Simplifying the Business of Music with Mogul

No, one person felt like they were getting paid 100 % of what they were owed. There's this feeling that people don't have the confidence to know that they're actually getting what they're owed. I believe some people are born founders. I think Jeff Punchick is one of those people. He's exited a company before. He's had big positions in SoundCloud. Now he's doing a new company, Mogul, that helps artists be paid what they should be paid.

Hey guys and welcome to Sound Connections podcast. Today my guest is Jeff Punchick. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having me. We're going to talk about you Jeff today. You've had an interesting career. You've had some successful founders journeys before and now you're doing a new one. It's called Mogul. It's a really interesting company. Jeff, where are you located?

Who are you? Based out... And what does Mogul do? Sure. So based out in Los Angeles, I'm... from Venice Beach originally. The joke I always say is I don't have blonde hair and I don't surf, so I'm a huge disappointment. Yeah, what were the other two questions? Sorry. So who are you, where do you live, and what is MOGO? Yeah, so from LA, live in LA, and MOGO, yes. So our mission is to help musicians and their teams understand their business and achieve their financial goals. And what that looks like, from suppose a product point of view is it's a lot like Rocket Money or mid .com,

but for your rights and content. So we've gone out, we've made integrations with Universal Music to DistroKid from Universal Music Publishing to Song Trust, different performing rights organizations. You actually connect those accounts. We pull in all of your earnings data, statements, metadata, content into one centralized dashboard.

giving you a total picture of your business across all rights types and income sources, which we didn't expect this to like blow people away as much as it did, but people just haven't seen their business in this way before. And then once we have that centralization, we're actually then able to provide recommendations on how you can make more money, where registrations are off, if you have money in say a residual database. And yeah, that's sort of the achieve the financial goals aspect of.

mission. Amazing. I do see why there's a big reaction to that. Okay, we'll get into the company more, but before we do that, we need to know your story. So how did you get into music? Yeah, it's a long, long winded story. So I think in a lot of ways you hear more about the successes than you do the failures as an entrepreneur. But my first company in my early twenties, I actually went to film school. I was a video editor. I used to edit for reality TV. I was at Disney for a little bit and I found this video software that could basically whenever I had to edit a multi -camera shoot, it would be a pain to sort of

overlay all the video, the different camera angles in the editing software, then I found this tool that can do it via the audio waveform. Because technically if you have three cameras, they're recording the same audio. And I had this light bulb moment. I always loved music. I was in bands. It was always a hobby. But I was like, oh my gosh, cell phone cameras are kind of getting to that point where, you know, people are recording, the cell phone cameras are good enough for people are now recording concerts. And so my first company was sort of a bridge between what I knew, video editing and my passion for music. I reached out to the company that built that software, a software that can synchronize the multiple audio source, the video via the audio sources, convinced them to make me an API. And we actually built a video processor

that basically crowdsourced all of the cell phone footage at a concert, synchronized it, and then auto edited it into a new video that turned the audience into the cameraman for the artist. Okay, wow. And so, yeah, so that was like my first like foray into music tech. And you know, I learned a lot. I was able to raise a little bit of money. You know, learned that it was a really, it was cool tech and an interesting idea. And we got, we worked with some pretty big artists, but it wasn't a great business, right? You don't own those rights. It was considered sort of a marketing shtick. We had this interesting situation where, you know, we'd work with Demi Lovato and then Miley Cyrus wouldn't want to work with us because,

you know, she, someone she was competing with, right, was a... had done it. So it was like something where one person would work with us, we would close three doors and you know that ended up failing unfortunately but it was I got addicted. I got the bug. I loved you know being creative and building tech and music and learning and you know that was eventually a lesson that you know the lessons in failure ended up being lessons that I took with me into the future and I think were a big part of you know the later successes. So that's how I got into it.

What was this thing about the founder's journey that you feel left with? I think, you know, I'm going through it a little bit with Mogul right now, which is there are these moments where there's almost, I would call it like a good pain where you build something and a ton of people sign up and it's kind of crazy. You feel like you kind of can't come up for air, but it's, you know, people have requests and things are breaking and you know, you're kind of scrambling and...

to take advantage of these moments that happen when you launch and build a company. That's just fun, right? And it's creating these good problems for yourself when things go right that in a weird way, I don't know if the word is like, it's masochistic or not, but I like the feeling of building things and having people use them and having to figure out the tough problems quickly and in the moment to keep.

the car moving and growing. A really great example of that is another company I started, Repost, which is now SoundCloud for artists, right? It's now the platform that, it's the underlying tech that every artist on the platform uses to make money, engage with their fans, things like that. Like scaling that was so, so hard. And the lessons in there were so valuable, but it was a very...

hard experience, but it's a level of reward. The reward, the feeling of the reward for that is next to nothing that I've ever experienced in my life. And I think I'm a little addicted to that, to be completely honest. Can you walk me a bit through that journey? Because, you know, we posted to have an exit and you took a position in SoundCloud afterwards. And not a lot of founders, you know, experienced that across any industry. You know, that's a big feat to do. Can you...

