This episode promises to equip you with strategies to make your crowdfunding campaign stand out amidst the competition. Find out what types of musical products and companies are ripe for Kickstarter and Indiegogo and the single most important factor for surpassing your goal. Hint: it's about community. Other hint: You need a couple months of runway to make it happen. Listen for details.
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Episode Transcript
Machine transcribed
0:00:00 - Dmitri
Welcome back to Music Tectonics, where we go beneath the surface of music and tech. I'm your host, Dmitri Vietze. I'm also the founder and CEO of Rock Paper Scissors, the PR and marketing firm that specializes in music innovation, and we are about a week away from the NAMM show, the annual trade gathering of the musical instrument world, and this year, Rock Paper Scissors, my company, is bringing a whole posse to our booth there.
You may have heard that we have fattened out our services beyond PR to include influencer marketing, paid ads, crowdfunding management and video production, and for today's episode, we're going to dive into one aspect of that world. Our guest is an inventor specializing in crowdfunding, digital marketing and product management, with over $16 million raised through crowdfunding campaigns. In addition to serving as an all-star mentor at Techstars, he has extensive experience helping organizations transform ideas into reality. Last year, our guests teamed up with my PR firm, Rock Paper Scissors, to work with our clients on managing crowdfunding campaigns, including the Demon Box, the electromagnetic synth demon, and the Zephyro, the wind controller that plugs right into your smartphone. So who better to talk to us about launching musical instruments and apps. Welcome to the show Andrea Baldreschi.
0:01:31 - Andrea
Dmitri, thank you so much. Very excited and pumped to be here.
Thank you for having me, yeah, so I thought it would be fun to introduce you to the Music Tectonics audience by giving an overview and tips around crowdfunding in music tech. Are you game for that, Andrea? Of course I mean already. All right, cool, so let's dive in. What's the state of crowdfunding as we kick off 2025? Is it still relevant and useful?
Yeah, very, very good question. Of course, crowdfunding is still a very helpful and useful tool for creators to bring their ideas to life. I think that things have changed dramatically since when its conception around 15 years ago, so it's now a much more renowned tool, so people have familiarity with it. It's still a beautiful and probably unique way for founders to get funds in order to realize something, basically cashing in before they actually produce and manufacture a product, which is something special. That is not possible otherwise. On the other hand, a few things have changed that made it slightly harder for creators, because in today's world of crowdfunding, a few photos and a bunch of sketches will not cut it. You need to see crowdfunding more as a comprehensive and extensive marketing operation at the end of the day, because you need to have solid content, a solid story, a solid pitch and you need to tell why your product is special, exactly as you would do if you were on the market already.
So that has changed slightly from what it was in the early days, but on the other hand, it's a very strong tool and it keeps being like that.
So in a way, you're saying the maturity of the platform or even the concept of crowdfunding has led to the need to be more prepared. You can't just be very idea-faced.
Exactly, although I love the idea of a creator jumping on Kickstarter, sharing a bunch of photos and sketches of something that they want to build and then raising a million dollars and there are a few stories like that in the early 2000s and 10s, but that will not make it today anymore. There are so many campaigns out there.
you need to be, look and feel special at the eyes of uh, potential backers did, did um, did some of those sketches just not manifest, and that's why there's kind of a higher standard now yeah, you mean manifest, in the sense that, like they, they didn't fulfill the product. They may have fulfilled the fundraise, but that's, yeah, that's that's a different.
That's a different topic. Of course there's a bit of that, but it's also the fact that Kickstarter had a period of time where it was mostly based on organic traffic, because the concept itself of crowdfunding was new and exciting, so people were willing to go and look for something new, pledge for it and wait. Now it's very different. Of course, you still have organic traffic, so you have people browsing through the platform searching for something new.
But in order for my campaign to be successful, I need to be exposed to many eyes and I need to do my best to catch the attention of a certain audience, because there are so many other creators and so many other products competing for that same exact audience.
I got you Okay, so let's talk specifically about musical instruments and other music creation tools. How well does crowdfunding work for instruments?
