$0 to $100K in Music With No Label, No Hit, and No Luck

This is Lil Breadstick. Right now, Lil Breadstick has $0, a Spotify account, and a dream. But in this video, we are going to walk him from broke to $100,000 in music revenue, and we're gonna show you guys every move that we make along the way. Lil Breadstick came to us. He was like, Ben, Henry, I love what you guys are doing for the independent artist community. I need you guys on the team. I need you to manage me. I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. He taps into the show and he approached us and we're like, yeah, we see the vision, Lil Bread. He played us a couple demos. Yeah, Gluten Tapes, V1. We love them. We saw the vision. Yep. We're like, all right, Lil Breadstick, let's let's fucking do this shit, okay? Um, but yeah, no, honestly, this whole episode kind of came from an episode we did with Ty Baisden, whose business partner's manager uh to Brent Faiyaz, right? And he said if he would have started Brent's career today, he would have been solely focused on direct to fan. They did it solely on streaming. Exactly. It's just not as possible anymore, guys. That'll be a part, you'll see our framework, but not now.

Shit's different. It's different. So we're trying to get you paid today in 2026. Yes. So we developed a framework called the 100k stack. It consists of five layers that we're going to fill up in order along the episode. You guys can follow along. And uh, we're gonna get this man paid, man, like he deserves. He's so talented. Yeah, and and I I want to be clear, right? This framework is based on the fact that you're not going viral. You're not having some super lucky viral moment. Well, you might. No, and that should just be the icing on the cake, though. We're not banking on it. We're not banking on that at all. Like everyone, including Lil Breadstick in this exact. I can't say I can't believe you called him that. It's the best. It's the worst. It's the best name. We're gonna run with it. Henry really lobbied for him to be called Lil Breadstick. Um, so I had to, you know, it's just one I had to give to him. Uh but no, so this whole framework can work for you guys too. Again, viral moments. We love them. Crazy record deal. crazy record deal, not necessarily happening. Rich uncle, yeah.

By all means, if you've got them, use them. Nah, Uncle Pita is not uh in the mix. How many bread puns are we gonna do? I'm running out. But the point is, where you guys are gonna follow along. I'm gonna put a little money counter on the screen to follow along in Lil Breadstick's journey. We're starting at $0. And uh without further ado, let's get into the 100K stack. All right, so layer one, we are calling the front door. We gotta walk in the front door, right? And this is actually where the streaming is gonna live, believe it or not, because the main point here is that we are not counting on streaming as a significant layer. It is a layer of our revenue. It is a piece, but it is not the whole game like it was for Ty and Brent back in the day. Yeah, but the way everyone needs to be looking at streaming is from a discovery perspective, all right? So it's huge for discovery, and it is where a lot of people obviously do listen to music, clearly, right? It's hard to argue that fact.

Yeah, so like step one of Lil Breadstick's journey has to be getting his music out on streaming platforms. It needs to be available for consumption. Okay, it sounds basic, but again, we're starting from zero, broke, hasn't even released music to 100k in revenue. That's the whole premise of the case. We're just we're reducing the friction here. If someone hears about him, they need to be able to go to where they go to listen to music, type in Lil Breadstick, and find Gluten Tapes v1. It's a great name, right? He came up with it. Don't look at me. So, how are we gonna do that? Uh, we're gonna point Lil Breadstick at the sponsor of today's video, DistroKid. Because for the low, low price of $25 a year, a year, a year. I almost said month, a year. Lil Breadstick can can distribute unlimited music to every single platform that we need to get him on for Discovery and keep 100% of his royalties. I mean, what a deal. If you're a new artist, or even if you're like an emerging artist and you're not at least considering DistroKid as your distributor, you want to you're tripping. I mean, people love to bitch and moan about every I mean, God, you see the comments on every distributor.

