Andrew: Hey there, Freedom Fighters, my name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. Today, I’ve got an interview with an entrepreneur frankly who, as much research as I’ve done, I think I understand the product, but I don’t feel I understand it enough, and I had no idea this was even a need.
Meanwhile, this guy is gung-ho about it that he’s throwing everything into this business, building it up and it’s going well. I want to know more about the industry, and I want to know why it’s going so well. I see you’re smiling Pascal because I must not be the first person to say “I don’t get it or I didn’t get it at first.” Now, I get it, I don’t get it enough.
The person who I’m talking to right now is Pascal Pilon. How did I do with the French pronunciation of your name?
Pascal: It’s pretty good. You’re exactly what’s [inaudible 00:00:44].
Andrew: Pascal Pilon.
Pascal: Pascal Pilon. Pascal Pilon.
Andrew: I would love to have that French accent of yours. All right. He is the founder of LANDR. It’s a post-production platform for music and sound. We’ll talk about how he built the business, and this interview is sponsored by CloudSponge. If you want to increase user acquisition through email, later on I’ll tell you why you’ve got to check out cloudsponge.com/Mixergy. It’s sponsored by Toptal, and again later, I will tell you why if you need a developer, you’ve got to check out Toptal.com/Mixergy.
Pascal, I feel like the best way to understand what you do is through an example and I read an article before we started about, how Bob Weir the guitarist for The Grateful Dead uses LANDR. What does he use you guys for?
Pascal: Well, when you’re a musician, there’s a three-step process to make that music. You actually have to play a song with instruments, and you have to record that performance. Then, you have to have somebody to mix that show so that you will put together the different parts of the song. When you play in a live concert like what Mike Weir did at the time, he basically created a live setting of two days, and for those two days he wanted to take the live concert and put it on Rdio.
Andrew: Rdio, why couldn’t he just do what we do? Just plug it into a tape recorder or some kind of digital recorder, record it, and then publish it on Rdio, and say, “Here. This is it. Live, exactly as everyone in the audience heard it.” You’re smiling as I say this because I know it’s a naive question, but I think it’s one that needs to be explained. Why can’t he just record it and publish it?
Pascal: When you record music, it doesn’t sound naturally as good as you’d like it to sound. When you attend a concert, there’s a lot of people . . . you always see that guy behind the console working with the sounds. So in order to get a great sound that makes you feel like you’re having that intimacy with the band, and you really feel captured and understand all the different elements of the song, you need to have sound engineers perform their work, and they’re working behind the scene.
So when you record something, and you put that, lets say, on YouTube or if you send it to a friend, it will sound super bad. It never sounds as good as if you listened to the Maroon 5 latest single for example. And the difference in between, is a sound engineer or a crew of sound engineers working to polish every sound in there in order to make them sound very good.
They work hard as well to recreate the sounds of a room so that you feel. So even if they’re not actually playing live on a stage, they want to give you that perception that the drum really comes from the back, that the guitar really comes from the left. By recreating that sense of space, it makes the listener more engaged, more immersed by the actual music.
So it’s important you finish that music that way because if you don’t, people get bored and they won’t listen to your song. So the difference between heard, and getting heard from the start to the end of the song is typically a matter of having a good song, having some talent, but absolutely, necessarily, having good post-production.
Andrew: Pascal, that’s true for a live recording, but is it also true for someone who records in a studio with a band?
Pascal: It’s even more true for that because when you record in a studio, each of the different instruments are recorded independently one from another. So when you put them together, you don’t have any feeling of a space. They’re just flat. They’re randomly here and there. So what post-production, which is called mastering for music does, is that it balances the different sounds all together so that they will look harmonious all together.
They recreate again, a sense of space, and sometimes you can find, let’s say, there’s two guitarists in the band, there could be distortion between those two guitars giving an impression that it’s chaotic. So what post-production does is that it separates those sounds, and make sure they don’t eat each other. That there’s room for each of them. So there’s adjustments, tiny [inaudible 00:04:51] of adjustments.
Andrew: I went to your website LANDR, L-A-N-D-R dot com, and there you do have before and after clips where I can actually flip a switch and hear what it sounded like before. Flip the switch again, and see what it sounds like afterwards, and just keep going back and forth within one musical piece to see what it sounds like before and after you guys did it.
So the amazing part about your work is that it’s not a human being who gets the file and then master it as you say, and sends it back. It’s done using artificial intelligence in the cloud. I don’t know how many other buzz words I can throw into it. But basically, it’s computers that are doing it, and kicking out the response. When I tested it, it was like within five minutes.
Pascal: Yeah, well, it can be instantaneous. We found that it’s better to take a little bit more time, and put more processing behind that, but in general it falls into the arena of machine learning.
So basically, you throw tens of thousands of different songs into the system. And by studying different features of all of these songs, and listening how they’ve been produced by masters and engineers over the last decades, we end up understanding relationships between multiple features of the songs coming in, and the actual desire of the sound engineer, and we’re doing that instead of letting a human being do that.
In the same spirit that Shazam can identify a song or that you have Google working on self-driving cars, there’s a lot of things that you can do by studying the work of human beings over a long period of time. We’re basically recreating those decisions that human beings have been making over the years.
Andrew: Pascal, we’ve been talking about music and how you make music more beautiful, and I was clicking around on your site, and still, I’m a philistine. I don’t fully see the beauty until it’s there. What I do understand is dollars and cents. So for a philistine like me, what kind of revenues are you guys doing mastering audio for musicians?
Pascal: Well, I will give you reference points. I won’t be too specific about that, but let’s put it this way. When you look at our website, we take songs and on the average we’re going to charge $10 per song for mastering. For beginners though we do that for free.
So there’s premium version where . . . if you to low res mp3s, an emerging band can just put their music through the system, and its going to do it for them at no cost. So there’s really a way for amateurs to enjoy this. When something really matters to them, then to pay for that, people can also subscribe and get as much as they want starting at $6 a month.
Andrew: I see. Or $25 a month gets you unlimited WAV files. So are you about to tell me how many people have paid, is that it?
Pascal: Yeah. I’ll give you a reference point so that you work a bit behind the camera here. So when you listen to the . . . so the actual audio production services, so the world of audio engineers, it’s a 2.5 billion a year market. About a billion of that goes for recording studios, and recording sessions, and recording engineers.