0:04:54 - Dmitri
Yeah, in general I say re-worker funding is the best tool to bring to market a consumer product which is tangible, and when we talk about product for musicians new music instruments we're exactly in that category. So the response is crowdfunding is a wonderful tool for new musical instruments. And also I believe that in in a certain way, musicians are a little bit more forgiving than other audiences, so they are okay sometimes seeing a campaign that doesn't necessarily look like super polished and finished, but they see what's the value of the invention because they're musicians and so they see that a musician has created something new for them so they're able to basically go through. Uh, you know a certain um filter which maybe consumers in other areas are not able to basically go through? Uh, you know a certain um filter which maybe consumers in other areas are not able to go through?
0:05:50 - Speaker 3
oh, that's really. I hadn't yeah, I hadn't thought about that. That's super interesting. What about music apps like music creation apps or tools for for musicians? Is that a crowdfunding um potential product, or is it really more physical stuff?
0:06:03 - Dmitri
as a general category, I'd say like 90 to 95 percent of the products that you see on kickstarter are hardware, tangible goods. So of course, when it comes to musical, physical, physical musical instruments, it's better. But apps still have their own market. We launched a bunch of apps in the past. There are a few rules. Basically, there's no way you can get people to pay for an intangible good like an app unless they tried it before, so it must must have been somewhere already available for people to test. And also there's no way you can get people to pay for an app, say on kickstarter, for one year of subscription. It must be something. If it's a lifetime access to your own software, then people are willing to pledge. There's no way you can say I'll give you two years of this and then in two years you need to pay me again, because that's not just aligned with the crowdfunding philosophy.
0:07:00 - Speaker 3
Gotcha. Okay, that's helpful. We do have a lot of folks in the Music Tectonics audience that are building software and apps and so forth, so it leans towards gear. You kind of have to have a good reason to try it with an app. I guess let's widen out even beyond that. How does a company know if they're suited for crowdfunding overall?
0:07:20 - Dmitri
In general, like really in the music industry, you can launch anything through crowdfunding, like I said, whether it's hardware or software knowing that software has a little bit of like say, a few more necessary steps to be ready for a crowdfunding campaign. But in general, once you have a product and you have a functional prototype at least, so you're able to create content in order to show how that product works today and will work tomorrow, then you are ready for crowdfunding. I think it's very important here we're entering into, say, a little bit more of a strategical approach topic, but you're never ready for crowdfunding unless you run already a pre-campaign. That's the most important thing of all. Maybe we'll keep these for later, but in general the response is as long as you have a product and you have a prototype and you have content to tell your story, you're ready for crowdfunding. But you will never push on the button tomorrow. You need to first create your own community.
0:08:24 - Speaker 3
So there's some runway involved that I think we'll get to a little later in the conversation. So you can't just boom, just do it right away. So you got to know that. But are there certain types of products that are more suited for crowdfunding? I imagine with musical instruments, if you're just I don't know, are you making a handmade piano, like a high-end handmade piano, or are you just reproducing, you know, an electric keyboard that doesn't have that many differentiators from other existing keyboards on the market, versus, are you doing, you know, an Artifon Orba or a BlipBlox, mytrax, one of these things that we've, you know've been involved with um that have, like a very unique form factor? Does it have to be gadgety, quirky, cool, different, new, or could it be something that's a little more common and and is just? I don't know? I'm just curious how you think about in terms of that as well.
0:09:18 - Dmitri
Yeah, great point I think so, technically, you can launch anything on Kickstarter as long as it's a new product.
That's the only rule right that they have.
On the other hand, it's obvious that when your product has some sort of a unique or very original factor, it will gain more visibility throughout the platform, because the audience that you have on Kickstarter that is already there browsing for new products is actually browsing for new inventions.
