Ep. 81 | From Hobby to Hustle: How a DIY Music Entrepreneur Built a Thriving Business

How do you turn a passion project into a thriving business?

In this episode, Jason W. Taylor sits down with Benedikt Hain, founder of The Self-Recording Band and Outback Recordings, to discuss how he built an international online coaching business from his home studio.

Benedikt shares his journey from being a DIY musician in Germany’s punk scene to becoming a music production coach and entrepreneur.

His story highlights key lessons for startup founders, including the power of community-driven business models, how to scale an online business, and why embracing coaching and mentorship can transform a side hustle into a sustainable venture. Whether you're a musician, tech entrepreneur, or creative founder, this episode is packed with insights on launching and growing a niche business in a competitive space.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

· From Freelancer to Founder – Benedikt Hain turned his DIY passion into a thriving global coaching business, proving that organic growth and community-driven models can scale.

· The Power of Community – The Self-Recording Band Syndicate became a global hub for musicians, showing how building a strong network enhances engagement and retention—a lesson startup founders can apply.

· Scaling an Online Business – Transitioning from one-on-one work to digital courses and memberships allowed Benedikt to scale without burning out, a strategy relevant to subscription-based startup models.

· The Role of Business Coaching – Working with a business coach transformed his strategy, showing founders why mentorship and external perspectives are crucial for scaling efficiently.

· Overcoming the Fear of Launching – Whether releasing music or launching a startup, perfectionism holds many back. Benedikt and Jason Taylor discuss how founders must push past fear and launch to grow.

Connect with our guest:
Benedikt Hain on LinkedIn
Check out The Self-Recording Band Website

Watch this video episode on YouTube

Transcript

Jason W. Taylor: 0:00

Welcome to We Code, You Launch, the startup community podcast from CodeLaunch and Improving. This is episode 81. It is a very special episode. It is the first one We're going to post-produce as a video for our CodeLaunch YouTube channel. We are going to continue this for all of our episodes throughout 2025 and beyond. So if you're hearing this on Spotify or iTunes or Amazon or anywhere else, make sure you check out CodeLaunch on YouTube and subscribe if you enjoy it. We'll get right to our special guest today on this historic episode. But first... I am Jason W. Taylor, president and founder of CodeLaunch. And you are listening to We Code, You Launch, a podcast for tech startups and the community of founders, technologists, and investors that support CodeLaunch, the world's only free accelerator where elite professional coders compete to launch tech startups. Today, we have a very special guest. It's special because I am a fan of his. and a client of his exceptional service platform. He is the founder of Outback Recordings and the Self Recording Band. I have been an active member of that community since 2023. And that means our guest is my music production coach and mentor. And we're going to find out about my music hobby today. His name is Benedikt Heim. He is based in Germany. Might be the first international, at least cross seas, guest on our podcast. And Benedict is a mixing engineer and music production coach. He helps DIY musicians make exciting sounding records from their home studios. The strong DIY culture of the hardcore punk scene that he grew up in had a big impact on his approach to business. He learned early on how to figure stuff out, build something from nothing and solve problems. The goal was never to be an entrepreneur, but somewhere along the way, he discovered his passion for building business and realized that running a business is about creating value, connecting people, and having a positive impact on the world. So without further ado, welcome to the We Code You Launch podcast, Benedict Heim. Hello, Benny.

Benedikt Hain: 2:47

Hello, Jason. Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor to be on this first ever video episode that you're doing. That's cool.

Jason W. Taylor: 2:54

Hey, man. We're so lucky. I'm glad you asked right when you did. So perfect timing. We've got 80 other episodes on audio if you're interested. This is our first of many, which will be video and audio, as I mentioned. So I discovered Benny. I think everybody in the community calls you Benny. Is that right?

Benedikt Hain: 3:15

Yeah, that's right.

Jason W. Taylor: 3:16

I picked it up from the other guy. I forgot his name on the podcast. He called Malcolm. Yeah, Malcolm. Malcolm always calls you Benny. So I found their podcast first, and it was called the self recording band. And I went, Oh, that's exactly what I hope to do all over again. And I've been talking about for 20 years. And, and then I found his DIY music production community and platform for learning about it and together both the podcast and the platform are the self-recording band so let's let Benny explain what this community is and what it offers so Benny tell us more about the self-recording band

Benedikt Hain: 4:00

yeah thank you so the self-recording band is an online platform, like you said, where we help self-recording musicians make records that they are very proud of and excited to share with the world. And we do that through one-on-one mentoring. We do that through community, through online video courses and a free podcast. And so there's different tiers, different levels of like service that we provide basically. and it all started as just the podcast and everything else just happened organically basically but yeah this is this is what we do

