Laura Simpson - Side Door

In this episode, we jam with Laura Simpson to discuss her newly launched product, Side Door. Laura and her co-founder, Dan Mangan (Juno award-winning, world-touring singer-songwriter from Vancouver) launched Side Door to empower and build local communities around live performances.

We cover a medley of topics including:

• 👯‍♀️ the power of communities and fanatic networks
• 🤾‍♂️ knowing where to focus your customer acquisition efforts (supply vs. demand) 
• 🏰 building teams at HQ or remote
• 💑 the importance to align incentives and values in a marketplace 
• and much more 🦋

Extra Extra

The global value of music copyright topped $28B in 2017: in this article it's interesting to see how growth has gone since the record business basically "halved" from 2002 to 2014. It's also interesting to see how the cash gets distributed amongst the labels, distribution, and songwriters. 

Here's a crazy story about random teen phenomenoms who are writing songs (pretty good imo) and blowing up on YouTube without any help from labels or professional industry folks. 

Music Industry Dynamics - we all know the music industry has changed with the introduction of streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, and Pandora. Although these services are excellent for the consumer like you and me, the artists have to completely re-think their business models. Musicians used to be able to monetize the actual work product of their art... the music! These streaming services have lowered the barriers dramatically for artists to distribute their music to an international audience, but now requires them to rely heavily on touring and alternative income sources to make a living. Here's the timeline of how the streaming services have come to be, and how the $9.99/month price leaves even the streaming services with shallow margins sparking a war between Spotify and Apple. This article is obviously biased; however, it does shed some light on how Apple is leveraging its massive foothold in the market.

Notable Mentions

Broken Social Scene (9:40) - a band that through one heck of a show on the Side Door platform, hit the link to see video highlights from the show

Hubspot (16:40) - an end-to-end marketing, sales, and growth platform 

Heap (16:40) - a powerful product analytics tool that helps you understand how users are using your product without writing additional code

Google Analytics (16:40) – analytics platform that gives you visibility into how people find and interact with your website

It’s with terabytes of LOVE that I ask you… if you find this interesting at all and want to support this project, please pass this along to a few friends or text them a link to the podcast. Thank you and enjoy!