Inspiring Conversations with Nathan Wright of Track Your Talent

Today we’d like to introduce you to Nathan Wright.

Nathan, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I grew up in Australia and fell in love with acting around 10 years old. If I’m being honest, it probably started because I was the middle child and loved the attention — but over time it became something much deeper. I fell in love with the challenge of acting, the feeling of complete freedom when a performance really clicks, and honestly just the magic of being on set. I still get excited walking onto a production, especially when work takes me somewhere new.

At 16, I moved out of home to attend Newtown High School of the Performing Arts in Sydney. After that I studied for a year at The Actors Centre — the same school attended by a number of well-known Australian actors — before moving to Brisbane to study the Stella Adler technique full-time for two years at The Actors Workshop. During that time I threw myself into student films and independent projects, trying to gain as much experience as possible.

Eventually things slowed down and reality hit. Work became inconsistent, I started teaching ballroom dancing at River City Ballroom to survive, and I honestly got very close to giving up acting altogether. Then something completely unexpected happened: I won the USA Green Card Lottery.

I was wildly underprepared and didn’t have much money, but thanks to the generosity of friends Karen Barrett and Stephanie Gunn, I landed in Los Angeles with a hotel room for a month and a dream. After three weeks I still didn’t have a job or a place to live and genuinely thought I might have to fly back to Australia having failed completely. But during that final week I managed to secure both a serving job and a place to stay — and interestingly, I’m actually still at both today.

Once I settled into life in America, I started studying Meisner at Playhouse West in Los Angeles, which ended up complementing my previous training beautifully. Around the same time, I realized how little most actors are taught about the business side of the industry, so I took a course called The Hollywood Winners Circle. That completely changed my trajectory. I refined my materials, improved my understanding of marketing and networking as an actor, worked with dialect coach Chris Lang to strengthen my American accent, and prepared for what I thought would be my big launch year in 2020.

Of course, 2020 had other plans.

Even with the shutdowns, I still managed to secure commercial representation with SAINT (huge thanks to Chris Saavedra), and once productions reopened in 2021, things really started moving. Since then, I’ve booked over 13 principal commercial roles for major companies including Amazon, DoorDash, Popeyes, Morgan & Morgan and Sleep Number. One of my latest commercials even flew me to Cancun, Mexico for the shoot — one of those surreal moments where I stopped and thought, “This is exactly why I wanted to do this.”

Along the way, I kept noticing something that actors constantly struggled with — missed networking opportunities, forgotten follow-ups, scattered audition information, and the overwhelming business side of managing an acting career. I especially struggled with remembering names and keeping track of industry relationships myself. That led me to create Track Your Talent, originally launched as a mobile app designed to help actors organize auditions, contacts, events, finances and career progress.

The last couple of years have been a balancing act between acting and entrepreneurship. Building the app taught me an enormous amount, but I eventually realized the subscription app model and no-code tech stack weren’t the best fit for the acting community I wanted to serve. I’m now rebuilding it into a much more affordable and accessible Notion-based system for actors.

At the same time, I’ve realized I let some of my own acting ambitions drift too far into the background while building the business. So lately I’ve been intentionally refocusing on the artistic side again — continuing my training at Playhouse West, performing in theatre, and pursuing theatrical representation. I’m currently appearing in Coyote on a Fence in Los Angeles, which has been receiving fantastic responses from audiences.

More than anything, my journey has become about persistence, adaptation, and trying to help actors avoid some of the confusion and mistakes I experienced myself. Acting is an incredibly difficult industry, but I still genuinely love it — the creativity, the collaboration, the unpredictability, and those rare moments where everything clicks and you feel completely alive doing what you’re meant to do.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Definitely not. Honestly, I think if someone says pursuing acting — or entrepreneurship — has been a smooth road, they’re either incredibly lucky or not telling the truth.

One of the biggest struggles was simply moving to the United States underprepared. Winning the Green Card Lottery was an amazing opportunity, but I arrived in Los Angeles without much money, no real industry connections, and no safety net. I remember hitting that point a few weeks in where I genuinely thought, “I might have to go home already.” Thankfully things turned around just in time, but those early experiences taught me resilience very quickly.

Another challenge has been balancing survival jobs with creative ambition. A lot of people see booked work or accomplishments and assume things happened quickly, but the reality is there were years of uncertainty, rejection, financial stress, and questioning whether I was making the right choices. There was even a period in Brisbane where acting had slowed down so much that I was close to quitting entirely.