Jason W. Taylor: 4:35

so i discovered it um right in the middle of the pandemic when there was no gym to go to so um there's no gym to go to and i was like okay i'm gonna walk around my neighborhood and sometimes i'm gonna jog and i'm gonna do push-ups so like it might have been like day one or two i was like well i have this spotify i know there's millions of podcasts in it i hardly ever really consume podcasts at that point and i don't know what happened i just found yours i think i was thinking like i wonder if anybody has a podcast for people that try to record music because i was as time had been going on through my life i've been thinking more and more and more this is getting closer and closer i'm almost to the point where my kids are going to go to college and then i'm not going to have any excuse anymore to get this passionate hobby back on track. And that being the passionate hobby I had before I had kids had gotten in the way of the baby coming. So we liquidated everything in the space and it became a baby room. And that was back in 2001. So I knew I could do it and I knew that the technology had moved along and I knew that maybe I would find resources to help. And man, was I so happy to find that podcast. And I started hitting, I think it must've been on episode around 60 at the time.

Benedikt Hain: 6:03

And so I

Jason W. Taylor: 6:05

started hitting like, you know, more and more episodes. First I learned about, you know, tracking software, DAW applications, and then a little bit about hardware. And boy, at first I was really into miking drums. And that's one of the hardest things. that you'll ever do, recording music, is trying to record drums. Right, Benny?

Benedikt Hain: 6:29

Yeah, very true, very true. Like it's up there on the

Jason W. Taylor: 6:31

mountain. It's up there at top, high on the mountain. So I was really kind of like, oh, I can do this. And I've learned all new ways to do everything. With all of Benny's platform at the Self-Recording Band's guidance, there's also interactivity with the other members that are like me. There's self-paced curriculum classes. There's actual one-on-one coaching and group coaching sessions. I have actually published one song. So if you're curious, I don't know if Benny will tell you that this song stands like, represents what he had in mind, but I'm real happy with it. Like real excited about it. and tell almost every person about it. And I'm pretty sure you'll see me perform it at Code Launch soon because we have a nice karaoke mix track where I can get up there and let it rip. You can check out Aut6, A-U-G-H-T-S-I-C-K-S. We'll put that in the podcast episode notes. It's on every platform. So Benny, I think that, at least in me, you can see a person that your vision is exactly fulfilling what you set out to do. So I'm curious, could you share with us the Genesis story of this? And I know it seems like to me it came out of Outback Recordings. Yeah. And so maybe like start there and then take it forward. Sure.

Benedikt Hain: 8:12

So Outback Recordings, like you said, is the other business that I have, which is my mixing studio. And this is what I've done all my life, my adult life. I've never had a day job. I just happened to become a mixing engineer. I was a I remember, so I had another podcast actually, that was also called the Outback Recordings Podcast. So I always kept it very simple with the names. And the other podcast was me interviewing people from the music scene, labels, bands, promoters, other engineers, people that I knew from working together. And I interviewed them on my podcast and just had conversations with them. And that was partly a way to get me mixing clients for the studio, but then also just a way of networking and meeting cool people. And so that has worked really well to build my studio business. And then at some point I met Malcolm, which was my co-host for the past almost six years now, crazy. And he, we, we met online in some kind of forum and he was asking for advice, recording advice, and I helped him out a little bit. And then I had questions for him. And then at some point he said like, you know what, you should do another podcast. and we should like help people who record themselves. Like we should just all the things we've learned from working with artists in the mixing studio, all those insights and all the lessons we've learned, we should just, you know, put that out there and help people who record themselves. And I was not really into that idea because I already had that other podcast. I was full with mixing work and I'm like, I don't have the bandwidth for this, but he kind of talked me into this and I'm very glad he did. And then the second podcast did way better, even better than the first one. And we did that for a while. And then he said, or we together said, maybe let's do an online course, a video course, something where it's like more or less passive once it's done. Turns out it's not passive at all to run like an education online business, even if you do courses like it's just a lot of work still. And so but we did that. We filmed our first course, put that out there and then added another one. And then, yeah, then it turned from just the podcast into kind of a second business, at least a little bit of a side income with those video courses that we were selling. And then I got to a point where it was just too much. And in terms of like the workload I had and things I put on my plate and all the things I was struggling. And I reached out to a business coach actually, to help me just figure out what I can do. Like, what do I need to cut? What should I focus on? How can I grow this? My wife was pregnant at the time. So I was like getting a little more serious about this. It was not just about me. And so I had to make it all work and also have time, all of that. And And then this business coach, Brian Hood, he's kind of, I would say we've, you know, not friends, but like, it's a little more than a coach at this point. I've been working for so long with him together and we really, yeah, know each other well. And he's helped me a lot. And he said, you know what? I'm not going to help you with your studio business. That's about as as big as you can get in the kind of niche that you're working in. So there's not that there's just a cap. There's only so much you can do. I'm not going to help you with the video courses either, because that's not the best business model for what you're trying to do in his opinion. But what if you build a coaching platform and a community and you work one on one with people? And I was shocked because I was like, that's the last thing I want to do right now. That sounds like even more work and like, no. And then he explained the model to me and showed me a couple of examples. And then I trusted him and I went with it. and I've built this platform and everything that we do now. And I'm so grateful that we did it that way. And yeah, that's when we added the coaching and now it's all of it, but in a much better, like done much better and with a much better model behind it. And it's very, very fulfilling. So yes, what I'm doing now and what you've done in the program is pretty much what I always wanted to do. I just wanted to help people make great music that they are proud of. And I'm not the judge of if the music is good or not or whatever. It's important to me that the artists themselves are proud of what they've done and that they get excited when they share it with their friends and family or a bigger audience. And if that happens, I'm happy. And I can do that with my mixing work, but I can also do that with the coaching. And every single time it happens, I'm like, that's exactly what I always wanted to do. I just, without external help, I wouldn't, have done it that way. And I'm very glad I had that help.