Too Lost sucks. TuneCore, fuck them, CD baby. You suck. DistroKid. Look, DistroKid is a tried a tried and true. Yeah, it's tried. 100%. I don't think I've said that in real life. Both tried and true. No, it's good. Exactly. So honestly, like, that's who we're gonna use for Lil Breadstick. We've used it before ourselves for other artists. Uh, so definitely we're gonna use it for Lil Breadstick. They got some sick features. They're gonna give you some content to get your content marketing started. Um, they got a super clean split system that we've both used personally, get everyone paid on time, crediting people. I mean, it's all there, guys. Like the tools really are legitimate. We wouldn't say this if we didn't believe it. So you can get 30% off your first year and support the podcast simultaneously by going to omtdistro.com. That's omtdistro.com. Let's get back to the strategy. Yeah, so again, we gotta get our we have to get our music everywhere. Yep. All right, everywhere that people are listening to music, we need it there, okay? And again, let's level set. Streaming is gonna probably be like everyone knows the numbers, like it's shit's pennies. He's Like, we know people with hundreds of thousands and millions of streams that literally can't pay rent.

Yes, it's unbelievable. And again, before you come in our comments and be like, you guys had Nic D on the podcast, he said he made 100,000 a month on streaming or whatever the fuck he said. Nick's not real life, like he's an anomaly. He's kind of the exception, not the rule. He has a lyric, he's like, So, so what's your income streams? It's mostly just the streams. That's not a Lil Breadstick bar. That's not that's not anyone else bar that I've ever met. This guy's crazy. Again, like he goes viral all the time. He cracked viral content marketing. He doesn't really want to tour. He Doesn't want to tour. So his whole like strategy is based around this, okay? Lil breadsticks is not, okay. And again, we're not stamping this whole framework on virality. So we just we couldn't include Nick's strategy as part of this and just really, really focus on streaming. Um, but it's important. It is important. It has to be part of the mix. Yep. So, bottom line here: streams are discovery. Actually, getting fans is the business, which is the Ty Baisden model, how he would do it today. So our money counter is only going up a bit here. Let's say maybe like 600 bucks.

That's fine. Onto layer two that we are calling the fifth bucket. The fifth bucket. Wait a minute, this is only layer two, Ben. What's going on? If you guys tapped into our last internal episode where we introduced 200 viral content ideas for musicians, we introduced a four bucket framework. And it specifically relates to when you guys are making content and the job that each post has when you post. Because most of y'all are just out here posting, not knowing what the job of the post is for. We gotta know what each post is doing. What we didn't tell you in that episode is that there's a fifth bucket, right? We told you about attract. We're making content that brings people into our world. We told you about the show bucket where we're showing people the music, we're performing the music. Here's the product. We told you about the TELL bucket where we're telling people the story, we're leaning into our artist development, giving people a reason to care. And we told you about the connect bucket, where we're actually like replying, communicating, right? The social aspect of social media that is low-key dying, by the way. That's it. Social media is not even that social anymore.

Side note. But the fifth hidden bucket is the convert bucket. Yeah, and I think the reason why we didn't include it in the viral content marketing kind of episode in our 200 viral content idea framework, um, is because convert bucket isn't exactly like prime time for going viral. This is more about nurturing the people that we already got. Absolutely. So again, we if you want a whole framework on how to create a shit ton of content. We talked with Patrick Stafford, who literally has helped artists shoot, you know, 200 reels in two hours or just crazy shit. Um but the principles that he shared in the episode and that he posts on his page, we'll, you know, we'll link his uh his Instagram profile here. And a link to his episode right up here, by the way, um, which we're forcing Lil Breadstick to watch and study that episode, by the way. Exactly. By the time this is done, he's already watched it. He's cranking out several times. He's got notes. Posting consistently and not burning out, okay? Because again, like the way that Stafford does it, it's there's some thought process that needs to go into like the world that you're trying to build as an artist, but then it really is like rinse and repeat, you know, rinse and repeat and cranking out content, okay? It's quality and quantity.

Exactly. And so, you know, that's where like attention is the game that we're in. We do have to get eyeballs on your content to then have your song have a fighting chance of reaching someone who then wants to become a fan that we can actually convert, right? Through this fifth bucket. And the other reason it's a little bit different of a bucket is because the first four are mainly about making people care, right? Like giving people a reason to just know who you are and understand the story and maybe wonder what you're up to every once in a while. The convert bucket is where they maybe take an action, right? They maybe click the link in your bio. Maybe you have ManyChat set up, which by the way, go to one more time.fm slash deals. We have a hot deal right now. You can get your first month of ManyChat pro free by going to our page. ManyChat is absolutely mandatory for most of you guys, but the point is, they're taking an action, right? We're getting them to actually start doing some things. Yeah. And for me, like, I don't love the the push content. All right.

