Automated transcription services provided by: Dan:  Hey, Jason. Jason:  Hey. What’s the name of the company? Dan:  The name of the company is Member Desk. Jason:  Member Desk? You know, my daughter, she’s only 2 and Member is how she says remember so it makes me think about just how you remember, but that’s not most people. But Member Desk sounds like you run some kind of organization and the front desk is sort of the metaphor for a lot of stuff. There’s a sign in sheet for volunteer stuff. There’s scheduling. There’s I don’t know, memberships. There’s just stuff and most organizations are bad at it and don’t have somebody devoted to it. So Member Desk is a virtual and yet it can also be physical, literally sitting in the front of the co- working space inexpensive way to do that for pretty much any organization. Dan:  That’s pretty decently close, actually. Jason:  Right. So what is it really? Dan:  Member Desk is a hosted membership site software. Let’s people sell premium digital content online without dealing with any of the technicalstuff.Jason:  What is premium digital content mean? Dan:  Videos, music. Jason:  Why is that premium? Dan:  Because you’re not giving it away for free. You want people to payfor it.Jason:  Premium means for money. Dan:  For money. Yes. Jason:  So selling music. Dan:  Music, videos. Jason:  Because you said premium digital media, so I didn’t get selling music out of that. Dan:  Yes. That’s one of the possibilities. Jason:  Selling music. Selling videos. Selling stuff that can be delivered electronically but you want to make money. Aren’t there a bunch of companies who deliver stuff electronically and let you make money on of it? Dan:  There’s a difference. Basically Member Desk creates a membership site for you where people will pay you, say, on a monthly basis. $10 a month, $50 a month, whatever, and then they get the user name and password to access their membership site; Then they get access to all the content that you allow them access to based on how long they’ve been a member. Jason:  OK. So this is a Paywall-type thing. This is like what Andrew Warner does with Mixergy. Where, if you sign up to be a member and pay monthly, then you get access to the whole archives and all this other stuff. You’re in once you pay. Dan:  Yes. Exactly. Jason:  OK. And so this is a way for just everybody to implement that. Dan:  Yes. Jason:  That sounds good. Dan:  It could work for anybody, but what we’re doing right now is we’re focusing on the music industry; because we’re actually running the premium fan site for the 70′ band Chicago right now, and they’re super happy with it so we decided to focus on musicians. Because musicians have a ton of content that can be sold digitally. And that kind of leads into my question because music and all content really is a pretty tough industry. So my question is how do you get to the people that you need to talk to in these industries? How do you get to the decision makers when they have so many people guarding the door? Jason:  They do. They do, and when you get into music or Hollywood it’s the worst. Like at least in IBM you try to get into IBM but you know what titles to go for and find them in LinkedIn and they have admins, but you can get around those admins and all that. Hollywood and music, you can’t call Madonna. That’s not ever going to happen. Those kinds of industries are very much who do you know and that kind of stuff, unfortunately. So actually I have been advising a company in Austin, who is also in the music industry; and they actually started with an idea not dissimilar from what you described, but they are not doing it now. They now do extra- merchandise so fan selling other fans merchandise that they made but this time with IP rights and everybody makes money, which is pretty cool. But they had the exact same problem. That they had to sell the band on it. One thing I learned from there, is that the manager is the first step. If the band members want to do it, that’s fine but A, They are harder to find anyway. And B,The manager often is the one controlling how the money works.So, if the manager’s on board, you’re probably going to start and if not, you’re don’t regardless of the band. So the manager, that’s one thing. And the good thing about managers is that they manage multiple bands, and all the managers know each other too. So the good news is, if you can get your wedge in there, one manager levers you into bunch of bands, which is already nice and that therefore more with your effort; and it’s easier once you’re intrenched that you could be this person doing this. But if it were easy to break in with a product for the music industry, which is sort of like, “I got a game. How do I get people to know about it?” They’re like, It’s a game. It’s hard. It’s expensive.There isn’t an easy, cheap way to make everybody know about a game because everybody is making a game. So it’s not going to be a patent answer. But I wonder if one