Jason W. Taylor: 12:44

You know, I had a business coach, Ashlyn, who's on our team and in the studio with me. She knows this business coach. We hired him at Code Authority in around 2013. And it started off with one-on-one coaching with me. And it was so great to have someone else to like download the all the things that were like overburdening you. And he helped me like just think of things in a whole new way that weren't from a stress perspective and like a clench and fear perspective, but like in just a completely different professional perspective. And that evolved. His name is Melarch Mitchell, and he runs a company that supports CodeLaunch called Drive Influence. He eventually was like, hey, why don't you let me start involving your team. And because I can help elevate their perspective about what your perspective is maybe better than you can, because I'm an independent person and I can get them to realize their job is to take responsibility, own it and deliver great outcomes and to let you stop worrying about all the things and worry about other things. And it evolved over years and it got bigger and bigger. And the more we invested in it, the more good outcomes we had. So there's a couple of, uh, thoughtful endorsements for business coaching as a service. If your business gets to the point where it's really valuable, you are kind of strung out and stressed out and stuck on it and you need help, business coaches are great. So Benny, like I said, I'm an example, I think, of a good outcome. I'm not going to say great because to me, it's still about the quality of the music and I I know my first song in 20 years after learning a whole bunch of stuff in about 18 months was pretty awesome and I'm super proud of it, but it's still the first one. And I know that when I get 20, I'm gonna look back on the first one and I'm gonna hear a bunch of defects and things that I don't like anymore. Who knows? Maybe I'll redo it someday. But I'm still really proud of it. And it never would have happened without your platform. It never would have happened. And so guys, what this platform is, in case you are an aspiring musician, let me just kind of explain it. It's a community you join. You get all sorts of built-in classes on how to use complicated digital audio workstation software. You learn all the concepts for all the bells and whistles that you see in those amazing tools that we have available to us here in this generation, which I didn't really have so much back when I recorded an album in 1999 and 2000. And then you have just an incredible community that you interact with and can ask questions. They're all doing the same thing as you. There's one-on-one coaching with Benny. There's group coaching. And in the end, if you're like me, some of those folks are trying to learn mixing. Okay. And what I've learned is like, it's like building a house. If you build a house, there's, there's the foundation crew. They have to be good at what they do. There's the framing crew. Uh, there's the design of the house, the architecture, and then there's like the finish out. and the aesthetic look of the house on the outside. And there's a bunch of other things too. And there's no way I'm gonna try to be good at all those. Just trying to be able to like come up with a song, have the bravery to try to record it, write the lyrics, put it down and listen to it back continually until you get it right, learn all the instruments and then To give that to you at the end and let you do the aesthetic part, like put your paintbrushes on it, on how it sounds over here and over here, it's so valuable. And I don't really care to ever learn any mixing because as soon as I do, I'm gonna forget something else about tracking.