So what they're looking for is something that they haven't seen before, because if you're launching a product that is already available in the same exact form say with slightly different features in the shop at the next block, of course, why should you put the money and wait for six months before it's delivered at the next block, of course? Why should you put the money and wait for six months before it's delivered? So, to respond to your question, Kickstarter and crowdfunding in general are definitely the place for products that have some sort of originality or like new features that I've never seen before or that unlock new possibility for music creation in general. With this said, I wouldn't't say no if someone that has a already existing product that, with a different angle maybe, is approaching kickstarter or car funding, that would be totally fine. But, of course, if you have something very, very new, that will help yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Um, I guess the other thing that I'm curious about is would an existing kind of established brand name musical instrument company have a reason to go to crowdfunding?
I think I mean they do for basically the same reasons of any other creator, of course at a different scale, but Kickstarter has its own community.
So if you look at the numbers, when we run a solid pre-campaign and say we put together a hundred backers thanks to our own efforts, then once we launch on crowdfunding on Kickstarter, mostly you usually get the same amount, if not more, of backers thanks to organic traffic coming from the platform. So that's the big advantage, which is you're tapping into an existing community and you're accessing and getting their attention because you're launching on that platform. Plus, it allows you to again get the funds for finalizing the manufacturing of a product before you're actually like distributing that. So that's, that is a great perk that any, any company would have. On the other hand uh, of course, like the, the dna and the reason why the kickstarter crowdfunding exists are because of the small creators right, like starting from from scratch and from zero. So so the big companies, like the renowned names, are a little bit more reluctant to approach it, but they're doing that more and more often.
0:12:12 - Speaker 3
Yeah. So you've got a combination of sort of just the general mechanism, almost like this gamified mechanism, of sort of like goal reaching to kick in benefits, to kick in the production and the sale gives you almost like a waiting list for a product. It's almost like a sneaker drop or something like that in a way that's built into most of the crowdfunding platforms. But then you also have this. What you're saying is like a almost like an exponential impact you bring in your audience, but then there's also an existing crowdfunding platform audience that starts to reverberate. They're almost generates some excitement, almost like some digital word of mouth in a sense, where somebody is like, hey, this looks pretty cool. They already have a lot of support, clearly they're going to reach their goal, or maybe they've already reached their goal. I should jump on this before it jumps by a hundred dollars or um, or just because it's you know, I want to be one of the first people to have this thing.
0:13:00 - Dmitri
Exactly, exactly, exactly, like you said, and that's why we focus so much of our efforts on the day one and, in general, the first week of a campaign, because when you do a good job during the pre-campaign and you launch, usually 30% of thousands of people that are on Kickstarter independently from you, and so you get this noble effect of tapping into an existing community. So, exactly like you said, that's the real, actual perk of launching on Kickstarter mostly.
0:13:39 - Speaker 3
Awesome. This has been super helpful. We have to take a quick break when we come back. I want to get into what makes a successful crowdfunding campaign. We'll be right back.
0:13:49 - Andrea
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0:14:36 - Speaker 3
Everyone who works where music and tech meet is welcome. See you soon. Ok, we're back and, like I said, I want to get into, like, what are the elements of a successful crowdfunding campaign? But first I'm curious what are the benefits of Kickstarter versus Indiegogo or other platforms? I'm not sure what are the benefits of Kickstarter versus Indiegogo or other platforms. I'm not sure what the kind of nuances are there. Can you help us with that?
0:14:50 - Dmitri
Of course. Of course, in the past someone made this comparison where they said Kickstarter is sort of like Apple, where Indiegogo is kind of like Android. I don't know if that is still relevant today. This was said like a few years ago, but in a certain in a sense it can still be applied to uh, the today's, uh, today's industry in general.
Kickstarter is the biggest crowdfunding community out there. When it comes to reward, crowdfunding is the, the most renowned brand. So the biggest return you have by launching on kickstarter is, like we said before, is the size of the community that you get exposed to. So the multiplicator of your audience can sometimes be 2x, even 3x. If I bring 100 people, kickstarter will give me 200 people. Of course I'm simplifying, but that's sort of like what you can get.
