The Solopreneur Podcast is not a comedy podcast, but it’s certainly very relevant to comedians. Hosted by Michael O’Neal, each episode features an interview with a “solopreneur,” which is essentially a person who has built a career out of working for themselves and being an independent entrepreneur.

In November 2013, Adam Carolla was a guest on the show and talked about everything from how he’s approached his career to the mistakes he thinks most comedians make. Below are a few key takeaways from the episode, and you can listen to the full episode here.

1. Everything Adam Has Done, He’s Had To Do Himself

At the start of the episode O’Neal points out that one of the reasons he felt Carolla would be a great fit for his show is because he’s an example of a comedian who has pretty much had to do everything himself in his career. Lots of comedians have to make their own breaks, but Carolla has definitely taken it even further building a podcast empire pretty much on his own.

2. Recognize That You’re Not Special

At around the 12:30 mark of the episode, Carolla explains that early on in his career he realized he was not going to be the kind of person who was going to just nail an audition and land a gig. He realized nobody trusted him or thought he was anything special. Taking that into account, he decided early on that if he was going to succeed, he was going to have to create his own vehicle.

3. It’s Not What You Think That Matters

At around the 16:30 mark of the episode, Carolla gives comics some blunt advice: “Stop thinking you’re special.” He then points out that it doesn’t matter if you think you’re special, it’s what the guy on the other side of the desk things that actually matters.

It’s a great point and one I think too many comics forget – while it’s important to have confidence in your abilities, it’s also important to realize that just because you think you’re great that doesn’t mean anybody else does.

4. Go For What You Know

Around the 24-minute mark, Carolla talks about how important it is to focus on what you really know when you’re starting out and trying to develop material. He points out that one of his earliest characters was Mr. Birchum, a character who was a woodworking teacher because it was based on a world he knew very well since he had worked as a carpenter.

5. Be The Guy They Know

Around the 37-minute mark, Carolla shares his advice for getting gigs or opportunities in general. He breaks it down and explains that he believes the best way to get gigs is by “just showing up.” He points out that so much of what he’s done – from radio gigs to working as a boxing trainer – has come as a result of him putting himself in the places where that stuff was happening and hanging around until people got to know him and an opportunity came up.

He mentions that just hanging around in the space where things are happening that you want to be a part of can be up to 80% of what gets you an opportunity. Simply put, “Be the guy they know.”

It’s solid advice and is one of the reasons why you need to hang out in comedy clubs as much as you perform in them.

Have you listened to a podcast episode lately that has helpful information for comedians? If you’d like to write up a summary of it to share on this site, please email me.

Comics spend a lot of time waiting.

Waiting for somebody to give them an opportunity. Waiting to have the time or resources available to put into getting better. Waiting to get picked.

But waiting doesn’t get you closer to succeeding. Starting does.

If you feel like you’re guilty of doing a little too much waiting, here’s a few things you might want to think about to start figuring things out and advancing your career.

Don’t Expect To Get It Right The First Time

The first thing you need to do is break from the mindset that you need to get something right the first time you do it. Whether it’s the first time you tell a joke, write a blog post, record a podcast, ask people to join your email list, or just about anything else you try to do, the chances are you will not get it right the first time you do it.

You’ll fail. And that’s fine.

It’s easy to paralyze yourself by thinking you need to do something right the first time you do it. Instead, accept the idea the idea that things probably won’t go as planned initially but recognize that the sooner you have a first time, the closer you are to getting something right.

Action Is ALWAYS Better Than Inaction

One of the best career tactics you can employ is to focus on being active as much as possible and to avoid being inactive. You want to be somebody who constantly does things, tries things, and pushes forward as opposed to somebody who forever plans and dreams without actually doing much of anything.

It can feel scary and risky to take action sometimes, but action is always better for your career than inaction. Even a step in the wrong direction can teach you lessons that ultimately help you move forward. If you stand still, you’ll never get anywhere.

Learn From Your Mistakes

Once you’ve broken from the false premise that you need to succeed the first time you do something and once you’ve embraced the importance of action over inaction, the next thing to do is focus on learning from your mistakes.

There’s nothing wrong with making mistakes…unless you keep making the same ones.

When something you try doesn’t work out, analyze the reasons why and make adjustments. You want to experiment and learn as much as you possibly can from your mistakes – that’s how you get better and ultimately how you further your career.

Mistakes are opportunities. Think of them that way and you’ll be well on your way to figuring things out.

Good luck!

A few days ago comedian J-L Cauvin wrote a great blog post detailing the results (and frustration) generated by his recent album release.

He expressed some thoughts I’m sure a lot of comics share when it comes to the challenge of monetizing their art and in particular when it comes to releasing albums, so I thought I’d share some of my own thoughts on the subject here.

But before I get into the specifics, I’d like to say that I’m a fan of J-L’s, think he’s a great comic with a bright future, and think he’s doing a lot of things right. I’m not criticizing what he’s doing, but rather sharing my take on the things he brought up in an effort to help comics see a different perspective on things.

You should definitely read J-L’s full post, but here’s a few excerpts that caught my eye, along with my thoughts.

View Counts Are Not Fan Counts

“I embarked on a plan to raise my profile and when my name recognition was at its highest (at least relative to my own career) release my best album and hope for the best. So the plan started off with a bang with “Louis CK Tells The Classics” the viral video of my Louis CK impression. I then made subsequent videos (Alt Wolf, Scared Straight) that got spread all around and promoted within the comedy world.”

