Hello world đ
Weâre back today with a few important updates from our partners at Emanate.
For those who need a quick refresher, Emanate is the blockchain music streaming platform we partnered with in late 2018. For music lovers, itâs like Spotify but with the newest and coolest artists who get paid in real-time as youâre streaming (pretty dope, right!) If youâre an artist, Emanate opens you up to a new world of collaboration and monetization.
First up, and most importantly, we have distributed the first of our perks to our new Vampr investorsâââwith an added cherry on top đ Any investor in Vampr who was eligible for any of the Emanate perks is now also eligible for a full 12 month artist Pro-Connect account, valued at $99 USD. This means you can add your own original catalogue of music to the existing 3,000 tracks on the platform and manage your profile for free from emanate.live.
If youâre not a music maker and youâd simply prefer to stream brand new music for free then sign-up to the platform using your crowdfunding email and enjoy 12 months of free streaming. Itâs that simple!
Next, we are excited to break the news that Emante and Mau5trapâââthe indie record label founded by Deadmau5âââare teaming up for a remix competition, with details to follow later this week! Follow Emanate on Medium to find out how you can participate đ
And finally, members of the Emanate community have launched their own original song competition, with $300 up for grabs đ„ To find out more head to: https://medium.com/emanate-community/emanate-community-song-competition-usa-only-ed5f167d5d38
We hope you enjoy the Emanate experience as much as we do. Itâs early days for Emanate but they are a great bunch of people who are on a mission to help young musicians have their music heard AND get paidâââcheck it out!
Cheers,
Josh & Baz
Great news!
Not only was Josh selected in the 30 Under 30 music industry awards, he also took the NUMBER ONE spot with the Readerâs Choice, taking Vampr to the top of the heap among innovative young Australian music companies and well established major corporations and brands alike.
So a BIG thanks to each and every one of you who took the time to vote.
As Josh said to The Music Network: âThrilled to get the gong and keep company with such amazingly accomplished people and companies. For Vampr this is a wonderfully timed validation as we ready ourselves to drop the next big update â more on that soon.â
More on that soon, indeed đ
Baz
We would like to take this opportunity to update you on Vamprâs approach in responding to the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic.
Vampr has implemented a wide range of measures to ensure the safety, health and wellbeing of our contractors and suppliers. These measures are consistent with advice from the World Health Organization (WHO) and we will be actively reviewing and co-ordinating our response as the situation evolves.
Our development team will continue operating remotely, with social distancing very much âbusiness as usualâ for them.
It should go without saying, we highly recommend keeping all your musical collaborations online for the time beingâââfollow your local governmentâs advice with regards to self-isolating and additional safety measures.
Iâm sure none of us imagined that our lives could shift so dramatically in such a short period of time. Thereâs no doubt about it, thereâs some tough times ahead. From all of us at Vampr, we wish you all the best over the coming weeks and perhaps months.
We also hope that for those who find themselves spending more time alone, Vampr can be that little ray of sunshine in an otherwise dog-day-afternoon.
Thereâs always songs to be written, collaborations to be made and networks to be built. Maybe itâs time to dust off those songs at the bottom of the drawer or buried deep in the brain, to reach out to that killer DJ/singer/guitarist/beatmaker you have been wanting to work with and start on the âwhatâs nextâ for your musical career.
Letâs face it, itâs a lot more productive than watching another news report on bloody toilet paper!
To our brand new shareholders through our Wefunder crowdfunding campaign, we are working on distributing your perks but due to the small matter of a global pandemic there will be a delay in cap/hat manufacture and additional distribution until things return to normal. We thank you for your patience and look forward to delivering your perks in due course.
In addition, we are planning to soon provide a preview of some of the groundbreaking initiatives we have been working on over the past couple of months. Make no mistake, our pipeline of consumer products for 2020 is rich and exciting and we canât wait to unveil them.
To the wider music industry, we will be reaching out to our PRO and label partners in the coming weeks to see how we might help their relief efforts for music industry professionals who have been affected by loss of work. No-one knows better than Baz the devastating impact the COVID-19 virus has had on the industry, with his own nationwide tour, 2020âs biggest Australian summer event, having just been cancelled midway through, with more than 10,000 jobs affected.