Indiegogo is much more open usually to helping creators. They're much more hands-on when it comes to also supporting the exposure that a project can get. They are, I would say, lately more focused on bikes and scooters. So whenever it comes to anything in the mobility sector, I would definitely and I did go to Indiegogo because they're very, very much specialized in that, whereas Kickstarter has a little bit more these board game nerd, collectible DNA, mostly in the recent years. But I would say to sum up, kickstarter has more organic traffic, which, of course, is a lot of value, but they're generally less hands-on, whereas Indiegogo is a smaller community, but they're more hands-on and available to help creators.
0:16:38 - Speaker 3
Are there other platforms worth talking about, or those are really the two main ones?
0:16:41 - Dmitri
From my perspective, when it comes to rework or funding, these are the two. There isn't any other player in the game. If we talk equity crowdfunding, there's a whole new world, but it's not for today.
0:16:53 - Speaker 3
Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And is one of them Kickstarter versus Indiegogo, more like focused on gadgets, or they both are, just with a different flavor.
0:17:01 - Dmitri
No, when it comes to gadgets and things like that, I think they both are probably positioned in the same way. If you look at the most successful musical instrument campaigns, though, they were mostly on Kickstarter, so I think, in terms of number, probably the music creator that is looking for new things is more likely on Kickstarter rather than Indiegogo.
0:17:27 - Speaker 3
Gotcha Okay, great, so let's dive into some more tips here. What are the elements of a successful crowdfunding campaign? What are the pieces that are going to make this actually reach your goal or 10x or 100x your goal, whatever it is and turn into a great success and kick off a product or a company?
0:17:43 - Dmitri
All right, that's a great question. Of course, this would take hours to discuss in details. I'll try and just focus on the highlights. So, as I said, most often we run a two-month pre-campaign for a one-month live campaign. The two pre the, the two pre-campaign months start when content is ready, meaning a set of photos and videos that are that need to tell your story. So if any creator is listening now, the first question is, of course, like what's my product called? I need to have a prototype, but I need to have a name, I need to have a story, I need to have a messaging, I need to have a positioning, I need to know what I'm saying, to whom I'm talking to and why my product is special, and I need to use content to tell the story. So that's where we start from. Then we use the content and run a pre-campaign.
The pre-campaign involves paid advertising, pr and, basically, community engagement. So these three levers how to get as many eyes as possible on your campaign over a two-month period of time. When it comes to when can this happen over the year, we always say that you want your live campaign to be in between March and July or September and November. So we tend to, of course, keep the whole Christmas period in August. Basically, the whole point is you want to leverage these three areas so paid advertising, pr and community engagement, using your content to tell a story and gather people in a community before you launch the campaign. Because all that the community will come price, because they connect on day one, they get you fully funded and therefore you get exposed to as many visitors as possible on the platform. Considering that, like talking about numbers, like I said before, your day one in a successful campaign will be worth 30% of your total funding. So that says a lot about where the magic is in a crowdfunding campaign.
0:20:03 - Speaker 3
Yeah, I mean not to give away too many secrets or anything. There seems like there's a lot of nuance and I'm sure it'd be impossible to express all of it. It's customized to each company and so forth as well. But I'm curious, top level how do you build a community when you've never released a product before? What's the general principle there?
0:20:26 - Dmitri
Of course, yeah. So in terms of framework, the framework is relatively simple, in the sense that you need to have a landing page. I call it landing page. It's a website, it's a place where you are explaining why your product is special, usually in one, two or three points, and you're giving a reason to people for subscribing, for signing up to your newsletter as simple as that. That reason is usually, like I said, it's uh, it's an economic incentive, so they need to. Basically, you need to basically tell them subscribe now so that you'll be able to pay for my product with a special discount when I launch on kickstarter once they subscribe. That's not enough, because a simple newsletter is not a community. It's a newsletter, which is fine, but it's not a community. It becomes a community when you take those people and you put them into a place which might be a discord channel, a facebook private group or anything in that area where you can communicate and interact with them.