J-L’s Louis CK video was certainly a hit and got him a lot of attention. But, I have to wonder how much of that attention he actually converted into an ongoing connection to potential fans?

The video has more than 300,000+ views,but I wonder how many of those viewers wound up subscribing to J-L’s email list? I assume not many.

And his YouTube channel still only has 300 subscribers, so it’s not like they connected to him there either.

I also noticed that aside from a mention of his website at the end of the video, there’s no plug or links in the description or anywhere encouraging people to connect with him – either by email subscription (ideally) or some other method such as subscribing to his YouTube channel.

So this means that likely a lot of people who saw and liked the video, never had any idea that his new album existed because he had no way to reach them. He had no “connection” to them. As a result, the success of his video was nothing more than a blip and some missed opportunities.

The video had exposed him to a lot of people, but that exposure is meaningless without a way to reach those people again.

Free Is More Powerful Than You Realize

“Also giving me hope was the fact that my previous album was downloaded 1000 times (granted it was a free download) and received 70+ ratings/reviews on iTunes. So the only barrier to reaching that level (if not beyond) was the price tag on iTunes of $9.99 (or $8.99 on Amazon).  I figured that might create a dip from 1000, but at the same time I thought it might not be as big a dip because I am more well known in October 2013 than I was in February 2012 when Too Big To Fail was released.”

There’s literally been books written (I highly recommend this one) about the impact/value of free so I won’t bore you by getting into all of those details now, but here’s one important thing to understand – the biggest price point hurdle for people to get past is the difference between free and not free.

It might not seem like a big deal for somebody to spend $10, but it is compared to spending nothing, and it was probably a faulty assumption to think there wouldn’t be a huge dropoff between the free album and the one he charged for.

In general, a targeted audience who is interested in what you do will convert about 2% of the time into purchasing a specific product. Obviously that’s a generalization, but it’s a decent rule of thumb to think that 2% of the interested people that you can reach with a product will buy that product. If you buy into that ratio, then in order to sell 1,000 albums J-L would have had to expose his album to 50,000 fans.

I have no idea exactly how many fans were exposed to J-L’s album, but I’m guessing it wasn’t anywhere close to that number and therefore his estimates were off.

Taken a step further, I wonder how many of the 1,000 people who had downloaded his previous album were aware of the new one? Did he have email addresses from that first 1,000? If so, how many bought this one? Those would be really informative metrics to better understand what happened with this new album.

You Have To Sell What People Want To Buy

“This is not me wondering why KMEC is not above Eminem and Pearl Jam on the iTunes chart, but rather how a better product (even if you think I suck at comedy (i.e. idiots), this album sucks least of anything I have produced) with better name recognition and better promotion can fare so much worse all for adding an $8.99/$9.99 price tag?  This year has sort of been an experiment by me – if I offer quality products (blogs, videos, podcast appearances, podcasts, etc.) for free and then ask for people to pay for one comedy thing (the album), then all the free stuff and the effort would pay off with one nice pay day.  But it did not really pan out.”

There’s one huge thing that J-L may have missed in this equation – he’s trying to sell a product that people may not want to buy.

People don’t really buy albums any more – certainly not in the numbers that they used to. Albums are essentially a product people don’t want to pay for – regardless of how much they may like J-L and his comedy, they just don’t value them as being worth their money.

The entire album industry has crumbled  – both comedy and music. So no matter how great J-L’s promotion would have been, he was still going to be fighting an uphill battle to sell people a product that they’re not inclined to buy in the first place.

This Wall Street Journal article has some stats that you might find eye-opening: The 200 best selling comedy albums in 2011 combined sold just 2 million copies total, with the Lonely Island’s album selling the most copies that year with 215,000 sold. That means the average sales for a Top 200 comedy album (not counting the Lonely Island album) was less than 10,000 copies.

And that was two years ago – the numbers are probably worse this year.

So no matter what he would have done, it was going to be an uphill battle trying to sell an album in this climate.

A Failure Doesn’t Mean You’re Not On The Right Path To Success

“All things equal I have had 50,000 unique visitors to my website in 2013, had my podcast listener average increase from 200 to about 400+ people per week, gained over 310,000 YouTube views to name a few metrics, which were huge increases from 2012 and yet by charging $9.99 for an album instead of free, led to a massive drop off in downloads.  I know this sounds like complaining, but it is really more confusion than anything else.  I long ago gave up on getting rich from comedy, but this year has taught me that producing high quality content, building your circle of fans/viewers/listeners means little in increasing your bottom line, if you are truly a do-it-yourself artist.”

It’s great that J-L’s getting more traction to his website, podcast, and YouTube videos and I understand his frustration, but I think there’s a different way to view this. J-L’s been doing comedy for a while and is a veteran performer, but it’s only relatively recently that he’s committed to online content and growing his fanbase in a grassroots way.

And, just like it takes years to get good on stage, it takes years to build a fanbase online.

Most comics understand that it’s going to take the better part of a decade to get any traction with their act, but they seem to expect that building a fanbase online can happen much quicker. It doesn’t.

I understand why he would be frustrated by his album sales, but he really shouldn’t be. He’s making great progress online, getting better at creating and marketing his content, gaining attention, and learning how to convert that attention into fans. But no matter how good he is and how much progress he’s making, it takes time.

Hopefully, this frustration won’t get in the way of the progress he’s making because I really do think he’s on the right track to some pretty good stuff down the line. And the irony is there’s a lot of comedians out there who would be well served to do half of what he’s doing even in “failure.”