From Rapping In The Basement To The Cover Of Forbes

How tricking yourself into winning will cause you to actually win.

Whats poppin?

Its Zach again, and i’ve got an entrepreneur that can teach you the skill of turning something negative into something positive.

This week, were taking a look at the 30 year old independent rap legend and professional hater debater, Russell James Vitale, better known as Russ.

Russ is a rapper who amassed an empire doing what everyone else wasn’t willing to do.

And in 10 minutes or less, you’re going to learn:

✔️How he marketed his music business, and how you apply his method into your own business

✔️How he structured his company to retain equity, and why you should do the same

✔️How his mindset caused him to succeed, and how you can think like him to help your own business

Now when it comes to successful entrepreneurs, I don’t think many people can top what Russ has done in such a small amount of time.

Lets look at some numbers to understand what he was able to accomplish:

Now those are some juicy numbers, I might start writing some bars too.

So I have broken down Russ’ business and belief system, so lets first look at his approach practically.

1. How he did it:

Russ started his rap career just like many of your favorite artists like Lil Uzi Vert, Lil Yachty, and XXXTentacion, on a website called SoundCloud.

For those of you who were born after 2005, SoundCloud is a platform where anyone can post their music and have it pushed to a wider audience.

Think of Twitter, but specifically for music promotion. And also before Elon ruined it.

So Russ began his journey in 2012 making as much music as he could. He would literally make an album a month, and upload it consistently for 2 years.

And for those two years he had basically no traction whatsoever.

He even mentions the fact that his mom told him to go back to college and focus on school, because this music thing wasn’t working out as well as he hoped.

That’s when Russ got a brilliant idea to secure the bread.

He noticed that the number of listeners would drop off significantly after the first song in his album.

So instead of making an entire album, he decided to make one new song a week and market it in smaller bits and pieces.

And that is what caused his SoundCloud to start exploding because people wanted more dopamine hits of those smooth rhymes all the time.

Takeaway:

If you start a business and things aren’t working out, it might not be your product, it might be your marketing.

You could have the secret to happiness for sale in your back pocket, but if you don’t know how to sell it correctly or how to market…

Your product will be more useless then a screen door on a submarine.

2. What he did differently with his company:

So if we take a quick look at the structure of the music business, we can see that the business structure is kind of one sided, to put it lightly.

The music business consists of a relationship between two people:

Musicians who just start out usually don’t have the resources to make a lot of high quality albums, because that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.

So artists who want to build a career almost always sign a record deal with a large label or corporation.

But here’s the problem….

Record labels flash a bunch of money in your face, but in return they ask for ownership of your business.

And were not talking a measly 10% - 15% like on Shark Tank.

They can take up to 70% of your entire business model…

SEVENTY PERCENT!

That’s a quick way to make sure you never make any money from your music literally ever.

What Russ did though was completely different from what most musicians do.

He did everything himself.

Everything from producing the music, to mixing it, to creating the vocals, literally he became a one stop shop for music creation and music distribution.

He also distributed the music online through a website called Tunecore. Tunecore lets you upload all your music to Spotify, iTunes, and all other platforms instantly.

And because he was able to do that, he reaped the benefits and make six figures a month from his Tunecore.

Takeaway:

If you are starting a business and you can do everything yourself, then do it!

Become self sufficient and don’t rely on anyone else to get the engine going for your results.

Now once you become a boss you can let go and start to hire help to grow and expand your company, but don’t hire help before you have made a single dollar.

3. Russ’ Mindset for success

Look, whenever you start something new, especially entrepreneurship, you will get judged.

Its just the name of the game, people don’t like what they can’t understand.

And Russ talks about all the time how the haters are holding him down and that he did it all himself.

Every single song he made he spoke his life into existence.

For his album “There’s Really A Wolf”, look at some of the song titles:

1. MVP

2. No Turning Back

3. Do It Myself

4. I’m Here

These titles make it seem like he already made it in life, calling himself the MVP and that he did it himself.

And this was all when he barely had 1,000 followers online.

Even when he had so many haters saying that his music was trash and that laughing at his craft, he kept going at it.

There were literally no signs of his success ever being evident, but he still kept chugging.

Because if no one else is going to be your biggest fan, you have to be your own biggest fan.

So how do you cultivate this mindset of having Delusional Confidence?

I’d say there are two ways:

🎮You just leveled up your mindset today!

Thank you for reading like always!

- Zach