A billion goes for producers, and mixers who are actually putting together songs, and half a billion goes for post productions which we call mastering. Those amounts, about half of that goes for the music industry, the other half goes for cinema, advertisement, podcasts like yours, and radio.
Andrew: So a quarter million dollars total market for musicians, and podcasters?
Pascal: Yes. In fact, it’s half a billion dollars if I just put mastering, post-production all together for this.
Andrew: Okay. Including movies.
Pascal: But the reality again, is that it addresses about 3 million titles a year. So there’s way more than that. Under our estimates here at LANDR, there’s about a billion titles. If you take all the music made by the 160 million musicians out there in world, and if you will count the people like merging in music with video, and trying to pull stuff on YouTube, and the equivalent of such sites across the world, you have a pretty significant population of people.
Andrew: Potential customers.
Pascal: Yes. So we believe that this half a billion dollar post-production market will naturally go above one billion over the next decade just because instead of being a very expensive item, it becomes something that everybody can access and we’ve crafted our platform so that it can be embedded into other people’s website. We actually have dozens of partners who offer small widgets on which you can drag-and-drop your song on their websites.
Andrew: Wait. I don’t want to make into a commercial. I just want to understand, is this, because you’re charging much less than other people. A lot of your users are using for free. It sounds like maybe you guys haven’t produced revenues yet. Right?
Pascal: No, no, no. We’re generating significant revenue.
Andrew: Over a million dollars so far?
Pascal: Oh yeah. Multiple million . . .
Andrew: Multiple millions of dollar. Over 10 million in sales?
Pascal: No, between 3 and 10. I’ll give you that.
Andrew: Between 3 and 10, and charging people for no more than $25 or $40 a month.
Pascal: Yeah. We have 350,000 users at this point, and about 10% of those users are paying users. So it adds up pretty rapidly. We’re growing 10% month over month, and the post-production element of things is just the beginning as well.
So the real thing we’re doing is helping musicians finish their music, and then collaborate with their peers in the same band or within their environment or outside of that spectrum. So if you look at the dozens of partners that we have made so far, we have the biggest distributors of music that are our partner and that are offering our services on their websites.
Andrew: All of this started when a couple of guys came in to your office, and they said what?
Pascal: A couple of guys in early 2013 invited me to come to their lab, and that technology that was transferred from Queen Mary University in London was transferred to Montreal into an accelerator called [inaudible 00:11:00]. I was there to look at the technology, and I said, “Hey, I really love this. I’d be willing to invest.” So they said, “We’re not at that stage. We’re not ready yet to do a round of funding, but we’ll call you later.”
Two months later they called me back, and then I spent time with the guy that was running the beginning of that startup. A guy named Justin Evans. He’s a brilliant guy. He was pitching that to me. He was demoing the mixing and mastering platform. At the time, he was also doing automatic mixing of five concerts.
I was just thrilled. And me coming from a B2B business before launching this one, I was thrilled to be seeing, basically, a consumer business like this one, for a product that I could really relate to.
Andrew: This was Averna, is the company that you created back, I think, in 1999. I read the site, LANDR is simple to understand compared to Averna. Averna is amazing in that what it does is that it does testing for aviation industry, for the auto industry. Equipment testing or is it finished product testing?
Pascal: It’s very easy, yeah. So it’s basically validation of finish product testing. So Averna basically builds quality control systems for the electronic products. So a company designing a new electronic product as it builds the physical product itself, just before starting to be able to manufacture it, they ask to check if it really works.
So in order to do that, you plug that product into multiple points to measure how that product will behave if you stimulate it, and if you measure how it behaves. Once you’ve got that, it enables you to adjust your design until the product feels perfect. Then you take those test systems and you put them on manufacturing lines so that every manufactured electronic product gets tested like that.
Basically, recreating the real life . . . simulating real life conditions so that no defective product will be shipped to customers with the advantage of protecting ones brand. You will not be too happy if you had an iPhone coming to you that was not . . . you have the new box. It’s fantastically gorgeous, you press power, and the telephone doesn’t work. So obviously we have high expectations. So those system . . .
Andrew: So you created the test than then made sure that every item that comes out of production actually satisfies those tests, and is as good as the company wants all their products to be. And there, according to your LinkedIn profile, I could see what your sales were. You took it from scratch meaning no revenue, just an idea, you built it up from 1999 to the year 2013 to $37 million in revenue according to LinkedIn. Right?
Pascal: Yep.
Andrew: Then you sold it?
Pascal: Yep.
Andrew: That’s what enabled you to go around, look for companies to invest in. You are now an investor, and that’s when these guys came to you and said, “All right. We’re finally ready to take on investment money.” You put in money in, but now you suddenly became the guy who’s running it. How did that happen?
Pascal: Well, it happened on the same time because as I was looking into the business, I really liked the technology, but when we studied the actual . . . so they were looking to, basically, do a play of licensing the technology for the big, hardware equipment mixing devices out there from companies like [inaudible 00:14:14], or from Sony, and Yamaha. But as they did that, I was just analyzing the size of that business, and it fell to be in the low 8 digits as a market, so if felt pretty slim.
So before investing, I studied with the founders of the business, what were the potential other opportunities for that, and we determined that building a cloud platform for the long tail for the entirety of the musicians on the planet would be the best way to address that. But that’s basically a big . . . it’s a big investment, and it’s a big deal. So I was thrilled, and the guys asked me if I would be willing to join, and frankly that felt like a very good idea. So here I am jumping again in the startup at the time.
Andrew: They’re still with you, they’re still with the company?
Pascal: Yeah. So we run that company. So we’re a team of 55 here. The world experts in the signal processing for music, the best sound engineers as well. The top back-end guys to build our own design infrastructure. The best front-end guys. We have the best designers in the country. We have crazy good marketing team.
Andrew: Speaking of the people, our producer asked you, “What’s the first step you took?” and you said one of the first step you took was hiring 20 people, and you used the word “immediately.” Why hire so many people so fast for a new company that has no revenue, and just now got a new investor? Why 20?
Pascal: Well, I think the scarcity that really faces everybody is a good idea. Once you have a good idea for a project, once you feel that there’s a business somewhere. Now you have to, of course, you have to assemble the money to be able to implement that project, but you have also to be scared of the fact that some competitor could jump on the space as well.
