Musician to Serial Entrepreneur to LinkedIn Creator: How Sam Browne Grew His Audience 100X in 1 Year

Yong-Soo Chung [00:00:00]:

The other day, I spoke to someone who went from this...

Sam Browne [00:00:03]:

The biggest song we had was a song called Bullets for Your Gun. You know, they still play that now... that's about nearly 15 years on. They regularly play it. I get a little royalty check. I've started businesses with a Squarespace site for $200 that will then make six figures.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:00:30]:

That's Sam Brown. Sam is a musician at heart and an entrepreneur by trade. Sam is also the founder of Haro SEO, which is a form of search engine optimization that involves getting backlinks from high quality domains by helping a reporter out. H-A-R-O or HARO.

Sam Browne [00:00:46]:

I launched Haro SEO as a side hustle, a solopreneur kind of thing, just to make some money.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:00:54]:

And if you thought that was all, well, there's more. Sam is also a well known LinkedIn creator who grew from 500 to 50,000 followers in the span of a single year. He's now planning a course for entrepreneurs on LinkedIn.

Sam Browne [00:01:08]:

I want people to come into it, not sure what the hell they're doing, and to come out the other side with a real game plan.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:01:14]:

So how does someone who started off as a musician become an entrepreneur skilled in such diverse industries? What was the journey that took Sam from playing in bands as a high schooler to a serial entrepreneur with multiple successes under his belt? That's what we're going to find out. Hi, my name is Yong-Soo Chung, and I'm a first generation Korean American entrepreneur living the American dream. I started Urban EDC to cater to enthusiasts of everyday carry gear. I also own two other successful ventures: GrowthJet, a climate neutral, certified third-party logistics company for emerging e-commerce brands and Spotted by Humphrey, an online boutique curating dog goods for good dogs. Through these three ventures, my business has generated over $20 million in eight years, and I'm here to tell you how you can do the same. On this episode of First Class Founders, I'm sharing the lessons I learned after talking to Sam Brown.

Sam Browne [00:02:14]:

Hey, man, thank you for having me, and nice to finally meet in person properly.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:02:18]:

Sam is the CEO of Find A Band, a New Zealand based agency that has been involved in thousands of corporate events, weddings, festivals, product launches, conferences, and brand activations. Sam is also the founder of Haro SEO, based on a popular link building method called Haro Help a Reporter Out. He is also a popular creator on LinkedIn and has created several excellent guides on how to create great LinkedIn content. We spoke on a wide variety of subjects, including Sam's early years as a musician, Find a Band, his first business venture, building and growing Haro SEO during the pandemic, becoming a LinkedIn creator, and last but not least, tips and tricks on how to create great content for LinkedIn. We also spoke about Chat GPT, Midjourney, and about the rise of AI in general, specifically about his plans to create a ChatGPT guide for Dummies. Premium members of First Class Funders will be treated to an extra segment of the podcast episode where they'll be able to hear Sam discussing his tips and tricks of getting incredibly useful output from the AI tools he uses. Of course, they can also listen to the raw, unedited version of my interview with Sam in the private subscribers only feed. Become a Premium member of First Class Founders by signing up at FirstClassFounders.com/join. I'll put the link in the show notes. And now let's get down to business. I first came across Sam's LinkedIn profile and had to get him on First Class Founders not only because of how great his content was through his storytelling skills, but how fast he was growing his personal brand on LinkedIn. I found in my research that he started off as a musician and played in bands when he was in high school.

Sam Browne [00:04:02]:

Really, you know, falling in love with music and everything about it, and spending every waking hour playing guitar in my bedroom. I'd get home from school and that would be where I would be till kind of dinner time and then back to it. A lot of musicians I know now, that's their story too, we became obsessed with it.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:04:20]:

Such was his love for music that he realized pretty early on that he wasn't cut out for the daily grind of a nine to five.

Sam Browne [00:04:27]:

If I had a full time job, I was not going to have the time and energy to work on songs. And so I was trying to figure out a way to somehow have the income of a job without the 40 hours commitment of a job. And honestly, that's how I arrived at entrepreneurship.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:04:42]:

Entrepreneurship in this context essentially meant figuring out an idea for a business and then actually doing that business. Fortunately for Sam, there was something that was absolutely right up his alley.

