Classic Episode: Issac Hayes III on building Fanbase

Issac Hayes III is a record producer, voice actor, and entrepreneur.

Issac joins the podcast to discuss the value of ownership, shares life lessons he learned from his father, the true story about the music industry, and the creation of his social media platform, Fanbase.

Host IG:@itstanyatime

Guest IG: @isaachayes3

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, Money Movers. Welcome back to Money Moves, the daily
podcast determined to give you the keys to the kingdom
of financial stability, wealth and abundance. Pay Money Moves Family,
Welcome to the Money Moves Podcast powered by Greenwood. Our

(00:22):
celebrity guest this week is an American record producer, voice actor,
entrepreneur who has a name that should sound familiar to everyone.
He is the son of the late great soul icon
Isaac Hayes. Money Moves. Let's welcome Isaac Hayes, the third
to the podcast. Isaac Welcome, Thank you, thank you for

(00:45):
having It is our honor and pleasure to have you today,
so happy you could join us. You've clearly come from
a legacy of greatness and continue to exude greatness and excellence,
and it's amazing to see what you're doing on your
own accord. Well, thank you very which I really appreciated.
I'm carving my on lane to see No, that's absolutely true,

(01:06):
and we love to hear that. You know, Money Moves
is about that. It's about creating generational wealth, and it's
about creating um family futures and just excellence. So I
think this is a perfect conversation I'm really excited to
see what you're working on, especially because you grow grew
up with a father that was deep into the music business. Um,
can you tell us a little bit about how that

(01:28):
has really set the tone and pathway for your own
excellence coming forward? Now? I mean it starts with entrepreneurship.
It was a career entrepreneur. Um. He started from the bottom.
You know, he started picking cotton and working in hall factories.
You know. UM, say that again, y'all do you understand

(01:50):
like when when when we're talking about growing up in
the South and starting from the bottom picking cotton. Yeah. Yeah.
He was born in nineteen forty two, UM in Memphis, Tennessee. Uh,
and his parents were sharecroppers and he picked cotton. Um,
you know, grew up a very very meager, poor existence.

(02:13):
But he was self educated and a self taught musician
and became like this, you know, international icon um, coming
straight out of Memphis, Tennessee and a boy with dreams.
You know what I'm saying that that rose to heights
of success through music. It's incredible story. Wow, that's incredible.
So you know what money we was. We really like

(02:35):
to talk about this mindset not just of excellence, but
how financial literacy was passed down. And I love how
you framed your dad as an entrepreneur, not just a musician,
but an entrepreneur. Talk about some of the lessons that
he left with you in terms of how you view money,
building wealth within your family. Well, I mean, it's they're

(02:55):
hard lessons because he was an artist in the music
industry that was taking advantage of He lost rights to
a lot of his music, and sometimes that resulted in
him losing millions and millions of dollars worth of revenue.
And so you learned, you learned the lesson of ownership. Um.
The music business can be savage contracts, things like that.

(03:17):
So UM, for him, my conversations were always about ownership,
always about owning your content, owning your publishing, owning your brand. Um.
And and that's really, you know, kind of what sustained
him throughout his career. He did things that were so
great that he was always someone that people called on
to work um. And he said, you know, he set

(03:39):
a tone for I think future future generations to really
understand and learned, especially in the hip hop business, about
how they retreated telling kids to own their things with
sampling and stuff like that when that came back around
and how that was extremely important. So for me, those
are the lessons that he taught. It was always like
I always had an entrepreneurial mindset from my parents, and

(04:00):
they didn't really force me, you know, saying like you're
gonna go out here and get a job. They kind
of let me do my thing. Um. And so when
I got a chance to really venture out and decided
that I was going to be a career entrepreneur, it
was a very scary decision, but it was the best
decision that I ever made, you know what I'm saying,
you know, going down that path. So talk about your
early days of you know, deciding to be an entrepreneur.

