:46:09] Okay. From a way smaller catalog that I have. But he's doing that on YouTube, and that's also a very stable income. Right. Uh, so I'm just thinking the fact that I have all this content out there, I mean, there's, there's probably a way where I could scale this and I could find ways where, you know, the algorithm is nice to me as well, you know, which is like, YouTube is one of them.

[00:46:36] But I think really paying attention to the smaller things when you have all these content out there is really the key. I mean, you, you do so many things and you produce all these things, but really paying attention to what, it's, what, what's feeding back to you what the audience is saying. Right. What the algorithm is saying, what works, and then scaling that.

[00:46:56] There's a huge power in in doing that.

[00:46:59] Nathan: There's three different things that I wanna dig into there, so we'll, we'll try to dive into one and remember the others. The first is the core driver in the business. Right? We should come back to that one. Mm-hmm. Because that's something as, as you and I have brainstormed flywheels and helped other people in the flywheels, you know, course and community, we've helped a lot of them understand the core drivers in their business.

[00:47:19] The next is asking this question of like, what is the unique advantage that I have? Right? And in your case, like if I were to say, you know what? Forget running a software company. I'm going to go create 25,000 tracks and I'm gonna follow Exactly. In large footsteps. Mm. You'll be like, okay, cool. Um, you have a few decades as a jazz pianist, right.

[00:47:41] Which helps obviously, you know, and it's like, oh no, I don't know. You know, I don't have that skill. Um. I could acquire that skill. Mm-hmm. You know, but that's gonna be a certain amount of time. So thinking about like, your background allowed you to achieve this based on, you know, how you love spending your time, going back to the first, you know, the first studio that you made in, you know, in your grandparents, uh, property.

[00:48:06] And the, the last thing that, that I like to think about that you brought up is what are the resources that I have now that instead of creating more new resources, I could reuse or repurpose in a different way Mm. To achieve more results. And that's what we're talking about, the move, you know, into YouTube or another platform.

[00:48:22] Mm. And you know, in this case, we're not speculating that the move onto YouTube could, you know, like could be effective. Mm-hmm. It's like you actually have a role model of someone who's saying, okay, I, I see what you've done. Let me. Yeah. That do something similar there. Mm-hmm. So I think those three things are really important to look for in any business that has any business or individual that has traction.

[00:48:43] And you, you know, you want to scale it from there. Mm.

[00:48:45] Lars: Yeah. And I think yeah. But identifying what works is mm-hmm. Kind of crucial as well. Let's start there. Yeah. Because

[00:48:51] Nathan: we've had this conversation a lot around, uh, helping people build flywheels in their business. Mm. Right. It's a topic that you and I are both very passionate about.

[00:48:59] Mm. But you also encounter a lot of entrepreneurs who don't actually know what works in their business. If they were to distill, take the 80 20 of their time, their traffic, any of these things, they couldn't tell you. Like, no, it's because it's,

[00:49:14] Lars: it's kind of hard to identify if you're, I mean, a lot of people, their, their mentality is that I just gotta, I gotta create the income.

[00:49:24] Right. So they're chasing income all the time. Right. And you sort of forget what works and what doesn't work. And I think one thing that I tell my friends is that, you know what, I rather. I'd rather make a hundred thousand dollars a year. Mm-hmm. Working two hours or four hours a week than making 1.1 million.

[00:49:45] But then having, you know, a huge team or other costs that would lead like a million million in costs. So

[00:49:52] Nathan: one quick thing that I see very often in creators scaling from the 500,000 to a million, most of the time I see this happen, they say they're making 400,000 in profit on 500,000 in revenue. Typically they're making 450,000 in profit.

[00:50:10] Exactly. On a million in revenue. Exactly. And why is that? I mean, why does that happen? I mean, they, they build a team. Yeah. And they say this is what's necessary. I need to go from the solopreneur Exactly. Methodology to scaling to a team. I need really smart people. Help me to do that. That's expensive. Yeah.

[00:50:28] And so you get all this overhead and you think, I mean, you end up in this chasm. Yeah. You do. Like, there's a very, like the say 500,000 to two and a half million a year. I think it's a really challenging place to be if you do it in a traditional way. Yeah. Right. And so if you were coming in and saying, oh, I want to, uh, the way to do this is to hire 14 members, you know, or 16 members, we're gonna scale this up.

[00:50:55] Um, you could do it. But if the goal is for one to 2 million a year, like you're, I think you're gonna be in a way worse position.

[00:51:02] Lars: Exactly. So that, which is why like the $500,000 a year, the situation I'm in now is such a great place to be. Mm-hmm. And if it means, if I'm gonna scale it, if it means growing means that I have to take on a huge team, uh, and my profit margin would just really fall.