Benedikt Hain: 17:04

Yeah. Yeah, that's how a couple of people do it. And you know, it's funny because You are the perfect student in many ways or a mentee, whatever you want to call it, because when we started this platform and we did our first course, we didn't even include the mixing part we just said yeah that's true we just said um you know what let's teach people the recording the production that's hard enough to do and it's like you are wearing so many hats when you do all of it and you get also so close to it there's a lack of objectivity and there's value in collaborating with others and we always believed in that and that's what we initially wanted to do it turns out though that a lot of people have already or many people actually have already made that decision that they want to also mix themselves because they want to have have the full creative control. There's just no way they're ever gonna hire anyone. And so I said, okay, If that decision already has been made, I would still recommend you go and hire a mix engineer. But if you already know you're going to mix it yourself, might as well help you do it a little better. And that's when we added the whole mixing part. And now there's two kinds of people. Some just record and let others mix and others want to do it all themselves. But originally, that was the vision to teach people to how to record or help them record and produce and get the ideas onto a hard drive. And so the thing they can then send it off to mixing, get better results. And while their song is being mix, they can already work on the next one. But yeah, different

Jason W. Taylor: 18:34

people. Yeah, I get it. But for me, I need I need the cutoff point. I need that so much. It helps me get the song done knowing that if I deliver everything to you in the way that you've asked for, that you're going to put it right into your professional setup there. outback recordings, and you're going to be able to use the experience of mixing, I don't know how many 1000s of songs, most of them rock songs, which I'm a, I'm a rock guy, man. Yeah. And that's exactly what we do. And to know that there's that demarcation point is, is actually makes me more productive, because I know I don't have this tremendous mountain I have to keep climbing. I get to just jump off at the first peak and toss it over to you and you can take it up to the next mountain. And then I get a little break because it takes some weeks to get a song mixed. It comes back and forth between me and Benny, which is a really fun process. Like I'm out at a bar with my friends and I'm like, I think I'm going to get an email any minute. I got my email. I run out to my car and I'm like, we want to go. No, you can't go. You can't go yet. And then I'll go back in, okay. All right, this one's good enough, you can go. Come on, come on, we're gonna go out to the car. And then that goes like four or five times until you're happy and then you're done. And then you have this like feeling of accomplishment and then you're free to think about new ideas. And now I'm up to the point that I have new ideas all the time. In fact, Benny, I'm seriously going to put some effort, some like creative exploration effort into creating some original production music for the Code Launch Show. Oh, wow, that's exciting. So the Code Launch Show, Benny has been to one. Of course, we have never been to Europe yet. This morning, I was asked to take it to Bangalore, India, but we haven't been to Europe. And, you know, it's, we call it Ventertainment. So we make a entertaining show evening at a rock venue that is about business startups but fun music sometimes we've had stand-up comedians um you know there's crowd engagement and dynamic crowd interactivity that's a lot of fun and we're rolling out new elements to that this year because we went on tour like we i call it on tour we did a show in a different city every quarter for 10 quarters, which is two and a half years, less than 90 days apart, or a little bit around 90 days apart, including recruit the class of startup founders, put them through the curriculum. And I have a curriculum kind of like you do. And honestly, I modeled a lot of the things that we do from the way that you do it at the self-recording band. That's not a joke. Like, if you listen to one of our audio podcasts... there's been a few times where I had CC, our creative engineer, listen to your podcast and like, see how they do this there? Let's incorporate that into what we do. And so it's been so much more valuable to me than you know, because I kind of have the same thing, but at the end, there's not a song, there's a live pitch to an enthused, interactive audience, investors, there's chance to raise money and our startups are running on an average run rate the ones that do raise that have been finalists it's somewhere above six hundred thousand dollars in raise which is about all you want to raise at this stage absolutely you don't want to actually raise two or three million right off the bat uh or you're going to be giving up too much at the beginning so sure um Yeah. So we're going to be, I'm going to be recording some like production stuff. I'm thinking about converting the way I used to do like the speech about code launch, what it is and the why of it. I'm thinking about changing it into like a spoken word sort of first with all problem, you know, like I didn't really know how it's going to go. I'm going to have to get creative, but I'm going to make it where the crowd is like, what the heck am I at here?

Benedikt Hain: 23:02

That's the way to do it. Well, that's exciting. And thank you so much for saying that. That's an honor to hear and very, very cool. Yeah.