Sam Browne [00:04:54]:

I came up with this idea for booking live bands for events and weddings, as I had been picking up a few of those myself. As someone who was performing in bars and so forth, I sort of thought it was demand and there was an opportunity and so forth.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:05:10]:

The capital required for this business came from two very interesting sources. The first was mostly standard run of the mill arbitrage.

Sam Browne [00:05:18]:

I was very extremely green. It was my first business, so I really had no clue what the hell I was doing. But saved up some money from. I bought and sold guitars on New Zealand's equivalent to Ebay.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:05:30]:

The second was, well, rather unique.

Sam Browne [00:05:34]:

I actually went on a game show and won some money on a game show in New Zealand.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:05:38]:

Yeah, a game show. Not just any game show, but the New Zealand equivalent of a show that was quite popular in the US a few years ago. I'm pretty sure you must have caught it on TV at some point in time.

Sam Browne [00:05:50]:

In the US. That's called are you smarter than a fifth grader? In New Zealand? It's called, like, are you smarter than a ten year old? Which it doesn't work as well, but it's the same thing. And I didn't win that much. I won ten grand. So it was something. And then I'd saved up, I think, another ten from my guitar trading. So with my 20, I put together kind of enough money to hire, like, a small design agency to build my site, and away I went.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:06:16]:

That first site became an agency called Find A Band. According to its website, Find A Band now represents over 100 of New Zealand's best live bands and musicians. Sam, however, insists that Find A Band was primarily born out of a desire to keep making music.

Sam Browne [00:06:32]:

That was it. It was a means to an end rather than any great passion for entrepreneurship.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:06:36]:

Because Find A Band helped him escape the shackles of the dreaded nine to five and allowed him the time to pursue his real passion music, by sitting at home and working on songs all day.

Sam Browne [00:06:46]:

I put a band together and we got our first album out two years later. That was with a band called Black River Drive. We had two songs from that first album go to number one on the New Zealand rock chart, which probably sounds more impressive than it is. It's a very small country.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:07:04]:

So one of the songs was Bullet From Your Gun, which still brings in the occasional royalty check because it still gets airtime on radio to this day. The band Black River Drive even put out a second album called Quicksand in 2014.

Sam Browne [00:07:16]:

And we actually went to Nashville to do the second one and worked with an amazing producer who'd worked with bands like Ozzy Osborne, Kiss, Slayer, Corn. So we sort of had the full experience.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:07:32]:

The great thing about Find A Band is that it slotted perfectly into a clearly available niche. People are out there looking for bands and bands are out there looking for gigs.

Sam Browne [00:07:41]:

You could sort of sum it up as the airbnb of live bands. So you go on there and you say, I'm looking for a band in X City that plays X genre. So let's say in New Zealand, I'm looking for a band in Auckland to perform at my wedding. And so then you get shown all of the bands that are suitable for weddings in Auckland and they're kind of displayed marketplace style little tiles for each one that you then click into. As with Airbnb, you get more detail. You get the photos, videos, song list and reviews from past clients.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:08:19]:

But that's where the similarities end, because Find A Band goes a step further. No, several steps further. In fact, Find A Band basically ensures that people looking for a band almost always Find a Band. Thanks to the way Sam has set up the process, it works in three phases. Phase one, the hook.

Sam Browne [00:08:40]:

Rather than being able to book straight away with my model, you can inquire about the band and you can find out how much they're going to cost for your specific event. So we give people a price indicator so they are pre qualified before they get in touch. Phase two, the line. When you inquire that goes to my salesperson. She will then call you, and this is really key, so she will call you and create a human connection with you. She'll build rapport, she'll build trust. She will hopefully, in the course of the conversation, let you know that she's a very experienced musician. She's performed all over the world.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:09:17]:

Phase three, the sinker.

