Plugola Inc.

The Story of Plugola, the Website

Filed under business, site news, updates

It was the end of Winter in 2007 and I had just launched a video sharing site for independent music only called, Jamphetamines. In layman’s terms, it was a Youtube for indie musicians and record labels. To make a long story short, It was a miserable failure. After about six months of the site going live, I had realized what I had done wrong. Around that same time, an acquaintance of mine overheard me talking about Jamphetamines and mentioned he had an idea for a music site. He said, “How come there’s no iTunes for indie bands”? I kind of shrugged it off at the time, until a couple of weeks later when I ran across Snocap. It was an interesting concept, but they were doing it all wrong. I knew I could use their concept as a blueprint for something much better and bigger. I researched everywhere to see if something, like what I had in mind, already existed and I couldn’t find anything else. Since Jamphetamines had already failed I thought my next logical step forward would be to pursue this.

In the next couple of days I was able to reach the acquaintance whom brought up ‘an itunes for indie bands’ and mentioned that I was going to do this and I would give him a piece of the action if were to be successful. He wanted to be a full partner. I was very apprehensive since he had zero experience, however I also knew that I could teach him what I knew as we went along and that if he really wanted it, he would learn quickly just from researching alone. He promised he would give it his all and was ready to put up his share of the money it would cost us to get things rolling. My own online (non-music) business was thriving, so even if I had to cover the majority of the expenses I could still easily finance it. I decided to give him a shot as long as we made everything legally equal. I’ve had bad experiences with business partners before this and I believed I was taking all the right legal precautions so I didn’t get screwed again. My new partner and I went to a corporate lawyer and had the corporation and our concerns all drawn up. We signed the necessary documents and began dreaming up phase one of our new online digital music store.

We studied other social and music websites to see what people responded to. At the time MySpace was huge, Facebook and Twitter were just coming into the mainstream, a lot of bands liked PureVolume, no one (or not many) knew of TuneCore, barely anyone had heard of ReverbNation and Bandcamp wasn’t even in existence. I know I’m missing some others in there, but my point is that we had a lot of room to build something special and to be the first web-based music community doing it.We were fairly confident that we couldn’t go anywhere but up, from there. We had a great business model and good plans to continue building to an online music behemoth.

For those of you unfamiliar with what became the website PLUGOLA, let me explain. It’s a social music community where artists have full control over their music, from ownership to pricing. I had been marketing on the Web since 2000 and I wanted to be sure it was built with the necessary tools and incentives for artists to properly market their music. We incorporated your typical social features of the time, sales and play stats, rankings, automatic SEO, download codes that could be printed directly to cards for artists to pass out at live events, financial incentives for music fans to share and re-sell music, a music locker and a fairly elaborate shopping cart with different payment options. From a music fans’ point of view we programmed the site to only display music from their favorite genre, a music locker and, as I just said, music fans could re-sell( or ‘Plug’) music and earn a commission for each sale. Not to mention, we were the first place outside of iTunes where music videos could be bought and sold! On paper, I couldn’t see this not working.

It ended up taking almost a year for it to be ready for launch. The work and frustration that went into the programming and design is enough for another full blog post, so I’ll spare you the details for now. We had also been rounding up and meeting with investors and several parties really wanted to invest. They hadn’t signed anything yet, but they pretty much had told us that there’s a check waiting for us. We had to tie-up a few loose ends in the legal department, then the money was in our hands.We had worked so hard up to this point I think it was such a sigh of relief that we took our sweet time with all the legal stuff. The market was getting bad and these investors began to have second thoughts.

By November of 2008 we were ready for a public beta launch. Suddenly, my business partner was nowhere to be found. He wasn’t showing up for appointments and he wasn’t returning my phone calls. During some routine accounting, I figured out why I hadn’t heard from him. He had spent thousands of dollars from the company account on personal items, paid some personal bills and took a vacation with his girlfriend. He was already in the hole with me personally for a few thousand dollars, since I covered some of his share of business expenses. Needless to say, I was extremely upset. When I was finally able to corner him, I found out that he had quit his job months earlier thinking we would “be rich by now”. He was completely out of money. I was mildly sympathetic, but the majority of the stolen money was spent on luxuries. I tried to keep my cool and be open minded, so I gave him a second chance as long as he paid the money back. He agreed. He walked out the door and I never saw him again until a few months later when I finally forced him to sign over his rights to the company (otherwise he was going to jail). It was an unfortunate turn of events, but I persevered because I really believed in PLUGOLA and thought I could pick up the pieces as I went along.