So the more confident one is in the two of the product than the idea, and the direction, the faster you want to test that, and make sure that you capture that market. So I felt that sense of urgency and wanting to capture that.
The other reason is because I have some money, and I was an investor in every round that this company ever made so far it commands some leadership. So I must say, it’s been pretty easy to raise money from Montreal Tech Entrepreneurs from one of the best VCs here. Earlier this year, even from Warner music group which is a key strategic investor, and we even got top DJs of the world, and the rapper Nas to come on board as investor as well.
Andrew: I know that one of the challenges that you’ve always had with this business was that people didn’t believe it. They didn’t get it, they didn’t believe it. How did you know that you could get enough customers to justify the investment in people, to justify the investment in software? How did you know?
Pascal: Well, it’s not so difficult because even when I look at the . . . as I said, I think this business can address a one billion dollar market, but even if, much to the contrary the market doesn’t grow and we’re just making that half a billion market or 50 million market by shrinking it by all that increase efficiency. Even if we only obtain like 20 million out of that, it would still be significantly profitable. So the question here to me was not, “Will it be a profitable, good return?” It was, “Would it be an okay return or a huge return on my investment and my time?”
Andrew: You were just that much of a believer. You didn’t even need to do customer research. Is that it?
Pascal: I did customer research.
Andrew: What kind of customer research did you do?
Pascal: I talked to a number of bands in the city. Montreal is town of big bands like Arcade Fire, and others. So I mean, Just Evans here has a certain level of connection as well. So I did talk to a number of sound engineers, number of people. We took the material, remember, we had a prototype, so we took the material of bands like the Killers that basically was supplied by, we were at the time talking with Armand to do a deal, and even with some other parties as well.
So I got the opportunity early on to jump in and talk with those big equipment vendors. Listen, I’m a computer engineer myself, and I was just seeing what these . . . so I really studied as well the different products out there, and its easy to see when a product is very complicated, and the learning curve is steep. When on the other side, the economics makes it so nobody can pay for those. It was clear to me that there was long term opportunity here.
Andrew: Did you check in and see, will you pay for this? Or was it just, is this making your music better?
Pascal: No, I looked into people and I asked questions around if like peoples habits into spending on mastering songs on post-producing songs, on what drove people to spend on that process or not to spend. The thing that came evident is that every musician in town, and out of town as well, they don’t master all of their music because it’s too expensive. If the question was, if you were to be able to subscribe to a service so that everything you generate would be post-produced, mastered will you go for that? Everybody was super excited about that.
The other thing is, we were saying to people, if you have that opportunity to get that resulting master immediately as you finish mixing, will you go for that instead of having to wait for days if not weeks? People, again, were super excited about that.
So I knew the world is full of those opportunities. Think about applications like Instagram for instance. Even if it only slightly improved the images, the possibility of taking a picture on a one button improving the visuals to compensate for a lack of, lets say, lighting.
Then on another click of a button, you can share that with people. The seamlessness, the frictionless experience enjoyed by the person producing the content, and the way it can get consumed, it is something I saw in the music business as totally underserved.
And that’s really what we’re doing. We’re really making musicians, and creators capable of intuitively finishing their creations and seamlessly reaching out to their audience whether that audience is their family or that audience is millions of fans on Spotify and iTunes. Our mission is really to make that process, that entire process intuitive without requiring any training at all.
Andrew: So let me do a sponsorship message that connects with what we just said right now. The sponsor is a company is called CloudSponge. At the top of the interview, I said that “CloudSponge helps you increase your user acquisition through email.” Now what the hell does that even mean? Let me tell you what it means. In fact, let me imagine LANDR.
Imagine somebody comes to LANDR, Pascal, and this is just a sponsorship message, but someone comes to LANDR and says, “I just finished creating this music. I’m going to upload it to LANDR.” Within like that, the final product comes out sounding much better, and the person can create an account on LANDR, right?
Actually, the first step is upload the file. The second step is here it is, play it, listen to it, see how it compares to the original. It sounds beautiful right? Now create an account so you can get this. Imagine if the next step after that is “Now, share it with your friends via email.” Did you guys do that now?
Pascal: It’s not something you do, the need is there. But the email aspect theory is something that people do, but it comes with downsides. Well, an email is, basically, taking a file, and sending that file to people. So once you do that, you lose control over that file forever.
Andrew: What if it’s a link to the file?
Pascal: When it’s a link you do then you do the Dropbox game which is, basically, you’re sending a link to people, right? But then you have to remove that link. You have to configure that link so that there’s an expiration over that.
Andrew: You don’t let people share it via email?
Pascal: The industry right now does that at times, and the industry is looking for something better. It’s a product we’re going to be introducing over the next few months. I don’t want to dig too fast into this.
Andrew: But it will be someway for people via email?
Pascal: It’s a going to be a way for people to share via the internet.
Andrew: So let me imagine a different product. Imagine someone who is listening to us right now has a photo sharing app. Somebody takes a photo, uploads it to their site. They do some things on it, make it look nice, and now it’s time for that person to share it. Yeah, you add a Facebook share, yes, you add a Twitter, you might even add other sharing like, what’s the one with the P?
Pascal: Pinterest?
Andrew: Pinterest, thank you. I don’t know why I was blanking on them but their logo’s stuck in my head. Anyway, but email’s an incredibly powerful for sharing because it’s a one-on-one connection. The problem with email is if you say, “Here’s a blank form. Now fill it with your friends email addresses, and we’ll send it out.” People don’t know their friends email addresses, and so they have to leave and go check for it, and really what that means is they leave and they never come back.
So what CloudSponge does is they allow you to give your users access to their emails no matter where they are. Maybe they’re in Gmail, maybe they’re in Yahoo, maybe they’re in other online address book. Whatever it is, CloudSponge says, “Here you’re on the form, you know what you want to share, just with one click we’ll suck in contacts from whatever address book you want, and we’ll let you pick the ones you want to invite to view this thing that you created.
Now that’s a powerful tool that LinkedIn has, that Twitter has. So many other companies and bigger companies have. They code it themselves often, but they don’t . . . but you, the Mixergy listener don’t have to code it yourself. You can easily add it to anything on your site using CloudSponge. They make it super easy.