Jason W. Taylor: 23:11

So you might be mixing a very unusual track here in the May-June timeframe before our June 25th event in Toronto, Canada. All right. So, Benny, you've been working at this now, I guess, five or six years. Yep. Right? Yeah. but Outback recording's much longer. The community, like kind of like where it's at now, has it set out to meet the financial goals, the metrics and the growth that you envisioned at the beginning? Or is it like, let's be honest with our founder community, is it a continuous struggle? Or is it something that is still gives you the feeling that you wanna, keep doing this for years and growing it for years and kind of where are you at?

Benedikt Hain: 24:03

Yeah, great question. I definitely want to do this for keep doing it for years. It is definitely growing. It is still a struggle, though, but the problems just change. So it has exceeded what I had expected in the beginning very quickly. So like that was after I started working with that business coach and greeted the model and everything. It was actually It did way better than I was expecting it to do. But then when things grow, especially if, you know, I used to be a freelancer and I didn't consider myself like a business owner. I didn't have a team. I didn't know a lot of the things about running a business. I had to learn all of that. And when I kind of transitioned from being just a freelancer trading hours for money into actually running a small business, then it was exciting, but also new problems come up and it is a different kind of struggle then. But I'm not complaining because that's just growing pains and that's part of it. But yeah, it's growing. Now we're at a point, it's interesting because so far the growth has been pretty steady, also pretty predictable. Now I'm at a point once again where I have to figure a few things out, change a couple of things, get new people on the team as well to be able to grow further and also to not be stressed out all the time. There's phases, I guess, like it was pretty smooth sailing last year. Now it gets a little more stressful. I will figure it out and then it will be cool again. And I expect this to happen over and over again every time we kind of hit the next sort of step. So, yeah, it is growing, but I don't know. yet how far I can take this. I have big goals for this. I know there's still a lot of potential, but I also know I cannot do it on my own. So, yeah.

Jason W. Taylor: 25:44

Well, I'm so glad to hear that because, yeah, I need you. I've got a long future in self-recording band syndicate. So, yeah. The group together, Benny calls them a syndicate, which I feel totally cool. I've never been a part of a syndicate. Yeah, that's true. Do you have any merch? You got like some cool...

Benedikt Hain: 26:07

We should do that. You mentioned it before. I'm a syndicate or

Jason W. Taylor: 26:09

something, you know?

Benedikt Hain: 26:10

Yeah, yeah. We need to do that. We only have these shirts for our team that we wear at trade shows or whatever or like conferences and stuff. But no, we don't have official merch yet, but we should definitely do it. We could come up with something cool, though. Ashlyn,

Jason W. Taylor: 26:24

let's send Benny some Code Launch merch. Oh, man, I would love that. With a self-addressed return envelope inside. So when he gets some merch, he can just stuff something in there and

Benedikt Hain: 26:36

send it back to us. Yeah, yeah. No, we should absolutely do this. There's a couple of things that I want to do more in terms of like with the community things, because the community part turned out to be much more valuable than I initially thought. I initially thought that people would be more into the whole one-on-one thing. But actually, the community has almost become the most important part of it. There has been collaborations. There have been collaborations between members. The group calls are always a lot of fun. And, and it's, it's this, like, even when I go to audio conferences or the NAMM show in LA or a festival in Vancouver last year or anywhere across Europe, there's always people from our community who like walk up to us and then we have a little get together and the meetup. And it's like, it's grown into something that I, I didn't really expect. I, yeah, I, that's just the value of community. I kind of underestimated that a little bit. And so I want to do more to grow that aspect of it for sure.

Jason W. Taylor: 27:37

Improving is a software development and consulting services firm founded in 2006, with locations across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Improving is deeply committed to establishing trust with clients, partners, communities, and more. Improving offers modern digital consulting services like software development and engineering, IT consulting services, and agile training and certifications. Whether you need software solutions, technology consulting, or training, Improving is dedicated to supporting your business every step of the way. Feel free to explore our offerings at Improving.com. Most importantly, since 2019, Improving has been our partner here at Code Launch and is helping us scale our traveling event in community across North America. Well, I think I could speak for most of us. We'd be proud to wear the brands because we really enjoy it. It's so much fun. It does take time, though. Boy, does it take time to... Now for me, because I still struggle with the DAW a little bit here and there. I catch myself avoiding doing things because I'm not really sure how to do it. And I don't want to have to search for one more, like how to do it. The more granular you get, right? Like it's so much faster to ask you than it is to like search and then watch a video, get through it and realize they never answered your question. Damn you Google. And then, you know, so.