That same month news of the economic meltdown had become widely known. All of the investors backed out of the deal. The little money we still had was already spent on some website upgrades. My already-in-existence, once thriving business had also took a very hard hit from the economic collapse. I had lost approximately two-thirds of my own income, because of this, so I could longer fund it with my own money, either. All work on the site was halted. My only option was to work really hard in hopes of saving Plugola. For the next few years I did everything I could think of to keep the site afloat, including paying for two servers out of my own pocket. The problem was that I couldn’t get the majority of artists to actually use the site. Once they registered and uploaded their content they rarely returned and almost never used any of the promo tools. I practically begged for feedback, but got nowhere.

After roughly two years, and few other similar sites doing a much better job, I realized that if Plugola hadn’t picked up any traction by then it wasn’t going to. My attention began to turn elsewhere in the music industry. As disappointing as the end result is, I learned SO much! I wanted to share this story so any aspiring entrepreneurs can learn from these mistakes, as well. Here are some good lessons I took away from a miserable experience (in no specific order).

1. We built the site way too big – It makes sense in our heads to build something bigger than the competition and anticipate the flood gates opening when the site is launched, but that school of thought doesn’t translate well in today’s start-up world. It wasn’t until I read the 37Signal’s book, “Getting Real“ where I began to realize this was a big part of where we went wrong. We needed to start with the bare minimum and build from there.
2. We took too long with investors – We had investors waiting to cut us a check, but we got lazy when it came to the legal red tape. Had we taken care of all that right away, or better yet, before we even met with investors, we would have had a decent amount invested before the American economy collapsed. I don’t blame them for wanting to back out.
3. We spent money before we had it – I knew this was a bad idea, but something inside me told me to roll the dice anyway. I should have listened to my gut, rather than all the reasons I made up on why I HAD to spend that money. Doing this just dug us a deeper hole before we were ever in one.
4. Bad choice of a partner – Not everyone has the same work ethic or vision, and character matters a lot. Never again will I partner with someone with little to no experience in the start-up world. Most people are all talk and will promise you the world, but when it comes down to doing the actual work and making good business decisions they are nowhere to be found. He wasn’t the only partner I had this experience with.
5. Partner quit his job with dreams of riches – I warned by partner a number of times to hold on to his job, at least, until we can cut ourselves a regular paycheck. He quit his job dreaming of limos and reality TV (I’m not joking about that), ultimately leading him into a very difficult situation. He did steal, but I don’t think he would have if he didn’t put himself into that position.
6. Not all good ideas guarantee success – I’ve been learning over the years, not only from this experience, that great ideas are everywhere and rarely are just the ideas enough to be successful. It takes very hard work, the right execution, a dedicated team, good timing and a little luck in order for a good idea to be successful. Don’t be fooled by stories of overnight success. Most ‘overnight success’ stories are of people who have spent many years failing before they finally got it right.
7. You can’t do it all on your own – I’ve tried many times on my own and it just doesn’t work. You’re spread way too thin and it’s tough to focus on what really matters. You need a team to handle most of the important things. It may be one other person or a team of ten. It can be very hard to trust others, especially strangers, with your baby; but you have to. Try to be open-minded about your employee/partner decisions, but not naive.
8. Upgrades were competitive, not needed – When we spent the money we didn’t have for upgrades to the site, we did upgrades that were to only keep up with the rash of other similar digital music stores that launched around the same time (ie: Bandcamp). They weren’t necessarily needed for the site to operate. Technically, it was wasted money.
9. I built the site for marketers – While designing the tools artists would need to market their music correctly I forgot one very important factor; I was building all this for experienced marketers and not a typical Internet user. The tools were easy enough to use, but only experience would know how to tie it all together and make it work for them. Keep it simple.

