We were lucky to catch up with Matt Denton recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Matt, thanks for joining us today. Getting that first client is always an exciting milestone. Can you talk to us about how you got your first customer who wasn’t a friend, family, or acquaintance?

This is kind of funny, but my first client has no idea that he was my first client. I’d gone from self-produced musician to collaborating with other musicians online, to doing a bunch of free mixing, mastering and production for friends and musicians in my circle. At some point, like a bunch of other people I was reading about, I wanted to make the jump from amateur to paid professional, which can feel like a huge deal.

Well, one day it just occurred to me that I was the only one who really knew I wasn’t already regularly charging for my services. I’d built a brand and a reputation, and the only thing really missing was the confidence to ask for money. Once I decided that I could just do that, I set an initial price and the very next person to inquire became my first paid client. To the outside that looked just like business as usual, but for me personally it was a huge milestone. I had to quickly sign up for Venmo to take the payment. After that first ask, everything got easier!

Matt, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My business is called Ragged Birds Music and I’m a remote mix engineer, which means musicians send me their music files and I mix them into radio-ready, streaming-ready finished songs. I also master them, which means that if mixing is like baking a cake from its ingredients, then mastering like frosting the cake so it’s ready to present to the world.

My clients are typically independent musicians and bands. I understand the needs of independent musicians because I’ve been one myself for many years. In fact, I started my business as a publishing company for myself and eventually turned it into remote mixing and production with the skills I’d learned making my own music and collaborating with other musicians online.

For me, clients aren’t customers as much as they are partners and collaborators. We work together to bring the songs into their final form in a way that is hopefully pleasantly surprising to the musicians. My favorite thing is turning their songs into something that even they didn’t know could sound that good! Something new I’ve been able to do in the last couple of years is live remote mix sessions, so when we get to the point where we’re doing fine-tuning, we can do it live over the internet and they can hear exactly what I’m doing on their end in real time, it’s very cool.

I think what sets me apart is my empathy and communication. Trusting someone with your music can feel like handing your baby to a stranger and I totally get that! As a musician myself, I really understand what it’s like to want your music to be the best it can be, and I can make that happen while explaining things in a way that puts people at ease. I have a lot of patience and I think a lot of musicians work with me because they feel comfortable and unjudged. Also, I have songwriting and production skills as well as technical skills, so I can really help a musician with whatever they need to bring their music to full bloom.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Absolutely. During the pandemic when everyone was recording and producing themselves, I was cohosting and producing a weekly podcast for independent musicians called the Indie Music Podcast. The idea was that this would help musicians in their journey and possibly bring in new clients. It did the former but not the latter, but through producing the podcast every week I gained a ton of new and improved production skills. So I added podcast production and voiceover to my services in order to bridge the gaps between larger projects. Now I’m back to focusing on remote music production but have kept some regular podcast clients as well. It’s good to be flexible!

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

It hasn’t become my full-time business yet but it’s heading that way. I started my business several years ago as a publishing company, so that I could be above board with revenue and expenses related to being an independent musician. Mainly I wanted my instruments and software to be deductible expenses! This worked for a while, until expenses outgrew revenue, which was bound to happen, and I switched to focus on remote mixing and mastering but kept the name. I did a lot of free work to build up my skills and portfolio and when the time was right I started charging for my services. I still do pro bono work sometimes.

In 2019 I decided to get serious and basically took the year to learn as much as I could about running a small business. I read books, got professional photos, retooled my websites, started a mailing list, switched to an online small business bank, and got serious with accounting. All of that made a huge difference in how everything works behind the scenes to allow me to focus on the work and the client experience instead of getting bogged down in systems. Now I can just do process improvement tweaks as I go, while serving my clients better. I’m always trying to level up in some way.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://raggedbirdsmusic.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/raggedbirdsmusic
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@raggedbirdsmusic

Image Credits
James Garrahan (first photo only)