[00:51:20] Nathan: Is it really worth it? And that's what I think is so interesting about your approach is that because you've spent so much time asking the question, what is the core driver? What actually moves the needle? And you keep pruning away, everything that doesn't, then for you to scale from 500,000 to a million doesn't require a team.

[00:51:42] Then you might say, oh, I wanna bring on one person, or, you know, make some small changes, or I wanna contract with someone who can fill, you know, fulfill this step in the flywheel because they don't actually enjoy it as much. Or that's where I want to get leverage. You could do a contract project with someone and it would cost you tens of thousands of dollars.

[00:52:02] Not an ongoing thing to bring a huge portion of your tracks from Spotify to YouTube. Yeah. Right. That doesn't have to be you. And it doesn't have to be like a huge ongoing commitment. Like that's a perfect, yeah. Like very tightly scoped project. Well that's a, that's a

[00:52:17] Lars: good idea.

[00:52:18] Nathan: Just hiring someone for that particular.

[00:52:20] Bridge and then if it works, you could say, oh, this is like, let's scale it up. Let's hire someone else, or let's bring this person on full time, or, you know, all of these other things. Mm-hmm. But the other thing is, is going back to your income models, right. The, um, you know, the hit driven business mm-hmm. Is what most creators are in.

[00:52:39] Right. If we're doing a, a course launch, let's say I have a $2,000 course, I launch it twice a year, each launch makes half a million dollars. Mm. And so then I, I have volatile income. Mm. Uh, and then I have steady payroll. Mm. And so now all of a sudden when one of those launches, instead of doing half a million, does a hundred thousand for some reason, then that's very, very stressful.

[00:53:06] But in your case, you could, if you wanted to, you can hire without stress because you have predictable income.

[00:53:11] Lars: Yes, I can. So, so it's a kind of different thing, but I, I think. I mean, we can talk about how to scale it, but I think at the end of the day, the question is why.

[00:53:22] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:53:23] Lars: And is it worth it?

[00:53:24] Nathan: Which is something

[00:53:25] Lars: that I, I mean, you listen to the show.

[00:53:27] Yeah.

[00:53:27] Nathan: We hear me say all the time, what are you optimizing for?

[00:53:30] Lars: Yeah. What are you optimizing for? Is it for, like, for me, the question is, am I optimizing for quality of life right now or am I optimizing to build something, build this music catalog. So you, you grow, grow, grow, grow, and then hopefully that's something I can hand off to my kids or I can sell for a large chunk of money.

[00:53:49] Right. And, you know, in the future.

[00:53:50] Nathan: Yeah. One thing that I've shifted in my life is I used to do a lot of projects in parallel where I would say, oh, I can do this and this, and I'd get so many things going at once. And then that was great until one or two of them started going poorly and they needed my time to bring them back on track.

[00:54:06] Yeah. And then another went poorly, and then I was spread too thin and I'd overcommitted and created a lot of problems, both for myself and for the company as a whole. Mm-hmm. And the shift that I've tried to make is doing things in sequence. Mm-hmm. Where I say, oh, like that's a great idea. After we do these other ones, you know, and get to a certain level of traction, then, then we can pursue it.

[00:54:25] And I think about that for your business. Hmm. Where you have this C, you have this strong desire to create, and then this level of curiosity around what works, what can we measure, what can we learn from it? Mm-hmm. And so for you to say, Hey, for the next two or three months we're gonna run the YouTube experiment, I'm not gonna go all in on it 40, 50 hours a week.

[00:54:48] I'm going to really step back and say like, what has to be true to create this? Mm. What are the core drivers that actually move the needle? You know? And then maybe list out what are all the time traps? Mm. Like if you were to dive all in on YouTube, here's 10 areas that if you weren't careful, you could waste a bunch of time.

[00:55:05] That makes a lot sense. Um, and then how do you hire someone? Yeah. Like, you know, you look at those time traps and be like, okay, these don't have to be done, but this. These have to be done by humans or by ai managed by humans or something, right? Mm-hmm. And so they're like, all right, who can I hire to do that?

[00:55:23] Mm-hmm. It's a fixed length project, right? Yeah. And so you're putting,

[00:55:27] Lars: how would you, how would you move forward in terms of finding the right person? How do you usually do it when you hire people for, uh, and you don't wanna commit to like, hiring them full time Yeah. For a very long time.

[00:55:39] Nathan: Yeah. So I think if you clearly define the project, that's the first thing.

