How To Leverage Comedy To Build A Profitable Business: Brad Gosse - Brad Gosse The Comedian

This is the Beyond the Story podcast, a show that goes way beyond the story. And now Sebastian Frost. Hi, Brad, Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me, Sebastian. I never start episodes like that, but I deemed it appropriate just because, well, I got a very funny individual with me today.

So try to be funny. We'll see what happens.

Well, isn't kind of they would. One would argue that comedy is subjective.

Absolutely it is. In my case it's definitely subjective.

It's great to mine as well, Great to connect with you. I know that you and I linked up on on Instagram, on the social medias over on the internets, and your content is very, very funny. I'm excited to dive into, better understand a little bit more about how you got to what you're doing right now with comedy and the multiple books that you read and the comments that you're forced to combat on a daily basis based on all of your content that you create. So let's back up a little bit to to more of the beginning of the story and kind of unpack things how and what really brought you to to where you're at right now.

Okay, you can start the story. How far are?

we going back. Hey, listen wherever you normally start the story.

There we go. I was born in a no. I started about four years ago doing comedy. Well, I did a second city standup class in in 2012. I wrote my first business book and I was doing talks at at various conferences and I wanted to get better at speaking. So I took a standup comedy class with second city and it just opened my eyes to a different world and it was, you know, the first time I went out on a stage and my only goal was to make you laugh. I had no knowledge to drop, I had no. You didn't have to walk away feeling like you've got value, you know, and and and. It was kind of this freeing thing where it was like all I have to do is make you laugh and it. It seemed easy at the time. Turns out it's not, but I thought it was, and so I said to myself I think I'm going to change my life and become a standup comic. This was like 2012, 2013. And it took a while for me to sort of wind down my businesses and, you know, I'd somewhat blow up my life to make it all happen. And so, about four years ago, I started, and I started strong Like I. You know, I had a couple failed attempts in the early days and then discovered, you know, my, my genre, which is children's books for adults, and once I once I found that path, I thought, no, maybe I'll do this for a year or two and then I'll switch gears. I'm 141 books deep and there's no sign of slowing down on the on on that genre because it's been extremely profitable for me. It's it's it's like every video that I make is a commercial for my product, and so I can't imagine getting off that train because the the you know switching gears and just telling jokes. I'm not going to be able to monetize that as well as showing you a joke that you can buy on Amazon. So that's kind of what I do day in and day out, as I make videos of me reading my books to strangers or to the camera and getting reactions and filming them and uploading them, and, you know, shitting out videos.

Where did this, where did this site? The very, very unique way of putting content out. By the way, not Brad, he shits the videos out.

Yeah, I shit them out. I have content diarrhea.

Do not do not get it confused with actually putting the videos out. It's a completely different scenario completely different strategy.

Yeah, you have to shit them out. Yeah.

So, uh, where in the world do this idea come from? We woke up one day. You're like you know what, if I write borderline, inappropriate adult children's books, they're going to fly.

Oh, there's no board, there's no borderline. They are inappropriate, af Um the idea is softened.

I was trying to soften the don't, don't soften it.

Let's make hard edges for people so that they can cut themselves before they um, before they buy the books. Um, it started so. I had a graphic design company. Before this, I owned a clip art company. Okay, do you know what your clip art is?

Yeah, Um, that was the name of the little guy on Microsoft right. No, that was Clippy. That was.

Clippy. That was Clippy. He was also kind of clip art, but he was animated.

He was like. He was like actual world. That was like the future of clip art, you know he was the first.

He was the first chat GPT, but he was horrible. It was terrible.

It was like he was terrible, he was like as chiefs, yeah, yeah.