Benedikt Hain: 29:22

And also you have limited time, you know, like there are some people who are, you know, full-time or part-time musicians or just have a, you know, nine to five or a lot of hours, you know, outside of work, but you have a pretty busy life, a busy schedule and only so much time to work on music. So. Yeah,

Jason W. Taylor: 29:39

when I sit down sometimes, I'm like, okay, I've got two hours and 45 minutes. I've got a hard cut at 9.45 because if I don't go down and watch Netflix, I'm going to get in trouble. So I'll be like, okay, do I want to tackle this problem? No, I'll leave that one. Let me tackle these five or ten easy ones. And that works for a while, but at some point you need the time with a clear mind. Like when you're creating something that's artistic, you've got to have like a good– Kind of like you got to be in a good mindset. You can't just be like kind of super stressed out about the stock market yesterday or your sister brother annoying you or family stuff. And so sometimes those moments don't line up with the window that you have set. And I've learned all these new things I didn't really ever perceive that I would experience. like that like the creative mindset and you also got to be brave because once you get something kind of done you're like man i gotta put this out there and then like i'm gonna hear people's thoughts about it and you just gotta chuck it

Benedikt Hain: 30:55

yeah absolutely the fear of uh you know hitting the publish button and like we all have like kind of a fear of rejection or a fear of know people criticizing our work or whatever uh but it's part of it and you have to overcome it and just do it and um so one thing you also do back on the time thing real quick is a smart thing that you do is you tend, at least that's how I perceive it. You tend to batch things a lot and you like block out with possible, like longer, you know, blocks of time to just work on music, which I think really helps because you want to be in the flow state. You want to get as much done as possible. There's also like set up time, set up cost every time you sit down and until you, even if you have a good system, it just takes a while to get into it. And then before you know it, it's over again. So that trying to find, you know, longer blocks of time where you can just batch things. that kind of work and really dive into the song and get lost in it like that's, that's a smart thing to do. And and I always recommend that to people compared to just doing an hour here and there, you know, so that has worked for you, I think. Yeah, it has,

Jason W. Taylor: 31:56

especially on this last song. I've had one 13 and a half hour session on a Saturday and I actually had it set my calendar and I planned out my Friday so it wouldn't ruin my Saturday. because I will ruin my Saturday on a Friday. I'll just tell you that right now. I'm that guy. And I had done that a few times and then realized, okay, I am gonna have to not do that to myself. If I'm serious about this Saturday, so like the first time I did it, I had the Friday night was very tame. The Saturday morning was a visit to the gym to start everything off, listening to my favorite new, like, literally brand new kind of music that I like. So hearing new things, not just old things that I love too. And, and then, you know, everyone in my house knew that this was my day. So they were for the most part gone. And I was up till 1 1 32 in the morning till I just couldn't hardly, I had to go to bed, because I wouldn't be able to wake up before 11 the next day. But boy, did I accomplish a lot that day. And then I knocked out another nine or 10 or And I think last Sunday I put in about a seven or eight session and I'm almost done with song number two. So. Awesome. You know, pushing the button like to launch your song is a lot like the fear. A lot of our startup founders, they get to the point where they're like, they have this dream, they have a vision. They may even have co-founders, but they're scared to like, Launch it. Like, this is what we're doing. And it's the same exact human nature fear. It is like, well, if I do that, then I'm going to have to be accountable if it doesn't work. Or I'm going to have to be accountable. I'm going to see my cousin at Thanksgiving. He's going to go, how's that business going? And then they think, I don't want to tell my cousin. Went three months, it folded, and I had to get a job, you know?

Benedikt Hain: 34:03

Yeah. It's so much easier to stay where we are because then, you know, that's safe. That's also boring. It doesn't get you anywhere, but it's safe and you avoid the potential failure. And like, that's very, very normal, I think.

Jason W. Taylor: 34:17

Yeah. And I think if you watch the the World Championship Code Launch 2024 video we have on our YouTube channel, you can watch the entire episode in 20 and 17 minutes. But the winner from Canada, in fact, Materia Bioworks, they will talk about the fact that the code launch program made them get over that. So startups do this thing called stealth mode, where they will join a LinkedIn instance called stealth tech startup. And so that you will see that they're part of some startup, but they can't talk about it. And in the case of Materia, we force them to push the button and come out of stealth. And they won Code Launch Canada. A few months later, they won the World Championship. They won $25,000 there. They've raised so much money, they had to stop investors from asking to invest. They're what's called oversubscribed. And so that's a common thing that I think we all have in common, startup founders, musicians, creative people.

