Who TF is this Zack guy and why should I listen to him?

0:01 Why you should care who's teaching this

Who the f**k is this Zack guy, and why should I listen to him? Hi, everybody. My name is Zack Fischmann. This is my story.

0:09 Starting out in punk, and touring young

I started playing guitar around 15 years old. I did it to impress a girl. That's right. I started playing in punk bands by age 16, and I really quickly got immersed in the local punk scene.

This is actually me at 16 years old playing my dream venue, 924 Gilman Street in Berkeley, California, a legendary punk club. It was my dream to play there, and I was already doing it within the first six months of playing music, which was really cool and exciting for me and made me feel like I actually belonged and had some purpose in life, which is important for a 16-year-old. I played in lots more bands. I ended up dropping out of high school to do music stuff. I toured a bunch, hitchhiked around the US, and busked in the streets for a living.

I founded a folk music showcase that's having its 20th anniversary this year, or maybe last year, I can't remember. I started a bunch more bands and made a bunch of records.

1:03 Back to school for ecology, tech, and business

Then I went back to school in my mid-20s. I studied at UC Berkeley, and I studied ecology, technology, and business. This was actually really amazing for me. This is a picture of me and my mom at my graduation. I still care a lot about these things, and I'm really into nature as well.

But ecology is a really interesting thing when we're dealing in the independent music world, because I think of it as an ecosystem. In fact, that's in our tagline, our mission: we are an online ecosystem for independent musicians.

1:35 Music as one part of a healthy ecosystem

I see this as a system where we need all of the sides to be healthy. It's not just about the art. The art is super f*****g important, it's the most important, but we also need a healthy relationship with the business, with marketing, with our fans, with communication, all of this stuff.

I see it as a whole ecosystem, and it needs to be healthy for things to be successful. Technology is also really important because we're dealing with all of this data stuff, analytics, and it gets technical. And business, because this is music business.

2:05 Startups, software engineering, and cancer research

I worked at a couple of startups: one was a website builder, one was a PR analytics company. Both of them sold. I learned a lot about working at startups. I worked as a software engineer for 10 years, which gave me a lot of the technical skills I need. I spent six years doing public cancer research work for UC Santa Cruz, so I have a really strong technical and systems background.

2:25 Back to music in LA, and people start asking for help

In 2017, I moved to Los Angeles and started making records and touring again. I've been making music for 25 years, and I'm 39 years old at the time of this recording. I noticed people were asking me for marketing help, and this was something I was kind of surprised by. It was just something I was doing, it wasn't an intention of mine to help people with marketing, but people were asking, and I was noticing it.

2:52 A life-changing workshop with Adrianne Lenker

And then I TA'd, which means I was the teacher's assistant, at a songwriting workshop with an organization called School of Song, which I love very much, and a songwriter named Adrianne Lenker. She plays in a band called Big Thief. Truly incredible talent, and what a beautiful teacher.

This whole experience was really life-changing for me. There were thousands of students in this workshop, and it changed my perspective on a lot. It taught me a lot about how we can do real s**t on the internet, and it was also a great way to see how you could have an effective teaching system for getting s**t done.

So we were focused on songwriting in that workshop, and I decided that I wanted to try this with marketing. I decided to build my own organization and call it Magic Nothing, and our goal is to be an online ecosystem for independent musicians.

3:51 Magic Nothing's fast growth

This project has taken off super f*****g fast. This is the growth chart in the first three months, less than three months: we went from 200 followers to over 30,000. So the project took off. Basically, it validated that a lot of people wanted to learn this s**t, and there were a lot of people seeking structure around this, which doesn't surprise me.

Magic Nothing has grown exponentially since its inception, not just on Instagram, but altogether. At the time of this recording, we've run five live online workshops with over 300 students in over 10 countries, and this is our first prerecorded course. So thank you for being here.