This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Welcome to something brand new. We're gonna call this new segment Throwback Thursday, slash where are they now? Throwback Thursday, I didn't actually invent that term, but you know, it just seemed appropriate to use it since it's coming out on Thursday. And we're gonna do an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved considerably. And the project we'll feature today is a suite of online resources to learn jazz.
It's a whole portfolio of resources. It began as a hobbyist blog and is now a booming multiple six-figure business. In a moment, you'll hear from Brent, the guy featured in this story directly. And his project was interesting in lots of ways. One unique way is that this is one of the very few projects we've ever featured where the side hustler didn't start the project themselves, but rather took it over from a friend who didn't have much time to devote to it.
So that was interesting, but of course there's a lot more as well. We first featured Brent long ago in the very first year of the show, and then once more in the "100 Side Hustles" book. So here we are two years later, checking in. I'm gonna hand it over to him. He'll tell you a bit more about the project, what he has learned along the way, what's happened, and some advice he has for anybody who wants to do a similar project.
He's got a lot of good things to say, and I'll be back at the end to wrap us up. [Music]
My name is Brent Fartstra. I am from New York City, and I have an online jazz education business called LearnJazzStandards.com, and I was featured on episode 69. I got started with LearnJazzStandards.com because a friend of mine actually came up with the idea. Originally he was a music teacher, an elementary school music teacher, and he just had some free time on his summer break, but he couldn't continue doing it.
So he had me on, I was in college at the time just trying to get my degree in jazz performance in New York City, and he thought I'd be a good person to take over what he was doing and actually start growing the thing. So long story short, eventually my friend wasn't able to continue working with me as a partner, so I now own the whole thing outright, but it started really just from this idea that we could create a resource for musicians to learn how to play jazz music, to help people that maybe didn't have the resources that someone like I have living in a big city that has a jazz scene and has lots of teachers to learn from, and that's kind of where it came from, and it became just something that I got really passionate about. The subject matter was in my ballpark. I got excited about teaching, and then I also got excited about the entrepreneurship side of it. Actually, this could be a business.
There's something here I can help people and make money at the same time, and that just kind of propelled everything forward to what it is today. Before I got into learn jazz standards, I was just a gigging jazz musician around New York City, and I was hustling gigs. I was teaching private lesson students, but naturally the struggle of being a musician kind of led me to think outside the box. How else can I make money off of my passion? 'Cause I got kind of tired living paycheck to paycheck, constantly looking at the calendar, seeing blank spaces in that calendar, and trying to figure out how can I fill that calendar with more dates, with more gigs, with more students, and that was a stressful life for me.
So getting into entrepreneurship, getting into figuring out how else I could make money off of my passion really was groundbreaking for me and absolutely changed my life. Back on episode 69, I was making $40,000 a year, and it was just then becoming my main hustle. It was just transitioning from my side hustle to my main hustle, and since then, my business now makes multiple six figures of revenue every year. I have started to build out my team with virtual assistants and more private contractors that I have, and I'm slowly starting to become more of the CEO of my business rather than the person completely working on every single aspect of it. Since then, I've come out with multiple more courses, multiple more e-books that over the combination of all of those have served thousands of musicians, and my subscribers on YouTube has exceeded over 100,000, and my podcast has just exponentially grown.
And just in general, my following has grown, and my influence has grown through all these things, and it's just allowed me to do some other things, like start to do some investments in real estate and little things that I never thought would be possible because of this business and because of how it's grown since, I guess, several years ago. One of the main things that I believe really jump-started and accelerated my business was starting to look at the things that were actually working versus the things that I thought needed to be done. So before, I thought, well, I need to update this page on my website or I need to write this particular blog post, and if I do that, maybe this will happen. But when I started really looking at the evidence, it became very clear to me that what was really working for me was just coming out with more products, and that's what people really wanted. I would say the first thing that you should really think about is just to figure out what your zone of genius is, and that means really looking at yourself and asking who am I qualified to help the best, and that's probably gonna lead you to understand that you can't help everybody the best.
So figuring what your talents are is kind of step number one. Step number two is really to figure out who your target audience is, and that's advice that a lot of people give, but the reason they give it is because it's really important. If you don't know exactly who you're trying to connect with, then you're probably not gonna be finding the right people, and so that's really important is to figure out who your target audience is, who are you going to be able to use your talents to help the most. Part of the fun of the business is realizing that, at first, I was just a musician, and that's all I thought I was good at. I just thought I was a jazz musician, and that's who I was, and then I realized through that that actually I'm a good teacher, and I can become a great teacher, which goes much farther than just even teaching music to people, and then I learned that not only am I learning how to become a teacher, I'm learning how to become a content creator and learning how to make great podcast episodes, how to make great videos, and then after that, it's sort of coming to this realization that actually what I'm really learning how to do is become a great marketer, so I've learned so many lessons along the way that I didn't even think that I would be doing what I'm doing now because that's just, when I started all this, that's not what I thought was happening, and then realizing that I do actually have a passion for business, I do have a passion for entrepreneurship and marketing.
All right, so a little bit of analysis here. As I mentioned earlier, the origin of this hustle was unique in the sense that he took it over from a friend. It's now his project through and through, but his biggest challenge is actually quite common. His biggest challenge or challenge is that he mentioned delegation and prioritizing because there's so much stuff that he could do, and in the beginning, as you heard, he did it all himself, but that doesn't work for the long term. Now, one thing I like, I liked a lot of stuff there, so first of all, shout out to Brent.
Thank you so much for being our inaugural episode of this new segment, but one thing in particular is that he hasn't gotten away from the core mission of his site and his brand. People aren't as interested in the back end of your business as much as you might think, or let's say as much as we tend to think. I see this happen all the time where people have a success and it's a teaching project like this one, and they end up pretty quickly shifting to doing, I don't know, life coaching or business coaching for people who want to do the same project, and in this case, Brent does have a side project called Passive Income Musician, which is pretty cool, but I think the real value is in his original business, which it is a business now. It starts as a side hustle, and now, as you've heard, multiple six-figure success. [Music]
All right, we'll be doing these new segments throughout 2020, so let me know what you think and who you'd like to see featured from our archives of more than 1,000 stories.
2020 is the year of interaction. If you have a question, if you would like to update us about your side hustle, if you'd like a free pony, we don't actually have any free ponies, but the first to apply, just come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. You're gonna be hearing answers and updates and more throwback segments throughout the year. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/howaboutthat, a magical episode, one, one, one, one. Thank you so much for listening.
Take care of yourself out there. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. [Music]