Walk me through the creation of that company and all the way to band. Yeah. Happy to. How much time do you have? I have plenty of time, man. I'm interested. I want to hear it. How deep do we want to go? Yes. Yeah. So it was, it was an amazing journey. It was about an eight year. It was eight years of my life. And you know, how it started was we were solving a really specific niche problem. So.

After I had failed building that concert video company, I went back to editing and I ended up at another startup called Fullscreen, which was working with YouTube influencers. Think of it sort of like a management company slash advertising agency for large YouTube influencers. And I started out as an editor, but I eventually moved into the music department and I became an expert in how to make money on YouTube. And I became an expert in also signing up and sort of sales.

I signed up a ton of artists and labels and YouTube channels to this company. And this is around 2015. SoundCloud rolled out monetization for the first time ever. So you could place an advertisement in front of a song on your channel and you could generate revenue. I thought, wow, that's great, right? SoundCloud's really similar to YouTube. How does this work?

And the way in which it was rolled out, unfortunately, was a little difficult. For folks to access that monetization, you had to send physical NOIs, you had to register the publishing with a third party company and send physical NOIs. So imagine if you wanted to monetize a YouTube video, you had to mail letters, right? And I looked at that and I thought, oh my gosh, if you're an artist on maybe a major label or maybe a really hands -on distributor, they'll help you do that. But for the independent aspect of SoundCloud, which to me at the time, on a personal level was the part that I thought was the most special, couldn't really access this thing. And so, Repo started out as sort of a weekend project where we built

a dashboard where you could log in, connect your SoundCloud channel, it would pull in your songs, you'd select what songs you want to monetize, which ones you don't. We'd collect the information necessary to facilitate that process and it looked automated, right? It would say, great, thanks for the information. Your music will be monetized in a week. In the back road, I was doing all the letters and you know, yeah, 100%. Yeah. Well, yeah, I think this is something about building in music tech, right? Is you have to, you have to launch products early on that it's, we call it like the 80 -20 rule. What's going to get you like 80 % of the impact with 20 % of the work to prove out like if people want it or not, right? And if you can get to market quickly

with something and prove something out and it's good enough to just prove it. Um, then you know, if you have something as opposed to spending all this time building something really end to end, you know, handles every weird, nuanced use case has infinite scaling. Um, you're, you have a much higher likelihood of failure, right? And that's, I think kind of like tech 101 is doing that. So that was sort of our MVP. It's called minimum viable product. Let's get this out in the market, see if people want this. And people did, and it was crazy. And it, it was one of those things where I think after a couple months of launching, I didn't have enough hours in the day to onboard new artists, handle all the registrations, field the customer support. And my technical co -founder, Joey, in that business,

who's also my technical co -founder again in Mogul, you know, he wasn't quite full time on it yet. And so it was one of these things where we almost got to a point with reposts where we almost had to shut down the business because we needed more resources to figure out the scale. from all the demand we were getting. And so we ended up raising, in the history of reposts, we only raised 500 or so K. We got to profitability pretty quickly and grew up, but we raised from a fund called AmplifyLA. We were able to hire a couple of engineers, scale the tech, grow it. We ended up pivoting into a full -service digital distributor. So since we were representing people's SoundCloud monetization, they were naturally just asking us, hey, can you...

represent us on YouTube? Can you put our music in Spotify?" And we said, sure. And so we became this thing called a distributor, which is a very hot, sexy thing to build right now. But back in 2015, 2016, there weren't a lot of them. And yeah, we built it from scratch. We grew it. And we always had roots in DNA in SoundCloud. And the relationship with the platform changed over the history.

of the company. We had changes in leadership, changes in ownership, but yeah, we ended up selling the company in 2019 to SoundCloud. And for the three years I was there, as I mentioned, we eventually turned to reposts, we de -branded it, turned it into SoundCloud for artists. We wanted to scale out distribution and basically create a centralized place on SoundCloud where folks could...