[00:55:43] What is the work that needs to be done? Mm-hmm. Most people, they say, you know, I need a, I need a YouTube expert. Mm-hmm. And so they bring it in and they get someone who might be optimizing for something entirely different, right. Or for a certain type of content. And so I think instead what you're saying is, no, no, no, I need these tasks done in this way.

[00:56:04] And then am I hire a second person to say, Hey, what am I missing in this? You know, what would you do differently? I might throw away 90% of their advice, but it's worth paying a thousand bucks for an hour of their time from some expert if they give me one little thing. Yeah. That works well. So I would clearly define, you know, the linear process of the flywheel that we're trying to run here, what step I need created, and then, and also like clear SOPs, then how to do these steps.

[00:56:31] Yeah. How to, how to do it. Mm-hmm. And that's where, as you bring them in, you say, Hey, here's my process. Mm-hmm. Feel free to critique or change things in it, but otherwise it's clear to execute on. Mm-hmm. And then, you know, a range of places, whether you're posting, you know, on a freelancer job board, I'm sure there's a lot of YouTube creators that have, um, job boards in their audience.

[00:56:52] Upwork is good. And then if you have an audience of your own, I can ask them, you know, sometimes then, then you can ask them. Yeah. And any of those things work well, but the tightly, like the clear outcome of what we're trying to create and the tightly scoped job description works really well. And often you'll find.

[00:57:08] Like, there's a lot of people that want to be the freelancer or the solopreneur, and so they're actually more excited about that than they are about the full-time job.

[00:57:16] Lars: Yeah. I mean, I now, I'm opening a program where I teach people mm-hmm. How to build music catalogs this way. Um, so I've been thinking that, I mean, I'm gonna teach that program and I'm gonna find someone from that group.

[00:57:31] Yeah. Maybe hire them for a while to do, to work on my catalog and see if that's interesting to them. So I can probably also hire for my own pond of, of students. Right. You know, in the future, I've been talking a lot about music and how I've scaled the, all these, like the production and, and all these tracks.

[00:57:52] What is your, like for someone who's not produced, like not a music creator

[00:57:57] Nathan: mm-hmm.

[00:57:58] Lars: How do you think my law of volume equals stability can be applied to. A creator, like other types of creator.

[00:58:09] Nathan: Yeah. So I've lived out a bunch of this in my own life. Mm-hmm. Right. Where I got my, I launched my career as a creator by writing a thousand words a day every single day.

[00:58:19] Mm-hmm. No matter what, which is very similar to what I've done here. Yeah. 'cause also it's, it's not that much time. No. A thousand words on a good day is 30, 40 minutes on a day. Where you gotta really put in, you know, and grind it out is two hours at most. And the

[00:58:37] Lars: 40, 50 tracks that I did each day only took me a couple of hours.

[00:58:40] Yeah. So I got up, grabbed my orange juice into the studio, worked for a couple of hours, that

[00:58:45] Nathan: was it. Yeah. And so, so much of what you create, you know, goes towards a, you know, in my case, a book, an article, all of that. But the, the thing was just show up. Do the reps. It's not, how do I sit down and write this flagship essay that's going to be read by a whole bunch of people?

[00:59:02] Those come as you refine the ideas. Mm-hmm. But I did that for 600 days in a row. And so if you imagine writing 600,000 words mm-hmm. Like, you refine a lot of ideas. Mm-hmm. There's a lot of things like the, um, you know, the l uh, ladders of wealth creation mm-hmm. Or everything I've written on audiences or all the stuff like building strip malls versus skyscrapers.

[00:59:21] Mm-hmm. And like business models and all of the stuff that people still reference that I wrote about years ago. And it came from that really prolific period of time. And so I, I'm a firm believer in quantity over quality because quantity

[00:59:38] Lars: leads to quality. I'm glad you are. 'cause it's good to hear someone like you say the same thing, because I do think that's, that's something that people misunderstand out there and people are afraid of putting themselves out there.

[00:59:49] They're afraid of, they might sit down and write all those words, but they're not gonna ever use them for anything publish. So, yeah. So you have to publish this. Well, otherwise you're not gonna be able to turn into something.

[00:59:58] Nathan: This, the idea of this faceless creator or a pen name or something like that is also really interesting.

[01:00:04] Mm. Because if you can take away all of the risk Mm. Of reputation of someone just dissing on your work, you know, or being like, oh, there's Nathan with another dumb idea. Mm-hmm. I think that's, I think it's fascinating. Oh, yeah. Once, say you wanted to make a, uh, a blog or newsletter about the creator economy.

[01:00:26] Mm. There's a ton of them. Mm. But if someone wanted to do it as a made up creator Mm. They like, you know, under a pen name, they could say all kinds of things that they truly believe, but they're like, well, I don't wanna make this person upset. Or Right. You could, you could say things how it is. Yeah. Um, and I think the level of, uh, you could be so much more prolific.