(04:22):
What were some of your first ventures and well, okay,
so my family makes fun of me all the time
because I have a little brother he's fifteen years old.
I've been working since I was like nine years old.
I was always the kid that with molaans help people
move anything to make some money. Right, So I mean
it didn't yeah always like that, you know, I did

(04:45):
that as a kid. Um. I got in trouble with
school one time for like creating a club and selling
like memberships to it with kids lunch money. I was
in like elementary school and like um. But then you know,
I worked. I worked. I went to the Mayor's Youth
Leadership program um in Atlanta, and then I worked at

(05:08):
the public library. And then I graduated high school and
I decided that I was going to just get a
regular job. I hadn't. I was in between the sign
but I'm really gonna do this or not as a producer.
So I worked a job at this this place called
the lin In Law for two years. It was like
dead bathle yard before that, and I remember it took

(05:28):
so long to get to work that when I quit
my job. I quit my job in February of nineteen
ninety six. I said, there's two things I never want
to do again in life. One is worked for another
person in the second one was ride public transportation. I
made that decision. I haven't done both. I haven't been
on the bus. So I haven't had a boss since
February nineteen ninety six. Interesting conscious decision. You were like,

(05:53):
no more. I want to, you know, be my own owner,
own my own businesses, and not work for anybody else.
And I didn't. I didn't go to college so so
I didn't go to college when a different World was
on TV. So let me tell you something. I was
like the last the last guy that a girl wanted

(06:14):
to talk to. You didn't seriously hits because everybody was
watching a different world and it was like you needed
to be at Hillman or so I get you. I was.
I was an outcast. I was at home like you know.
But um what I learned was my college was I

(06:34):
had earned enough money to buy some equipment and learn
how to start to produce an engineer records. Right, So
those four years from ninety six to two thousand, those
are my four years of learning how to make records use.
Um I got my first chance to really do jump
into music business with Tricky Stewart over at Red Zone.
UM I produced a record. I made like four thousand

(06:55):
dollars from my first record. I was like, Wow, okay,
I could do this, you know what I'm saying, Like
that was a lot of money at the time for
me coming up like all right, but um that's starting
me on my journey of really learning how to hustle.
Because everything that I did was always learning how to
have a skill set that could get me in places
where I could I could use my skill set to
make money, but also use my skill set to hustle.

(07:17):
I love that, you know. Like I worked at recording studio,
so the studio needed a studio manager. I know how
to do that. But then during the downtime, I could
use the studio to make beats. So that's kind of
how I got my foot in the music industry, was
learning how to engineer, burning c ds. All these kind
of like eye jobs, you know what I'm saying. That

(07:38):
really just got me into spaces and places where I
could be around music, and then they led to opportunities
that led to my break in the music industry. Well,
you were being very humble because you've been behind some
of the most memorable tracks and soundtracks of the last
twenty years, Little Scrappy, there's a whole litany of them. Um,
and now you've sort of taken a twist and you're
getting into the technology arena. And I love this because

(08:01):
it's completely in line with what your the legacy your
father's left behind in terms of ownership. Can you tell
us about fan Base? Yes, So fan Base was a
venture that I started in It was an idea that
I had about I saw a kid dancing in a
Spider Man costume um in a game stop to Aha,

(08:26):
take on me. And he was from Memphis, Tennessee. He
goes by the name of Ghetto Spider Um and he
quickly had like three thousand followers out of nowhere. And
I just shot him at d M and I was like, hey, congratulations,
young Memphis. You know, just to say it was casual,
so casual, and his his immediate response was are you
a manager? And I was like no, not, like thanks,

(08:47):
I really need a manager. Like he was really on
me about the fact that he needed management. I said, well,
give me your number. Um, let's talk about it. You
know what I'm saying. I'll see maybe if I can
help you out. But I left the conversation like, Yo,
this kid is like a deer caught in the headlights
and he's having this viral moment and he doesn't know
how to monetize it. I said, he needs to be
able to monetize his dancing. I said, there needs to