If you're a content creator, you can access all the amazing tools from mastering to chat to monetization, like all in one place. Historically, all this out cloud, all of those creator tools have been very fragmented. So it was sort of our attempt to bring everything into one place and make it a little easier for folks. And then, yeah, for the first two years, I was running just the subsidiary, which grew very nicely. The investment thesis was...

Artists on SoundCloud, people upload their content to SoundCloud before they have the confidence of going to Spotify or Apple. And that's something that a DistroKid and a Toon Core don't have that SoundCloud does from an acquisition funnel. So we launched an at -scale distribution service and that went very well. And then the other aspect, which was really interesting was, SoundCloud has a lot of interesting data, right? Like could we predict who the next Post Malone would be or the next Billie Eilish? And could we invest in them and provide artists and label services to those folks ahead of?

faster than other people in the industry could identify. And so that was another really fun project to work on while I was there. And then, yeah, my last year at SoundCloud, I was the head of creator. So SoundCloud has a direct to artist subscription. You know, charges for things like upload space. And yeah, all the business marketing product was under myself and my co -founder, Joey. And yeah, left about a year and a half ago.

Took some time off. And yeah, that's sort of the whole resume and story of Until No. That's great. It's not everyone who has that sort of journey and after that you sort of went into hiding it seems. in a way that you started building or like that's at least how it can read it from the public. Yeah, no, I don't think it was too much going into hiding. I think for me, you know, from when I was that kid on a couch trying to hack SoundCloud monetization to the point in which I was running, you know, the artist side of SoundCloud, you know, it's hard, you know,

I think it's hard personally, the entrepreneur's journey, it's lonely, it can be very And I think that was almost a decade of my life. And I think from a personal standpoint, when I was at SoundCloud for the three years I was there, I kind of had the realization that I have more companies in me, if that makes sense. I don't know that I'm going to be fulfilled going, staying at SoundCloud for much longer, going to a Spotify or, you know, a label or something like that. And I was also a little tired. And so I think I wouldn't call it so much going into hiding. I would...

almost call it a little bit more like a sabbatical, if that makes sense. Just take a little bit of time off, focus on my personal life. I got married, traveled. Amazing. Spent time with family, which is something that I think I hadn't avoided, but work can be very consuming. And so it was sort of almost like a good break, mental health, kind of just take some time off. And I always knew I wanted to start another company. I always knew I wanted to start another company with Joey, my...

my previous partner. But yeah, I think we kind of had the sense of like, let's not rush into it if we don't have to, let's take the time off and, you know, not rush into anything and let sort of the right concept or problem find us on our own time and, you know, kind of go that route, which I'm actually very happy and grateful that I did. So in this interview so far, you've mentioned, Joey.

five or six times. So obviously he's a big part of your life. Can you tell me a bit more about him? Yeah, totally. So Joey is on top of being my business partner, one of my best friends. We met at a bar, believe it or not. Everyone's always like, how'd you meet your co -founder? You can meet great people anywhere. That's a joke I like to tell. We met through a mutual friend. But yeah, and we've gotten super close, I think.

Choosing who you do business with and who you work with is the most critical thing you can probably ever do in business. I think the number one reason most businesses fail is due to founder fallouts, if that makes sense. And we've just gone through, when you start something, you're scaling it, you're selling your company. These are very intense things to go through. And we've very rarely ever fought. We...

compliment each other really well, whereas I'm pretty good, I think, on the sales business side. He is a killer engineer. So, you know, we compliment each other super well. And I had another thought and trying to remember what it was. I know. Yeah. And, you know, we're very able to put the business first, right? I think a really important aspect that you want in a partner is, you know, you don't, you take the ego out of it, right? Like there have been times in which things have gotten heated, but like, if I have the right idea, hill back off and say, you know what, you're right, this probably is the best path and vice versa, right? And there's that respect in that. Like you can have conflict in a way in which there's underlying trust in which you trust each other

to do what's best for the company and for the business and get to the right answer. And I think that we're very much on the same level with that, which is why he's, from my perspective, a pleasure to work with and a great partner. So you guys left. SoundCloud, you took a sabbatical, a lot of hiding, but a sabbatical. And you had an idea? Yeah. Yeah, thank you. So like I said, we didn't exactly rush into it, but we, I think first we had to make the decision of, did we want to continue to build in music?