[01:00:50] Mm. Uh, and you could build that up and you might at some point say, oh, I want to bring this back into my actual name. Mm. Or, um, I want to, uh, shut it down. Mm. Right? Like, oh, I talk about James Clear, he's an example. Uh, he wanted to learn how to do online marketing. Mm. And so he had a website called passive panda.com.

[01:01:12] Oh. And it was him learning, how do I build an audience? Uh, how do I make passive income on the internet? You know? And so he learned SEO and email marketing and the habits of writing and all of the stuff. Uh, and his goal was he wanted to, uh, go to medical school, but he wanted to do it without debt.

[01:01:31] Because he saw talking about lifestyle. Mm. He saw this trap that doctors fell into where they got a whole, they worked like crazy. Yeah. Made no money, had a huge amount of debt. Mm. That became normalized. Mm. And then they felt like they'd made it when they, you know, became a full doctor. Mm. And so they started spending money and they ended up in this trap where they were always, you know, at some point they're making $500,000 a year and they're more in debt than ever because they're trying to maintain a lifestyle.

[01:01:59] And so he was saying, look, I still wanna go to medical school, but I wanna opt out of that whole path. So I'm gonna learn how to make money online so I can pay my way through medical school and live life on my own terms.

[01:02:10] Lars: Yeah. I think it totally makes sense. I mean, when I was working as a music manager, art, like managing artists, um, one of the things that I said the most was that, well, this thing doesn't really fit under your brand.

[01:02:23] Mm-hmm. And I regretted so much. 'cause number one, these artists should probably have worked harder on that thing and just. I carried it, but I should have, what I should have said is that if you don't feel like this fits under your brand, why don't you create another outlet for it, right? Because that's such a simple thing you can do, like with these artists, you're not gonna find my name on any of these releases 'cause I did it under other artists names that I created that would fit the brand, right?

[01:02:52] Mm-hmm. And I think for creatives as well, find other outlets if there's something you can do and you know, you can do a lot of it and potentially it can turn into something if you don't like, feel like it fits the outlet you have now. Find outlet for it. Create, yeah, create a new outlet for it and, and test it and see if it works.

[01:03:10] And you, then you can do, like you said, you can do it faceless or you could do it with, you know, your full support on social media and say, I, I'm also doing this. But, but I think creators shouldn't be afraid of creating. Several outlets for their creativity.

[01:03:26] Nathan: Yeah. 'cause there's two different versions of this that you can do.

[01:03:29] You can do the James Clear method where you can say, I'm going to learn all of this under a pen name, you know, figure it out and then I'm gonna scrap the entire thing. Mm. And he just took all the skills that he had. He started james clear.com and he built it into all of this and used that. Yeah, yeah. Or you can run these under your actual name and brand.

[01:03:47] And so I think of, uh, Mike Otta from Lincoln Park. Right. Lincoln Park is a, a very, very popular band. Huge amount of success. But he is like, I wanna mess around on the side, I wanna try some other things. And so he started Fort Minor, which is his, you know, his side project put out some really great songs.

[01:04:04] Mm-hmm. They're different than Lincoln Park. Uh, and, but it doesn't detract from it in any way. And like I think he gets to exercise that creative freedom. Mm-hmm. And as a fan, I. I love it. I actually like Fort Miner more than I like Lincoln Park.

[01:04:17] Lars: There you go. And I think for him as a creator, and I'm just guessing, but for him taking away those limitations that a brand mm-hmm.

[01:04:24] Established brand gives is so cool. Like, 'cause it just, it ignites new ideas and, and, and you go out there and you feel like, oh, I'm a new creator again. I was born again. So there's something fantastic about just accepting the fact that, you know what, I'm a creator, but I can do several things and I'm gonna do it.

[01:04:42] Nathan: So how would we state that advice differently? You said there's the advice that you gave as a music producer Mm. That you regret. Like what's the, because there's truth in it Mm. Of what you originally said, but what's the version that you would say to someone now?

[01:04:55] Lars: Well, I mean, you mentioned Li Lincoln Park.

[01:04:59] Yep. I'm gonna mention Picasso. Okay. Slightly better isn't it? A little bit, a little bit elevated. Uh, Picasso made. I mean, they're, they go back and forth these numbers, but it's somewhere between 75,000 and I think 120,000 different pieces. Wow. Over his career. We only know of, or Well, I mean, unless you're really into Picasso, we only know a few of them.