Unfortunately, I will be shutting down Plugola in the next few weeks. The amount of sales we made I could count on both hands and I just can no longer afford to keep it going. However, I would hate to see such a good application go to waste. If you think you can salvage it, I would be more than willing to let it go for a reasonable offer. It does some need some work, but mainly in the upgrading department and perhaps a few adjustments to your liking. There is nothing broken about it, only that we couldn’t afford to keep up with the rapidly changing music/tech world. If you think you might be interested in taking it off my hands, please shoot me an email: support@plugo.la and we can talk details, before February 15, 2012. If no one is interested, it will be gone forever after that date. We will be keeping the name of Plugola Inc. for our company, however.

I hope to hear from some interested parties soon, but if not, please avoid some of the pitfalls we ran into when building our first REAL tech start-up.

———————————–

UPDATE: Just to clarify, only the website PLUGOLA will be closing. The company Plugola Inc. (and this blog) will be moving forward with our other music projects: Hifidelics and Flexi of the Month. The @plugola Twitter feed will continue, as well.

 

Our Flexi Record Club Project

Filed under format, site news, updates

How would feel about being part of a club where you would be sent a new music single from an up-and-coming artist every month? Each single would arrive in an extremely rare (yet still playable) format that comes with original artwork, available in very limited quantities and can be proudly displayed.

Back in July of this year I was looking for a relatively inexpensive way to get the wheels turning with Hifidelics. If you have ever tried attracting active users to a website (or profile) you know it’s no easy task. If you’re on a shoestring budget, such as us, you must come up with innovative ways to get the word out since a professional advertising/marketing campaign is not an option. My initial thoughts were to find a way to present Hifidelics on a smaller scale, or at least a smaller release-a Hifidelics-lite, if you will. This would be a challenge since I’m not part of an active band myself, so I had to get artists involved.

I thought back to music promotional materials from when vinyl’s golden years and the only thing that stood out to me, and was even remotely similar to Hifidelics, was the flexi-discs that would come in-between the pages of music magazines. However, flexi-discs are super flimsy and I wasn’t imagining any attractive ways  in presenting them where they held any real value (until much later of course). After a bit more research I learned about Polish postcards and amazingly I also found a manufacturer that still produces them. I knew little about the postcards before this; I didn’t even know they had an actual name, but I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect format to pursue for this project.

Hifidelics was originally conceived based on Sub Pop’s ‘Singles of the Month‘ Club, where for a one-time fee subscribers would receive one new music single each month.  A lot of things happened before we abandoned that aspect of Hifidelics and took it to where it is now, but I always loved the concept of the ‘club’ and I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to bring back to table.

I finally opened Flexi of the Month in late July, updating our blog with as much behind-the-scenes content that’s not completely boring. The participating bands can be found (listened to) here — first flexi-disc, second flexi-disc and the thrid flexi-disc.

Flexi of the Month — Introduction from Hifidelics on Vimeo.

If you would like to literally get your hands on some great, new music and try something different we would love to have you as a subscriber! It’s only $24 for a three-month subscription (shipping included in price) and membership is limited to the number of records produced for each artist, which is only 250. To sweeten the deal even more, we will be donating all proceeds to charity.

Please visit the Flexi of the Month order page for full details.

Interactive Collage of Killer Vinyl Records

Filed under design, packaging

I was playing around with an idea I had last night. As you probably already know, not much music is released on vinyl; and out of that small number even fewer vinyl releases use true creativity. When I explain to artists that they can design their record release any way they want for Hifidelics, I get a sense that it’s not completely understood what I mean. Not too long ago, I posted some ideas to help; but I want to try to keep posting new ideas that other artists and labels have released.

My idea is to go to you and the public and ask for photo submissions of some of special edition vinyl records, like what you see below. I put together this interactive photo collage (just mouse over the image) of some of the slick, cool and creative record releases I know about. Let me know what you think and if you like it, we can get others involved and do more just like it.

If you would like to see this same collage on a larger scale, I have it on a tumblr blog.

Why Choose Vinyl?

Filed under format, marketing

It’s true that music fans have started to become interested in vinyl records again. Only halfway through 2011 vinyl sales were already up by 41%. And it’s not just the baby-boomers or people that grew up with vinyl; it’s really catching-on with the younger generation and new artists, as well. That really only played a small part in our decision to make vinyl records the chosen format for Hifidelics. Albeit true that the general music-loving population will probably care little for vinyl records with so many format options available today, some people have always found a certain charm and emotional attachment to their records unlike any other format.

