From A Rap Career To A $500m Production Company - With Grammy Nominated Badass John Reuben

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the Six Figure Home Studio Podcast, Episode 119

SPEAKER_2 (0:04)

You're listening to the Six Figure Home Studio Podcast. The number one resource for running a profitable home recording studio.

Chris Graham (0:19)

Welcome to another episode of the 6 Figure Home Studio Podcast. I'm your lonely co-host, Chris Graham. Brian Hood is in Thailand with his lovely wife, gallivanting around the world, having lots of fun. And I'm hanging out here in Westerville, Ohio, with one of my homeboys, one of my best buds, Mr. John Reuben, who is going to tell us his story is insane. So I'm just really briefly tell you why you should listen to this episode, because John has a lot of nuggets of wisdom for us to process here.

John, at one point, what, 15, 20 years ago was like, hey, I'm going to make Christian rap songs. And then the whole world was like, yeah, you're the best Christian rapper ever. And you sold a humongous amount of records. And then at some point, you started producing artists.

That also went well. And then at one point, you moved out to LA to run a company called Maker with your brother. And Maker is essentially like a label for YouTubers.

John Reuben (1:21)

Well, Maker was a multi-channel network. There was more to that than, you know, I guess that term always can mean different things depending on who you ask. But really what I think at its core, what was fascinating about that was it was a digital studio back when nobody was talking like that. So kind of the end of the aughts into the 2000s and 10s, you know, even before, you know, I say before Maker, there was a whole community and culture around content creators. And it was extremely exciting because this new platform called YouTube enabled people to be able to create something, put it out there into the world and get it out to people without necessarily having to have someone say, yes, you can put that out. Yeah, they just empowered a whole bunch of independent, really creative content creators, you know, to be able to do what they do. And so I was a part of that kind of that whole culture and community when it was first taking shape. And so that's, you can call it that, but I really what was fascinating about it was the digital studio component and the collaborative nature in which a bunch of different creators were coming together in a time when nobody had done anything like that.

Chris Graham (2:38)

Right.

John Reuben (2:39)

Because it just hadn't been possible before.

Chris Graham (2:41)

And there's a couple of things I think are really interesting about that story. One is that you were working with a ton of artists who were getting a ridiculous amount of exposure. Like the viral thing was happening with YouTube. Videos were going viral. And I would imagine, I want to hear way more about this, you would work on a project with people. You would be managing people, you know, the whole nine yards.

And then you guys would publish it.

And then the views and the comments instantaneously, you would have a feedback loop instantly. Which is so interesting to me because you put out a record and then like you just kind of wait to hear back about what people thought about it. With this, you guys had an instant feedback loop. And what makes this so interesting, guys, is you had to navigate being gritty to build this company. And you had to navigate a ridiculous amount of stress because let's kind of skip to the end of the story and we'll come back to this. What eventually happened with Maker?

John Reuben (3:34)

Well, the company sold. So I guess that's a...

Chris Graham (3:37)

It sold for... Do you want to tell us that number?

John Reuben (3:41)

You can look it up. Let's say you had...

You could get the actual number.

Chris Graham (3:45)

$500 million.

I guess you guys are like, oh, that's why Chris brought him on. He's gonna know a lot of stuff that we don't know. So my thing here is, and we were talking about this just a moment ago, I got stress in my life. You know, I got projects I'm working on that I struggle with and have to navigate like, oh, I'm taking this too seriously, or oh, this thing is freaking me out, or I'm stressed about it. It's encouraging for me to pause sometimes and be like, well, it's not as complicated as what John had to do.

John Reuben (4:14)

Well, see, I don't, you know, I'm not sure that that's true. I can't verify that for you, because I think anytime you're trying to set up shop and build something, I mean, I can tell you some of the hardest things I've had to do are putting out this record. I just put out a new record, which isn't nearly as interesting as everything else you probably want to talk about.