(09:10):
be a platform where people can can subscribe to you,
but follow you. So I said that was the birth
of fan base. UM. I got extremely lucky with my
attorney introducing me to my now c c O and
his firm, and we built the We built the app
from July to December. And this was a this is

(09:34):
a bootstrapped company like fan Base cost me two hundred
thousand dollars to build own money. Y'all understand what bootstrap means.
You know, people think you're just going out asking for
investor money, like this is his own blood, sweat and equity, right,
And it was a lot, you know, I, you know,
earned money um in the music industry and spaces and

(09:56):
places like that, and I was able to use some
of that to really, like I said, go out and
and and put this idea into the space. And so
we launched a company like January twenty nineteen. But I
didn't tell anybody that I built it. I was really
quiet about it. And the reason was because I wanted
to raise money at some point. But I knew that

(10:18):
if I ever raised money and told people like, okay,
how many users you got, what's your traction? Like if
I told people that I told this famous person or
this famous person to download it, and they would be like,
that's b s. That's not real data. So I left
the Apple loans for a year and in the course
of a year, a couple of people made some money,
but one person, one user, made about six thousand dollars

(10:40):
and we had about ten thousand users. I was like, okay,
I have a proof of concept. Now I know that
this will work. Now we can scale this. Now we
can take it and say, all right, if this person
can do it, that other people can do it and
make money. So as soon as I plan to do that,
covid hit came down like an animal. The world was
the world was shut down. So so body that we

(11:00):
both know Monique, I'd let her absolutely rain venture shout
out to them. Monique said, you need to go and
raise money on this platform called starting It. I had
shown her fan base. She says, this is dope, Like
there's nothing out there like this, And and only Fans
was a thing that was out there, and I was
totally aware of them, and I always knew that they
were gonna blow up. I was like, only fans are

(11:21):
gonna have this viral moment that when the strippers find
out about this thing that crazy, and it happened during
and when Beyonce said started only Fans, I was like,
this is out of here. This thing is it's nuts,
it's crazy. So anyway, my initial goals to raising a
million on start Engine. I got accepted to the platform,
but when I got accepted to the platform, I simultaneously

(11:45):
got yes. So at the time that I was that
I got accepted the Start Engine, I got invited to
this app called Clubhousehouse. So so the end like the
Clubhouse came. And when you're raising me in a REXI
if you can't tell anybody that you you you you're
you're raising money until the race goes live, you have

(12:06):
to be quiet about it. So I got on Clubhouse
and there were a lot of cool people on Clubhouse.
Don't don't get me wrong, there are a lot of
brilliant people out of vcs. But but one thing that
I noticed was they were black people on a clubhouse.
But there were some black people that I knew personally
that knew a lot of the vcs and a lot
of the other people on the Clubhouse that we're not

(12:28):
black and white or whatever. And I'm like, why are
they not here? I'm like, oh no, this isn't right.
I was like, I'm finding, like the hood to Clubhouse,
I'm finding I'm finna turn up. So I got some invites,
so invited like uh Snoop Dogg, Van Lathan Cortez, Brian
who managed Little Lines that suld be read, invited Sean Garrett,

(12:50):
I invited um Brian, Michael Cox, I invited just a
ton of like people, Dina Markets because I feel like
you were certainly early to the game, and you know,
I was early on Clubhouse as well. And then all
of a sudden, Isaac gets on Clubhouse, and I'm telling you,
you definitely changed the culture of Clubhouse for shut like

(13:11):
Atlanta represented heavy. Now, yeah, it came, it came in
and like maybe a week later, like Fia got on
there and then it was over. It was like it
was just action packed and so Clubhouse was having these
really viral moments. But when we got there, everybody black
got on the app. The first thing that people started
saying was here we go again. We're finna blow up

(13:34):
another app. But is it is it really? Like is
it really for us to do? We earn it? And
I was thinking, like I said, well, I'm about to
raise money for this startup, So I just sat back
and let people complain for like three months, like all
this ex September. My raise didn't go line to October
twenty nine, so people were coming on the platform and
I was like, I hear you talking all this big ship.

