How to Quit Your Job to Sell Beats
The biggest issue I have with this concept is that the majority of the people who come to me with this aspiration to make thousands upon thousands of dollars every month are missing out a few big points in their business plan. For instance when I ask how much money they have to spend on their business, the answer in these cases is almost always “$0.00”.
If this is your response when I ask you what your budget is, it automatically shows that you are not interested in investing in your business. Or, if you are, you simply can’t do so which is going to hold you back more than any other factor.
This famous quote from Thomas Edison, inventor of the light bulb, should clear things up:
Now obviously Thomas Edison was someone who invented an item of very low production cost. To be able to fail ten thousand times, though, even for a small trinket would have cost an enormous amount of money. In today’s day and age, I’m guessing it would be equivalent to about $1 per lightbulb in terms of getting the right materials together.
That means that Thomas Edison would have had to spend $10,000, and if you look at his life you will see that he only got paid for 1 out of those 10,000. So you could look at it like $9,999 roughly in expenses that didn’t even profit. But that’s all stuff we don’t like talking about, right? We just want to look at the end result, which is that he invented the light bulb, one of the most powerful inventions of the last two hundred years, which simply gives us light inside using electricity.
This is what may prove faulty for many producers, and not just for the money. The budget doesn’t mean anything UNLESS you are not willing to obtain budget.
To explain it simply…
The less you do, the more you make. If you have a budget of $10,000, you’re going to easily go further than the man with a budget of $1,000. Aside from that, the man with $1,000 will easily go further (speaking of nothing more than the laws of probability) than a man with $100.
But if you have $0 to your name, guess what? That’s not going to work. No matter what you have to invest. So to make $5,000/mo off of $0 budget is actually pretty much impossible. Everything costs money, at least here in America it sure does.
So if you don’t have a budget, does that just mean you’re doomed to never sell beats?
No, you’re not doomed. Don’t take what I’m saying here the wrong way, just understand that jumping from $0 to $5,000/mo overnight is not going to happen without signing your soul away on a contract with a record label or something not preferable like that.
But if YOU want to make your own business come up and be your own boss, you’re going to need to get used to not only spending money on your business, but actually wasting money on your business. Yeah, I said it. Not all of your investments will turn a profit, and it would be wise of you to understand this fact. As a business owner I’ve lost as much as $2500 by putting my money in the wrong places.
If you have no money and that’s simply how it is, then you need to use free forms of promotion to get your first sales and invest those back into your business. I remember being 16 years old and living with my parents, using a free account on Soundclick, forum marketing and simply using Twitter.
How much did I make per month? Honestly some months I made $500, but most common was $15-$300 per month. This is not enough to move out of your parents house or even allow you to run your business fully.
What I did in my scenario was I actually saved up $1,000 by selling 5 exclusives for $200, a sale I held for only one month. By holding this sale I was able to gather the $1,000 in a fairly short amount of time, and instead of wasting it on booze, clothes and shoes, I ended up spending every single cent into my business plan, which took me three months to come up with on notebook paper.
It’s not uncommon and it’s something to definitely get used to if you plan on being a business owner. You should count yourself lucky that you’re trying to run an online business, which has notoriously low costs. If you were trying to run a store on the corner of 4th avenue downtown, for instance, you can expect $4,000+ per month in renting fees just to have a building.
Then there’s hiring employees, making sure your store has merchandise and more. This can easily end up running thousands more per month.
The online market place is the easiest business arena in the world
When it comes to online marketing, it’s as good as it gets. If you plan on spending $1000 up front or more, you can expect to make yourself successful a lot faster than the guy who is only willing to spend $10. Like, seriously! How can your budget for your business be less than a meal for two at Subway?
Aside from spending money, the most important thing in business is…?
Take a wild guess. Don’t want to? Okay I’ll go ahead and give it away then… The #1 most important thing for your business, even above the idea of spending enough money to keep yourself going? Simple… HARD. WORK. #HARDWORK!!!! If you are not willing to work as hard as humanly possible towards your goals, and willing to work your ass off to get the first few dollars necessary to invest and quite literally push your business in the right direction, then you’re going to fail regardless!
Point blank. Your chances of making your business work are 0% if you’re not willing to work just as many hours if not more than you would at a 40-hour per week full time job.