Sam Browne [00:09:20]:

By the time we get to the pricing and the suggestion, or should we listen to you too, and saying, what exactly are you wanting to achieve at your wedding? And these sorts of questions and helping you to dream big on what it is that you'd like, finally she will say, okay, great, I'm going to take what we've talked about. I'll send her an email with some pricing and so forth. And she will do that and she'll make a recommendation for who the band is that you should choose.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:09:42]:

In other words, a customer calling in to inquire about a band gets captured hook, line and sinker.

Sam Browne [00:09:48]:

Yeah, the phone calls really keep between the conversation and then the recommendation and her credibility and our credibility as an agency. That's what's worked really well for us.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:10:00]:

I love this approach so much. I'm going to make a note for us here to remember this as a key takeaway from this episode. Takeaway number one: The hook, line, and sinker approach to closing a customer used by Find A Band. The pre qualification ensures that only the serious customers call in. Establishing a rapport helps ease any nervousness or friction. Finally, the detailed questions help with narrowing a suitable price point. That works for everyone. Isn't it a brilliantly designed funnel? It also helps that everyone represented by Find A Band is promoted with high quality videos and photographs on their website.

Sam Browne [00:10:37]:

And that's because the agency pays for it. So we have a team that we bring in ten to 20 times a year. We will do a shoot in a recording studio. We'll pay for the studio, the engineer, the photographer, the videographer, and we put together all the media and in exchange, that artist is exclusive with our agency.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:10:57]:

Despite the fact that all these performers are relatively unknown artists.

Sam Browne [00:11:02]:

Not a single famous artist. No. So this is purely cover band. So these are bands that are playing the hits. So they're either playing Beyonce and Bruno Mars type hits or they're a jazz band playing jazz standards, or they're a string quartet, or they might be a solo artist playing Ed Sheeran and that sort of thing. So, yeah, these are artists that you've heard of, performed by musicians that you haven't heard of.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:11:27]:

I like that. Artists you have heard of, performed by musicians you haven't heard of. That's a really great and quite a respectful way to put it. That's probably why Find A Band has consistently done great business over the years.

Sam Browne [00:11:40]:

Year after year after year, we see sort of 20% growth. We hit seven figures for the first time in 2019, and then we very much dropped back to six figures. We basically went from a million back down to 500,000 in 2020 because of COVID up to 750 in 2021. And then we did double that in 2022 as the world kind of came back online. So it's a really strong, resilient business. COVID was the one thing that knocked our legs out from under us. But if there isn't a worldwide pandemic, it's a great business.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:12:16]:

There's that brilliant New Zealand humor shining through again. It was probably the sense of humor and the itch to keep doing something that prompted Sam to find something to work on even when his primary business, Find A Band, was severely affected due to the pandemic.

Sam Browne [00:12:31]:

It stopped making money. One day, one day, everything's fine, a week later, we're at pause. And so I didn't immediately come to the realization that I needed something else to keep me going in the meantime. But probably six months after that day, I launched Haro SEO as a side hustle, a solopreneur kind of thing, just to make some money.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:12:54]:

Haro stands for help a reporter out. It is a link building technique which involves helping out reporters, looking for quotes from subject matter experts on a particular subject. The reporters get quality responses on the subject they're writing about, and in return, they provide backlinks to your website.

Sam Browne [00:13:09]:

I've been paying freelancers to do this for me, where basically journalists will post via this platform each day, saying, we need to hear from, say, entrepreneurs who are on LinkedIn. Should you be on LinkedIn or not? Email us your answers, and you might be listed on Forbes or Bloomberg or whatever the case may be. So there's sites at that level, New York Times, these top, top tier sites, and then there's kind of next tier down sites as well, where maybe you haven't heard of them, or they're not a household name brand, but they're still very credible sites with real traffic in the millions and so forth.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:13:44]:

While building Find A Band, Sam had picked up several SEO techniques, and horror was one such technique that he had gotten really good at.

Sam Browne [00:13:52]:

I kind of realized pretty early on that being extremely good at SEO would be a very useful, hard skill for an entrepreneur, an online business, although, to.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:14:03]:

Be clear, he didn't really need the money or anything.