(13:55):
That's what I'm gonna come back around and be like,
well guess what. So so clubhouse was starting to blow up, right,
you know, like Savage got on there popping so um.
October twenty night comes and I go back on clubhouse
and hold my first room, and from that room, I
think the first ten or twenty dollars of investment in

(14:18):
fan base came off a clubhouse having rounds and explained
to people the opportunity to invest because you know, doing
a reg cf raise, um a regulation crowdfund, you're actually
raising money from the general public. So you're giving people
a chance to invest in a tech company that are
aren't accredited investors, that never get the calls to invest

(14:38):
in Uber lift clubhouse like that, And I love this
because this is what money Moves is about. It's about
being able to create generational life and expose our community
to you know, investments and wealth building that we've previously
been excluded from because people, are you an accredited investor,
can you get into this round? Are you connected in
the valley? And here's a perfect example. Um, you creating

(15:01):
opportunity for so many people to invest some money and
you know, get returns down the line. Yeah, and so
so that was extremely important for two reasons. I know
that in social media the users were three reasons. But
number one, the users are the ones that directly affect
the value of the platform. Okay, so that's one. And

(15:22):
then too, I understand the effect that black culture has
on the valuation of these text startups because we just
watch it on Clubhouse. It just Clubhouse literally went from
a hundred million dollar company to a billion dollar company
from August to January. I just seen it. We've seen
it happen in real time. So, um, the fact that
I know I could go to the community and say, hey,

(15:44):
look here's a chance to invest in the startup and
have a piece of equity in it, and we could
turn around and the cheat code is we leverage our
culture in the same way. Yeah, and and and and
make it happen that way. It will be extremely important.
And then what what really was important to me was
when fan Base is successful, because I'm just claiming it

(16:06):
it's gonna be a multibillion dollar start and when it
is you know, whatever exit or I p o we
have when I do this, and when we do this,
it will be the largest distribution of wealth to black
people in the history of this country. We have overstors,
most of them are black people, most of the first
time investors. And the fact that these people took a

(16:29):
chance in this company and they're gonna rise and see
a return. It becomes a model for the way that
we can fund our own businesses because if this works
for fan base, it can work for a multitude of businesses.
It can work for a record label, It can work
for a barbershop, It could work for anything. Like you know, Okay,
I'm gonna start a barbershop. Okay, I'm gonna raise a

(16:49):
million dollars on fan base, and then all we do
is go to that barbershop we invest in, we have
piece of it and that and I tell my friends
it's the only barbershop we go use. And then we
blow that thing up and so on the so forth,
and we can do that with our businesses. So I
thought that was extremely important. Taking it, taking advantage of
the rex CF regulation is important. And it also one

(17:11):
thing also it says is you know, and I know
I know we've heard this before, how people say Barack
Obama hasn't done anything for black people. I was like,
you understand this job act, this job that is something
that people don't understand that they should be taking advantage of.
And since then I referred at least two or three
people to start it and who are gonna raise capital
on there, and other people have asked me about it

(17:32):
and they're black and brown people. So I'm telling everybody,
take your take your opportunity to go to start engine
and raise money. And that's what I'm doing. That's amazing,
and it's it's sets such precedent for how we continue
to look at business supporting business. And again, like those
people that invested in fan base, when they get their returns,
they now have the ability to take that money and
reinvest it back. And that's the cycles and that's sort

(17:55):
of what we need to start seeing happen, is that
trickle down effect occurs again in the in the game.
I mean, the accredited investor rules been around his nineteen
thirty three. The one thing I can say is coming
out of the Great Depression, and don't matter if you
were black or white, it was really about rich people
making themselves rich, or like, oh yeah, here and invested.
IBM's like, don't worry, you gotta be accredited, and I'm