All you have you do is go to cloudsponge.com/Mixergy. They’ll show you how easy it is, and they’ll give you two months for free so you can prove that it really is effective at growing your user acquisition through email. Email is are incredibly powerful. When you do that, users won’t have to leave your site, users will be there.
By the way, this is something that’s used by AirBnB, and many other companies that are big, and have vetted CloudSponge to death. I interviewed the founder of CloudSponge and he told me how he had to be vetted and make sure that everything was absolutely kosher with the way he did business before they would work with them.
So that’s what CloudSponge does. If you want to make it easier for your users to share your site via email, go check out cloudsponge.com/Mixergy. If you need even some consultation, they do even more than just the software. They will help you use email to grow your user acquisition, and I’m grateful to them for sponsoring.
You see me start to sweat by the way when you said email’s not a good one. I said, “I was about to use you in my ad. I should not do that without knowing where he was going to go.” I’ll pull it out.
Pascal: Well, there was a better example, but you should have told me.
Andrew: Nah. It worked out okay. I’m glad you weren’t willing to lie to the audience, and say “Andrew that’s a wonderful idea.”
Pascal: That’s integrity.
Andrew: All right. So you had your 20 people, you guys were developing, you had your site, you launched about 11 months afterwards, you told our producer. It’s time to get users. What did you do get people to come to the site which was called at the time MixGenius?
Pascal: But the site was still landr.com. The company was MixGenius because the first endeavor was a mixing platform first, and soon after we realized that people were just too tied up with their mixing software so we felt it would be difficult to move people away from that. And with that being said, the site was landr.com still.
But as we did that and we tried to communicate with other music festivals out there, and we tried to sponsor some of them. But the thing we actually did was like affiliate marketing. So we were saying to those U.S. festivals and European festivals that they could try their users to come to our site in exchange for a portion of the [inaudible 00:26:11] we generate with those.
Andrew: That worked?
Pascal: That worked.
Andrew: They were willing to do affiliate marketing?
Pascal: Many did. Don’t forget, we’re into an era where selling ads is more and more difficult so people have to be more and more creative to generate those ad revenues. So they are taking those risks. We did a number of web share spaces like that. We did the same thing with pro ambassadors. So we take a number of DJs out there, and we offered, again, them the same thing.
The more they’d be talking about us from their tweets, we would be tracing back the leads for new users that they generated, and will give them percentage of the revenue would generate. Again, that wasn’t that successful. It was successful in terms of creating free users, but it wasn’t monetize to the extent where it was that compelling for the artist.
Andrew: This is without the artist even signing up for an affiliate program, you would track who they sent over and pay them for it?
Pascal: Yep.
Andrew: So I might be, if I were a DJ, and I tweeted, I might suddenly be surprised by finding out that LANDR was willing to pay me for the people I referred.
Pascal: We always engaged to people for that . . .
Andrew: So you chatted with them after I cite in my tweet, and they you’d chat with me, and then I’d say, “Hey, this is a good company.” Then you say, “Look, you tweeted before we even met. I want to pay you for that too.”
Pascal: Yeah, we could do that as well. We did pretty much everything that seems fair, creating a win-win. So we did that. As we did that though we did become very popular in the electronic space. So on the sake of doing that, we also started, because with the relationship with the media, we tweaked it and made remixing contest.
So where participants submit in contests would be mastering their remix using LANDR, and with that we basically displayed the remix contest winners using LANDR and so forth. So we acquire users that way, and then all the big blogs in the electronic space started doing a critique over LANDR. Places like MusicRadar [inaudible 00:28:04]. So it basically became more and more known.
And then we started getting visibility from Forbes, from Fast Co, and so forth. The real deal is that we got a lot of media attention because of the fact that machine learning applied to music production was a new thing.
Andrew: But Forbes doesn’t understand that unless you explained it to them, and Forbes isn’t in the world of music unless you tell them about it. What did you to get that kind of press? What did you do to get them to know about it?
Pascal: Well, they happened . . . You know what, Forbes happened to have done a few pieces on the music industry, and the fact it’s going digital, and the fact, I’d say the streaming services are bringing attention to music and digital.
Andrew: So you hired a PR person to reach out to whoever at Forbes about music and say, “Here’s a new part of music industry.”
Pascal: No, we did that internally at that point. So it’s just by approaching the writer over time, and just to create a relationship that the guy felt that this was something interesting, and Forbes itself just happens so. The guy liked the story. So he liked basically the angle it was providing him to write an article.
Andrew: I see, but you were reaching out to them. This is Karsten Strauss, and you guys were reaching out to him staying in touch.
Pascal: On Twitter, on email, by phone, and just trying to warm the relationship, and after a few months he, basically got it, and I guess something in his life happened so that he probably . . . I think in this article he interviewed a New York master engineer to talk about it.
So I bet he was at a party, and he crossed that guy, and basically the combination of the two idea, say, “Have you heard about LANDR?” The guy probably said yes, and then he talked about it. He felt that there would be some action if you wish to expose the actual human beings doing the job, and the machine doing this. So it felt like a good story. So we played those angles as well to create some news.
Andrew: Like a competition between humans and machines.
Pascal: Of course, it’s interesting.
Andrew: I see. I could see how that’s interesting. By the way, in his article here’s what he said, “MixGenius is a 30-person firm offering similar product but a subtle product, etc.” MixGenius he is calling the 30-person firm. “In March the company emerged with a product called LANDR.” So he’s a little confused to by the difference between MixGenius and LANDR. LANDR is actually is the company, MixGenius was the product. He has it reversed.
Pascal: No, it’s the other way around. MixGenius was the company. We launched the first product as LANDR. It was so complicated with that that rapidly, earlier this year we just erased MixGenius, and the company change the name to LANDR.
Andrew: Now it’s just LANDR.
Pascal: Just LANDR.
Andrew: I see. So I’m the one’s confusing the two.
Pascal: Well, you’re not the first one.
Andrew: So you said MixGenius, the problem with the product was that people were too connected to their own mixing software. Was their something that you could have done to anticipate that before launching it?
Pascal: I guess, I could. When you enter a market, and you want to win competition over competition, you really have to see the willingness. So basically, you want to feel the pain. There was one. Mixing is complicated, people need assistance. But when I realized that there were so main popular mixing softwares out there, and that people . . . when I started reading about this a bit more on forums, I saw that basically people were defending the mixing software they were using.