Right? There are other markets out there that are much larger, maybe a little even less competitive, you know, could have larger outcomes for you personally if you succeed, but you know, we, took a decent amount of time to decide if we wanted to stay in music or not. And ultimately we did decide to stay because we love the lifestyle, we love the space, and we do have some very, I think, good domain expertise that we built that we can build off of. So that was ultimately why we chose to do that. Then we just started talking to artists and managers and business managers and lawyers. And I think we talked to maybe between 100 and 150 people.

ranging from, I would say, part -time musician to superstar level, if that makes sense. And we just asked them questions. You know, what are the pain points you're feeling? You know, what pisses you off about the space in the industry? And we just went out and started having conversations. And what ended up emerging were some really interesting similarities that led to Mogul. And the similarities were, first off, no, one person felt like they were pain - getting paid 100 % of what they were owed. And these are people where it's just an individual artist and manager. And some people who have a business manager with a royalty department, there's this feeling that people don't have the confidence to know that they're

actually getting what they're owed. The second piece was people don't trust any of the entities that pay them either. There's not a lot of tooling or ways to verify that the payment you're getting is what you should be getting. And... Also, if what's what the, you know, that middleman distributor, publisher, whatever, if they're doing, if they're actually doing a good job of the thing they're supposed to be doing for you compared to other companies that could be doing it for you, right? It's, it's a little hard to see that. The third was a fatigue problem. So now there's so many distributors, labels, middlemen, platforms, you know,

ways of making money in music. The average artists we learned were managing between 15 to 50 different lock -ins to things that made up their income and a very low competence that any of those things were organized or tight. And so they started coming back to us with the solution, believe it or not. They started saying, you know, it would be really great if you could just build me a place or a tool that could just tell me if I'm good or not. Like, am I getting paid what I should be getting paid? And if I'm not, could it tell me like what I need to do? And we said, Sure, yeah, let's try it. Because the reality is all these companies,

they give everyone reporting. They give everyone their data. The issue is people don't have a great sense or way to take that data and make it understandable or actionable. And that's actually a problem that technology could be very good at solving. And we saw that there's not really anyone. I mean, I think people have tried. And People have raised money on the concept of trying to solve this problem, but we've seen very few companies actually launch products that succeed in delivering on that promise. And so that's what we're doing. And that's essentially how we got here. Just talking to people. Because

out the gates, you've already had quite a bit of clients and customers, and you come with some proof of what you're doing. Can you walk me through what is it that you've done so far? What is it that we've done from a product standpoint or just holistically? What is the results you've had looking through the data, looking through all the revenue you've sort of analyzed for the artists?

Yeah, so this can go in a couple different directions. So we're we are pretty early stage. So we've been probably working on this concept for a year, probably like really full time about six months, you know, because a lot of it there was a lot of just talking to people and iterating and you know, things like that. But we what we found is that, you know, I would say there was sort of phase one, which was everything was very We were building the tech and everything was very manual, right? And so what that looked like was for the first 200 people or so we brought into the private beta, you know, they would like give us the logins. I would manually log in as them. I would log

into literally their tune core account, their song trust account, download the statements and we'd build the processing. And I would basically get on calls with them and say, Hey, here's, here's where I think you could be making more money. You know, here's, here's where the rights issues are, right? Like I found you money in this. residual database or you had this big spike in Apple Music Korea, but for some reason, you didn't see a spike from that royalty type in your distributor statement. So we started just putting that in front of artists, right? And the first version of our product was very much, it was actually a data studio, just like a looker dashboard that had a million different bells and whistles. And it was actually literally the tool I used to audit people's businesses. And we would just show them that.

And we would show them like, okay, like the revenue per play you make from ToonCore is this much lower than you make on STEM. And we would see their reactions. And ultimately what we learned was, A, I think artists don't necessarily, they want analytics and having a view of everything is important, but really you can give someone too much analytics and too much data into which their eyes sort of glaze over and it stops becoming valuable. So for us - we had to learn what metrics are really important. One of the most interesting findings was we thought that showing people how much money they've made across their career would be a really obvious data point to show them. But we actually found that ended

up upsetting people when we showed people that data. So it's almost similar to like, if you're afraid to look at your credit card balance, you log into your bank and you're like, oh, how much did I put on my credit card this month? People would look at it and be like, oh, there's no way that's how much I made. And it would... They'd get like, so there were a lot of like interesting psychological things we learned with regards to how people perceived certain data and information relative to their business. And that was just really valuable to take a few months and do that in a really hands -on way and just see on zoom calls and stuff, how people physically reacted to certain things. And that I think was