Sam Browne [00:14:05]:

I had enough saved that I wasn't going to be homeless anytime soon. But it wasn't much fun just sitting on the couch waiting for the world to get back to normal.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:14:15]:

So he gathered the freelancers who had been working for him privately, rustled up a few clients, and launched Haro SEO.

Sam Browne [00:14:23]:

One of our very first clients, in a strange twist, ended up being a guy named Brian Dean, who is pretty much the King of SEO. It would be like putting a classified ad on the newspaper saying you're looking to join a band and the Rolling Stones call you and say, can you come play lead guitar for us? We're about to go.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:14:42]:

I looked up Brian Dean, and Sam was definitely not exaggerating. Brian Dean's SEO service is called Backlinko, and it is highly regarded. Forbes says that Backlinko is the place for next level SEO training and link building strategies, while TNW called Brian an SEO genius. So did Sam take Brian on as a client? What happened? Was Brian testing Sam in some way? Did he manage to win Brian over? What became of that relationship? Answers to all those questions and more in a bit. But first, I would like to ask you for a favor. I'm sure that as you're listening to this episode, you're thinking of someone. It's probably a friend or a colleague at work or could be a family member. Basically someone who would really enjoy this because it is right up their alley, because they have used to find a band before, or because just yesterday the topic of Sam Brown came up in a conversation, or you saw them sharing something that Sam Brown posted on LinkedIn. And look, Sam is on this podcast episode. Surely they would definitely get a kick out of this. Well, can you do me a favor? Can you send them this podcast episode and ask them to listen to it? I'm not going to pressure you to do it, but I'll let you in on a little secret. Every time you share an episode of First Class Founders, a French bulldog named Humphrey gets extra treats. Jokes aside, you sharing this episode will help my podcast grow. And for that, you will have my eternal gratitude. And who knows, the person you share the episode with might also enjoy the episode, and you might have their eternal gratitude as well. Eternal gratitude from two people? Sounds like a good deal, no matter which way you look at it. If you want, you can hit pause on this episode and share it with a friend. I'll wait. Done. Ready? Awesome. So we were just talking about Sam launching Haro SEO in the midst of the pandemic and one of his first customers being one of the best SEO experts in the business, Brian Dean. Sam was, of course, a little overwhelmed at the thought of working for Brian Dean.

Sam Browne [00:16:55]:

I was worried that I would take this job on and then not deliver for the King of SEO. I've literally learned SEO from this guy.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:17:04]:

He's right up there, but never once back away from a challenge. He and his team took it on.

Sam Browne [00:17:09]:

And it went great, and he ordered some links, and then he ordered some more, and then he ordered some more. We did a lot of business with him.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:17:15]:

Sam later figured out that Brian was probably testing the method and trying to see how it worked.

Sam Browne [00:17:20]:

I think in hindsight, he obviously didn't really need outside help for SEO when he's so good at it, but I think he wanted to see how the method worked in a relatively painless way for himself. So he was kind of wanting to see the process, and that's fair enough.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:17:35]:

Having Brian as a client definitely did help Sam's business, especially because Brian was gracious enough to give them a testimonial. And Sam already knew that a testimonial from Brian Dean is worth its weight in gold.

Sam Browne [00:17:47]:

What that did for us was gave massive credibility. And honestly, every time I talk to a new client, I go, hey, by the way, we've worked with Brian Dean, and they go, cool, where do I sign?

Yong-Soo Chung [00:17:55]:

I think this qualifies as our second takeaway for today's episode. Takeaway number two. Nothing can stop a good entrepreneur from pursuing their entrepreneurial passions, not even a worldwide pandemic. Sam started Find A Band because he didn't want to get stuck working on nine to five. When the pandemic hit, he had saved enough money that he could ride out the storm. Instead, he chose to follow his entrepreneurial instincts and used the SEO skills he had picked up in his journey to start a new venture. However, now that the threat of COVID has subsided greatly and events are roaring back online, the success of Haro SEO is proving to be a distraction.

