Justin JacksonIn the early 2000, Chad Muska was one of the most popular pro skaters in the world. When he was on tour, he would get mobbed by thousands of kids who had seen him in magazines, video parts, or played him in Tony Hawk Pro Skater. Around this time, 1999, I was working for a skateboard manufacturing company. There was a big contest in Canada called Slam City Jam. I met Chad there during one of the after parties and everybody was talking about how much product Chad could move.
It's been reported that during the height of his fame, he was selling at least 10,000 boards a month. It seemed like Chad Muska had everything going for him. He was selling the most boards. He was part owner of a shoe company called Circa, which was super popular. He was in the most popular videos. He produced a hip hop album with a bunch of artists. He was also doing a lot of partying, hanging out with people in Hollywood. And like a lot of professional athletes, he ran into financial trouble.
What happened? Laurie's You were riding the wave.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I was And I was having a blast, but, like, any wave, there's a crash. From being a kid that never had any money, like, nothing, just having that money was like so insane to me. But people in skateboarding don't educate you on money and how it works. I I was making a lot of money, but I was spending it just as fast.
Justin JacksonAnd the reason I wanna talk about Chad's story on this channel, which is for solopreneurs, bootstrappers, indie hackers, is that in 2024, Chad is doing what we're doing. He's building a solo creator business from the ground
up. Right around the beginning of the pandemic, everything ended in skateboarding for me as far as finances go. My last check came in from Supra, and it was done. Mhmm.
It
was bought by another company. And I said, what the heck am I gonna do? Right. You know, this ended. My main goal in life right now is, financial stability, and I wanna build my platform and a little empire and something that can live beyond my ability on my skateboard and possibly beyond my life as well too.
Justin JacksonI think Chad is realizing that fame doesn't automatically equal, a good life or even financial stability. And now for the first time, he wants to own his own business as an independent creator.
And I'm becoming a I'm becoming a businessman for the first time. I've always been a skater. I've always been a creator. I've always been part of the marketing assets, but I've never been a businessman. I I've I've always allowed others to do the business.
Whatever I wanna do, I'm just gonna do it, and it's all labeled under the Musco brand. And I look at it like Stussy or Burton or, you know, Calvin Klein or anybody who brands their name and utilizes it, to promote the products or the designs that they do.
Justin JacksonA lot of Chad's story about fame and how it didn't translate into financial stability is reminding me of things my friend Nathan Barry has been saying about how creators need to own the equity in their own company.
And this is the same playbook that years later, like Ryan Reynolds uses Mhmm. Where he's going, okay, I could be the spokesman for your product Mhmm. And you'll pay me 500 grand, a $1,000,000 or whatever. And the the hourly ROI on that is insane. Right?
He's like, I just have to show up, record for a day, shoot some commercials, get paid, I assume, $1,000,000, and walk out. And he's like, let's do this all the time. This is amazing. Yeah. But instead, he looks at it, and he's like, wait a second.
If you're willing to pay me $1,000,000 to do this thing, it has to be worth more to you. So how is it worth more to you? It's like, well, this builds the brand, gets in front of a lot more people, and sells a ton more products. And so he's like, cool. I'm only gonna do that for products that I own now.
Justin JacksonAnd so what's Chad Muska doing now? He's building the Muska brand as an independent company, and he's bootstrapping it just like you or I would.
Are you fully funding this? Oh, 100%. There's nobody involved. One man corporation. I do Love it. Everything. I like I said, I pack the boxes. I ship them. I process the orders. I design. I source, manufacture, customer service, janitor, whatever. Any all the everything.
Justin JacksonSo now he's making his own products, not under the Shorties brand or the Circa brand or anything else. He's making them under the Muska brand. And he's doing these limited edition drops where he'll do a 100 boards. He'll announce it on his Instagram, sell it on his website. And these drops have been selling out.