[01:05:21] Mm-hmm. Like the ones that became successful. Do you Nathan Barry believe that Picasso knew which pieces were gonna become the ones that you and I would know that Picasso made when he created? No, I don't think so. No. Exactly. So for him, it was just like another day of creating something. He was probably in his studio, um, and creating this and felt like, yeah, this is, this is fantastic, or this is what, probably not as great.

[01:05:47] We don't really know what he felt at that point. Right. But he, he created it and he put it out there. Mm-hmm. And that, that's the whole thing that changes everything. We don't know what's gonna work. I mean, we do think that we, we believe that we do, but we don't. I mean, I certainly didn't, I was working. For 30 years almost in the music industry.

[01:06:06] And yes, I could probably do better guesses on what would work than my mom or my aunt, or that wasn't in the music industry. But at the end of the day, I wasn't as great as I thought I was. Right? Because clearly I could just put out music passively or faceless or whatever. It's something that would find an audience and suddenly I could see some of them just fly off and become the most popular tracks ever, and streaming millions without me thinking much more of them than that was just a thing I did on a Wednesday, in September, you know?

[01:06:37] So the point is, I did it. I went out there, I created it, I found an outlet for it, and I published it. And so, so much more people should really just embrace the whole fact that you are a creator. Then don't sit on your hands and be afraid. You know? You gotta go out there and publish it and then learn from that.

[01:06:57] Nathan: Yeah, there's a few mantras that have shaped my life, like starting back in 20 12, 20 13, when I really made this push into being a full-time creator. The first one is create every day. Mm-hmm. For me, that was writing for you? Mm-hmm. That's improvised jazz. The piano, you know, just showing up, putting in the reps.

[01:07:18] The second one is teach everything, you know? And that's like, I love that you're not just keeping this to yourself in these lessons. You're saying, Hey, I'll talk about it. You know? Yeah. I'll put out content and do a podcast on it. Everything else. For me, it was writing about like finishing a book launch and then writing about how that went and sharing the numbers and everything else.

[01:07:40] And then the last one is work in public of saying, all right, I'm gonna publish these things. Right. I'm gonna put it out there. Because there's a very different world. There's probably people listening who do things like play the piano and improvise every day. Yeah. Or they write regularly or whatever else it is, but they're like, I would never, I would never put that out into the world.

[01:08:01] Mm-hmm. It's like you're missing out on so much opportunity for feedback. Absolutely. A, you know, a life changing business. All these things, if you will, like, show your work and, you know, and work in public and put it out there. It's fascinating to see those like three mantras that, yeah, I was 22 I think when I started working on, on those and like had those as kind of the defining principles for my creative career, but see them show up in so many different ways.

[01:08:26] Oh, yeah. I mean, they've been

[01:08:27] Lars: so important for you and your career and the way you're building this business and everything as well. Yeah, no, I, I, I, I mean, I've told people that, you know. Imagine my grandfather in his boat being a fisherman and he's worried. So he's sitting there with all these fishing hooks that he's created and which one should I use?

[01:08:43] Yeah, which one should I use? 'cause I'm so worried that some of these fish are just going to ignore my fishing hooks. It doesn't make any sense at all. Just put them in there and see what happens. If people ignore it, fine. Mm-hmm. But you can't attach, you know, you can't let your happiness depend on other people's ignorance.

[01:09:00] Right, right. So, so I just, I think that's the key that I want people to remember after this podcast is that, you know, you just be a creator. Not just say you're a creator, but be a creator and

[01:09:10] Nathan: put it out there. What I think that understanding the word creator, right? So many people are talking about the business aspect, the marketing aspect, and it's like, but at the very core, you create things.

[01:09:21] Lars: Yeah.

[01:09:21] Nathan: And so spend the time on that

[01:09:23] Lars: and people are

[01:09:23] Nathan: born to be creators. Yeah. So, I mean, embrace it. I love it. Lars, you've built an amazing life, an amazing business. Thank you for coming on to share all of this and give us an inside look. Thank you. Uh, if people wanted to learn more about you and follow you on the internet, where should they go?

[01:09:38] I mean,

[01:09:38] Lars: they, they could go. I mean, if you're a music creator and you wanna learn about catalog building, the stuff that I do, you just go to lars tiger.com and then you'll sign up for my little free course there and check out my book on the subject and then, um, we'll take it from there. Sounds good.

[01:09:54] Thanks so much for coming on. Thank you.

[01:09:56] Nathan: If you enjoyed this episode, go to YouTube and search the Nathan Berry Show. Then hit subscribe and make sure to like the video and drop a comment. I'd love to hear what some of your favorite parts of the video were, and also just who else do you think we should have on the show?

[01:10:10] Thank you so much for listening.