So all the like four buckets in the 200 hour content ideas framework is more pull. So like we're assuming if they do like the song, they like the story behind the song, they like the content, they are going to click some links and poke around and oh, I'm interested. I want to learn more. I want to listen. I want to, you know, support. So that's gonna happen, okay? But again, we like closed mouths, don't get fed. Like, we still need a bucket, and we need some percentage. It shouldn't be at all the majority. Like, It's one of five buckets. one of five buckets, so like 20% max, but like probably even less, honestly. But it is where we're making an ask of our community to directly support us. And I promise you guys, I promise you they want to. Like, it's the craziest shit, man, how many people literally just don't ask. And the ask is absolutely free. You don't know what people will do to support you because most of y'all just aren't even putting the offer in front of people's faces, man. It's that simple. Yeah, I mean, honestly, we had uh Mag from Even on the podcast, right? He's he's the uh founder of even who's a direct to fan platform.

We're gonna get a Lil Breadstick on, probably test a campaign on even, by the way. For sure. We got sure. Um, but yeah, man, like, you know, people will pay for your music and pay for experiences tied to you and your art, um, like in the thousands, to be honest. And like, yeah, of course, there's like popular artists like the Russell who have crushed it on there, but like the principle holds true regardless, I think, of the stage that you're at. And I think people have it twisted where they think, you know, I have to be an artist of a certain stature to like be able to do this. And that's just not the case, man. Like your day ones are your day ones, regardless of like if you're still, you know, like just getting started, or whether you have been doing this shit for you know five, 10 years. And we started from $0, guys. So even if our first asks make us a couple hundred bucks, like that's more than zero. You know, we're getting started. The money counters going, man. Money counters rolling, baby. So, yeah, the idea here is that you you know you can rent a crowd, but you you can't keep one, which is this problem that gets introduced, but simultaneously solved with layer number three. Maybe my favorite layer, very exciting layer.

This is the capture. Ooh, I like the name. The capture. It's good. Capture the flag, baby. Capture the fan. Capture the fan. That's good. So we got people taking actions, but the biggest issue is they're still on these social media platforms that we don't own. They could disappear tomorrow. Do you remember when TikTok USA was gonna just cease to exist and all these TikTok artists were shitting their pants? They were freaking out. And they're like rightfully so because they didn't have email lists, they didn't have any sort of like fan data of their own. So I mean, I I get it, honestly, but it's not to mention the algorithms just not showing you shit from people you follow. You might even have all the followers in the world, and your content's not getting shown anyone because no one gives a shit. Absolutely. So we need a place for them to live, right? And when we this is when we're talking about data, this is when we're talking about email lists, we're gathering phone numbers, uh email addresses, cities, right? Maybe their age, whatever we can get. We have a database set up so that we can reach them whenever the fuck we want, and not when Mark Zuckerberg says we can reach them, right?

That is why we built you your own Superfan Tracker. Okay, and again, we're starting from nothing, okay? So this is gonna be really helpful as you're starting to figure out who your people are, okay? So just keep that in mind as Henry kind of walks us through quickly, like what it is and where we can find it. Very excited about this. This is the Superfan Tracker. You guys can grab it for absolutely free right now at one more time.fm slash tracker. And it looks like this: it's it's pre-built with lots of smart functionality. It's a Google sheet, right? So if you don't have a Google account, if you're one of 1% of people in the world, they have a Google account. Low breast stick had one guy. If you don't have a Google account, sorry. we can't help you. No friction here, no upsell. You enter your email, it you get an email that says make a copy, you get the Google sheet, boom. So the idea here is that we are keeping track of our fans, and we are knowing where they came from, we're knowing when the last time we reached out to them was, and we're nurturing them, right? We're making sure that nobody gets underserved, okay? Because we don't have a lot of fans right now.