(18:17):
like exactly. And the thing that I tell people all
the time, even when I was raising capital was they
said that the accredited investor rules to protect people from
squandering life savings and making bad investments. But I asked
people to questions. And when I asked them these questions,
they'd be like, wait a minute, it is some bullshit,

(18:38):
Like do you have to be accredited to go buy
five thousand ills worth a lottery tickets? You know? Do
you have to be accredited to go to Vegas and
gamble your life savings away? No? So it's bs. So
someone like or In Michaels if you don't know who
he is, or Michaels was a seed investorent Uber. He
put five thousand dollars into Uber right in twenty nineteen

(19:01):
with the I p l that five thousand was worth
twenty four million dollars. Detaining We in a t M, rappers, producers,
fall riders, strippers, street dudes, everybody. We all got five
gs in Atlanta, Like we're not getting the call ye now,

(19:21):
But this is what I love where. But this is
what I think is also so important that we're recognizing
that we can create our own and you know that
narrative has been changing. We're especially in a city like Atlanta,
and I know you're you get this. Like we have,
we drive the culture, we have the creators, we have
all these things. And so now it's not only that

(19:42):
we're taking a seat at the table, we're creating our
own table and harnessing our own power. And this is
also what I love about fan Base, because number one,
you've allowed people to invest in it, but fan Base
is also about being able to monetize our own I
p our own creative content. So just so that people
understand and exactly what fan base does, can you give
us the lowdown on fan Base the app? Yeah, So

(20:06):
fan Base, like I said, it's a platform that allows
you to monetize any content via subscription or virtual currency
we call love. So like on platform where you can
like content, you can do that on fan Base. But
you can love it, but when you love it, you
wind up giving the person that posted that content, the
user the creator, half a penny per love. And you

(20:27):
can love a post as much as you want, So
if you want to give somebody a hundred dollars, a
thousand dollars on one post, you can do it when
they go live. If you want to love. When those
hearts float up on Instagram, that don't mean nothing. But
with them hearts float upon fan Base, you're making half
a penny. And people can hold hold a button down
and actually give you something called big Love, which is
like one hundred, five hundred or a thousand loves at

(20:47):
one time. And you can hold that on Big Love
and go one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand.
So you can just shoot somebody twenty dollars a hundred
dollars really really quick. What's the biggest love someone's ever
got so far? Oh man? I mean, I don't I
don't know. While I did something Banana's but I don't
want to. I did a case study and we had
a creative conference in Atlanta, and I had a hat leftover.

(21:11):
I had a I had a snapback left over, and
I posted the snapback on fan base and I said,
whoever loves this post the most in the next forty
eight hours, I'm gonna send you the hat. In forty
eight hours, it was twenty was worth a love given
to me and I made twelve hundred dollars off a
forty dollar hat in forty eight hours. Now, mind you,

(21:32):
I'm not like, I ain't Travis Scott Beyonce like, so
I'm thinking, like, yo, man, when they figured this out,
it's gonna go crazy. Or you know, I went live
and I was maybe live for like thirty minutes, but
I had two hundred and two hundred and thirty six
viewers and I made two hundred and fifty six dollars. Okay,

(21:53):
So this tells me that one day somebody's gonna go
live on fan Base with a million viewers and make
a million dollars, and that is gonna change the game.
It's gonna be like, Okay, I see, and and I'm
seeking to be I'm seeking to democratize access to distribution
and and um and access to capital for everybody, because
I consider we use this term content creator all the time, right,

(22:16):
and I think every single user is a content creator.
You mean anybody. You know, if if we're out at
lunch and I take a picture of some hummus and
post it, I'm creating content because in between those posts,
they're running ads and so at the end of the day,
we're all contentrates. Collectively, these platforms use us and run
ads and make billions of dollars and don't get anything