Sam Browne [00:18:35]:

I'm basically trying to sell it now because my main business, which is much larger, is back in action and doesn't show any signs of going away. And then with the LinkedIn stuff as well, I'm trying to realign and kind of cut out anything in my life that isn't 100% what I want to be doing for the next ten years.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:18:53]:

And yes, the LinkedIn stuff is where Sam plans to concentrate most of his efforts for the foreseeable future. He also has considered exiting from Find A Band to concentrate on his LinkedIn journey.

Sam Browne [00:19:03]:

Although probably with Find A Band, I will put a really great manager and just cut my at the moment, it's probably taking me 15 hours a week, and I'd like to get that down to 1 hour a week of just working with a great manager who keeps it on the tracks.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:19:17]:

So what is this LinkedIn stuff for which Sam is ready to leave behind the businesses that basically makes him a million dollars a year? If you search for the keywords Sam Brown LinkedIn on Google, one of the top links will be a link to a Gumro page featuring a collection of ten PDF guides, all written by him, all rated 4.7 and above, on how to create great content for LinkedIn. This is the LinkedIn stuff that he keeps talking about. Sam Brown went from having zero followers in January 2022 on LinkedIn to 50,000 LinkedIn followers in the span of a year.

Sam Browne [00:19:53]:

I kind of just stumbled into it. I couldn't even tell you what my exact motivation was. I guess I realized that LinkedIn was there's a lot of entrepreneur content on there. I think I felt that it could be a good fit for me, as opposed to, say, instagram and so forth.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:20:07]:

He attributes it to a course on LinkedIn by Justin Welsh.

Sam Browne [00:20:11]:

I only got about 15% of the way through and I've never finished it. But what it really taught me that was well worth the money was how to write headlines and how important good headlines are for content.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:20:24]:

That single learning, combined with his SEO expertise, resulted in him being able to come up with all types of content that people not only liked, but also shared freely on their own accounts.

Sam Browne [00:20:34]:

My early posts are not great, but they were good enough that people kind of went, oh, this guy's interesting, and started sending me DMs and stuff. And I think it kind of hooked me that I got off to a good start even when I had a very small follow account.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:20:47]:

The other thing that helped out was being part of Justin Walsh's paid membership community.

Sam Browne [00:20:52]:

I think it was like $50 a month, and there were like a few hundred people, maybe 200 people in there. And of those, about 30 that were really active. And I connected with some really cool people in that group. And we were kind of supporting each other's posts in an organic way, like, you would only do it if you actually did, like somebody's stuff. But I think that was really helpful as well for getting me off the ground.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:21:12]:

Oh, in case you're wondering, LinkedIn doesn't have a dedicated input feel for headlines. But longer posts are cut off and hidden behind a link to expand the post. The part of the content that remains visible is called the hook or the headline.

Sam Browne [00:21:25]:

It is, yeah. So I guess the two terms are interchangeable. But yeah, hook is kind of, I guess, the accepted terminology. So, yeah, it's the first line. It can be the first three lines. If it's a text post, it will be the first two lines. If it's a video or image with a carousel, I think it's the first two lines.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:21:43]:

I asked Sam if he would be willing to share an example how he goes about crafting good hooks for his content, and he was more than happy to oblige.

Sam Browne [00:21:52]:

So I only post about once a week and sometimes less, which is not often at all, but when I do, it will be like a fairly deep guide. It might be like a complete guide to how to comment effectively on LinkedIn to Build Your Audience or complete I'm working on one right now, the Complete Guide to an Optimized Profile. So that might be 45 50 pages of large text, but call it a solid page of a four at twelve font.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:22:21]:

Once the guide is created, Sam will spend some extra time crafting suitable hooks, or headlines, if you prefer to call them that, for this content.

Sam Browne [00:22:29]:

If I have that great content, but I also have a great headline that I spend, I'd probably spend ten to 15 minutes thinking about it and workshopping a bunch of options before choosing the one that I think will do the best. That is when I see really incredible results. This is sort of Copywriting 101 stuff where if you can get a great headline for a great post, your chance of success is infinitely higher. And I unfortunately see a ton of people writing good content or pretty good content, but they're not getting eyes on it because they don't understand the power of the headline and they aren't putting the requisite focus on getting that right to get people in the door, so to speak. So until you stop the scroll and you get people onto your post, it doesn't exist in their mind.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:23:20]:

Stop the scroll. I think that is another great takeaway to note for this episode. Takeaway number three. Even if you craft great content, your post doesn't exist for your audience unless you can stop the scroll.