My house burned down in the central Texas wildfires. I snuck into my barricaded, burning down neighborhood through the woods on my mountain bike to rescue my vinyl collection.

While the above quote may be a bit extreme (and dangerous), it really does show the level of emotion music-on-vinyl lovers have with their records. You may have also noticed he made no mention at all about a CD collection or saving his iPod. Those are all replaceable objects where vinyl usually has a lot of sentimental value to their owners. There always seems to be a story or memory associated with our records. Hollywood even made a hit movie devoted to the subject, starring John Cusack; and that type of relationship with music has been seriously lacking since the CD and digital music made their appearance. Could this be one of the reasons why recorded music sales have declined so much?

…is there anything more soulless than a downloaded collection of music then compressed onto your i-pod?…

Artwork and packaging are other major factors in vinyl’s appeal. A lot of people are unaware that at one time records were sold in plain cardboard jackets. In 1939, record companies really had no idea how low their sales were until a graphic artist named Alex Steinweiss proposed to Columbia Records that he design original artwork for the jacket covers. Sales skyrockted after that and a record’s art and packaging became an important part of record album. Not just because of sales, but because music fans came to expect it. Part of the thrill of getting your hands on a great record is studying the artwork.  Some people would even hang the jackets on their walls, like a poster. A lot of underground artists have always understood this and have continued to release records that could be described as a works of art themselves. Unfortunately, since CD’s and ultimately digital music has come into play, the packaging and artwork has become almost non-existent. Most people will be satisfied with convenience over quality, but there will always be a smaller group that will gladly pay for music that can be held in their hands and proudly displayed.

While the record was doing it’s thing at 33 1/3 rpm we would sit and look at the record’s artwork. We’d smoke cigarettes and drink cider as we wondered if there was ever going to be anything as important as our records…

Part of Hifidelics’ goal is to encourage and assist artists in releasing non-traditional vinyl records (of any size, length) where music fans feel a connection and are excited to get their hands on it.  Let’s work together to give them a record that will encompass quality, creativity and emotion.

If you’re interested in learning more about Hifidelics.com and how it works, please visit our post: Hifidelics – Crowdsourcing Vinyl Records

 

————–
[This is a mirror post from the Hifidelics Blog]

Vinyl Packaging & Design Inspiration

Filed under design, packaging

I realize it’s not always easy to think outside the box when it comes to vinyl records and their packaging. I mean, they’re round and they come in a sleeve or jacket. How else can they be more customized other than in record size, shape and color?

As you may already be aware, part of the Hifidelics experience is in artists releasing very limited edition records in their own packaging concept. While artists DO have the option of releasing black vinyl in your standard cardboard sleeve, we strongly encourage they push their creativity and release something grand; a limited record that everyone must get their hands on. Admittedly, there are not a lot of examples out there to get the creative juices flowing if you don’t already have a concept in mind. So I collected a few of the interesting recent vinyl releases I have run across in the last couple weeks for some inspiration.

Someone on Twitter was showing off some of his vinyl gems and this photo caught my eye. It’s a limited edition 12″ ep with grooves on only one side and a stenciled image on the other, from Chicago Thrash Ensemble. It comes complete with a nice, clear jacket and a baseball card collection of the band members. Apparently, there were only (100) copies pressed. Please keep in mind, on Hifidelics it’s not just about  the record, but the full presentation. If you have other artwork that goes with the record that is just fine.

I just stumbled across this video today. It’s a handmade booklet of records from old Reader’s Digest books, from PIAPTK Records. Pages include band artwork, while other pages contain a 5″ vinyl record in a pocket. Labor intensive, yes; but it’s very cool and it’s something that will never be reproduced.

Last, but certainly not least, is a 2011 double-vinyl release from Explosions in the Sky. You really have to see all the angle views of this, because it’s pretty darn incredible! I’ve never seen anything like this release, but I know you can beat it; or at the very least, match it’s cool factor.

Hopefully these examples spark some ideas to start putting your plans into action. I’m getting anxious! I want to get some records out by you guys! :) If you have any questions or need to discuss some things about your release, please feel free to contact me: hifidelics@gmail.com

UPDATE: If you’re still looking for more inspiration, our sister project; Flexi of the Month posted a video of another clever release concept – a booklet of flexi disc records.

————–
[This is a mirror post from the Hifidelics Blog]