Just like people would root for their school or whatever, people who were using Logic would be being a bit condescendent with people using Pro Tools would be condescendent . . . So basically people who are creating those relationships with that piece of software. That’s when I felt we were in trouble.
But there’s still a great business [inaudible 00:32:20] there. But I felt that this segment that we could be addressing was much smaller, and would take longer to address than the actual need that I saw into mastering because, again, most people don’t want to spend the money to hire somebody to do that because they can, because they don’t or not enough money, and even the young musicians. They barely make enough money to pay for the production cost of their music. So it’s a losing money proposition. So we were that missing link.
So when we realized that we decided that we would first be faster to market if we were just to focus on the post-production piece, we felt. And then we’ll follow on with the mixing piece. But the mastering piece became so popular, and people were talking about it so highly as being the best idea ever for musicians, that we realized that there were so many features just on post-production alone.
And not only building LANDR.com, but building it as a platform, just like PayPal did providing APIs and widgets for the world of applications and websites out there to use those features, we realized that the real deal was to dominate post-production. Maybe down the road we’d go back to mixing.
Now, being a company called MixGenius, and selling a mastering software platform was confusing. People would think MixGenius, and mix is used as well, not only for people editing music to create new songs, but also by DJs trying to mix songs live. It was, basically we ended with the name that was giving people the wrong impression about us, and the thing we really like about LANDR as you what LANDR stands for, right?
Andrew: No.
Pascal: It stands for left and right stereo, hearing, auditing.
Andrew: I see, and that’s why in the logo you’re the isolating the word “and.”
Pascal: Yeah.
Andrew: Got it.
Pascal: The two ears. So it’s the audio experience human beings enjoy. So we really loved it, and the other thing is because we think that post-production is a complicated word, and that mastering, people don’t know exactly what it means for music, and everything else even though it’s used by people who have money for that, its still something that is poorly understood.
So we thought, “Why not create a new verb?” If LANDR is great because instead of Googling for searching something, you’re Landering your song, and it’s not mastering. What does it mean? It means we’re taking the intention of the music creator and the audio creator, and we’re doing whatever’s needed to make it sound as good as professionals.
Andrew: You mentioned earlier, the first thing that you did was you went after affiliate programs. That did okay for you, you started looking then for industry influencers, and you started talking to them, that helped you. You went after reporters who covered the music industries, spent some time with them, that helped.
You also talked a little bit about widgets, and we really hadn’t got into it, but it feels like widgets are what help you take your software to other sites, and therefore those other sites bring people in. The first widget that you did was, I think, on TuneCore, right?
Pascal: That’s right.
Andrew: Tunecore.com. What did the first widget do for TuneCore?
Pascal: It does exactly the same experience as what you enjoy on LANDR.com which is basically on landr.com, you take a song that you just mixed. You drag-and-drop it on the website. The website uploads it immediately.
It prepares a 30-second preview of that song, and you can listen to it so that you can see the transformation of your song. If you like it, you just subscribe and you have the free version of your song in low-res mp3, no charge. So we do the same on TuneCore. So on TuneCore which happened to distribute music on iTunes, Spotify, Rdio, and all these site.
Andrew: That’s a place where any band can go, and if end, get their music to all that sites that you talked about, iTunes.com . . .
Pascal: That’s how you distribute your music on other retail and streaming services of the world from one place. They push it, then they collect royalties for U.S. [inaudible 00:3619] when you sell those. It’s a no complication, super simple website for that. Now, obviously, many musicians tried to do post-production themselves or aren’t so aware of that so they don’t even do the mastering piece, and they just push it out there.
So by putting all the widgets on TuneCore website, when people upload music for distribution on their website, TuneCore tells them, “Hey. You want to hear what you would sound like if it was ran through LANDR?” People say yes or no, and nowadays, when people try it, one person out of two who tries it, buys the song. It’s that convincing.
Andrew: Not just signs up, but buys?
Pascal: Buys the song.
Andrew: Buys.
Pascal: Buys the song, $10 U.S for one song. People buy it, you know, why? Because, when you make a song, it’s like fatherhood. The baby that you bring to life, you care about it.
Andrew: It’s a no-brainer, $10 is nothing. Frankly if you told me we could make every one of our interviews sound better for $10, I’d be in in a heartbeat.
Pascal: There you go.
Andrew: You guys don’t do if for podcasts, do you?
Pascal: We do it for podcasts. There’s a number of podcast running hours.
Andrew: Are you and I are going to sound better if I run it through LANDR?
Pascal: Supposedly, it’s music mostly, but yes, it will sound better. It will sound better. The thing is we haven’t [inaudible 00:37:28] the podcast market aggressively so far because there’s a few elements in a vocal interview that you want removed, some like noise from the mountains. Stuff like that. So there’s some editing that you like to do. But for us it’s a tiny thing to do so of course we’re going to do that down the road .
Andrew: We love it. Here’s the pain in the neck with that. I was just listening to someone else’s podcast, and it was so quiet, I couldn’t hear it outside of the office. So I would just pause it when I leave the office, play it again when I got back home because it was so quiet. That’s one issue, people don’t know how to get the volume at the right level. That should be a simple thing to adjust.
Another issue is you’re volume and my volume right now are at different levels. So Joe the editor is going to have pick up your volume probably, and because I’m such a loud mouth, lower me a little bit so that people don’t have to keep adjusting their volume knobs every time one of us speaks.
Pascal: Run it through LANDR just for the sake of trying. You’re going to see. For sure you’re going to improve that at least because it’s not optimized for podcasts, your guy might do some editing, but it’s going to be 90% of the work from the start.
Andrew: Okay. There’s so many little things that have to get every time. Sometimes people have background noise like you said around what they’re saying, we have to edit that out. All right. I’ll try it. So that started working for you. The partnerships are, I’m assuming, sites like TuneCore get a percentage of your sales, and if they . . . do you also sell subscriptions through them?
Pascal: We sell no subscriptions, but when they do email campaign to their user. The thing is, any time one of their users buys a song or registers from their website to our service because they can sign in from their website on our service. When they do, we mark it as “originating” from that partner.
Andrew: So anything you sell them in the future, they get a percentage of?