So the ones we have, we're really going to bat for here, okay? Yeah. For me, I I look at this more as like almost like an accountability tracker. Like literally, just like you you need to start recognizing who your people are on the various platforms. Because again, there's not necessarily a super easy way to like capture who's commenting a lot on Instagram or who's commenting a lot on your YouTube or SoundCloud or whatever, and then start correlating those and figure it, right? So, like it's just like getting you to keep this shit in mind and making sure that you're nurturing them. So I love the whole like how many days has it been since you last contacted them. Yeah, so it gets darker and redder the longer it's been. That's a red flag, literally, to comment and reach out to that person. For sure. And I mean, again, this is something maybe earlier on in your career. As you get a little more sophisticated and as your fan base grows, you're not gonna be able to do this forever, okay? But again, we're talking about someone who's trying to go from zero to a hundred K. So this is a good way to at least have you start thinking like this, okay. Then you can invest in all the fancy softwares and shit that can like do some of this for you.

But like early on in your career, this can probably help you get the job done. Yeah, I think the goal would be to graduate from the Superfan Tracker eventually, but it's pretty sick right now, man. Let me just touch on a couple. So, current goal up here, whatever kind of just if you're starting to try and just get 25 super fans, right? You type in your goal, everything automatically updates. We have a progress bar to get to your goal. All of our super fans, when you uh click a drop down over here, you can put someone in casual, engaged, or super fan. If they're a super fan, they'll get a fancy gold little background. And then yeah, the day's counter getting redder and redder to which is just your your cue to you have homework, right? Hit them up, hit them up. This automatically, there's a reach out right here. These are the people that it's been the longest since you've contacted. Here's your top cities, and here is the place that most of your people have come from. So maybe you can double down on that. We're keeping track of our revenue, keeping track of our split. Awesome little resource, guys. One more time.fm slash tracker. Grab it right now. Why not?

What are you waiting for? But don't click off the episode still. We got more to go through with breadstick. Okay, so as far as the money counter goes, because again, we're trying to like help you guys have this framework of how to go to 100K in revenue. Okay. We've we're starting to capture people's, you know, data, right? Whether it's Instagram handles of people that are super active, emails, et cetera. Like our first real fan money is gonna come from the fact that we're making an offer to our like more engaged, engaged slash super fan, you know, community, okay? Maybe we're selling a t-shirt, comment shirt, you know, for sure. Exactly. So so let's maybe call it like 40 people buy some $30 ticket item, right? Again, whether it's a t-shirt, hoodie, custom mixtape, vinyl signed, gluten Gluten Tapes on vinyl. On vinyl? On vinyl. Dude, I would buy Gluten Tapes on vinyl. I'm buying it. Fire. Yeah, I'm one of the 40. Yeah. Yeah, but the the main takeaway from this layer is that your fan base should look like a list. It should not look like a follower count, guys.

This is whether you're using the superfan tracker or you're big enough where you can invest and pay for something fancy, it's a list. It's not a number, it's not a monthly listener count, it's not an Instagram follower count. Fuck that shit. Get off that right now. And it's a list of real people. Yeah. Also, that's kind of why I like the manual aspect of Superfan Tracker because like typing someone, yeah, like there's fancy shit where what we don't have to type shit in manually in 2026, but there's something nice about this is this person's name, typing it in one by one, really understanding who they are and soaking it in. I feel yeah. Until we can afford the fancy software, we gotta do what we gotta do. And as Breadstick's co-managers, we are gonna try and get him there. Which we're gonna try and graduate him off the Superfan Tracker fast. But we're watching budgets. We're also gonna be able to do that. And that's why we're using the free Google sheet that we that we came up with. Well, to get 100K, this is only revenue, it's not profit. So technically he could break even if we wanted to just sprint to the 100K. Yeah, absolutely. We're getting off topic. Let's get to the next layer. This is where it starts getting really fun, guys. This is layer four, and we're calling it the offer ladder, right? So we've introduced one, maybe two little offers where people are starting to actually spend with us.