very important and still like what was in the box when we launched from an analytic standpoint. Um, from the found revenue standpoint, that's something that I would say we actually haven't fully nailed yet from a product standpoint. There's an art, I think the art in this is how to make this very simple to artists who have a very wide range of understanding of how the music industry works and what companies they should even be working with. So the joke I keep saying is it's like very easy for our app to just all be text. So how do you not do that, right? And so, on the found money side, you know, what we're learning is, you know, our system basically, once you've connected all the sources, we basically give you a list by rights type. We say,

okay, for your mechanical publishing royalties, here's all the issues we found. Reach out to your publisher, log into your publishing administrator and fix it yourself. Nice to have. The feedback we've gotten is a lot of folks just want us to do it for them. So I think there's a decision that needs to be made on our end, which is, you know, do we actually maybe warrant... to become a collections pipeline, or do we wanna philosophically stay out of that is something interesting, but, and I think ultimately we'll let our artists feedback be probably the decider of where we go, but yeah, we are kind of like, there's this interesting thing where it's like, we can show people where the issues are, but then there's another added step, which is how can we help them resolve the issue?

And for our business, that's something that we need to figure out. So I think. I hope that answers your question. But those are some of the initial learning so far. And we're learning every day. So we've had a really great, we launched publicly last week, actually. We've had a really great amount of signups as part of this press launch.

And people are already starting to tell their friends about it. And we're starting to see some early signs of good word of mouth traction, which is great. And we're just, I mean, I'm spending like all day in customer support just talking to people, you know, and that's, I think, that's, I think what you have to do at the early stage to learn as much as you can. And it's a really easy way to show that you care and show value early on is just by talking to your customers. So we're, we're very, when you ask what we've learned, it's, that's a very hot topic right now because we're literally doing daily sessions with the team where it's like, what did we learn today? Right. Because we're getting such new, fresh data in, at this very moment.

In the company's life cycle, if that makes sense. Can you walk me through the process of getting money for this startup? You have some really interesting investors. What was the journey? Because you've only been going on for six months. It's just out the gates. We have a great idea. We built an MVP and then we just got the money. What was the process? So it's been more than six months. So just to totally clarify, I would say, yeah, when we were...

It's maybe been a little longer, but yeah, from idea to working on it full time to raising the capital to being really, to hiring our first engineers and stuff, it's, you know, it's been a, it's been a blended thing. But yeah, the, your question about fundraising, you know, I think I will say this to anyone who's listening. It's hard and it's really hard right now. And even not to cheat my own horn as someone who bootstrapped, more or less, raised very little money. I almost consider it bootstrapped. Um, you know, technically it wasn't and sold to a pretty name brand music company. It's, it was still not super easy to raise money. I think my stats were,

I reached out to 200 people. This is, this is going to be rough. I reached out to about, to a little over 200 people. I got about a hundred responses ranging from just an email response to like follow -up calls to VCs wasting a lot of my time. Um. or investors, I got about 85 nos. I ended up with, we moved forward with four investors and I think we had to say no or cut off existing conversations with the rest. And so, you know, it takes a lot of work and it's a full -time job. I mean, that's all I did for three months. And, you know, I will say it was a little easier, probably because of what I went through,

but it still wasn't easy. I have like this really funny story where I helped an entrepreneur. with their pitch and I set up an investment meeting and the investor said no and they quit. And I was like, whoa, that is like not the right way to think about this. You know, like it is a hundred percent a sales like volume game. And specifically in music tech, music tech is really difficult because it's a really small market. It's a competitive market. It's kind of a gate kept market. If that makes sense. And which very few companies already make all of the money.

And if you look at actually the companies that actually have been disruptive, they've had a really hard time too. Like the hamster died or has come back. So yeah, you end up when you go out trying to raise money for music tech, I think you end up finding that you end up getting put in some interesting like. You had a lot of similar experiences in which you get the VCs who think music is cool and they want to talk to you and take up your time. They have no interest in investing.

You have the VCs who you think would be open to investing in music because maybe it's some ex Warner music exec you're talking to or something, but they have no interest in investing in music. Right. So that's, I think, a lesson to learn as well. And then, yeah, and then I think you do have the people who are interested in music. Maybe it's similar to kind of like the first point, but are just, there's this trepidation and unfortunately, sometimes you don't know how someone feels about the space of the market until you're kind of in the room with them. But my advice for entrepreneurs are trying to raise in music tech is, you know, try and figure out as quickly as possible if someone is open to investing in music or not.

And if they're not just move on and don't, don't let the nose get you down. It is a numbers game. Ehh Do you have any experience? This is my own personal question. I mean, you invest. I would love to hear your opinion if you agree or Yes, so the way that we actually do it is we get investment behalf of our company. So we don't actually invest. So as a Venture Studio, we build it together and then we get the investment for them. But we meet with hundreds of investors as well. We've sort of chosen a different path. We've chosen all together not to talk about music in the music companies we work with. We only do parallel storytelling.