Sam Browne [00:23:33]:

In other words, no matter how good the content is, no matter how unique or helpful, if you don't get that click, it's all for nothing.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:23:41]:

Naturally, I had to ask him if he had any tips or tricks to crafting really attractive headlines that he could share with us on this podcast.

Sam Browne [00:23:49]:

Once you understand what it is that people are looking for in headlines, you can do it all day long. So a really easy one is money stuff. So if I put something like in a kind of before and after money thing, so say if I put I'll use Haro as an example. I launched a business for $200 in August 2022. Six months later, it had already made $100,000. Here's how I did it. Everybody's going to read that. Anybody who hasn't already done something much larger than that is going to think, I need to know that. I want that secret.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:24:21]:

Sam also explained how this technique of using a before after scenario can be further generalized to craft attractive headlines.

Sam Browne [00:24:29]:

So anything where it's like, I went from this to this. I went from bad situation to incredible situation. I was 50 pounds overweight, now I've got a six pack. Here's how I did it. Okay, great. Tell me all about it.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:24:41]:

The reason this works is because it appeals to our baser instincts. According to Sam, there are certain topics and subjects that seem to trigger a primal curiosity in our brain. Some topics just cause an itch that the brain deems absolutely necessary to scratch.

Sam Browne [00:24:57]:

It's like money, fitness, happiness, freedom, time, freedom. These sorts of things are evergreen success guarantees, really.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:25:07]:

It seemed incredible to me that Sam chooses to handcraft his headlines for every piece of content that he creates, especially given the rise of language learning models such as Chat GPT and Bard. Although, to be fair, when we spoke, Chat GPT had only been around for a few months and used GPT-3 Five rather than the currently popular GPT Four. So I asked Sam about it. Sam's response provided a huge insight into how he uses the various AI tools to help him elevate his content to the next level. And if you are a premium member of First Class Founders, that is exactly what you'll be listening to at this point in time. One of the perks of the First Class Founders membership is that premium content that I craft specifically for my members. For example, for this episode, at this very moment, premium members of First Class Founders are listening to Sam explain how he uses AI tools such as mid Journey, for example, to create content.

Sam Browne [00:26:09]:

It'll take me, I don't know, ten or 15 minutes of generating images, and eventually there'll be one where I'll go, that's actually really cool. I'm going to use that.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:26:17]:

Sam also shared details about the two editions of the Chat GPT guide that he's working on right now. The first edition will be aimed at people who are not too familiar with the subject.

Sam Browne [00:26:27]:

He says, I'll do one to kind of for the person who's never used it, this is how you use it, and this is maybe I'll do it from the point of view of LinkedIn content.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:26:35]:

He also plans to create a second guide targeting the intermediate users, that is, the users who have some knowledge of Chat GPT.

Sam Browne [00:26:43]:

Okay, you're no longer a dummy. You've got some clue of what you're doing. Here are intermediate recommendations for somebody who's already experienced with it, and that'll take a lot more research and time.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:26:53]:

The whole thing is quite interesting, and you can listen to all of it on the private members only podcast feed. Go sign up for the First Class Founders membership. It also comes with a ton of other perks. For instance, members of First Class Founders also get early access to podcast episodes, bonus episodes, including the entire raw, unedited interview, the ability to ask me anything, and much more. Head on over to firstclassfounders.com/join. I'll see you there. I asked Sam what advice he would give to entrepreneurs and creators who are just starting their journey. Sam had two specific pieces of advice. The first, this stuff takes time.

Sam Browne [00:27:38]:

I'm 15 years into this now. I had absolutely no clue what the hell I was doing for at least the first five years. No clue. And I nearly gave up at the five year mark because I was so broke, and all my friends were making six figures. I was making less than I had when I had a job and I'd had a business five years. So that's part of it. Don't run your own race and be comfortable with the fact that it's going to take years rather than weeks or months or days.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:28:04]:

And the second piece of advice...