Pascal: Yeah. Whatever they do. Even if they come directly. So it’s basically a joint venture over their customer base working together to bring that benefit to their customer-base and sharing the benefit together.
Andrew: I’m hunting through SimilarWeb, the software that I use to see where people get their traffic, and it’s looks like you’re getting traffic from CD Babies. So I’m assuming you have a partnership with them too.
Pascal: Yeah. They’re a big player as well.
Andrew: I don’t know Ask.Audio, but is there a partnership with them too?
Pascal: Nope.
Andrew: No. Hypebot?
Pascal: No, that’s a log.
Andrew: Okay. I see.
Pascal: People talk about this . . . the thing is you have to realize that one of the reasons why people talk about us is that it’s not a [inaudible 00:39:53] product. It’s really a disruptive product in terms of pricing, in terms of speed, and in terms of ease-of-use. So it was the last thing that was preventing do-it-yourself musician to be able to do the entire cycle themselves.
Andrew: It’s look like The Next Web is sending you a considerable amount of traffic, and that’s because they recently wrote an article about you. All right, and here’s their article, “LANDR just took a big step towards making all recorded musicians sound better.” Cool.
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Pascal, one of the problems that you told our producer was that people just don’t believe it’s possible, and how has that been a problem for you?
Pascal: Well, the thing is, when you look at how it’s done typically it’s a human being performing the work. So typically, musicians know somebody or they don’t, they can’t reach out to them. If they do know somebody, now they have to rely on the machine to do something that often times they’ve used a human being for. Musicians, they are not always that confident in the song that they’re coming up with. They don’t know. They don’t know how people will react so those songs haven’t been validated.
So they often time feel that the song engineer is going to save their lives for making a huge difference in their song. So there’s a psychological element to it. And people also that there’s an artistic element brought by sound engineers when post-production is done by a human being, and it’s blocking them sometime from using our platform.
The reality though is that when people understand what we really do, they end up understanding that it’s a human being. It’s just the sum of all the behaviors of human beings that we’re repeating. It’s not a robot. This is not a synthetic decision. It’s basically giving a different weight to millions of human being decisions and trying to sort out what the best way to address that.
So it says human as anything else. In fact, it’s the result of very, very experienced, a combination of music engineers working on it. So once people understand that, every month we issue a new iteration of our mastering platform. Once people understand that every new song coming in, every behavior of the user is impacting the evolution of the platform. They realize . . .
Andrew: Meaning every other person who . . . actually what do you mean by that? Every behavior of the user.
Pascal: Well, right now. I’ll give you an example. So when you go to LANDR, the only thing you can ask for is three different intensities. Intensities in music refers to the loudness of it. So it can be bold like what you get in a club or it can be quiet like what you get in a Tracy Chapman concert. So basically you can play that spectrum. Typically, teenagers wants it to be bold. Older guys want it to be mild and delicate, but there’s everything in between.
So just the decision of exposing according to a certain genre of music with a certain type of features, if everybody that goes and is exposed to that ends up always choosing the higher intensity of our settings, its telling us something. Nobody would care so much, the actual nature of consumer doesn’t care so much about quiet peace for those threats of a song. So what do we do? We then add that song to the population of songs that drive how we’re going to build future decisions . . .
Andrew: I see. So future songs it sounds like these that have asked for higher intensities should just get higher intensities right away.
Pascal: Yup.
Andrew: I see.
Pascal: But when we will expose these guys, for example, three intensities in the future, instead of giving something mild, something standard, and something, let say, bold. They’re going to get bold, bolder, and very much bolder.
Andrew: Let’s talk a little bit about the low point. I don’t want people to think that everything was easy for you. One of the low points you told our producer was that people went on YouTube and tried to expose weaknesses in LANDR software. You’re smiling today, but at the time it couldn’t have been easy. What was going on when you first saw it?
Pascal: Well, establishing your credibility in the space was very difficult. It was very, very, very difficult and the numbers again at first we were bleeding money. Your launching a product, you’ve got all those engineers, and you need to succeed. It’s not like investing is not a big deal if you see a growing trend, and you can see you’re going to be building that platform.
But we were wondering if people would feel risk adverse to the point where they wouldn’t even try to release content with that platform. The moment at which we started getting people telling us that the [inaudible 00:47:44] that they gave to master engineers 10 years and 20 years ago, and they pitched that into LANDR, and they preferred the LANDR version. Once people told us how much they were happy about the result, and better than what they’ve done . . .
Andrew: Wasn’t there a period when they told you the opposite?
Pascal: Not so much, but when we launched, because it’s a machine-learning platform, and because you keep on improving the quality over and over, there would be some cases in songs when the results weren’t so good. So then you would see master engineer trying to show on a YouTube video that for that song “LANDR sucked, and here’s what I would do, and here’s mine, and this is no good.”
Andrew: I see. So the engineers had a reason to come in and tell you that your software wasn’t as good.
Pascal: So I’d say, when you launched products like that we have moments of doubt because there’s a window to establish your credibility because if you lose that credibility people won’t even look at you in the future.
Andrew: So what did you do? It feels you somehow influenced some of the YouTube videos that people put up because there’s a bunch of reviews here. What did you do to start influencing them, and getting more of positive stuff out there to combat the haters?
Pascal: Well, we have a very good team here, and one of the things that they put together is first of all, we never hate the haters. We never go back and just blast the people who are negative about us, even those who are doing that with bad faith in mind just trying to brig us down. We always open our hands, and say, “Here’s the process, here’s what we’re trying to do, and remember guys, there are so many musicians who are starving in the world who can pay for the service of a master engineer. We’re thinking about them as well.” So this thing is beneficial for musicians. And we kept on issuing that message.
And we also kept on saying this machine-learning based. Just like Deep Blue lost to Kasparov and chess, the first time they played together. Deep Blue ended up winning against Kasparov after a few attempts. We will keep on becoming better and better and better. So it’s just a matter of time. So stay with us and even if it’s not perfect for every song, there’s going to be songs where it’s going to be perfect for you right off the bat.
So that was the beginning, and ever since, the reason why we felt we needed to add more and more people, we reach a team of 55 now, is that the more we have experts in every genre of music, the more we have experts in sound engineering, master engineering, signal processing and so forth, the more people can come together and innovate to come around weaknesses of the product, to go across and find solutions to obstacles and so forth.