Which is sort of weird, but like, you know, I did a FinTech journey, well, I tried to do a FinTech journey five years ago with a company that, you know, if you compare to the idea of Jukebox right now, we were just young and dumb. That was a big difference, but. But sort of what I learned about that is sort of crafting a narrative of the worth of music, but not talking about music. So when you talk about trading songs, you talk about, you know.

an alternative asset class, non -correlated to the general equity markets with sort of recession resistant dividends and all that kind of stuff. So that's sort of been our process because as you say, I've had no luck with music people, music investors. I haven't tried like very, very hard, but we have a quite high hit rate with non -music investors. Like across a portfolio, we have 16 different investors with 25 tickets.

And you know, it's not big stuff, but I believe as music founders, there's also the root of telling what I call parallel stories or crafting narratives that are not music, but is understandable to other industries. So that's sort of our experience at least. Yeah, that's a really great point. So I mean, to bounce off of that, I mean, when I think about the story we were telling when we were fundraising, it was very much a fintech.

like income tracking app for musicians and content creators, right? And we do want to eventually get out of music, right? But, you know, it was kind of more looking at like the creator economy, looking at, you know, which music is part of, we could say, and looking at sort of that as our market. You know, being explicit and honest that, you our background is music and that's where we're going to start and that's what we're doing and that's what we're going to nail. But yeah, like, very little of the conversation.

was actually about the music industry itself. So that, yeah, it's similar kind of experience and tactic, if that makes sense. But tell me about that. Was that for strategic reasons? What made you do it that way? It's kind of like what I said earlier. I think it's just very difficult to raise if you're just a complete one -to -one music tech company, right? It's not impossible. But I think you have to show...

you know, what gaps you're filling and how music can also just be a really great, like, starting acquisition channel, right? Because music is very visceral and people are very connected to music. I think there's some stat, like, one in every three or five people follow someone on a musician on Instagram, right? So, you know, it's, uh, it's, it, you obviously shouldn't be, like, dishonest, right? Like, we were clear we're a music company, right? But, like, the, the vision, right, and the outcome of what you're selling is it's, we're in a lot of ways a fintech tool for the music and content creator space. And so, you know, I think it's,

yeah, just selling that. I think that's something that investors understand, I think, a little bit better than just if, you know, I got on a call with them and said, let me tell you what the issue is with neighboring rights, royalties, and how big that problem is. And, you know, like, their eyes are going to glaze over and just say, like, I... you know, versus like, oh, look at Robinhood, look like in our case, look at Rocket Money, look at Robinhood, look at, you know, all these other companies were a lot like that, but for this, right, is a very different, just a way of selling and positioning yourself. In. You said, you know, the music industry, it might be a place where you start and you might, you know, cover other areas in the future. What does it mogul believe?

What impact do you have in other industries and how can you move on for what you're doing right now? Yeah, totally. So obviously we love music and we're very, very focused on music. But the beauty of what we're doing is, you know, an artist signs up and they say, okay, part of my income comes from Twitch, right? And we build the integration for Twitch and then we build integration for YouTube, right? Like, could you turn around to gamers, right? And say, hey, like...

Hey gamers, gaming influencers, you probably make money on Twitch, you probably make money in these other places. Would you like for us to also maybe organize your income? And I think that's something that we're very open to. And I think also a lot of musicians span different creator types. Yeah. They usually will have e -commerce businesses and while we're very royalties focused in our early days, we do want to expand into other spaces. I think if we're going ahead and integrating, the services and tools that creators are using in other industries, then, yo, if we can solve their problems too, why not turn around and help them? Right? The goal is to help as many people

as possible understand their business and achieve their financial goals. So, yeah, we can kind of kill two birds with one stone, I would think. Yeah, it makes sense. It makes absolute sense. I'm curious, Jeff. So you have been through two founders' journeys before. One of them took... what was it, eight years? And you know, most likely this one will be long as well. Like, how do you feel about going on that journey again? Good, yeah, so I think, I feel really good about it. And I think what I've learned about myself, and this is just a strictly personal thing, is that I really enjoy, A, being

my own boss, if that makes sense. I think it's like a personal thing. While SoundCloud was great, it's a bigger company, there's a board, there's lots of layers of communication. That's the case at any company, right? And I like being close to product, I like being close to my customers, and I like running the show. And so I think for me, when I was building Repost and we had the opportunity to sell, we did, and I'm glad I did, you know, From when I kind of look at all of those periods, like post -acquisition, early stage, you know, thriving 25 -person company, right? You know, I think the happiest I was probably at across that entire journey was when Repost, I think,