And right now, the only thing you can buy on his website is the shirts he just released. And I thought it might be fun for all of you and for me to go through what Musk is doing right now that I think is working. And I also have some tips for him if he ends up watching this on how I think he could improve this business. So one thing he's doing well is he's really leveraging his social media following on Instagram. This is the main place he seems to communicate with all of his fans.
He shares a lot of his life on the farm and the recurring characters on his farm. This is Dig Dug, But he's also showing folks the behind the scenes stuff. This is just filmed in his living room in Ohio, and he's inviting his audience and his fans to kind of partner with him, be on this journey with him as he's releasing his own products. He's sharing a lot of behind the scenes stuff all under this banner of Muska, a one man corporation. It's like him.
He's packing the boxes. He's shipping out these products for his fans. And I love this. I think this is the one thing a lot of creators don't do enough of is showing people behind the scenes, showing people that you're a real human being, showing people what goes into the process of building, creating, launching, and distributing something. The other thing that I think he's doing well is he's selling these products at a premium.
These are limited run pieces. One of a kind. Often he's signing them and they're expensive. It's a $107 for a shirt, $70 for this little passport mini bag. And, the boards he's selling are quite a bit more expensive than you would find in a skate shop. And I think this is the right approach. His audience is older now. They're in their thirties and forties. They've got money to spend. They've got a real job.
And, a lot of fans, a lot of an audience wanna support the brands and the creators they like. And so I think this premium pricing approach is the right approach. I do have a few tips on things I think he could try to improve his one man business. These are things I've had to learn the hard way and might be helpful to him. The first tip is to have some content on his website that answers the question, what is Chad Muska doing now?
What happened to Chad Muska? Derek Sivers is the originator of this idea of having a now page where you just have a page on your website, you know, the muska.com/now that explains what you're up to now. What are you doing now? What are you thinking about now? What's going on in your life right now?
And I think Chad could benefit from this because there's a lot of people wondering what happened to Chad Muska. So having a page on his website, a slash now page where he can explain, hey, man. This is what I've been up to. Here's the journey I've been through. Now I'm a one man corporation.
I need your support. And I I think people would rally around that, and I think it'll help him rank for searches for people trying to figure out what he's doing in 2024. The biggest opportunity that Chad has is to have an email list and an email signup form on his website, especially if you're doing product drops. You know, Instagram's fine, but nothing beats email when it comes to notifying a bunch of people right away and selling products. Almost everybody in e commerce knows that email is what sells products.
And unlike Instagram, it gives you a direct line of contact with your audience. So instead of having to go through an intermediary, you have a direct connection with them because you've got their email address. I could even show you what that looks like. He could just add a little bit of little bit of code right here. It looks like he's using Shopify for this.
So Shopify's got a button, you know, just a little button that says, get on my list. People can click that, sign up for his email newsletter. And he's already writing these amazing updates on Instagram with these photos. And I think he could turn this into an email that he sends out to his fans. He could just copy what he's already written here, Bring it into ConvertKit, paste it in, add his image from Instagram, clean it up a little bit, and then just send this out.
And if he wants to, he can even add a button which says, you know, buy this product now like this, if he has a drop and, you know, wants to link directly to his Shopify page. And the main idea here with a newsletter, or it could be a podcast or a YouTube channel is to leverage people's interest in his story to allow them to go on this journey with him. And right now he's sharing that story on Instagram, but I think he could share it via email newsletter, podcast, YouTube channel, even written updates like a blog on a Shopify site, And really have more entry points into a story, but also create more connection points so that if there is a product drop or a product announcement, he has multiple channels where he can announce that. Well, this is really fun. A lot of this was inspired by his most recent appearance on the 9 Club podcast.
Highly recommend you go watch that or listen to it in your favorite podcast app. Just really incredible to see somebody discovering the power of being an independent creator or independent entrepreneur. If you've got ideas on how you think Chad might improve his business or his marketing, his connection with his audience, leave those in the comments below. Or if you just want to reminisce about nineties or early 2000 skateboarding, you can put that in the comments as well. And I will see you next time I make a video.
Thanks for watching.