Andrew: Sorry to interrupt, but what about for credibility? Getting, you said, top people, famous artists using LANDR is one of the best ways to get everyone else to be convinced that if they’re using it and it’s worth using it and that the software is good, what do you do to get famous people to use your software?
Pascal: You put them in front of blind tests. So you take songs done by LANDR and you take songs performed by real master engineers, and you expose them to the two, and then you ask them which is which. And if they choose our version, there you go. So there’s a band, for example, called Echosmith. It’s a pretty well-known band that’s going pretty fast, that want to
Andrew: Echosmooth?
Pascal: Echosmith.
Andrew: Echosmith, okay.
Pascal: E-C-H-O- S-M-I-T-H. And the band, as Warner Music was considering investing in the company, were asked to listen to different versions of a remix album they were about to issue without letting them know some of these versions were LANDR versions.
Andrew: So they already paid for someone to master it?
Pascal: They did. Again, they did, but they didn’t know about that. Their managers were involved in the thing, and basically was just no obligation. Here’s several versions of them. Which one do you prefer? And the band, all of them members, preferred the LANDR version for the three songs they were remixing. So because of that, when they were disclosed after that, the reality they said, “Hey, man, no problem. Yeah, we’re going to release those LANDR . . . ”
Andrew: They’re going to go with LANDR. But how did you get their music and the ability to both remaster it and to get in front of them so they could do this little taste test?
Pascal: Yeah. Well, we’ve got friends in their community. So one of the LANDR friend of the community is a guy called Jay LeBoeuf. He teaches at Stanford, and the guy, at some point, was in contact with one of the big tech advisors of Warner Music Group. The guy was named Greg Mertz, and Greg Mertz asked Jay, “Hey, are you seeing any decent technology businesses in music space these days?” And here Jay spoke about LANDR. “You should pay attention to LANDR.”
Greg contacted us, and as he did, Bruce Roberts, who’s also an advisor to Warner came on board as well. Both of them were curious to see how human beings would behave if they didn’t know what they were facing. So they wanted to see the upper [inaudible 00:53:04] because they felt that this was crazy good. So they figured, “Let’s see how musicians can see a difference or not, and if they prefer it or not or like it less or not.” And that resolve gave them confirmation that just like . . .
Andrew: That sounds like a collection of events that’s hard to duplicate. A guy at Stanford was asked by someone at Warner what can you do, and then all the stuff happened. Is there anything that you do that’s more proactive, that allows you to get in front of musicians, big musicians, who then will sway everyone else?
Pascal: Well, reaching out through [inaudible 00:53:38] is a big deal for sure. So we have a big blog. So we write a lot of content, and the blogs that we write feature often Time artists, and we feature them in the way that they compose. We feature them in the way that they produce their music and so forth. So when you approach artists that love the craft of making music, and because we have a very good voice, our writers are super good, and the visuals are great as well if you Google on blog.landr.com, it’s just gorgeous stuff.
So because people over at Time saw that for emerging artists, we’ve been doing very cool articles, and that there’s a lot of readers there and we have hundreds of thousands of readers on our Facebook page and we have tons of followers.
So at the beginning, we were taking just emerging artists, and today, people who have emerged but are not super popular feel that this is a great vehicle for them to be featured. And then that blog gets exposed to our user base as well. So we’re already at 350,000 users. We’re already at a point where that blog featuring them could be exposing them to a new audience and so forth.
So I guess it’s starting small. So smaller artists trying to get some visibilities, [inaudible 00:54:53] trying to get some SEO as well. The fact that we supply the interviews, that we have a good brand, that people like and felt comfortable with our brand, that’s something that can be duplicated.
Andrew: So you’re saying you get to the big artists by going to the small artist?
Pascal: [inaudible 00:55:08]
Andrew: But you also have a process for getting to the bigger artist directly in the studio, right?
Pascal: Yeah.
Andrew: What do you do? What’s your process for getting directly to the big guys?
Pascal: Well, nowadays because we got Warner Music as an investor, it’s easier . . .
Andrew: I see.
Pascal: . . . because we try to get every level to understand the financial advantages of going with LANDR, not telling them to do everything with LANDR but telling them, “Hey, you could release smart content on streaming services because of the [inaudible 00:55:35], the production costs would go down if you were to use us for a portion of your content.” And so we’re just telling them why in some instances it’s better to use LANDR than using any other alternative ways. And they see the benefits of that. It’s value-based, but it’s always value-based. There’s always something that you’re pitching to people.
Andrew: I’ve got three big topics to talk to you about. We’ll do rapid fire since we’re at the end of our time together, but they’re important for me to talk to you about. The first is you said that when you were a kid, your father told you he didn’t care what you were doing, even if it was picking up dirt at the end of the day as long as . . . you’re smiling. You know what I’m talking about?
Pascal: Yeah.
Andrew: As long as what?
Pascal: As long as I own the truck, he would have no problem seeing me picking up dirt.
Andrew: Why? Why is owning the truck . . .
Pascal: Independence. He was fiercely independent and wanted to . . . he felt that anybody that was in full control of their life and didn’t rely on politics and internal pressure to do things could have a free and happy life in a way, and I guess he was a very young political type of guy that was a straight talker as well.
Andrew: As long as you’re the entrepreneur, as long as you own the material of production, then you could do anything, because if you do, then you also own your life and you get to decide what to do.
Pascal: I’d have his blessing if I did that.
Andrew: Meanwhile, it took you until what, 28 before you started your first company.
Pascal: Yup.
Andrew: Was he a little disappointed in the first seven years of your 20s?
Pascal: Not so much. There were tough periods, especially when I started university and I was on the party mode too much when grades were low.
Andrew: I see.
Pascal: Or when I started catching [inaudible 00:57:20], he was also as he was an entrepreneur himself, he was also a teacher at HEC Montreal in statistics. So he was a teacher at university as well. So he was also insisting on the importance of studying and forging yourself in education.
Andrew: Speaking of teaching, we asked you what you would teach other entrepreneurs, and you said, “You already are teaching, and the one thing you teach is attitude.” Why is attitude so important?
Pascal: Because resilience is so important. You’re going to face problems. When you start a business, the initial ideas never [inaudible 00:58:00] thing by which you’re really going to win. There’s always going to be something that you need to renew and tweak. So an entrepreneur needs to be patient, needs to be adjusting all the time, needs to be sensitive and sensible to the outside world to understand those things, but there’s going to be bad days. People are going to tell you . . .