(22:36):
back to the creators. So I feel like the ad
model is a little bit stale um and and the
rev share model and the subscription based model is the
wave of the future. And so that's what we seek
to do is be extra, extra disruptive. So fan Base
is really giving. You know, we got we have long form, right,
So we have long form up to one hours. You

(22:57):
can post up to one hours where the content on
fan Base, so literally every single person on the globe
is their own Netflix. So if you spend the time
to shoot a sitcom podcast, the reality show, you can
post it put it behind a paywall. But the cool
thing about that is you're you're doing it in a
community environment. But different different differentiates us from platforms like

(23:17):
Patreon and Only Fans is those are platforms that are
sent it in in in seeing one individual and they're
not community based. So once you go there to see
the one person on Patreon or the hot like naked
girl on page on Only Fans, once you leave, once
you see that there's nothing else left for you to do.
You're like, I'm out in a community environment. You're sending content,

(23:39):
you're sharing content, you're commenting. You know, we and and
I did build audio rooms like Clubhouse, And I know
it's a little bit controversial, but the but the reason
why I did that was there was a little a
little turbulence during the election that happened, and and I

(23:59):
feel they feel like Clubhouse put everybody to their perspective side.
They put the Republicans and the Democrats to the liberals
and conservatives and say, look, this is too crazy over here.
And in that process, I think people felt like they
didn't necessarily have a voice in audio. I felt like
was a vertical. And I was right. I felt like
audio was a vertical that no matter what, how how

(24:19):
great Clubhouse did, the other platforms were going to duplicate it.
I feel like they built their version of what like
when Snapchat did stories, I feel like Clubhouse did audio,
and like like Paris Scope and People did Live and
these platforms, I said, they built a vertical that's going
to be amazing, and everybody's gonna try to copy them.
And I said, there's no sense in me not at
least trying to add that functionality, but add monetization. So

(24:40):
when you're on the stage talking in fan Base, there's
a little hard icon of love your profile picture and
somebody who loves what they're you're saying, they can give
you money and they can hold down on and give
you bread to while you're talking. So people make money.
We had a kid I was talking to you yesterday
and he said he made about a hundred and fifty
seven dollars this month on fan Base. And he just
said by simply talking audio rooms. He doesn't have any
some bribers, but all that money came from him talking

(25:02):
at audio rooms. That's where that's where most of the
revenue on the platform is coming from, is people talking
at audio rooms and getting loved. I love that part
of the plan. Sorry, okay, So tell us, Isaac, how
we can all get involved. Tell us where we can
find you on social media. Tell us where we can
download the fan base app and make some money. So

(25:24):
fan Base is available on Iowa's and Android, UM and UM.
You can find me on fan base at Isaac three, Twitter,
Isaaca three, Instagram, isaacase three, clothouse Isaca three. Oh man, Isaac,
this was such a great conversation, and I'm really excited
to see what you're building, what's next with you and
with fan base, And thank you, thank you, thank you

(25:47):
for creating a platform for incredible creatives to monetize and
create wealth. And this is all about what Money Moves is.
So I appreciate you and thank you so much for
your time. Will be sure to get involved, stay on
top of the growth of the platform, so all fan
base app get it downloaded and let's get cracking. Thank
you so much for tuning in Money Moves audience. If

(26:07):
you want more or a recap of this episode, please
go to bank Greenwood dot com and check out the
Money Moves podcast blog. Stay tuned tomorrow and every day
this week. We owned a tailor shop, which is actually
on the same street, so this is our street. The
tailor's shop was literally across the street from where we

(26:28):
are today. Sometimes black people were so innovative that we
innovate at a pace that we don't realize. We're creating
economies and we're creating infrastructures that we don't owe and
you won't want to miss. My grandmother had a catering business,
and so I started working with that business when I
was seven years old, so I was making money. When

(26:51):
I was seven, Mom had a cake busions which was
tied to my dad was executive show. Money Moves is
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