We're starting to see some money, but the offer ladder is where we get to get creative with how we introduce our offers to our audience. Absolutely. So I mean, the the whole old notion of like a thousand real fans spending a hundred dollars with you. Shout out Kevin Kelly. I think he introduced that in like 2008. Yeah, so like still holds true. And again, and that's what I was gonna say. A lot of people, I mean, Curtis even was like, fuck that, you only need a hundred diehards. There's a lot of ways to get to 100K. 100 people spend a thousand, uh, a hundred, the thousand people spend a hundred, a hundred people spend a thousand. Something like that. There's ways to get there. Yeah. The concept remains true. Yeah, and so I think, you know, that's that's just like a framework you need to have in your brain, I think, to just again wrap your head around what I think all those, all those examples do is that no one's saying that you need a hundred thousand people to spend $1. Right. Yes. No one says that. Because I don't think that's a good way to look at it, to be honest. But to get to the hundred, you know, we might have one offer that's 30 bucks, and then you have to do that three times a year, and then they have to all you know contribute to all of them. It's hard with one or two offers, right?

For sure. This is where we ladder them down. We got we got rungs on a ladder. And again, I mean, I think what this does is it it gives people options. Yeah. I mean, again, if you're only selling one product at $30, at one price point. That's $30 max. That's just all they can do. That's the match. You've capped yourself. Any business is probably not selling just one tier of one product. Like that's just not a smart business move. So we're running a smart business for Lil Breadstick. That's right. So we're gonna do things smart. So in this example, we kind of came up with like five different rungs of the ladder. And again, we have some examples. Um, but like tailor this to whatever it is that you think fits your artist brand. This should be custom. Exactly. But like these are some good ideas, at least of like kind of places to start. So, like rung one again, is like let them buy the music somewhere. Yeah, okay. Like, again, whether it's sell before streaming and you sell it on bandcamp, you sell it on even, whatever, um, vinyls, etc. CDs are coming back too. CDs, cassettes, even, dude. They're doing like cassettes. like cassettes kind of wild.

Yeah, so like let them buy the music. That could be like anywhere between, yeah, like a 10 to $30 type of $20. $20 for a single, $100 for an album. This is people are doing like you guys hear that and you think, who the fuck is paying that when Spotify is so cheap? People are paying that because they care about their favorite artist and they want to support. I'm telling you, it's real. Absolutely. I mean, I love the pay what you want model for everything. Seriously. I don't really see why You'd be shocked. You wouldn't. And like, I don't even know if we have pay what you want set up for everything that like we're, you know, merch. Like, like this is our like this is something you can go buy at one more time. Fm slash shop, right? That might be the first time we've mentioned it. So great shout-out. I love this shirt. It's great. Uh, it's very ironic because we love content Well, we have an I love content in the shop as well. I decided to go negative today. Yeah. That's per usual. Anyways, um, and so yeah, that you know, pay you know, pay what you want is great. Rung two, love this bucket. I actually like I'm like obsessed with doing this with artists, so like any artists that are watching the show, if you do want to hit me up for custom novelty merch ideas. Yes, I'm all about it.

Yes. Like, again, I'm not gonna spend like hours and hours like laboring over trying to come up with it, but I'm pretty quick at some. It's fun. And like you had a really good one for Lil Breadstick. Oh, we're definitely gonna sell the custom Lil Breadstick bread baskets. And again, y'all might be like, that's so stupid. No one's gonna buy that. They will. You'd be shocked. They will. I'm telling you, like the more quirky and less like generic t-shirt with the look, like you know, yeah, we have the OMT logo tees. If you want to buy an OMT logo tee, that's just lame though. Like, if you know us, you know we love content, so it's either fuck content as a like. We both love love and hate it. I mean, it's perfect. Exactly. And who the fuck else is offering a bread basket? Yes, merch item. Nobody, bro. You see that in your living room in the corner there, you immediately think of Lil Breadstick. Yeah. What's his name? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's so you know, that's gonna be somewhere maybe like a little bit higher ticket than the music, you know, 40, 50 dollar type of price point. But again, this can all vary. Um, and then rung number three, this is like that paid community type of approach, okay? Patreon grouped, who we love as well, is doing really great things for the independent artist community.

