Sometimes we know deep down when we need to leave something behind – a project, a circumstance, a person, whatever we may be. So, why do we tend to hold on to things that are no longer serving us?
In this episode of Creativity Excitement Emotion, David shares why he hesitated to pull the plug on Music Entrepreneur HQ, and why he felt like he should have done it sooner.
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Highlights:
00:17 – Addressing the elephant in the room
00:41 – The embarrassment of public failures
02:53 – Rebranding can be risky
04:01 – How much work is involved in moving to a new platform?
05:00 – Knowing when to pull the plug
Transcript:
So if you've been listening to me to this point, there's a pretty good chance you already know about Music Entrepreneur HQ and some of the decisions that I had to make around it. And looking back, I think I would have pulled the plug on it much sooner, but there are obviously reasons why I didn't. And I think that's what we're going to be looking at in this particular episode.
And the first reason is because of, I think, the same thing that we all deal with. Sometimes a very public failure. Did I want music entrepreneur HQ to be documented as something or known as something that had failed, something that I created and poured my blood, sweat and tears into that just didn't quite find the footing that I was looking for.
Don't get me wrong. I think it's all relative. It had traffic, it converted a certain number of sales, it attracted readers and sometimes converted them into subscribers or even buyers. Which is incredible. And that's what we were looking to create with Music Entrepreneur HQ. It just never quite happened at the scale that we were looking to have it happen at.
Either because we had trouble growing it beyond a certain point, or because of just adverse circumstances. Although, like, I'm not too quick to blame circumstances, uh, I would say that there was botnet attacks. And so there were things that I did not know that happened in the background. And if we had staff or if we had experts and people that knew how to handle that kind of thing, I suppose, you know, that kind of thing could have been dealt with.
And now that I know that that's something that needs to be dealt with, I can put structures and people and resources in place to make sure. That we handle those types of scenarios in the future. It's a lesson, right? Something I can learn. Something I can grow from. Um, I think that's the good news about, like, any mistakes that's made is you learn from it and you can do better in the future.
So, yeah, number one reason is just like, hey, this just sucks. We all have had failures. There's just no way to go through this life without ever having failed at anything. And, just so happens to be far more public than some other stuff might be, right? If you fail in private, no big deal. And then failing in public is just, it's a completely different experience, right?
And so that's one of the things that I had to face in pulling the plug on it. Number two, moving to a different site or a different platform or a different brand. You know, you think you might have something on your hands when it's getting a certain amount of traffic and conversion sales. And then moving over to something entirely new or different could be risky.
I guess I sort of had something in my back pocket, which is the fact that content marketing musician, while not thriving, sort of did well on its own in that it kind of began to attract some traffic without really a whole lot of effort. There was no backlash around the brand. Even though I was thinking about maybe choosing a different brand, like the Renegade Musician, I also thought about keeping the Music Entrepreneur HQ brand.
There is just this growing awareness that it needed to be and it had to b...
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