Lennon Bone

After touring for over 10 years as a musician with the band Ha Ha Tonka—appearing on television, playing on multiple Billboard Top 200 albums, and performing at major festivals like Lollapalooza, Austin City Limits, and Sundance Film Festival—and collaborating personally with artists such as K. Flay and Rocky Votolato, I stepped away.

I left music because I had become a social alcoholic, and I didn't like the direction my life was heading. I shifted to producing records for other bands and quickly realized my years of experience treating creativity as a business could help others strategically grow.

I began creating YouTube videos designed specifically to help musicians, which led me to take a class from Tim Schmoyer, who helped YouTube write the curriculum on how they initially taught the use of their platform. Tim eventually hired me as one of his first salaried strategists, allowing me to work with top-tier creators across YouTube. Collectively, our team generated billions of views and millions of subscribers for our clients, and I personally helped creators earn hundreds of thousands of dollars and achieve milestones like becoming YouTube's "Creator on the Rise."

Despite this success, my heart was always drawn back to helping artists directly. So, using what I'd learned about personal branding and marketing, I started building a course specifically designed for artists looking to sell more of their work online.

My first test subject was my wife, whose Instagram following quickly grew to over 20,000 engaged followers after we clarified her messaging and branding. This growth led Netflix Family to reach out to her for illustration work, and she was featured in Bored Panda, HuffPost, and received book deals from two publishers—all cold calls, thanks to her newfound visibility.

On January 1, 2021, I left Video Creators to launch Stop The Starving Artist full-time. Since then, artists I've worked with have not only started successfully selling their work online but some have also achieved six-figure incomes.

Now, my mission is clear: to help our community of artists collectively earn over $1 million in 2025.