We're starting the Lil Breadstick fan club. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're we're starting as his grouped, man, because again, like monthly recurring revenue, like you that shit can add up. Like if they're if they're paying 10 bucks a month for you know, exclusive access to you and like really high engagement where they get to vote on like cover arts and single name, like single releases, like names of songs, lyrics, they get to do exclusive live streams, like maybe like Zoom hangs, custom like IRL events too, maybe where they just meet up at a coffee shop or a bar or some shit. Like, do something cool for your community. They will pay you every month. And like, do you know how many subscriptions I have that I pay for that I don't even fucking remember paying for? It's like once they set it up, like damn near they might also just even like forget, oh yeah, Who else that 10 bucks a Lil Breadstick. Like that's cool. This is keeping it so real with you guys, like, yeah, offer a subscription because they'll forget. That shouldn't be the strategy, but I'm just saying, like, it's a good, like it's just a slept-on thing where you just cooked on the fan club offering. Why wouldn't we, bro?

You cooked on that. Oh, so yeah, that's kind of like rung three. Yep, right? Rung four, we're gonna take it up a notch again, okay. Um, so I mentioned kind of like you know, stuff that you could be doing with your paid community, but you can also do like IRL, like intimate experiences outside of the paid, like monthly. I have to go out into the world. Yeah, I mean, dude. That's where like the real fandom is made, man. Very true. Again, like, you know, maybe do a small intimate listening session or like a small intimate concert where it's like 10 to 20 people, but they're gonna pay like 50 to 100 bucks or something, man. Yes. Um, and again, like people love exclusive shit and they love having an excuse to like go do something, man. Like, we're all sitting doom scrolling, fucking brain rotting on our phones. But like the IRL stuff is still huge. Like, we even talk about how can we bring our community to real life, right? Because yeah, all this internet shit, listen, you know, watching us on YouTube, listening to us, wherever, seeing our clips on social media, like that's cool. But like, but like we want to hang with y'all and like What's good? and on artists, like that's even you know a bigger thing, right? Like, you know, we're cultivating a community of people who are all trying to like do the same thing, and like that's really cool too.

But like, think about fans of artists, bro. Yes, they want the access, which leads to rung five. Oh, tell me more, Henry. Rung five, we're taking IRL up a notch. This is just a perfect example of like you don't know what people will pay unless you offer it. This is the epitome of that. So we are going exclusive. One, maybe three people buy this, and it's an absolute success. High ticket experience, right? So maybe it is like private show again, but but like hang with me for the whole day, right? I got one for Lil Breadstick. You just cooked, maybe like a bread making workshop or something. Oh, okay. They bake bread together, bro. Okay. Sounds kind of weird, but also cool. Almost like an all-day experience. Shit, you can even level this up to like we go to a sick Airbnb for a couple days and really hang, you know, like sounds creepy. We're becoming hey, but we're talking about thousands of dollars per person. You know what I mean?

This is high ticket. You just do a few and you really serve them. And maybe you don't sell any, maybe you sell one, but you literally don't know until you offer it. That is like a big through line that I just want. I hope that gets through to y'all. Yeah, or like an exclusive private dinner at like a fancy. Italian. We're going to Olive Garden. Why did you say Olive Garden? Breadstick. Lil Breadstick, but like sponsored, man. Can't it be like he's sponsored by Olive? Garden. But can't it be they got bread? Bread. See what I did? They got some bread to spend with bread. But no, man, the whole notion of this, right, is different fans, you know, are gonna enter into like different worlds for you, right? From a pricing and like purchasing perspective. We gotta give them different doors to walk through. And people are just in different places in their life, bro. You might have like a super rich fan and someone who can't even make rent, but does want to like, you know, buy you a cup of coffee type shit. You know what I mean? So we need to offer them things accordingly. We gotta have like five doors in our offer ladder hallway. Some people might just get through the first one. Some people might literally walk through every single door in our offer ladder.