That's where the real community feeling starts when you have more than 100 people in a place and you, as a founder, can chat with them, share news, share prototype pictures, get them to share their feedback, them saying I like this, I like that, why don't you do this, why don't you do that? That's when the real crowdfunding begins. There's such a big difference between when people are, say, in the concept phase, just with a bunch of videos and photos, and then they have like 500 people in a Discord group. There's a world in between, because when you have 500 people in a Discord group, that's a world in between. Because when you have 500 people in a Discord group, that's a real community and you need to handle that. So you need to handle expectations, desires, requests and so on, but that's the magic.
0:22:07 - Speaker 3
Got it, that's great. No-transcript versus the way the finished product is going to be, and also, you know what storylines you tell with that and so forth. And then also, how do you reach those potential audiences that would engage in, and so forth, and then, well, maybe we could talk about the pr piece as well at some point, um, since we've had a chance to partner on that together. What are some typical mistakes inventors and companies make in crowdfunding?
0:22:50 - Dmitri
yeah, of course, like, ironically, the the most common mistake is exactly what we're talking about right now, which is missing the pre-campaign. So often we get requests from creators that have just launched, thinking you know, I'll launch this on Kickstarter and I'll get loads of funds because my product is really cool and most of the products are cool. But if there's no momentum on day one, a campaign is very, very hard to get back on track. So that's the most common mistake. The second one is very similar to this one, which is they tend to forget that their community is their most valuable asset in the pre-campaign and in the campaign. So they forget to engage with these people in the pre-campaign and in the campaign, so they forget to engage with these people.
Another very common mistake is, for example, having low quality content. Like I said, in the world of yesterday, it would have been fine, like we said at the beginning, a bunch of sketches and a few you know not very nice looking photos would have made the job. Now it doesn't work anymore. Or another very common mistake this is a little bit more, say, financial, but basically the unit economics here are very important, because when it comes to hardware products, margins are very, very important and we always say that your cost of goods or your cost for manufacturing one unit of your product should be three times less than your average price on Kickstarter. So, basically, cost of good times three should give you your average price on Kickstarter at least, because if it's less than that, then it gets very, very hard to sustain all the advertising costs and everything else.
And most often the equation here we say you want cost of good times three is your average price on Kickstarter. Times five is your retail price. And with this equation then you're playing with the numbers, and that's a mistake that I see quite often, where creators imagine that they can provide a lower price than that, but then they run the campaign and they find out that it's financially unsustainable. Of course, we all would like to have very high margins on the products that we sell, but in order to have high margins, we need to have high quality content, because people are not going to pay a premium price unless they see a story that they like. Plus, they see it told with the right tools right. So I'm not saying just make sure that you price your product at 3x or 4x or 5x. I'm saying you need to make sure that your story and content are able to support your unit economics that need to work if that makes sense.
0:25:39 - Speaker 3
Yeah, yeah, this is super helpful. I mean, I think this is a great way for people to just dive in and really go through this thought exercise of whether crowdfunding is a good fit for them or what they would need to do, and start to think through that. Of course, bringing you into the mix and the Rock Paper Scissors crew would certainly help mitigate some of those risks as well, but this is great content regardless. I'm curious, before we move on from some of the tactical stuff what do you see as the role of PR in crowdfunding with musical instruments?
0:26:09 - Dmitri
It is essential. At the end of the day, where do people look for great stories and new inventions? Where do people look for great stories and new inventions and what's the most credible way to interact with a new product Other than like on an article on TechCrunch or the Verge? It's the best way possible for someone to get to know the story of a creator bringing something new on the market. So it is essential. The story of a creator bringing something new on the market. So it is essential.
It's, um, it's one of those things that it's not possible to do with all campaigns.
Not necessarily, because sometimes the product is not, um say, interesting from from a pr perspective, which doesn't mean that it's not a good product at all. It just means that it's not an invention that a journalist would write about. In my experience, maybe it's just like an existing product, so it's nothing particularly new. But the impact that a PR, a solid PR campaign, can have on a crowdfunding campaign is just massive, because it doesn't only bring a huge amount of exposure, but it also brings a huge amount of credibility. And, like we said in the first question, in today's world, credibility in crowdfunding is probably even more important than marketing itself, because you need to make sure that you give the feeling to your backers that you're able to do what you're saying, that you're going to do the feeling to your backers that you're able to do what you're saying that you're going to do, because otherwise you would let down people and you would leave a bunch of like hundreds or thousands of backers with a pledge and nothing in their hands.