Sam Browne [00:28:06]:

Spend a lot of time, however you do it, journaling or thinking about or whatever, about what you would like your work life to be. And so what I mean is, sometimes I see people identify an opportunity to make a dollar and they'll dive into that and a year goes by or two years, and they realize they've accidentally committed themselves to something that they don't really care about. That was just a means to an end. I think I was very lucky with Find A Band that I accidentally started a business that happened to be something I really enjoy and that fulfills me outside of the money side of it. I get to work with musicians. I get to spend time in recording studios hearing amazing players do their thing. I get to facilitate those people building, making a great living from their craft. So this is easier said than done. And typically, people don't get it right on their first business. Even if they have some financial success, they'll get bored of it, and it's usually the second or the third one that they really start doing what they want to do. But that's something even for a brand new entrepreneur. I would think, like, think really hard. As much as you want to think about where the money is, and that's an important consideration, too. Think about what you want your day to look like, because whether you're selling vacuum cleaners or you're selling layer jets, ultimately you're probably going to be dealing with you're going to have emails, you're going to have clients coming in, you're going to have complaints, you're going to have fires to put out. So think about the types of fires you want to be putting out.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:29:39]:

I guess I love both pieces of advice that Sam shared. In fact, I'd like to include it as our final takeaway for the day. Takeaway number four: If you want to succeed as an entrepreneur, first, be patient. And second, spend lots of time in advance thinking about the kind of fires you want to be putting out on a day to day basis. Before we conclude, let's quickly recap all five takeaways from today's episode. Takeaway number one: The hook, line, and sinker approach to closing a customer used by Find A Band. This is where Sam described the three part process of closing a customer who was looking to hire a band via Find a Band. Takeaway number two: Nothing can stop a good entrepreneur from pursuing their entrepreneurial passions, not even a worldwide pandemic. Sam started Haro SEO because his primary business, Find A Band, could not be operational due to the restrictions imposed by the global lockdowns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, he found a way to continue being an entrepreneur even in that situation. Takeaway number three: Even if you craft great content, your post doesn't exist for your audience unless you can stop the scroll. In Sam's own words, no matter how.

Sam Browne [00:30:50]:

Good the content is, no matter how unique or helpful, if you don't get that, click it's all for nothing.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:30:56]:

And finally, takeaway number four: If you want to succeed as an entrepreneur, first, be patient. And second, spend lots of time in advance thinking about the kind of fires you want to be putting out on a day to day basis. It is a well established fact that entrepreneurial success takes time, and most entrepreneurs dive into their ventures before properly analyzing what they're getting into. Don't be that guy. You can reach Sam Brown via his LinkedIn profile or his website.

Sam Browne [00:31:24]:

Yeah, so probably the easiest thing to do would be to just go to sambrown.co. So that's sambrowne.co, and right now, that redirects to my LinkedIn, so that's what I would do. If you're interested in what I'm talking about and want to see what I'm doing on LinkedIn.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:31:46]:

All right, that wraps up today's show in the next episode of First Class Founders. We're talking to Jennifer Phan, Founder of Passionfroot, which she describes as an operating system for creators. This was a fascinating conversation about being a VC backed founder building tools for creators. Tune in next week to listen in. One last thing before I go. If you're a new listener and you enjoyed this episode, you can follow the show by going to Firstclassfounders.com and clicking on the link that matches your preferred podcast player, like Apple Podcast or Spotify. Or you can also add your voice to the show by leaving a message on Firstclassfounders.com. For example, what did you think of this episode specifically? And when you get a chance, could you also head over to Firstclassfounders.com/Review and leave the podcast a five star review? It really helps boost credibility for the show, which means more incredible guests for you. And why wouldn't you want that? I'll leave a link in the show notes to leave us a five star review. Thank you so much. If you want to connect with me, you can hit me up on Twitter at yongsoochung. I'm pretty active there and would love to connect with you. You can find links to all my social accounts in the Show Notes. I'll see you in the next episode of First Class Founders.