It looks like you're trying to write Um. So, uh, I had this graphic design company we did, you know, a clip art and I used to do the advertising and marketing for it. And I came up with this idea for a Facebook ad terrible idea, by the way, but I didn't care Um, where I would say you can do anything with our clip art, even children's books, and it was like a bad children's book cover and that ad did not move the needle at all for sales for the clip art. It did not help at all, but it went kind of viral. It got a lot of you know, um, polarization, which I love. I love polarizing stuff. Um, so, people, some people loved it, some people hated it and, um, they were sharing it. You know it was getting a lot of play, but it wasn't getting any sales. And then I was like, okay, well, I was just starting to do comedy on Tik Tok. I had a couple of videos that had failed and I was like, okay, I'm going to take this cover and I'm going to make it a joke. I'm going to say my name is Brad Goss, I write books for children, but my publisher keeps rejecting them. Why do you think they rejected this. And then it's like why daddy hits mommy? A kid's guide to understanding alcoholism. And that video got a million and a half views on Tik Tok. So it was kind of my first you know, million plus view video and I was like, oh, wow, this is. You know, I'm onto something here. And, um, I read the comments and most of the comments said the same thing go to hell, die in a fire. And then a few people said this is hilarious. And then a few other people said why can't you read us this book when? Please read it to us. But I hadn't written it, it was just a cover, it was just the idea, didn't go any further than this is a book that should never be written. But now everybody wanted me to write it and read it. So I sat down and I wrote the words to why daddy hits mommy in the style of Dr Seuss. And then I held up the book and I read it. I just read the, because I didn't have pages illustrated. I just read it as if it were a book. But I just kind of held up the cover, which was just a printed out page, and then and that went viral that got like a million and a half views and all the comments said why can't we see the pages? And that's when it clicked. I'm like I don't know why I didn't think of this before, but I'm gonna illustrate these pages. I'm gonna publish it on Amazon. The next time I do this video you're gonna see the pages and I'm gonna be able to tell you you can buy it. And so I did that, and that video went viral too, and the book started selling, and it didn't do huge numbers, but it was enough to give me a smell of the success that was to come and I thought if I can do, if every time I make a joke, you could buy it. A few years from now I could have a big catalog of stuff for people to buy and I could be pretty successful at this. So I'm like I'm gonna keep doing this for a little while and see what happens. And so the next book was called Don't Bait, with Uncle Joe Setting Boundaries With Adults. That did really well. And then I did another one called my Racist Gran says we still can't trust the Japs. That did really well. And so I just then, from that point on, every video was me reading a new book or reading the same book in a different way and it just ballooned from there. So some of the books were extremely successful, some of them not so much, but overall the numbers were good enough to encourage me to keep going. And, like I said, we're 148 books or 141 books, I think, 141 books deep now and no sign of stopping. It's just growing phenomenally.

That's great, man, way to lean into your own craft, but also figure out. What does this mean for my business? What does this mean for making money In addition to doing comedy? It's such an extension of the art of comedy. I think that the traditional route is become a comedian, get a spot on a sitcom, maybe have a dying career, write a book to talk about it and that's about it. And that's changing drastically now. Obviously, social media has had a lot to do with that, but I don't see a lot of comedians outside of merchandise and sponsorships really figuring out a unique angle to be able to monetize their brand as a comedian. So I love, I love and I got it. I've got to imagine that this type of content comes with a tremendous amount of negative feedback and engagement on there. So what have you done to proactively combat that as much as you can? Cause, like I mean, it's the internet. I mean you've got what? 50% of people are gonna absolutely love the content. The other 50% want to burn your house down.

Yeah, it's about 50, maybe 40% love it, 40% are indifferent, and there's about 15 to 20% of people who definitely want me canceled, murdered, you know, castrated, imprisoned or made an example of in some way. And what I do to combat that is I agitate those people. I don't combat it, I lean into them too, because what I've learned is the people who love you will share you to one or two friends. The people who hate you will share you to their entire friend group and they will call for outrage from that group. And what ends up happening is, you know, if you have some Karen that hates your stuff right, and she shares it to her Facebook wall and says this guy's a predator and he deserves to be put in prison, you know, if she's got 100 friends on Facebook, 20 of them are going to be like that guy's hilarious, what are you talking about. And then in another 20, you'll be like, yeah, karen, let's get him. And then the rest of them will be like whatever. And so they help me pick up new fans inadvertently, which I love. I love when people who hate me help me get more fans and they don't even realize that they're doing it. Or my favorite is when they're like I'm going to buy these books so that I can burn them and I'm like I don't think you know how book sales work, because I still get paid, whether you light it on fire or read it or whatever, or both yeah or yeah, whatever. You let you know. I mean, if it's, if it's kindling for you, then that's great. So yeah, I, I love, actually love. It's funny. People are like you know, you must hate being called a pedophile. Of course I would rather it not be that, but if that's what it is, I'll take it, because if I had comedy that was just funny to a group of people, then the other group of people wouldn't care about it. But if some people love it and some people hate it, then the people who hate it are really kind of helping me sell more books. They don't know that, but they really are. You know their engagement bumps, all my social media numbers. You know they're the ones who you know. If someone says that's hilarious, and I respond in a comment and I say thank you, that's the end of the exchange, right? But if somebody says to me you know why are you? You know why are you making this kind of content? This is disgusting. You know this is, you know this isn't for children. And then I just respond with children are the future. The exchange that we have can go on for days and it can be, you know, 100 comments deep where they're. Just they can't, they can't get past their anger enough to see that I'm just trolling them and so I. They boost my engagement, you know, and, and, and I love that for them because they're like volunteers, they're volunteering to work for me and I love that.

