Pascal Guyon Show Notes

Pascal Guyon is a multi-platinum music producer who contributed to 3 Grammy nominations. He’s also a programmer, a social media strategist, and a speaker.

3 facts about Pascal:

• I am proud to have contributed to 3 Grammy nominations and to over 15 million albums sold worldwide
• I have served as a mentor to 10,000’s of artists and business owners worldwide, through my video game, speaking en-gagements and education programs
• I have also helped some of the most disruptive brands in transportation, cryptocurrency and food dominate social media

Most passionate about

• Most people are known to be specialists in one field, and that’s about it. I’m more like a polymath if you will; I get bored extremely quickly. So basically, I have different specialties. Of course, my first specialty is music. I ended up doing a lot of live music, playing with bands, but I figured out that I prefer to create; so that’s how I became a music producer. So actually, my passion for computer science came way later, after I spent 15 years producing music for very famous people as well as less famous people, and mentoring these people as well.
• What I really like to do is combine all my specialties to create a unique experience. This is how I managed to create a video game six month ago, which pays me every time the game, which features my music, is played, at no cost to the player.
• I think my game is the best thing I’ve created. So I decided to go into computer science; it always made a lot of sense for me. I decided I was going do a game, but an educational game. And since I know quite a bit about social media, I hid information about social media marketing in the game, so when people play the game, they actually collect information, and avoid the enemies of course, and that’s where they learn how to do better in social media and also, they are hearing my music! That’s one of the really cool things I did last year.

When did you fall in love with social media?

• So basically, I am French and I love modern music, modern, popular music, and all my heroes were in America, and I was like: ‘I want to be there! How do I do that?’ So, this was when Myspace became really big, so basically, I used Myspace to communicate about my skills. So, I maximized my opportunities, I was also using additional software that was running in parallel of Myspace to maximize my visibility and it worked out really well, this is how I started producing songs to like, really big stars, from my French village.

Who are your customers?

• As a music producer, at first my customers were mainly music artists, music labels, that kind of stuff. But since I got bored of that circle, and also because I found out it was a very inefficient circle, I moved on to get to know the entrepreneur circles; basically, I moved from producing music and mentoring artists to mentoring business owners on how to do well on social media.
• So now my customers are mostly brands, startups, and celebrities in business, and because they are hungry people, it’s perfect for me; they are willing to learn, they want results, and it’s very satisfying for me too.

Pascal’s best advice about approaching customers

• I think there are two things. When people ask what it’s like to produce music for an artist, my answer is that it is to realize an artist’s dream. I think that if more businesses would think like that instead of pushing to sell stuff that people don’t necessarily need, they would get much better results.
• And then the second thing is definitely the use of social media because when people see you are here to serve them, it builds trust, and we know that trust is everything.

Biggest failure with a customer

• I think the first mistake I did is, I thought artists would be the perfect customers for me, and they are not, because my services at the time were mostly producing music and mentoring for music careers on social media, that kind of stuff. The problem is that an artist is an artist; they don’t really have business minds. I could also question my quality of teaching, but I do know that artists unfortunately don’t have business minds.
• So, I think my first target, as an entrepreneur, was not the right one. However, when I switched to talking to entrepreneurs and businesses, and showing them how social media changed my life and could make a big impact on their businesses, things became much smoother, because these people are more hungry, they loved to get stuff done fast. So, that transition was very interesting and I learned a lot from it.
• Still to this day, new artists are looking for people to take care of them. Unfortunately, in the music industry, things don’t work this way at all. So, the only way for them actually is to embrace entrepreneurship. The most successful independent artists are definitely entrepreneurs that get that.

Biggest success due to the right customer approach

• I don’t really measure success by commercial, numbers, famous lovers, or stuff like that. To me, it’s more like: okay, am I doing things that are fulfilling for me and also helping people the most? That’s the most important thing.
• So my biggest satisfaction is to keep following my instincts. I think it’s the reason I’m here today and have worked on so many different projects: because I adapted and served the people the proper way.

Pascal’s most recommended tool

• It’s a tiny tool, but so cool because you can combine a lot of things with that, it’s called Zapier. That’s it, it’s so cool!
• For example: I built a fully automated mentoring program for artists. For the ones that are willing to learn, I have a landing page on my website and Boom! Then they are in and that’s it. The whole process is a combination of Mailchimp, Google Sheets, Google Form, Zapier, and emails of course. So basically, what Zapier does is, whenever someone fills my Google Form, it sends the info straight to MailChimp. On MailChimp, I have a sequence of seven emails that will start to go to these people once a week. So, for me, it makes the link between the entry of my funnel, if you will, and the email list on MailChimp.

Pascal’s key success factor

• I think it’s being curious and disciplined, I think that’s the two things. Yeah, I think, nowadays, people are distracted by a lot of things. But, I mean, being curious because if you are the most informed in the room, it’s always better, I think. Entrepreneurs read a lot constantly, and that’s what I naturally do everyday too. It’s interesting; when you know stuff, you appreciate life on the much higher level. I love it!

Pascal’s Mountain

Since we believe that the best way for entrepreneurs to get a fast, big, and sustainable success is by leading your (new) market category, and the entire entrepreneurial journey reminds me of mountaineering, or conquering the mountain; I want to ask you if there is a mountain you dream of climbing or a mountain you have already climbed?

• I love mountains! I used to go on vacations with my parents and we were constantly going to the mountains. I do a lot of hiking in Los Angeles as well.
• On another level, I would really like to travel much more than I have so far and visit all the places I haven’t had a chance to yet. Because the more you understand people, the more you will be able to serve and help people so that’s very important.
• For me, the ultimate thing is trying to find ways that make people have “Aha” moments, you know, when they see a unique experience or something that makes them realize that anything is possible.

The best way to connect with Pascal

• Website
• My Game

More resources for Entrepreneurs

1. Don’t Miss – Customer Focus Strategy & Execution: Market Analysis for Fundraising
2. Hayut Yogev’s Latest post: The three free, most practical steps to researching and locating your market
3. Former interview: With Mark Schaefer “Marketing is sick right now. It’s too tech-centric instead of human-centric… If you don’t have customers, you don’t have a business.”