SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 88: How a NYC Piano Street Performer Makes $100k/ Year
20 Oct 2015
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000 unit sold mark.
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Yesterday morning, I spoke with Elliot Hulse, who is making $80,000 a month after being $90,000 in debt just three short years ago. Okay, Top Tribe. Good morning. I hope everybody slept well. You're going to love my guest today. His name is Colin Huggins. And listen, I met Colin through a mutual friend named Nick in New York.
And I was living in New York on Washington Square Park. And I'd always go out in the mornings with a cup of coffee and kind of watch the musicians play. And, you know, we all assume things about these musicians. You know, maybe you assume that they do this because they have to for a living.
maybe you assume they're actually really rich and they're out there just making free money because they enjoy it. But long story short is I, I learned about this guy named Colin and he brings a grand piano, puts it right under the arc on central square. I mean, sorry, in Washington square park in New York. And his story is really, really interesting.
So I asked him, I said, Colin, I want you to come on the show. He said, yes. So Colin, are you ready to take us to the top?
I am ready to take you and everyone listening to the top.
I love that. Well, speaking of listeners, there is always a huge crowd around you in Washington Square Park. Walk us through how you do your schedule when you're out there and how you get that crowd.
All right. Well, I am out there every Saturday and Sunday. I bring a baby grand piano. It's a Yamaha, as you've seen. And I get there in the morning and I play all day and then I push it back to the storage space at night and people seem to enjoy it.
So it's every Saturday and Sunday. What time do you start and what time do you end?
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Chapter 2: How does Colin Huggins attract crowds as a street performer?
Give us one or two more that get people to take their wallet out and move to the bucket and drop the money in.
Another thing that you can do is you can ask people to make a lot of noise to help gather an audience. Even if you only have five people listening to you, you can say, all right, everybody, I'm going to count to three, and you guys make a lot of noise.
And last week I said, okay, listen, folks, I'm going to do something really awesome here, and I need you to make a lot of noise as if your apartment is on fire, and this awesome thing that I'm about to do is going to come to your rescue and save you and all of your Apple products.
And people make noise and then that attracts a bigger audience.
Yeah. Yeah. Because then again, people from, you know, a hundred yards away will hear the people clapping and making noise and they think, Oh, something awesome must be happening over there. Which again, I think is something that your listeners, you know, when people are making noise, whether it's in real life or on the internet, you know, Oh my gosh, this is amazing.
Then other people say like, okay, fine. I'll check this out.
Well, this is, I mean, I think that's why Inc just said the top of the podcast is number one above like really other big podcasts like Tim Ferriss, Gary Vaynerchuk, Entrepreneur on Fire.
And I think the reason, Colin, is because we get amazing guests like you come on who are at the top and they're not just talking about business, but they're talking about strategies of persuasion and influencing people and drawing in crowds with psychology. And that's why so many people, millions of people are listening in. So walk me through, walk me through in an average hour,
let's say, actually it's on an average day, on a Saturday from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., about how many donations will you get in the bucket?
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Chapter 3: What strategies does Colin use to engage his audience?
Yeah. Yeah. It's easy. It's easy for people to just naturally drop it. It's also easy for, for drug addicts to come and try and steal money.
Do they really try and steal it?
Yeah. Yeah. From time to time. But it's, what do you do?
Do you tackle them? What do you do?
Um, you know, if I chase after them and usually there's an audience watching me and I chase after them and I get angry and then I come back to the piano and I say, you know, sorry about that, folks. It's just what I have to deal with. Then usually people are sympathetic and, and they, I ended up getting almost more donations about it. So I'm thinking about actually.
So do you hire drug addicts to come attack your bucket of money to make more money?
Yeah, because I think it might actually boost.
Amen, brother. I love this psychology. Everyone on the interview is going, oh my gosh, okay, how can I apply this to like online marketing? And this is great stuff. Last question, last question. You have a crowd around you, 40, 50 people, they're making noise. One person finally gets the guts to go up and drop money in the bucket.
Do you say anything publicly when they drop in the bucket to encourage crowd dynamic to get other people to drop it in after the first person does it?
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