And we're we're really profiting now. And they're feeling great because they're supporting because they love the music. For sure. Win-win-win. So this is where the money counter is starting to go up. Like pretty nice. This is getting real. We're making real progress here towards the hundred K. We're in the tens of thousands, I would say at this point, whatever our editor chose to put the number at right now. Before we get into layer five, which is the big one, of course. Oh Yeah. I just want to remind you guys one more time. Please, it's please. It's so easy to drop a like on this video. You can do this in about 10 seconds flat. Drop a genuine little comment in the video and hit the subscribe button, maybe with the bell, op bell optional if you haven't done it. It helps us out a lot, man. We have a lot of fun doing this, but you can help us back by just doing a few clicks, man. It really would mean a lot. This is us drinking our own Kool-Aid. We're making the making the ass. This was a lesson in disguise. That was vulnerable, man. I took a lot for me to ask. I'm proud of you, buddy. But I'm not afraid to ask. Because I know some of you guys out there, not a lot of you, but if you just if you just hit subscribe, I love you, man. Okay, get to the fucking fifth layer, bro.

This is huge. This one is huge. This is the one you guys have been waiting for. Henry, Ben. What is it? When am I going on tour? When am I performing? Going to play live, Henry. I want to play live, Ben. I'm Itching to do that. Well, you're gonna do it in layer five. We're calling this the room. This is where we get into the room, we own the room, but we're not gonna just willy-nilly go play LA and New York because we think that it's cool, right? We have a very smart system for a Lil Breadstick. Based on some episodes that we've done recently, um, that really opened our eyes to some things we didn't even know was possible. Yeah, I think the legacy way that people toured is again, they did have to hit like all the major markets, right? Um, and that's because there's the most people there, and you know, whatever other kind of like old school thinking um, you know, that that people had. But we have data now. We have data now, okay? And we have super like creative artists doing some really creative shit that they're talking about on podcasts like one more time, and everyone else should be copying and replicating this shit because it works and it's smart, okay? Yes.

The the whole like touring, you lose a fuck ton of money thing, it can be true, but again, that's oftentimes because you're making like not that very informed decisions, right? Or you're making an investment in it and you're willing to take that that risk. But again, if you don't have the budget, we didn't have the rich uncle funding our career. We weren't fucking Nepo baby industry plant type shit here, okay? We're we're grinding right now, and we gotta be wise with every dollar that we spend, okay? Yeah, so with the KELS episode, and again, there's another artist that I love, Kennedy Ryon. I think she does something very similar, where it's you know, selling the idea of doing a show in a certain market before you make all the financial investments, okay? So you can put up the fact that you're you're doing an Atlanta show without having even booked the actual venue yet, right? Zero risk, guys. Pay attention to this one. Yes, it's getting people to commit at the idea almost of you doing a show in their city. Yep. So you're gauging demand, okay? So we're gonna make sure that we have the demand for a show before we actually go through all the motions to make that show a reality, right?

Yep. So we're not pulling up to Chicago with three people in the room. No, exactly. So date, time, and and location can all be TBD. And I think y'all are probably thinking, like, there's no way that works. It fucking works. We've seen two artists that we're just really good friends with do this, and it works successfully. So we know there's more out there that we just haven't talked to yet, and you can do it too. And Lil Breadstick is definitely doing this shit. KELS is literally selling tickets to a show where she doesn't even know where the fuck the show's gonna be yet. Yes. And guess what? If you don't get enough pre-sales, you can cancel the show and offer full refunds. That she bakes that into the price, because we're not gonna go do a show that's gonna literally lose us money. We're trying to make a hundred thousand dollars here. Absolutely. And the way that this works best is like if you have 25 people, okay, you can go find a venue that economically makes sense for a 25-person show. If you have a hundred people, same thing. Two hundred, you know, the the you know, the list goes on and on. I think I think Kels said like if she gets 50 pre-sales, she'll book a hundred cap room, is about like an average. So maybe it's like a two to one, just based on what she taught us.

But she also said that then she pushed up on the hundred number and she upped the shit to a 250 cap room. Yeah, and like you can do that, no problem, right? Or again, you sell out the hundred and that's fine. And then next time you go, you know, you have a good feeling that you're gonna maybe hopefully pull more tickets, right? Um, but I just love this model, and again, with everything that we're doing, let's go pay what you want. We're definitely going to pay what you want. Let's go pay what you want. People are gonna throw hundreds of dollars to come see us live just because we offered it. You guys probably still don't believe us. It is so so real, man. It really is. People want to support you, and we're gonna give them the opportunity to do that with Lil Breadstick. I'll tell you that much. Yeah, so I think the other unique thing about what KELS has done, and and I think Kennedy as well, is that they're not letting their ego get in the way and thinking that they need to play that famous venue in the city, right? They're literally booking Peerspace venues, churches, diners, office spaces, fucking whatever, right? Like just anything they can get their hands on that again fits their budget, fits the city, um, fits maybe, of course, like the vibe if they can.

