Jon kilmer #98 pt 2

The genesis of group, I'm going to blow your mind because it's a crazy full circle moment.

I'll start by saying we started, Mike wanted to do like the subscription month, like monthly subscription business model a while ago, like probably around 2020.

2021 maybe, like he wanted to start doing that and no musicians were doing a monthly subscription model.

Like it was completely foreign.

We partnered with a group that didn't exist yet.

We partnered with another company and they were a startup and it was kind of a train wreck, but like we made it work and we kind of built our only Steve's monthly subscription for our fans community for about two years with that company.

And I wouldn't say it was awful, but it wasn't as good as it could have been because they were just a very new company and very young.

And then all of a sudden this offer comes by, this opportunity where my friend Tim Weber, who earlier in this interview I talked about the blog GoodMusicAllDay.com, which is where I kind of got my start, where all my music videos and all the people I work with were on that blog.

Tim Weber ran that blog back then, and I was very close with him.

And this is 2011 since I've known him.

And we talk to you here and there.

We would always catch up every now and again.

But around 2022, he comes around and says, hey, I see what you and Mike are doing with the subscription thing.

We're building a new platform that is for all my communities just for musicians.

We want to use what you guys have done and your business model and make a whole platform out of it and help other artists do the exact same thing.

And at the time it was just Tim and the other CEO at the time, Finn, and it was just the two of them.

So then they brought Mike and I on to kind of like help build this platform.

And they brought on the artist Nick D, they brought him on, who's another like amazing independent artist.

And we started Grouped and we decided to just use what we did with Only Steve's and we brought our whole community to Grouped and we built a platform based on everything we learned and started bringing artists into it.

So today, like the, you know, Company Group is a couple years old now.

It's on its third year, I believe, and time has been flying, but I can't believe I've been working with them for a couple years, like about two years now, but the company's growing really amazingly.

We have some amazing artists on the platform, and it's... proven that online communities are very beneficial for independent artists.

Yeah, it's a great way, you know, when you can't control the algorithm.

I mean, you can in some ways, but like you can't fully control it.

And it's a way that you can kind of say, go into their stuff so they don't miss anything.

The genesis of group, I'm going to blow your mind because it's a crazy full circle moment.

I'll start by saying we started, Mike wanted to do like the subscription month, like monthly subscription business model a while ago, like probably around 2020.

2021 maybe, like he wanted to start doing that and no musicians were doing a monthly subscription model.

Like it was completely foreign.

We partnered with a group that didn't exist yet.

We partnered with another company and they were a startup and it was kind of a train wreck, but like we made it work and we kind of built our only Steve's monthly subscription for our fans community for about two years with that company.

And I wouldn't say it was awful, but it wasn't as good as it could have been because they were just a very new company and very young.

And then all of a sudden this offer comes by, this opportunity where my friend Tim Weber, who earlier in this interview I talked about the blog GoodMusicAllDay.com, which is where I kind of got my start, where all my music videos and all the people I work with were on that blog.

Tim Weber ran that blog back then, and I was very close with him.

And this is 2011 since I've known him.

And we talk to you here and there.

We would always catch up every now and again.

But around 2022, he comes around and says, hey, I see what you and Mike are doing with the subscription thing.

We're building a new platform that is for all my communities just for musicians.

We want to use what you guys have done and your business model and make a whole platform out of it and help other artists do the exact same thing.

And at the time it was just Tim and the other CEO at the time, Finn, and it was just the two of them.

So then they brought Mike and I on to kind of like help build this platform.

And they brought on the artist Nick D, they brought him on, who's another like amazing independent artist.

And we started Grouped and we decided to just use what we did with Only Steve's and we brought our whole community to Grouped and we built a platform based on everything we learned and started bringing artists into it.

So today, like the, you know, Company Group is a couple years old now.

It's on its third year, I believe, and time has been flying, but I can't believe I've been working with them for a couple years, like about two years now, but the company's growing really amazingly.

We have some amazing artists on the platform, and it's... proven that online communities are very beneficial for independent artists.

Yeah, it's a great way, you know, when you can't control the algorithm.

I mean, you can in some ways, but like you can't fully control it.

And it's a way that you can kind of say, go into their stuff so they don't miss anything.