On a parting note, weâre all pretty much an incredibly resilient bunch, but the physical social isolation of this pandemic has the potential to remove our network of friends and family, the very people we rely on through tough times. To state the bleeding obvious, if ever there was a time to remember that our friends and the wider world are waiting for us online, itâs now đ
Stay connected folksâââand be safe!
Best,
Josh
Co-founder and CEO of Vampr
Two things you definitely want to know!
We have just released an important update for Vampr, available immediately from both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. This update will look almost identical to the current Vampr however weâve significantly improved the sign-in process based on your feedback.
Previous versions of the app will stop working on Mondayâââso in order to keep Vampr working we ask kindly that you update immediately.
Meanwhile, we are over the moon to find out Vampr was prominently featured in a recent Apple Story highlighting apps which help to connect like-minded people! We are keeping some fine company in this listâââcheck it out in the above image đ
Weâre back with our first two Vampr Stories for 2020.
We first found out about Xtina Jewell and Jordan Hayes in the press đ
Today they have been gracious enough to let us share their stories with you in the two videos below:
? Xtina Jewell in BIG/SOUND Blog
? Jordan Hayes in the Whitefish Pilot
As you are probably well aware Vampr just closed our seed round of fundraising. We raised close to $1.2M between private and public funds and let me tell you⊠it kicked our ass. Throughout this process, I learned quite a few things about raising capital and entrepreneurship which I wanted to jot down while itâs all still fresh in my mind.
First, about Vampr. Our platform gives creatives the ability to discover, connect and collaborate with other creatives instantly. My co-founder Baz Palmer and I have enjoyed successful careers in music, and we have been watching on excitedly as the industry began to evolve and revolve around the internet. However, one thing was missing! It became increasingly obvious to us that whilst certain previous challenges were being solved at scale (ie. distribution, publishing, fan servicing tools) the biggest barrier to entry and challenge of them all was being completely ignored: Getting started! Finding your tribe and building your network. Labels and the rest of the music industry gang seemingly had no real short-term incentive to address this problem either.
So we set out to create a tool we wished we had when we were starting out.
In taking on this challenge we committed to building something great. We wanted to build a movement. And every movement grows from the inside/out. We wanted our core users to find utility and value every time they logged in. And then connect with that core user baseâââget them excited and let them evangelize. Thatâs where passion lives. Thatâs how we know communities are built.
But communities need support. Support needs resources. And you need capital for resources.
So raise some money, they said! It shouldnât be too hard, they said! Investors will come, they said!
Well, we didnât have a choice in any event. Our runway was getting shorter by the minute, and weâd done this twice before. Sure, we needed more money this time around, but how hard could it really be?
Spoiler alert: really fucking hard.
Donât let Shark Tank fool youâââdoes it fool anyone?âââraising money sucks! Finding an investment partner is just like dating. Youâre going to go on 1,000 first dates trying to find someone you like. Youâll burn through a boatload of money, spending hours talking about yourself and trying to impress somebody youâre not even sure if you really want to date!
Dealing with VCs is wild and itâs something we really did with a lot of caution. Getting in bed with a VC partner is somewhat straightforward but extremely hard to get out of. The wrong VCs will offer you a lot of moneyâââbut will give you terms on the money that will ensure youâll always have to go back to them, or alternatively be fame obsessed: âIs Kanye in, man?â. For this reason we preferred dealing with the smaller firms and family offices. The right VCs? More often than not music isnât their wheelhouse.
Then we had the added complication of crowdfunding. Weâre incredibly grateful that our campaign attracted over 1,180 new investors, however the time it took to procure such a large collective of folks who were ready to invest was insane and frankly frustrating. Particularly securing the first $250,000.
Every morning started with calls lined up before the rooster crowed, where you were unsure if the person you were talking to was genuinely interested in investing or kicking tyres, or worse still, on a fact finding mission for their own crowdfunder or competitor startup. Really, that happens! This was my routine for the first several months of the campaign. It took me a while, but eventually I became savvier at vetting the calls before committing time to getting to know them. Time management and resilience became my best friends.