0:27:49 - Speaker 3
So it's very, very important yeah, cool, I want to get your perspective on something kind of even broader. Um, uh, just in terms of like, when you walk in, maybe if you're new to crowdfunding or new to kickstarter, you may not know kind of even broader, just in terms of like, when you walk in, maybe if you're new to crowdfunding or new to Kickstarter, you may not know kind of a culture or where things stand. You know, like, maybe you pledged on something years ago and you got a product. Maybe it was a good experience, maybe it wasn't whatever, but things shift and you've sort of been helping us get up to speed with sort of where things are with kickstarter. Now, beyond music, what other interesting trends are you seeing in crowdfunding these days?
0:28:22 - Dmitri
yeah, good point.
Um, so, like I said before, between kickstarter and indiegogo indiegogo there's a little bit like this split between kickstarter having loads of board games, so it became really the go-to platform for board gamers and then collectors in general, whereas Indiegogo become a little bit more of the place to go for anything new in mobility.
The one thing that I'm seeing a lot and that I'm hoping to see a lot is new products and new tech for people to meditate and to chill out and calm down, and I'm seeing so much of it in many forms can be products like for just like from the grow, your plants at home, so that you do something that reconnect you with, with nature and you can focus on, you know, taking care of a plant, up to devices that allow you to focus on your breath and devices that allow you also to unplug from your smartphone, and so on. I think at the end of the day, crowdfunding sort of reflects, you know, what are the general trends for consumers and humans in general. Right, like I think we all are currently feeling a strong need of disconnecting from time to time, and creators out there are coming up with loads of ideas on how can people find ways to disconnect and chill out when they're at home, and I'm seeing a lot of that coming to us lately.
0:30:06 - Speaker 3
As I hear you and kind of reflect on kind of like the macro trends. It sounds like, and I feel like this was part of the DNA of Kickstarter and Indiegogo, but it sounds like the crowdfunding platforms really represent where do we stand in kind of the nichification of products that we used to live in a world where broadcast media meant you could reach lots of people on very few channels and, as a result, the market economics of media traditional media was such that everybody could have the same thing. You know, in a way it's like you know, some product would break through this mainstream method but they'd have to have like a lowest common denominator of interest, but what's available in these platforms is a much more artisanal or more customized or more niche type experience. So, as you say, you know, board games and card games are popular on Kickstarter and mobility and scooters is popular on Indiegogo. You could imagine, well, when I was a kid, everybody played Monopoly and, sorry, those were the board games. But now I've got a shelf, I've got kids, I've got a shelf of a hundred different games. You know, and, granted, we're pretty into games, but not as much as the Kickstarter.
Like you know avid fans that are like picking up new stuff that nobody's ever heard of. But in a way it seems like you sort of have to think through, kind of like what is what? What is what's emerging? That's cool, the wellness, the wellness, the breathing, the nature, that that's. That's expanded out. The scooters is an interesting one too. You know, when I was a kid there might've been a kid with a scooter, like a non-electric scooter, but pretty much everyone had a bike and that was it, you know. And now you have electric bikes and you have scooters and electric scooters and these hover boards and all these different gyroscope things and so forth, and so you're seeing kind of like this narrowing down of specific things. Seems like that's true in the musical world too, where these more specific use cases, these more innovative new things, are specific to somebody, a smaller demographic but a but a very excited demographic I fully agree.
0:32:16 - Dmitri
Fully agree with that, and actually I think this goes back to, uh, what chris anderson said many years ago about right, the theory of the niches. Right, because in a digital world, a niche becomes potentially a big market because it's available to so many people. Right, and, and I think crowdfunding crowdfunding platforms are reflecting that a lot you see loads of creators, small size size creators. Most of them very few of them are actually like mid-sized or big size companies. Most of them are small ones launching a product from time to time that then has its own small niche, small audience that is very engaged. They love what they have. But again, it's not a massive market. It's not available to everybody. Like you said, it's not mainstream.