was at about 15 employees, where it kind of still felt like we were... I know you shouldn't call your company a family, but, you know, it... you know, everyone kind of was, like, responsible for their own thing. They had ownership of it. The culture was great. We were growing. It was on our own terms. And yeah, the way, the thing I like to describe it's I like to be in the pirate ship and not on a naval ship, right? And that's just a personal thing. And so when I think about the next five, 10, you know, however many years of my life, if that's mogul and we are helping artists make more money, that's a, a very like personally fulfilling mission and purpose for myself. And.

It based on my last experience and you know, starting and growing and selling reposts. It, you know, it, it was. It that was when I was, I can focus on when I was the most happiness, when I was the most happy on a personal level. And yeah, you know, I want to get to that again. And that was, that was very exciting for me. It was very fun. So I feel great about it. One thing I think about, uh, when I hear some founders towards outside of the music industry and they might be general.

but people sort of go for creating companies because they want to have a big financial success. I'm always a bit confused because is it really worth the journey? Like if you're not passionate about the product, if you're not passionate about what you do, how can that really be enough motivation? Because I can imagine, go for it. Yeah, sorry, I'm like jumping in on this question. Yeah, do it, do it. Strong opinions, yeah. Like...

I feel like you, if you want to make a lot of money, like a building in music tech, like might not be the best place, but also to your point, like what, what's like, what's your, what's your motivation to really kill it? Right. Like for me, I'll explain what happened at repost. I, you know, I thought, okay, you know, we'll solve this niche problem, help artists monetize their sound cloud. And then on that journey, the first time an artist told me, Hey man, I was able to quit my job at Starbucks this week and take music full time.

because of the company you created. It was like an arrow through the heart. I got like, that was such a good, unforgettable feeling that it completely changed my purpose in life. And I was like, I am on this planet to help creative people make a living doing what they love. And it stopped being about a business, stopped being about making money. It became about chasing that feeling and that purpose. And the moment that happened, right? Like if you were, If you are chasing money, it's, I mean, you, I'm sure you can succeed going with that strategy, but if you were chasing a purpose and a feeling and you're setting a good culture for that, like the money will come, right? Uh, is, is my two cents. And I think it's important,

you know, especially going into your third founder's journey and probably more ambitious than ever, you know, that requires a lot of work. requires a lot of energy, a lot of sacrifice. And if you don't have that base, if you don't have that purpose, like I have a hard time believing that it's worth the ride. You know, you got married and I can imagine, I don't know how it is with kids and stuff, but like there's always gonna be costs about this journey. And you gotta sort of, if you don't have that base of purpose, I just can't see how people pull it through. Like, you know, how do they do it? And is it worth it? You know? Yeah. And I - I agree. Like it probably makes the hard times so much harder,

right? If you don't care about what you're doing, right? Like it's the passion and the love for what you do that makes the hard times like navigatable, right? Cause you can say like, this is really hard right now, but you know, or this is really lonely, but this is why I do this, right? And if you can kind of point back to that, this is why I do this, it helps you to just...

push through and be more successful. And yeah, of course, you know, life changes, people get older, people have families and, you know, life changes. And yeah, the hope is eventually, I don't think you ever stop working hard, right? But hopefully you start to learn along the way and you figure out how to work smarter and not harder. Well, not necessarily more, yeah, but figure out how to work more smarter, if that makes grammatical sense. And...

Yeah, but yeah, I completely agree. If like, if you're in it for just the money, like, I don't, I couldn't build a business like that. Hey. Yeah. I don't understand it. Not one of the subject. I'll ask, since we're in the presence of a very successful founder, I'll ask a controversial question. It's not so much about you, but maybe your viewpoints on something. So I speak to a lot of founders. A lot of them are working in the music industry, but not from a music background.

and they see sort of a problem they want to fix. What is your opinion on founders that come into the music industry to build music solutions, but don't come from the industry, they don't know the industry, and therefore the motivation for the love of the product of the industry can most likely, you know, it's not there. What's your opinion on that sort of founder's journey?