Benedikt Hain: 35:31

And you know what? There's a funny thing where Like it's not just when you start something completely new and you're afraid that it could fail or people could judge you or whatever. There's also, at least for me, um, when you already have something that works and you shift to something else, there can be almost like an identity crisis thing. Like what happened to me was when I, when I went from, um, I was, um, I identified as like, I am a mix engineer. I am, that's what I do. I, I, first I was in bands and then I mixed, but like I wanted to make great records. That's who I was. And then I did this podcast and it It was fun, but it was a way to get, you know, to grow my mixing business. And then I remember that day when a label reached out to me. And that was a label that I always wanted to work with. And some of the bands on that label I really loved. And I saw an email from them in my inbox and I got super excited. I was like, oh, they're probably wanting. I don't know. They want to hire me, whatever. And so I opened that email and then it said, hey, we discovered your podcast. We're big fans of that. And like you want to do you want to put like this band on your get this band on your show and do an interview with this person and whatever. And instead of being happy about this, that they like my podcast and want their artists on my show, I was completely like, that was so frustrating because I'm like, I'm not a podcaster. I want to be known as a, as a mix engineer. I'm, and they saw me as a podcaster and that, and it took a while for me to appreciate that and to realize that that's actually a cool thing and that I can build a new thing, you know, there. And now I don't mind if people see me as an educator or mentor, podcaster, whatever, I'm fine. Uh, but it took a while. And like that almost kept me from pursuing the whole online business thing, because I was like, what if, people don't see me as the mix engineer anymore. And all of a sudden I'm this like online dude that I never wanted to be. And so this can also happen like this almost stopped me.

Jason W. Taylor: 37:18

Well, we're glad it didn't. And yeah, I hope our community will understand that everybody has the same concerns, their human nature. But now that I have one song out there, I am pretty fearless about song two, three, four. I don't even care. It's great. Now I'm just going to put them out and annoy people if they don't like them. And there's some that do, and there's some that don't, and I don't really care. It's so great. It's just the feeling of accomplishment at the end is so fantastic. So, um, Benny, you have something else in a lot in common with our tech startup founding community, which is in our particular startups. They're all tech startups. They're trying to build a digital product that is new and innovative and the special thing that we're good at helping them with is the software development. If they become a finalist in one of our competitions, they get a free elite professional software development team, which tries to fix whatever's wrong with their product or put in amazing new things that it has to do to be able to launch and disrupt and sometimes build up for the first time. Sometimes they come out of code launch and they have something they can show for the first time. And I know that you had to go through a process where you decided you didn't build a digital product, but you had to build a tremendous amount of content into the digital platform that through which your lessons are conducted, the interactivity amongst the members, the chats with you. And I don't even know what that platform is because I've never actually used it in any other way. but I know it must've took some effort to figure that out. So share with us about the evaluation process of that product and what is it?

Benedikt Hain: 39:08

Yeah, absolutely. So there's two actually, but because our video content for like most of it, our courses, they live on our actual website. And that's what we started with. So my website is just theselfrecordingband.com is just a WordPress website. And we use kind of a software suite that lives there, which is a theme and then certain products on top of that, like plugins. It's called Thrive Themes. And it's a theme builder. It's a bunch of custom stuff. It's a membership plugin. It is a course platform. It all lives on the WordPress website. And that's what we started to, what we, yeah, what we used when we started to build the first courses. And that That was relatively simple. I mean, you had to learn a little bit, but they make it really user friendly. And this is great for hosting courses, giving people access to it automatically. You can connect it to like a shopping cart and that kind of thing that that was relatively easy to do. But then when we started the mentoring i needed a community part of it and i needed better like a way of like a project management tool basically because every every everyone in our program has their own what we call a roadmap like their own um login where you have your songs and your assignments tasks whatever we we agreed to do together and so we had to have kind of a i was looking for a productivity tool that also had like a community or chat sort of integration and so i tried a bunch of things and there's no really great solution out there in my opinion for what i exactly wanted to do so i uh it's a bit of a hybrid so We left the courses on the website, and then we used this other tool called Plutio, the P-L-U-T-I-O. Plutio. Plutio, yeah, which is actually a productivity software. So the roadmaps, the projects inside there are like Kanban board, Trello style things. And you can have as many projects as you want. You can have unlimited clients. At least when I signed up, when they launched it, they did a lifetime deal thing. And I just hope they survive and I can keep are using it now they limited it i think it's a limited amount of clients you can have and there's a monthly subscription of course but um you can have a in my case i can have unlimited clients and a limited amount of contributors which are my team members who have more permission access stuff and so every client can have their own project their roadmap there is the check community And it has worked really well for us. And it's a white label thing. So you can have your own branding. You can have your own domain. You can connect it with the website. And so when people join the program now, they get access to this coaching portal. And they also get access to where our courses are hosted. And that's how we do it.