Think that that's that's something intriguing because, like, if you put it like on a broader perspective, like you said, like it seems like we're all doing the same thing globally, we're all using the same products globally, we all have access to the same information globally, somehow. But then, on the other hand, like, thanks to a platform like this, we might have very unique products in our home device portfolio at home, because we found them on Kickstarter and I think on these, you know, for this specific aspect. Kickstarter and Indiegogo are quite special, of course. On the other hand, then there's a whole topic about how can you sustain then, on the long term mostly when it comes to hardware a hardware business just based on Kickstarter, which is most often quite hard, mostly when it comes to tech, because tech has very high costs. So it's very hard that you can keep your business up just by launching on Kickstarter a new product.
From time to time. You need to find new distribution channels. But board games, for example, like you said, the unit economics are much, much, I want to say easier in a sense, because it's relatively easier to make a board game as long as you know how people play. So that's why you see many companies popping up and launching new board games from time to time. So it's a very interesting, uh say, platform where people can find something new and unique.
0:34:31 - Speaker 3
That's that's for sure right, I'm talking to andrea baldoreski. We've been talking about all sorts of things around crowdfunding and we haven't really heard much about who you are, andrea. So we're going to take a quick break and when we come back, I want to hear who is this guy who figured all this stuff out. We'll be right back. You want to stay on top of the news about music and innovation. I know, but how do you focus on the stories that matter when there's a firehose of information coming your way? That's why I launched Rock Paper Scanner, a free newsletter you can get in your inbox. There's a link in the episode show notes to get the latest edition and a fresh one every Friday morning.
Every week I'm scanning hundreds of news stories from the music trades to the tech blogs, from the music gear mags to lifestyle outlets. I handpick just the things music innovators need to track Industry revenue numbers, AI twists and turns, cool new user tools, the live music and recording landscapes, partnerships, acquisitions, emerging trends and adjacent industries. Cut through the news feed noise. Tap the rock paper scanner link in the text about this episode or type bitly slash rpscanner that's bitly slash rpscanner in your browser. Get the news in your inbox. Okay, we're back. So, Andrea, I want to ask you what's your background? How did you get into this?
0:35:48 - Dmitri
So yeah, funnily enough, when people ask me what I do, I still say that I'm a DJ music producer. That's what I've been doing since when I was, I think, 10 or 11 years old, but then I had to, of course. I studied and I was an engineer on the side, besides being a music producer, and I got into crowdfunding, because in 2015, I invented this love to make music called Remedy T8. And I launched it on Kickstarter and we raised $150,000 around that amount and that's what then triggered my first big entrepreneurial experience. That's when I moved to Austin, texas, for the first time in my life and that was my start in the crowdfunding world as a founder. And that's also what most of the founders like about me, because by working with me, they see that I'm not just a marketing person, which is great, but I'm a founder. So I've done it. I've been in their shoes.
0:36:57 - Speaker 3
That's cool, yeah. So then from there, friends started to ask you to help with their Kickstarters, or other people were to maltravel. Does that what happened?
0:37:04 - Dmitri
Kickstarter, which was called Scribit, along with three other co-founders One of them is this guy called Carlo Ratti, who's a quite renowned architect in Europe and we raised $2.4 million. It was extremely successful. And, again as founders, then we had to deliver this product worldwide in more than 10,000 units and we're talking about IoT, so very complex, harder product back in 2019. And it was such a great experience one of the most stressful experiences of my entire life, but I had the opportunity to learn so much. And then, in 2020, I decided to start my own agency with which I help creators and brands in bringing their new products to market, mostly through crowdfunding.
So that's how it all happened. And then, of course, once I started the agency, we worked with so many creators around the world, and anytime we launch something new, we learn something new. Like with you guys, it's a lot of fun and it's a lot of learnings every time, because every product has its own story, uh, its own founders, its own uh pros and cons and uh yeah, yeah, we love, we love working with you and I'm excited to continue that this year.
