Lawyer Moonlights Music Production Tutorials

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

When a lawyer's after hours hobby of music production draws interest, he creates a series of video tutorials that leads budding producers to an online course. This story is called lawyer moonlights music production tutorials. I thought about calling it lawyer teaches reasonable music production, but that's kind of an inside joke and you'll get the joke once you hear the story, but since you haven't heard the story yet, it doesn't make sense to put it up front. These are the decisions I have to consider as I work on these case studies. Now specifically, the stories about this lawyer who moonlights on the music production tutorials, but I think it is a helpful case study for anyone who likes to post comments on Reddit or on forums for a specific topic, like a type of software perhaps, or it could be something totally different.

If you're really into online communities and being helpful posting answers to questions and such, that is absolutely the kind of thing that can be monetized. So this case study will tell you how he goes from just being a helpful guy on a forum to making I think a couple of thousand dollars a month extra on the side from his knowledge. All right, so that story is coming up after this quick shout out to our sponsor. Thanks sponsor and thank you listeners. [Music]

Evan Oxhorn has a demanding day job as a lawyer, but when letting loose at night, he engages in his favorite hobby, producing beats and making music.

Over the course of the last decade, it's become a true passion for him. This passion is easier and more accessible than ever, even for a one man band. Gone are the days when you needed a ton of expensive equipment or sound studio. It's been replaced by a laptop and music production software. Software that's known as a digital audio workstation or DAW for short, some say DAW, whatever you call it, you can think of DAW software as a recording studio in a box.

Now there are a lot of DAWs on the market, but Evan uses a relatively less popular one called Reason. And during the past 10 years, he became quite an expert at it. In fact, he liked the software so much that he became an active participant on their official forums. He'd often pop up to provide guidance to folks just starting out, as well as anyone who wanted to level up their skills. Basically he became the go-to guy for advice.

This led to Evan drumming up an idea. Surely he thought making video tutorials about making music would be more effective at helping people than just writing about it. So he started his own YouTube channel with the intent of posting how-to guides and tips for producing great music with Reason. Reason being the software again. Startup costs were effectively zero.

He already had the gear he needed to start recording. Although as he discovered, producing high quality videos was easier said than done. In his haste to get content out, he didn't really focus on how it sounded. And this led to a lot of hurtful comments, including some from people claiming he shouldn't be teaching others about audio if he couldn't even be bothered to touch it up on his own videos. That's when Evan's imposter syndrome appeared.

He knew he was an expert at the software, but since he'd never made much popular music of his own, did he have the right to teach others how to produce quality songs? Fortunately, he was able to quiet that inner voice. He was, after all, focusing on teaching people how to use the software. He replied to all the naysayers, apologizing for the bad audio and promising to do better. Several wrote back words of support, complimenting the quality of his content, even if the audio was less than stellar.

That gave Evan additional motivation to keep the beat going. He posted more videos and bit by bit, he improved. Now in hindsight, Evan says he would have invested more time and effort early on to make his videos high quality from the outset. But of course, that's hindsight. Here we are now.

And Evan had what a lot of side hustlers crave, which is traction. A steady stream of people were viewing his videos and his subscriber numbers were growing. To compliment the YouTube channel, he started a blog. On the blog, he covered the same types of content, but now with an even stronger focus on SEO. He knew if he filled both his blog posts and video titles with keywords, keywords that people were actually searching for, it would help them find him through Google.

The more people that found his website, the more chance he had of building trust by helping them. And once he had that trust, he could drop the next single of his hit side hustle album. That single was called monetization. Evan planned to put together a course on using this software for music production, then sell it to his audience. To get them interested, he created what's known as a lead magnet, a freebie he'd share in exchange for someone's email address.

He promoted this everywhere. Everything within his hub, YouTube, the blog, his forum posts, it all promoted everything else. And using this method, it didn't take long for him to sell his first course. For a brief period, imposter syndrome set in again, although it didn't last long this time, and Evan was right back to producing more content. Eventually, his channel ended up with over 10,000 subscribers, and he explored additional monetization strategies, including affiliate marketing, where he recommended products on his site and would receive a commission for each sale, as well as ad revenue from his growing views and subscriber base.

He even started one-on-one consulting for those who wanted a little more instruction. With all these dreams of income, it's little surprise Evan is now making a solid $2,000 per month from his musically pleasing instructional side hustle. [Music]

Hey, before we wrap up, I wanna look at something that's pretty interesting here. I mentioned that there are a bunch of different digital audio workstations, or DAWs, and Evan focuses on Reason. Now, here's the interesting thing.

Reason is not one of the most popular ones. There are at least several others, if not close to a dozen others, that have a larger user base, including Pro Tools, Logic Pro, Ableton Live, and more. So you might say, "Well, why doesn't Evan focus on one of the larger ones, "or one of the ones that have more of a user base?" And the first reason, no pun intended, since he uses software called Reason, the first reason is just that he's a fan of this other software, and he's been using it for years and being helpful. So he's known in that community, and wants to kind of support that product. But in addition, I would say the business reason is those other apps have much larger user bases, but there's also a lot more competition.

So there's a lot of other people who are also experts, offering courses, resources, and so on. So the broader the market base and the wider the interest, the harder it is to succeed. And sometimes what people end up doing is they start with really focusing on one, and then they might develop a companion course, and start going into building stuff out for the others. But the greater point is, Evan's been able to be successful by focusing on one of these smaller ones. So perhaps that inspires somebody out there.

Speaking of inspiration, inspiration is good, but I hope you'll do something with this content. Inspiration with action is better. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/1697. I'll include links to Evan's YouTube channel, his other work, anything else I mentioned in the episode. And if you have a comment or question, you can also ask that directly from the website.

I'd love to know what you're working on. I hope this is helpful to you. Do come back tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]

from The Onward Project.