Yeah, it's a very good question. And I feel like this is an answer that I'm going to be thinking about as I'm saying it. So I think ultimately people get into the music industry, of course, because it is a cool, fun, sexy business to be in. Who doesn't love music and who doesn't want to help creative people, right? So I think ultimately that's great that really smart people from other industries with knowledge of product or engineering or whatever it is are bringing their expertise into the industry. I think that's ultimately going to be good. I think the music industry, there is a steep learning curve for understanding how it works. And you have to understand how it works

if you're going to be building solutions and tech in the space. And there's some great resources, right? You know, there's the Donald Passman book on, you know, music industry. There's, you know, Hopefully tons of great materials online, but yeah, I mean, it goes back to my first startup. I built a video processor in the concert space. I knew nothing about how the music industry worked and it failed because of that. For that exact reason, I didn't know what publishing meant. I didn't understand what rights occurred when, you know, some, an artist performed live and it got uploaded to YouTube or a third party site and.

I just thought, wouldn't this be cool? Now that's, I think a big part as to why that business failed, but I will say this, it changed my life for the better and it made it so that it was a very sort of crash course way of learning the industry. I do learn by doing and it, and you know, it, that is a part of the process as to how I got here today. So I think, I feel bad kind of telling people to not build in music tech or to stop.

think about not building in music tech if they don't understand the industry, but I think it is sort of a prerequisite. Or it factors very heavily on your success because if you don't know what you're talking about and you know, you're infringing on people's rights, you're doing something you shouldn't be doing, you know, that can be pretty bad for you. So, yeah, hopefully that's a good answer.

Yeah, sorry for putting you in a spot for that question. It's obviously this podcast is also for founders in the music industry. There's a lot of people that are curious. Some might come from music, might come not. And it's something that's not talked about that much. But I do believe everyone who works the music industry came into the music industry at one point. So obviously there's room for being an outsider, but like it's important to understand sort of that perspective. Yeah. So it's hugely important. It is. Yeah. On a personal level.

Now you're in for the ride for five to 10 years. What do you see happening in five to 10 years? Is it an exit goal in mind or what do you have in mind? Next five years for mogul? Yeah, no, like, you know, mogul turned successful, right? No, for mogul. So the mogul turned successful and you maybe have the opportunity to sell the company in five to 10 years.

Is that what are you going to do or what's sort of your path on running this company? Sure. I am selling right now is not even on our radar. So it's hard to say. And it's hard to know where you'll be in five years and if this worked or if this didn't work or not. So I would say right now, it's hard for me to answer that question because my thinking is very actually short term. It's like getting to product market fit and making sure what we're doing is valuable to people so this can survive and live on. But yeah, I think ultimately, you know, it kind of goes back to your question about like building a business for money, right?

If you were building a business with the initial goal of trying to sell it, right? That is like, oh, I want to build something and flip it in a few years. You know, then that's not going to, that, that's a little counterintuitive, especially at such an early stage in the sense that it might taint the decisions you make and taint how you think about the future and.

you know, how you build the product and things like that. So for us, the vision is long -term. The vision is to create as much value for musicians and their teams to understand their business and achieve their financial goals. And if we accomplish that and do a great job and a partner comes along that could accelerate us achieving that mission, we would maybe and probably consider it, but...

For now, we're thinking very long term and trying to grow this as big as possible and to help as many people as possible. Yeah, I'll take that as great advice. Actually, I'm proud to think about it. I think that's something. Well, Jeff, this has been a great talk. It's been super insightful. I'm very inspired by your journey. I'm very interested in seeing what's happening with mobile in the future. Thank you. I think you have some great guys.

Supporting you, you have some great investors, you have a track record, I'm sure there's gonna be a lot of interest around what you do. At the end of the episode, you've given a lot of advice, so maybe you empty of advice. But if there's any advice you would give founders and entrepreneurs that's listening to the podcast for something they should know, what would that be?

Yeah, there's so much. Just launch a product. 99 % of things never make it to being launched. And I understand it can be scary, and there's doubts along the way of if people even want this. And you're making tons of assumptions. But just if you have an idea, and you're passionate about it, and it's keeping you up at night, and you can't stop, you're staring at the ceiling, and you can't think about anything else because you think it's so great, just find a way to get the most simple version of it live and get people using it. And you know.

At the very worst, if it fails, you'll learn and you'll be stronger for the next thing. Just like how my first company, the video crowdsourcing thing was kind of a, it was a failure, it was a disaster, but it was the best lesson I ever, I ever learned. So yeah, I think my advice is just 99 % of companies fail because they never launched and do everything you can to just getting something out into the world and trying to make a difference. And if you fail, you'll learn. And that's very valuable. So that's great advice.

Well, thank you, Geoff. And with that, I want to thank you for being on Sound Connections Podcast. Thank you very much.