It's definitely a volunteer army. It's it's got to be somewhat stressful, though, kind of weighing at all. Or do you just try to find the, the, the comedy I have?

I have my days, you know. I would say, maybe, like I feel like I think men have periods. So I think there's like a time where I'm on my period and people call me a pedophile and I'm like, why do they call me a pet? I'm not a why to? But? But then, like the next day, I'm like let's do battle, bitches, you know, and I'm right back into it. So, like, once in a while I have my period. I feel a little bit I don't like it, but the rest of the time I'm like let's do it, bitches, let's bring it. You know, I'm coming to your school tomorrow Like I just keep you know and I'm ready to battle again.

But some days are you know, I think I'm just going to throw my phone away.

Yeah, yeah, there are. I do have those days, there's no question. I'd say. You know, maybe once a month I get a. I get a day where I'm like I don't want to be called the pedophile and I just put the phone aside because it's still happening, whether I like it or not, you know, but it's. It's funny. Like you know, the amount of money that I make doing this makes the makes the tears easy to dry. You know, it's like if I have a bad day, someone calls me a pedophile. I just have to look at the bank account and the stats and remember this is all benefiting me financially, so I'm good with it. This is true.

Laughing all the way to the bank.

ladies and gentlemen, Exactly, yeah, all the way.

So, um, you've, you've built I mean just a an extremely large community online. I was, I mean I would just looked at your Instagram and I found you on YouTube earlier this morning. I mean well, well, over the six figure range of followers and fans that are consuming.

You should see my TikTok. You should see the TikTok. Okay, I'm, I'm. That's million and a half on TikTok, so yeah.

Okay. So I mean, this is this. This has become something. This is gone from mate mate, maybe it is to. This is my brand. Now that that begs the question, though You're. You're very attached to this entire business as an extension of your personal brand, as would an actor, comedian, et cetera has always been. What does that look like long term? I think about this a lot too, and I've. That's why I've always thought maybe I don't want to go all in with my personal brand even though I've always had a personal brand per per se because I don't know that I want to be attached to the business, you know, forever. Have you given that any thought at all?

Well, being a comedian, you are the brand. You're attached to it, whether you like it or not. So that was a decision I made consciously, knowing that that was going to be what was going to happen. I've built businesses. I've sold businesses. You know, I've sold a ton of businesses over my lifetime and I've done that where I built the business with me as kind of the man behind the curtain, and that's okay. I like that. But this was a different. You know, there's a, there's a part of me that wants to have that personal brand, that wants to be you know, quote unquote famous to a group of people. You know, something in me wanted to be the thing. So I'm okay with it, because this is all I want to do, I don't want to do anything else. And the fact that my, like, the product of my work now is laughter or published work it's so different than anything I've ever done before. You know it's not. There's no customer service. There's no refunds. There's no. You know there's just people who buy your books. Sometimes they return them to Amazon. I don't see that. You know I don't have to deal with them. I don't have to. You know I don't have to pack their order and ship it out. None of that happens. It's completely transparent to me. I just get royalties and I like it that way. But I like being the brand because it's easy, it's just easy, you know. And when I'm dead the brand, like when artists die, the brand gets stronger, right, like Dr Seuss sold more books dead than he ever sold alive. Elvis too, elvis too, exactly. So the Beatles, you know like. You know all that kind of thing. So you know it allows me to leave a legacy behind. I'm happy with that.

Yeah, I totally dig that and that makes a lot of sense because you finally found your. I'm not that you finally found you've had a lot of success, sounds like but you found your lane. That really like gets you.

Yeah, I've never been happier doing what I do. Like every business I've owned, I've enjoyed running, but there was always a part of it I didn't like or component I didn't like. Like I now control the day. I don't do anything. I don't want to do.

Same here.

I know that's an incredible feeling. Takes a long way.

It takes a bit of time to get there. But, once you're there, you're not negotiables become pretty strong and there's a lot of freedom available in that space. Do you do all of your own graphics for the books?

I have a cartoonist who works for me full time Cool and I do the layouts and I write the books yeah, he does. I basically give him a list of cartoons and he does them for me, and then I can't draw. So it started out I made them with the clip art that my company had and then I went from that to you know custom pretty quickly.

No, they're super dope. I mean did incredible graphics. That's why I asked my next question. I had it here. I know what I'm doing here. I've done I've hosted a podcast before I've got this.

Just fake it. Where do you see yourself in five years, Whatever you do? Don't ask that question. There it is.

The random people that you have them.

I can't.