Jason W. Taylor: 41:57

So that's a really good example, too, for our community. Because Benny was able to build a new and innovative, literally, as far as I know, the only one that exists on earth it is that offers this incredible interactive educational and rewarding service to people and he didn't have to build a digital product and there's there's some groups in our community that just jumped the conclusion they have to build something and he's able to use and leverage plutio wordpress and a wordpress plus press plug-in for all of us to consume their content and Yeah, it took me about one full year to get through my beginner to have a song done roadmap. Yeah. But my last song, it's almost done. I didn't even start tracking it seriously until right before Christmas. So like December is when I started kind of like getting some work done and getting it down. So I've cut that down by, you know, 75% almost. So I'm looking forward to a bunch of more work and a bunch of more support from Benny and everybody at the self-recording band and Outback Recordings. And so we have just a minute or two left, Benny. Yes. Let us know what's new, what's coming next in 2025 and beyond for the self-recording band and Outback Recordings.

Benedikt Hain: 43:33

Happy to share. So one thing that's new is that we're I don't know if you've listened to the podcast lately, but Malcolm, unfortunately, left us. We're still really good friends, but he just focuses on other things now. He's doing more camera work, less audio work, and so it was just a natural decision. This means we have a new co-host. His name is Manel. He's from Madrid, Spain. He is actually a Syndicate member, and he joined my coaching program in 2024. about one and a half years ago. And he just got really, really good through the help of our coaching program. He turned his passion and side hustle that he had into his full time gig now. So that's very awesome. And I'm very proud that I was able to help him like that. And then we started hiring him to edit our podcast and to edit some of our content. And he's just really, really good. And now he became the new co-host. And we so that's new. The other thing is that while we're doing this, we thought like, let's change a few things up. It's been five or six years. We need to improve. We need to get better always. And so what we're now finally doing is that we're not just talking about all the things audio. We're actually showing all of this on the episodes with audio examples, which is harder to do than you think on a podcast because some of the platforms are just mono and there's like different kind of audio problems. But we figured out a way and now we talk about the things, but we also have audio examples and actually show what it sounds like on the podcast. So that's new. It sounds obvious for an audio podcast, but it's really not. And the other podcasts out there almost always are just interview episodes and talking. We changed that now. And then the other thing is our community. The way it was before was you could buy courses without coaching. or you could get into the syndicate and get one-on-one mentoring. Now what we're doing at the moment is we're offering a new tier, a new membership tier, where when you purchase any of our video, standalone video courses on just a certain subject, like mixing or recording or editing, whatever, You also get 90 days access to the syndicate, but only the group part of it. So you can join the group calls. You can ask questions in the community. You can interact with members. You can pre-submit question for the group calls. And we help you for the first 90 days to get the most out of the course that you just bought. So there's a little bit of support. There's a little bit of accountability so that people actually implement what they learn in the courses. And then after those 90 days, you can either stay in that community on a monthly retainer basis. Or you can upgrade to one-on-one mentoring if that's what you want. Then you get full access to me and all your questions answered and all the stuff we did together. But that's new. So more people have access to the community now, which I think benefits the community. And it helps more people make the most out of the courses they just bought. So yeah, those are the updates at the self-recording band. And for the studio, it's basically just mixing more exciting music. One little project I can mention is I'm just at the moment mixing a... 80s glam rock hair metal kind of thing for a band from India of all places. But they are really, really good. I've mixed a single for them a couple of years ago. I think it's one of the most successful ones that I've ever mixed. It has like hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube and I think a couple of millions overall. But they came back just for a new record. And I love this band. So this just happens at the studio and it's just mixing a lot of songs. Yeah.

Jason W. Taylor: 47:06

All right, man. Well, we're glad to have you to support us, amateur musicians, DIY musicians. And I'm looking forward to sending you some new songs in 2025 and beyond. So we'll wrap it there. Thanks to my code launch team, CC, Ashlyn, and Eve, everyone at Improving, and our special guest, Benedict Time, with the self-recording band and Outback Recordings. If you enjoyed the content of this podcast episode, please subscribe wherever you listen or watch. Founders, hit our website to find out when our next competition or event is. And follow CodeLaunch on social media. Dive into our news page to find out more about our 2025 schedule. And remember, CodeLaunch community, keep your feet on the ground, but keep reaching for the startups.