0:38:35 - Speaker 3
Um, especially the combination of what you have to offer, what our influencer marketing team has to offer, what our pr team has to offer, and and now PR team has to offer, and now video production too. We can bring into the mix All of who are going to join us this year at NAMM with me and you, which will be super fun. It's going to be fun to all be together in person talking to some of the coolest musical instrument products and brands that are out there, which is great. Now, you mentioned that you got into DJing at age 10, or you got into music at 10. What got you interested at such a young age and how did that play out?
0:39:11 - Dmitri
I'll never forget that, because my mom got me this video game called Music 2000.
I don't know if you ever heard about it. I don't think it was that famous back then. But you know, back then I was playing like, I guess, like Doom or Duke Nukem, like all those you know, violent video games that were famous in the very early 2000s. And she got me these video games that was based on music production and from that moment, I just left any other video game that I was playing because I just loved it so much and I started music you know, producing music and, funnily enough, then in 2009, I released a song that I produced myself with another guy and we were at number one in the Beatport top 10, you know Beatport, the website where they sell basically music for DJs. We have been at number one in the ranking for 12 days and this song, which was called Swahili Song, was played from all of my favorite DJs at the time, and I was not even a 20-year-old kid, so it's been an amazing experience that I will never forget.
0:40:10 - Speaker 3
So this is my music journey, and your first Kickstarter was music-related, which is pretty cool too.
0:40:17 - Dmitri
Absolutely. But, I never gave up. Music has always been somewhere in my life.
0:40:23 - Speaker 3
Yeah, super cool. So, as we hear at the beginning of 2025, I'm curious are there certain types of companies or products that you're hoping that we get to work together on this year?
0:40:41 - Dmitri
in the area of creative tech or music tech or even, like I said before, products that allows us to free our minds in general. That's what I hope to see, because that's what I think that we always need as human beings, and more than ever. Today we are getting in this area where feeding our brains with creativity and openness and freedom is really good right. So that's what I'm hoping to see, and not just because I like it, but because I also think that there's demand. There's a lot of demand coming in for that.
0:41:14 - Speaker 3
Yeah, awesome. And, like I said, we'll be at NAMM. We're also hosting a meetup on Saturday, january 25th, at noon at the MIDI Association's presentation area. They have kind of an event space inside the trade hall, so Andrea and I will both be there. We'll have a booth nearby as well. So if you can't make it to the meetup, you can still come to the booth, and if you're not coming to NAMM, that's okay too. You can email me music at rockpaperscissorsbiz B-I-Z and I can get you on a strategy call with Andrea to figure out what kind of crowdfunding possibilities there are for whatever you're working on as well. Andrea, I'm really excited to see you in about a week over at NAMM in Anaheim, california, and this has been super valuable. Thank you so much for sharing all these tips. I think people will probably get a lot of ideas about whether they're ready for crowdfunding, what they should look out for, which platform to select, and hopefully some of them will want a little bit more as well. But this has been great. Thanks so much, andrea.
0:42:11 - Dmitri
Thank you so much, dimitri, thank you everybody for listening.
0:42:15 - Speaker 3
Thanks for listening to Music Tectonics. If you like what you hear, please subscribe on your favorite podcast app. We have new episodes for you every week. You here. Please subscribe on your favorite podcast app. We have new episodes for you every week. Did you know we do free monthly online events that you, our lovely podcast listeners, can join? Find out more at musictectonics.com and, while you're there, look for the latest about our annual conference and sign up for our newsletter to get updates. Everything we do explores the seismic shifts that shake up music and technology, the way the earth's tectonic plates cause quakes and make mountains. Connect with music tectonics on twitter, instagram and linkedin. That's my favorite platform. Connect with me, Dmitri Vietze, if you can spell it. We'll be back again next week, if not sooner.
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The Music Tectonics podcast goes beneath the surface of the music industry to explore how technology is changing the way business gets done. Weekly episodes include interviews with music tech movers & shakers, deep dives into seismic shifts, and more.
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