Trying to not break character here. Ladies and gentlemen, Very difficult the random people that you have choose a book for you to read. Who are these random people? Are these just followers?

No, these are strangers that I meet on a video chat website called used to be called Omega, but they shut down. There's a new one called omtv and it's basically you and me on Zoom right now, but I can just hit escape and then I got a new person and I got a new person, a new person. It's like chat roulette, you know, and it's just like. It's terrifying. I love it. It's allowed me to practice crowd work, it's allowed me to film a ton of reaction content to my stuff and it's helped me sell a lot more books, because my audience know, like I only have 141 books right, which means I have 141 jokes as a comedian, right, I have other jokes that I tell I do other content, but the real money, the real meat, comes from me reading the books. So my audience, most of them, know most of the books and so if I pulled out the same book and read it over and over and over again, they'd be tired of it. But they love, even if they know the book, they love to see new people reacting to it. Let's see if this person laughs where I laughed. Let's see if they get. You know, I can't wait for the punchline to hit. So there, it allows me to share the same content over and over and over again, without it being too repetitive, because it's like, hey, here's a new person reacting to this joke. You love, and they love, to watch it again and again and it's and it's enough. It you know when, when, like, sometimes, like like my number one best-selling book is called Mike Hunt, smells like fish and that book did really well because women liked the book. Right, men were like that's funny. But when they saw women do adding the videos on tiktok and they saw me reading it to women and them laughing, that sort of opened up the the can of worms for people to say I'm gonna buy this for my mom just to make her say you know Mike Hunt at the at Christmas, you know, or whatever. And so it's getting the reaction. Content has really allowed me to.

To amp up the numbers, yeah, so have you been able to do something similar when you go live? When people like can like on Instagram? Do you do that at all? I?

Don't normally go live on Instagram. I do go live on a streaming platform called kick and I sometimes go live on tiktok, but I find that Instagram live hasn't been that great for me. I've tried it a couple times, but it hasn't worked out well. Tiktok is one of the few platforms like Instagram. If you go live, it notifies your followers and you'll lose followers, which I'm okay with, but for the most part, I'd rather not do something that immediately loses followers. Tiktok, on the other hand, will. If you upload a video to tiktok and then you go live, tiktok will put that video on the for you page and they'll put your live on the for you page and you'll show. You'll be shown to new People who never knew you existed, and so if I go live for an hour on tiktok, I'll pick up 3000 followers. So so I go live on that platform and I go live on kick, but I find Instagram live has not been lucrative for me.

So you said, you upload a new video on tiktok and then you go live and that's that's a Engagement that seems to be a.

It seems to be a good, a good. But even if it's like I uploaded a video this morning, if I go live this afternoon, they'll boost the video and they'll boost the live and what do you typically talk about when you go live?

I read books, oh, okay.

Yeah, I go live and and it's like a radio show, but you're, you're watching me and what I do is I'll just have a stack of books on my desk and I'll be like you know, here's what we're gonna read today, and I show you what's coming, and then I have. I also have music which you don't usually see on Instagram or in any of my clips, so every one of my books has a theme song and so on. When I'm, when I go live, I'll be like you know, okay, next up we're gonna read this book, and and then I hit the theme song, and then you know that, like it all kind of goes Through all of that so it's like adult Sesame Street or, mr Mr Rogers neighborhood, exactly.

Well, this is great, man, I am. I'm really encouraged to see that you've been able to step into, literally step into your lane and just do shit that makes you happy. I think that if we in a lot of the world Would be a little bit a better place to be if people just focused on doing shit they loved. I heard somebody say that a long time ago and I always say that ruined me. It didn't really ruin me, it helped me tremendously because I started doing it. It was like what do you want to do? Go do that, yeah, and and be relentless with, with the boundaries around, actually doing that, because the dividends of happiness are Undeniable and and and they continue to pay, you know, day after day. So 141 books in, what's next? How many books a week are you putting out? I?

put out about a book every two weeks, about every two weeks.

Yeah, so what we're time. We're recording this. It's almost the end of 2024. It was New Year's Day yesterday, but time flies when we're having fun here writing books, right. What what are you excited about for?

2024? More the same, more books. I'm working on a like a web series called Brad's apartment We've done a pilot for it so far where there's some of my characters have become puppets. So I have like a Becky the throat goat puppet. I have a clip clop the racist horse cop puppet, cucumber Curtis, and so I do this series with another comedian named J Rainville and we basically he does the puppets and he helps me write the, the episodes and and it's a. It's a story about a deadbeat dad who lives in a shitty apartment and he's trying to get. He's trying to get his kids back and he's constantly finding out he has new kids and it's just kind of it's. You know it's like Mr Rogers neighborhood, but it's a deadbeat dad and it's it's. It's fun, you know it's kind of fun to do. And then probably some more stand updates. I did a, I did a couple of us states this year and I did a bit of a stand up tour this year. So I want to do a bit more of that. But I make more money in my basement right here than I do anywhere else and so I, when people ask me what I do for a living, I tell them I'm a stay at home comedian.