answer could be that there are these other technology companies like this one I’m talking about. It’s called Bitvibe. They do have some traction. I wonder if another technology company in which you don’t compete, so that then doing one thing means they wouldn’t do the other and yet you’re both going after the same people. I wonder if it would be useful to team up with one of them. Not to merge companies or anything like that, but simply to say “We’re all trying to get in here. We don’t compete. Maybe we should try to share some of this as we go because we’re all trying to do this.” It could work although people are usually pretty tight about that. The way Bitvibe broke in is that the co-founder is the drummer for several really big bands that you’ve heard of from the 80′s and right now he’s in Gregg Rollie Band. Gregg Rollie is the other guy in Carlos Santana. So pretty top, not A+ list but enough. But the answer is the co-founder’s been in the industry for 30 years and he’s somebody and so they can get meetings. So, like in most things, is who you know and networking and finding out the next person in line, the next person inline.Patrick:  You know, I think most start ups are not like that. In other words, if you look at the most start ups on Earth, their success is not depending on who they know. But in music and film, I’m not sure I know people who just break into music and don’t know anybody and have no ends. That’s a tough one. Hamid, do you have any insight in this? Hamid:  It’s kind of interesting. So Member Desk is actually an AC disruptors company, that incubator that we have going here. So Leon and I have met numerous times, about marketing strategy and the music one is that developed after Chicago became a customer. But until they had become a customer I think the thought was that the site might be used more for people who have very popular blogs or they have content that they write about about sports or medicine or whatever topic that they become an experts on. Then over time they start building a library of that content that they then sell as a monthly subscription of some kind. Or maybe they have forums that they have premium access for the members. So that was sort of the direction that we thought about going in and it’s just hard to figure out the marketing strategy around that. Dan:  Exactly. One of the things is that it’s software that can be used by pretty much anybody so how do you narrow it down? How do you focus? Jason:  Yes. I think you do have to focus. You probably don’t have enough time and money and energy to go after multiple markets at the same time so having Chicago, that’s fantastic. And again, if you’re successful with them, if they show success, which they have big enough of a fan base, you should be able to. Dan:  They’re very happy so far. Jason:  They may be happy but if you show some sort of objective success like look, Chicago had, I’m just making this up, 200,000 people in their email list, they had 77,000 people in their fan club, which by the way was people literally mailing out their things and getting stuff. And they’ve successfully moved most of those people to this, and now making monthly money and more money than ever before because of this, and now they’re all digital and now so easy to do that, and you have that complete story, I don’t know why their manager wouldn’t push you on to the other bands they manage. It’s more money for everybody.It’s like why would this not happen? So I think you use this, again, as a wedge and go from there if you really focus on getting this out of the park. Not just they’re happy but the next person has to be bowled over, whatever that means. Alternately, if you wanted to go after this other stuff, I think you can certainly can. I think that makes sense, that market, and it’s even pretty obvious how to find those people. They sort of, like there’s some standard places that everybody like that reads. Like a lot of people that read Copy Blogger are the kind of people that might do that, and Copy Blogger does guest posts and does other things that you could assume insinuate yourself in. There’s even conferences around conferences that you could go to where those kind of folks are. These people like the guy behind I will teach you to be rich, I forgot his name. Dan:  Ramit. Jason:  Ramit. He’s a conduit to it and first of all he’s a perfect customer for this. Although, we don’t need to go in deep in that. He might not be just because of his particular style but what he is is definitely the kind of guy that if he got behind this and explained this as a strategy, he might be able to put 1,000 in your lap. Dan:  Interesting. Jason:  So going after those kinds, the influencers of those people like Ramit. So in other words, it’s pretty clear how you would go after that thing that’s a growing market. There’s a lot of people who are experts or have a book that want to make money in other ways just like this. Bob Welsh is another one who is sor