Um, but they're just not doing this the traditional way. And the and the benefit of that is that they get to own all the data. All those famous venues, like you take a vinyl here in Atlanta, it's a 300-cap room, it's a Ticketmaster Live Nation venue. You don't get the data. Nope. Right. So it by doing it kind of on your own and like building it really creatively. Um, you get the data, which again goes back to the capture, right? Like we're capturing all that data, we're owning it in our own systems. Um, and I just think that that was a huge part of like what KELS and Kennedy have both done. Um, that is slept on still, bro. It's a little more work, but the the payoff, right? I mean, and he has me and Ben managing, so like we're gonna help out, don't you? No one is watching this show if they're not if they're afraid to put in the work, though. I hope so. So, bottom line of layer five is we're touring the demand, we're not touring the dream or the ego. And that's hard to do, but the money counter just went way the fuck up, by the way.

It did, but Ben, that's five layers. That's the hundred K stack all filled up, and we're not at a hundred thousand yet. Fuck, what do we do, Henry? Is this are we chalking this up as a failure? Absolutely fucking not. Let's go. Because we're a quick beat here. Let's get a Lil Breadstick all the way home. The magic hidden sixth layer is the compounding effect that all of this has. Um, we've just created a flywheel, right? That we can now go through this whole process with every release that we have, single or album, it doesn't matter. And each time that we go through the five-layer stack, it is compounding on top of each other. Every time we get to the next layer. It's more successful than the last one. Each layer feeds itself and gets more and more powerful. So by following this five-layer stack a couple times, three, four times through, I mean, we're blasting through a hundred K. It's just no way we're not. Yeah, I just think that like, just like with anything, if you can get 1% better with every release or every, you know, layer, right? Compounds.

It compounds, right? And so I mean, the content's getting better. You're attracting and converting more people. Your email list is growing by the time that you're converting them, right? The ladder that, you know, the offer ladder that you're doing, you're gonna start selling that to more people. You're gonna tweak the offers because you see what people are liking and not liking. The next room is booked off more and more data. You're selling out venues that you never thought that you could. Okay. And so that's really the key about this whole compounding effect. And I mean, we've seen it to be true. We looked at our own data of like when we started the podcast versus where we're at now, and the shit is a hockey stick. It's like exponential. It's exponential growth, and that's what starts to happen with artist businesses. So don't get discouraged when you're kind of at that like super slow burn in the beginning, bro. Cause like it's tough. And it makes a lot of people want to give the fuck up because it's not easy to be putting in a ton of work and see kind of just like dollars like you know, stacking up, stacking up, and you're just grinding, grinding, grinding. But I'm telling you, there's like an inflection point with some of this shit, to be honest. Starts to get really fun if you guys stick with it.

So yeah, by lap number two through the stack. We're over the hundred K. Our boy has hit a hundred K. Let's put some confetti on the screen. We took 20 K though. We did. Well, actually, there's two of us. We actually have to probably negotiate higher than 20%, but that's let's not talk about that in this story. Uh Lil Breadstick is paid. He's got his excuse me. What does he have? He didn't get famous. He didn't sign a crazy record deal. He's got a very smart list of fans that is compounding. He's got real relationships that he's profiting on. It's a system. It's a system. Exactly. And I love that. We're not betting on viral moments, but we hope we get some. We'll take them. I'll take them out. Right? But yeah, so if if this was valuable, go to you know one more time.fm slash tracker. Tracker. Right? To get the Superfan Tracker and start engaging with those people today. Like stop procrastinating that shit. I know it's hard to keep up with, but hopefully the tracker helps. And yeah, we're here each and every week. Until next time. Let's get the fuck out of here. Bye bye. Bye.