The upside, of course, was talking to so many diverse people excited about what we are doing. Big or small, everyone who participated, parted with real cash and were taking an active risk on our opportunity. Also, risk is relative. $100 is a lot of money for 99% of people on the planet, myself included.
I would also add that upon reflection our approach to due diligence was somewhat misguided, although we had all the right intentions. We spent a silly amount of time and money prior to launching this round in auditing our own company and publishing all of those materials online.
We wanted to wear transparency as a badge of honor.
However we now know that most investorsâââbig and smallâââskipped on most of the reading and details, preferring to quiz Baz and I directly. This was what we were trying to avoid as thereâs only so many hours in the day!
âCan this scale?â
The most useless question in the world! But for VCs, itâs all about GROWTH and SCALE over everything. Even if you have to hack it. Hell⊠they actually prefer you hack it. Companies pumping and inflating user/consumer bases has kind of been a dominant story for the past decade.
You donât need to be a tech nerd to have observed the hype and trends around these âfastest-growingâ companies and how much money they have raised.
All of these companies folded for one reason or another (WeWork on the decline), but itâs clear that saying youâre going to grow means 1000x more than actually growing or selling anything. And VCs donât seem to care.
I will say, it does seem that people are waking up and understanding that there is way less value in having 7 million dormant people on a platform than having sixty thousand paying customers on a âsmallerâ platform. Hopefully, thereâs a wake-up call and weâre getting back to the core goal of creating great products with passionate fans.
Why does this matter? Because we found it so difficult to find partners who believed in our mission to grow organically. Time after time, we met with VCs and angel investors who only cared about our âscaleâ or how fast we can growâââas opposed to believing in a community of independent creatives who are passionately using the platform right now.
Even our market leading position wasnât enough for many investors. They wanted to see impossible growth chartsâââand I refused to play along. I wasnât going to fudge our projections, opting instead to forecast based on fact. Itâs important to have values and draw a line in the sandâââask yourself, what do you stand for? Is getting money at any and all costs the name of the game? No.
Itâs one of the main reasons we went after a public raise. Let the people invest in us and let us tell you where the money is going. We didnât want to lie on paper about how easy it was going to be to grow.
But we could, and did, show you the impressive milestones weâve consistently hit along the way.
We donât know how big weâre going to be. But we know we have an awesome community who really give a shit.
Not so long ago we tried building a paired back version of Mailchimp. Our mailing list was getting rather large and the monthly fees were becoming excessive. So we set a development course, invested money, time and resources into building this alternative email marketing solution.
However we had/still have a really small dev team; the time spent building this admittedly tiny part of our overall marketing machine was time spent neglecting user feature requests and bug fixes.
Itâs moments like this which force you to step back and reflect, override your pride and realize Vampr is as much theirs as it is ours. And if people really like something, theyâll use it.
Nothing prepares you for being an entrepreneur. Sure, youâll hear about the long nights, dedication, etc. We all know about the sacrifice.
But you know what nobody mentions?
Laying people off. And how hard that is.
Unfortunately, we had to lay off six people over the course of a year spent raising.
Sure, thereâs 7 videos on YouTube and plenty of âscriptsâ on the internet on how to lay people off, but there was nothing that prepared me for that. It was the hardest thing Iâve ever had to do in my professional life. And nothing in all my years prepared me for it. Itâs very difficult to tell a teammate, one whose livelihood and familyâs livelihood is dependant on you, that you canât find a way to keep them active for the foreseeable future. Especially when you get to know their families and situations. These guys are human beings, not resources as theyâre often described, and it takes a psychopath to not take that duty of care very seriously.
Weâve been through it all. And we have more to go through. But itâs a beautiful struggle.
Thereâs parts of the startup game that we detest and despiseâââbut itâs a game weâll keep playing and keep winning at until we have enough influence to change it.
And with all that weâve learned⊠I wouldnât do anything else.