What? What is the comedian, the comedy tour look like? Is that just? Are you joining an existing show doing your own show? How does that work?

I toured with another comic in Canada for a little while and then I did some festival dates on my own in the US. So I did the Omaha Comedy Festival and the Burbank Comedy Festival. So there may be more of that. But if it is, it'll be sort of my own private, like I'll rent a theater and sell it, sell the tickets myself, kind of thing. Yeah, but I don't know like as much as I like that, I'm not it is a lot of work, it's a lot of travel and I'm not really chasing that as much as I'm just trying to chase, like the, the sort of royalty based passive income, you know, building up these, these book, this book catalog, and selling lots of books. Like I can't, I'm, because it's, I treat it as a business first. Like I say I'm a comedian, but I'm really, I'm in the novelty business. That's the way I look at this. And you know, as a, as a collectibles, like I, yeah, I'm an entrepreneur first, right, so a lot of people are like, oh, you know, it's an, you're an artist. No, like, that's not really it. Like I'm a, I'm here for the money, you know. So, because the books are so lucrative. Until I can find something similar where I can, you know, say, hey, this is also available. And the reality is people don't buy t shirts like they buy books, right? You know it's much harder to sell you merch than it is to sell you a book, for whatever reason. Until I can kind of figure out what that next business avenue is, I'm staying here because, or if the book stops selling, then I'll have to shift gears. But you know, like I could see myself having 1000 books.

I can see you having a Vegas show with the puppets.

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know about the puppets. We'll see, we'll see.

Well, brad, it's been great to hang for a few minutes. Man learn more about what you got going on. I am, as a fellow comic. I am incredibly inspired by what you've done to really take your craft and create a fucking business that makes money out of it, and you enjoy every single part of it. So kudos to you for that and continue the great work. Any final thoughts for our listeners, people that may be scared of starting something? I think that's a great way to end things, a great ending point, because we've all been there on an entrepreneurial journey, scared to take that first step or to actually do it, and the inner critic and all of that stuff. What are some final thoughts to people that may be listening that struggle with that, which is like 98% of people.

Get it out. You have to get to the place where you shit it out, where everything is doable. I have, out of 141 books, only I'd say 10 or 20 of them drive the majority of my income. The rest of them are mediocre or flops in terms of sales numbers. So you have to be willing to do the terrible thing to get to the good thing. And anybody who's afraid of criticism. Just take a look at my comment section. I mean it's you know there's really like some people believe I'm indoctrinating children into a lifestyle. They believe that I'm trying to teach children about, you know, polyamory or whatever it is, and so I take the most abuse out of anybody. I don't know anybody who takes more abuse than me. Like there's I can't think of a single comic even who has taken more abuse than me in terms of like you can get called a lot of things. You can get called racist, you can get called homophobic, but being called a pedophile is probably the hardest thing to manage, right, cause people think I'm a pedophile. If you're worried about criticism, just look at me. Like I can take being called a pedophile, cause it helps my bank account, like you know. There's really nothing worse, if I mean, unless you got some skeletons in your closet that are kind of come out later, like you know. If you're afraid of being criticized, look at my comment section, cause I can tell you that. You know, like I said, only one day a month does it bother me. The rest of the time I'm handling it just fine because the money is good. So if you're, you know, if you're willing to go through that and you know, and whatever it is you're going to be criticized for, it's going to be way less than what I'm getting criticized for. So just do whatever it is you want to do and, like, if people are criticizing you, that means you're doing something. If they're, you know if they're, if they're, if they're not, then you're just being mediocre and that doesn't work for anything Like. It's not going to get you anywhere in life. There's my final thought.

Love that. Yeah, take Brad for example. Okay, next time to remember remember Brad's comments yeah, give less fucks. There you go and shit it out. Ladies and gentlemen, shit it out, brad.

Thanks for your time, brother, thank you. Thank you, sebastian. I was going to say thank you, podcast suck.

Oh, that's cool. I've been called worse, brad, I've been called worse. Thank you, suck. You're very welcome, man. I'll talk to you soon. All right, see ya. Until next time, friends. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the beyond the story podcast. Be sure to appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show. This way, you'll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined, please leave us a review. Be sure to appreciate it. Signing off from the podcast launchlabcom studios. Talk to you next time.