The industry itself can also be emotionally difficult. Acting involves constant rejection, comparison, unpredictability, and long stretches where it feels like nothing is happening. You can do great work and still not book the role for reasons completely outside your control. Learning not to tie my self-worth entirely to external validation has been an ongoing process.

On the entrepreneurial side, building Track Your Talent came with a completely different set of struggles. I went into it with passion and determination, but very little experience in tech or startups. I spent years trying to build and market a mobile app using no-code tools, often learning things the hard way through mistakes, stress, and expensive trial-and-error. There were definitely moments where I felt burned out trying to balance restaurant work, acting classes, auditions, self-tapes, theatre, and running a startup all at once.

One of the hardest realizations was accepting that just because something is a good idea doesn’t automatically mean the business model is sustainable. That was a difficult lesson emotionally, because I genuinely cared about helping actors and poured years into building the app. But instead of seeing it as failure, I eventually started viewing it as redirection and education. The experience taught me an enormous amount about adaptability, listening to users, and simplifying solutions. That’s ultimately what led me to pivot the idea into a more affordable and accessible Notion-based system instead.

I think the biggest overall lesson has been understanding that careers — especially creative careers — rarely move in a straight line. Mine certainly hasn’t. But many of the struggles and setbacks ended up teaching me skills, perspectives, and resilience that I probably couldn’t have gained any other way.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
Track Your Talent was originally created as a mobile app designed to help actors organize and manage the business side of their careers — auditions, industry contacts, networking follow-ups, events, finances, goals, tasks and long-term career progression. The idea came directly from my own experiences as a working actor in Los Angeles and from seeing how many talented actors miss opportunities simply because the industry can become overwhelming and disorganized.

The biggest thing that sets Track Your Talent apart is the focus on relationship tracking and long-term career organization. In entertainment, relationships are everything, but most actors are juggling contacts across Instagram, emails, casting sites, phone notes and memory alone. I realized I was constantly forgetting names, losing track of conversations, or reconnecting with people months later and struggling to remember where we’d met. Opportunities were quietly slipping through the cracks.

Track Your Talent was built to solve that problem. Every industry contact has an ongoing history attached to them — auditions, meetings, events, follow-ups, notes and reminders — so instead of walking into auditions or networking events blind, actors can walk in with context, confidence, and actual conversation starters. It turns networking from random chance into something intentional and manageable.

Another major part of the system is helping actors identify patterns in their careers. Most actors have no easy way to actually track what’s working and what isn’t. Are certain casting offices calling you in more? Are specific headshots performing better? Are your auditions increasing or slowing down? Are you consistently following up with industry relationships? Being able to visually track progression — or even regression — can be incredibly valuable.

I also wanted something that genuinely worked for actors on-the-go. Most organizational systems break down because they aren’t mobile-friendly. Spreadsheets become frustrating on a phone, contacts are stored in one app, audition notes in another, and project information buried across multiple casting site inboxes. Once an actor gets busy, it quickly becomes chaos. The goal with Track Your Talent was to create one central hub that actors could actually access and update in real time — even while sitting in an audition waiting room.

More recently, I made the decision to transition away from the standalone app model and rebuild Track Your Talent into a much more affordable and accessible Notion-based system. One thing I’m very proud of is that this version is designed as a one-time purchase rather than a locked-in subscription, and it’s built to function within Notion’s free tier so actors don’t feel trapped by expensive ongoing costs.

Another exciting aspect is that actors fully own and control their data. They can export it for backups, customize the system to fit their own workflow, and even connect it to AI tools for personalized career insights and trend analysis based on their own audition and networking history.

At its core, Track Your Talent exists to help actors feel calmer, more organized, and more empowered in an industry that can otherwise feel incredibly chaotic and overwhelming. It’s a system built by an actor actively navigating the industry himself — not from theory, but from firsthand experience.

Are there any books, apps, podcasts or blogs that help you do your best?
– HollywoodWinnersCircle.com (business side of acting)
– Talent Managers for Actors (facebook group)
– WeAudition app (self-tape readers on demand)
– DialectCoaches.com
– The acting books from Sanford Meisner, William Esper, Uta Hagen, Ivana Chubbuck & Stanislavski

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.trackyourtalent.com/ & https://www.nathanwrightactor.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/trackyourtalent & https://www.instagram.com/specificallynathan/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/trackyourtalentapp & https://www.facebook.com/nathanwrightactor

Image Credits
Headshot – Vanie Poyey