Richmond DinhCreator & Founder of Tiny Challenges™

What BTS Taught Me About Business..

16 Jul 2026 · 1 min

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1:14

In this solo monologue, Richmond Dinh reflects on a long‑held belief that giving away one’s best work is risky because it can be stolen and leaves nothing to sell. He experiences a breakthrough when a fan named Penny purchases multiple high‑priced BTS concert tickets despite the fact that BTS’s music is freely available online. Dinh realizes the tickets sell because BTS first released their best songs for free, building massive fan love, and then monetized the live‑experience concept. He extrapolates this to a general business principle: creators should give away their best content for free, but sell the underlying concept or experience. By identifying and packaging that concept, a brand can grow without fearing loss of revenue from the free content. He emphasizes that the key is to understand what conceptual value you are selling, after which offering the best work for free becomes a growth engine.

Chapters

So you know how they say like you got to give your best stuff out for free? Like the biggest story I had for many years was if I do that, number one, people are going to steal it, someone's going to plagiarize it, and more importantly, what am I going to sell at the end? And so my biggest aha moment only came pretty recently when Penny, she bought these BTS tickets, right? She's in love with BTS. Not only did she buy one concert in Sydney, she bought both tickets to both days, and she bought the ticket to Melbourne as well. And I'm thinking, why is she spending hundreds of dollars on BTS tickets when the music is for free and every song that they sing, she's gonna go there and hear it again but just in a live format. And it just confused me, but then made me realize the reason why they're selling out their concerts, like 80,000 people, average ticket price $500 each, that's $40 million in revenue excluding merch, is because they gave their best songs out for free first. And so that was a big aha moment I had, is that if you want to grow your brand, Give your best stuff out for free and sell the concept. And when you do that, that's when you win. And so you just need to figure out what is the concept that you're selling, because when you figure out what the concept is, then you can have no problems giving out your best stuff out for free.