This is a picture of me on stage in front of about 500 people at my bands last ever show in London. I’m 28 in this picture, and it took me and my friends about 8 years to get there.

No business plan, no strategy.

Just 5 twenty-somethings throwing everything at the wall over and over again to see what sticks, until one day something really did.

I wanted to breakdown a few things that I attribute a lot of our early success to. It was responsible in helping us build a community of people who truly gave a shit about the things me and my friends did, and the people we were.

Raw Energy

In the beginning there was nothing but raw energy. A passion for music, a naivety that we could make it, and nothing to lose. I’d been playing music with my co-founder of the band since we were 14 in music class at school. The pic below is us at a Nickelback show, we had really excellent taste in music and haircuts from a very young age.

It took us 4 years or so to build the final band we wanted to go all the way with. Like any business, there were a few hiccups along the way.

At 15 we vowed that “if we weren’t bigger than the Jonas Brothers by next year, we have to quit music”, for some reason we assumed that would be quite easy. We unfortunately failed that part of the mission, but by 16 we’d decided being 2nd best to the JoBro’s was fine, so we carried on writing.

Anyway, raw energy. That, I think is the most important part. At 18, there is no overthinking it, there’s actually very little thinking at all. There’s just doing. Doing, failing, doing, failing slightly less, doing, kind of succeeding. So, that was our formula. Write songs until they stop sucking, play live until my voice doesn’t crack, and email every band I’ve ever listened to with the business pitch of the century: “we have no audience, you gotta take us on tour”.

I would later be made of fun of for these emails by the very bands I sent them to.

The reason I think it’s so important to build and fail publicly like that is not only that it builds character & skill, but it brings your audience along for the ride. Think about The Office, you wouldn’t watch it if they just sold loads of paper all day every day. You watch to see the fires, the chaos, the character development, the hardships. Sharing the reality is what makes the win all the more sweet, it makes them feel like your wins.

The other thing about figuring it out in front of an audience is that you have to be you. You’re not putting on an act at that point. You haven’t had real success, and you barely have the skillset, so when you make your art it can only be an extension of you.
There’s of course some room for taking inspiration, and a level of imitation in the early days, but you still don’t really have the skillset to be anyone other than you.

When you’re that honest, transparent and unintentionally vulnerable with your art/product/thing, slowly but surely people start to show up. It’s likely those people look like you, have the same worries as you, and desperately need to hear the thing you’re saying. Which makes it incredibly easy to have a meaningful relationship with them. You both need each other.

It feels fucking incredible.

You write like you, because it’s all you know how to do.

That’s gotta be the definition of success. Showing up every day, being unapologetically & completely you. Not only being seen for it, but being validated by likeminded people joining your cause and building a community around you.

That shit is life affirming.

It’s a feedback loop rocket ship. Honesty, accessibility and the willingness to look stupid and fail publicly enabled us to very quickly build a small base of super fans in the UK & Europe, which in turn allowed us to tour with bands we’d grown up listening to and build that same fanbase across the world.

1 off festival in Singapore – Carbon footprint failure on our part.

Amplification

Once you’ve found that magic in your thing, whether you’re completely oblivious to it or fully aware, the next thing is amplification. Amplification with as little filtering, tweaking or editing as possible.

We brought our buddy on tour with a camera, and documented a huge amount of our early touring in tour diaries and photos. I didn’t realise it at the time, but he was essentially capturing that same raw energy and posting it for the world to see. Yes, there was footage from our shows, but really it was the night drives, nearly missed flights, high ticket warnings, multiple robberies and backstage footage of 5 friends constantly failing and figuring it out that was really building our community. Even if there’s a lot of footage I wish didn’t exist now, including something referred to as “The Ostrich”, I accredit a lot of our success to that amplification of chaos, and the lack of planning or staging that made it so obviously real.

You didn’t need to know us to get us.

Honesty and raw energy carried us through most of our twenties. It enabled us to tour the world, sign record deals, collaborate with our favourite bands, record and release 3 albums and rack up something insane like 35,000,000 plays on spotify.

Uncovering the shit that truly lights you up, the thing you would do even if no one ever paid you, bottling it at the source and shouting it from the rooftops until it lands on the ears of people who need it hear it, that’s where community is built.

Ditch your business plan, make the thing you can’t stop making.