Andrew: But it sounds like you had every day was good. The whole time we’re doing this interview, you’re smiling. You’re talking about how you got the right . . . here I’m actually talking . . . I’ve took some notes throughout. You said people saw the first version. They were super excited that we’re going to give immediate results. They were super excited we’re going to get everything remastered so fast. Everything that they created mastered. When was a hard day that you needed to have a tough attitude?
Pascal: Pretty much every day.
Andrew: Give me an example. What’s one day that many other people would have given up?
Pascal: For instance, when we lounged, when we got the investment from Warner, we used the PR firm, and the PR firm was supposed to only talk to journalists. So we hired a PR from that point to talk about this, and we asked the news to be under embargo. And one of the sites we talked to didn’t respect the embargo that we had sell to that site.
So that day is a very bad day because when we saw that the news that was supposed to be coming out the week after in big publications was already being leaked on that site. All the big news that we were trying to build, all the momentum and the news, because we’re expecting to have lots of traction, and we did by the way, we did end up earning like tens of thousands of new users with that big push.
When that small music website released the information without respecting the embargo, the people from Warner weren’t so happy obviously because it’s fine to invest in a startup, but it’s another thing to look like you’re not in possession of your game. So we hired a super professional PR department and so forth then.
And so that day, when you have to face . . . because when you’re running a company, you’re responsible for all the mistakes of everybody in your company, which is fine. So because you always need to take the other responsibility and the hit, there’s always at least something that are going to be bad in the day, and that responsibility is [inaudible 01:00:22] to support, you have to support it. So every day I must say there’s at least two or three things that if I just look at this, it makes me a bit sad, then I feel more pressure. And if I look at all the good news on the other side, I feel good.
But typically at the end of the day, when I go home, I typically feel the weight of all these moments of friction, of dissatisfaction, of imperfection, of our brand needing some tweaks, and I see the things that we need to do that we’re not yet doing, and sometime things I talked that we’re already doing that we’re not yet doing as good as I’d like to. So I’d say the more the day advances, the more I feel all the work that we still need to do.
Andrew: And so your attitude helps you get through it. Do you have an example of how did your attitude help you with this Warner leak?
Pascal: It’s funny, I timed the moment that which I face these things. So first of all, when I’m tired, when I feel like I’m facing tough . . . a lot of difficulties like those, I’m trying to first of all, do whatever is needed to cut the bleed. So managing risks and saying “yes, yes, yes,” so customer relationship and so forth. But typically in those moments, I’m trying to gather facts from the people around me. And if I know I don’t have to act immediately, anytime I know I can act the following day, I cut myself from it.
In fact, these topics when I wake up in the morning, when I’m fresh, when I haven’t done anything else, and all the time every time throughout my career, every time I wake up I find the path to solve these issues, and I feel better at that. So I’d say timing my anxiety, timing my ability to respond to difficult things is very important. If I don’t feel I’m in the mood for this, I know I’m going to be in the better mood for that tomorrow morning.
Andrew: I see.
Pascal: So I try to work on the right things at that. So when I’m in a situation like that, I would spend the rest of the day potentially trying to get rid of the mechanical stuff that doesn’t have much value, but I need to do anyway so that my emotions would not be in the way of doing the right thing. This way, I’m always trying to avoid feeling, acting under anger, or doing stupid things if you will.
And if I feel like I’m frustrated, I will oftentimes write an email to myself just to try to clarify my thoughts on things, and then I would read myself the following morning, and oftentimes I find myself to be stupid. The perspective of myself on myself that delay is a huge deal.
It’s when you’re an entrepreneur, you’re always on the ball. You’re [inaudible 01:03:08]. You’re active, but delays from yourself looking at yourself, train you about yourself. And my ability to behave better in real time to tough situations, in a big way comes from me taking notes immediately and looking back at me so I can have a snapshot of my feelings and my train of thought under pressure versus when I [inaudible 01:03:32].
So delays as much as can be, and definitely if I need to respond immediately, I always gather people I trust around me, and then I share my thoughts and people will share their thoughts and so forth. And I make sure that we’re all aligned before we respond to these things because it’s . . .
Andrew: That’s good advice.
Pascal: You better watch out for those instinctive, destructive behaviors at times. But stress, stress is really dangerous. In general, resilience comes oftentimes by managing stress but nobody has to manage stress immediately. Most of the time, you’ve got to take a step back and minimize the number of moves but do the right moves.
Andrew: You also said you need to meet your competitors face-to-face. Why is that so important?
Pascal: In my opinion, to dominate a space, you need to understand the environment. You need to understand the dynamics and so forth. But the more you feel like you know your competitor, the more you know how they’re going to, what they’re going to . . . what they think, you understand their bias to action.
And most of the time, you’re going to find their mentality and oftentimes it’s going to show you that they’re not even looking for the same thing. Sometimes you meet somebody you feel is a competitor, and you know in a year he’s not even going to be a competitor because his focus is something a bit different.
So I think it’s really important to understand who’s your real competition, and also to learn from your competitors. Many competitors I see, I inspire myself from. There’s great entrepreneurs at times in my competition, and sometimes, it drives me to . . . when I was at Averna, we had much bigger means, so it drives you to seek an acquisition.
Sometimes you’re just going to do a licensing deal, so that guy’s super good. So you know what? I’ll do a partnership with him, maybe a [inaudible 01:05:23] share, maybe just licensing. So I’m going to have the best features there. I will not invest on features in that space. That thing is going to be more like relying on a third party.
So I think in life, you need to seek to win, but you can always craft your game so that you stop attacking a field that you know you’re going to lose, or you basically know you’re going to win and you just accelerate, so sometimes you also find out that your competitor is weak in many ways, and his understanding of things as shortcomings. So learning. The key is learning, and I think you . . .
Andrew: I can see that.
Pascal: I think if somebody can have a smile, if you can be fun to be around even to your competitors, if you have a certain level of confidence, I think you can meet competition and be friendly with them.
Andrew: One final question.
Pascal: Yes, sorry. Go ahead.
Andrew: I’m looking here at your name in my inbox, and I see that we’ve scheduled . . . you are one of the first people we asked to do an interview in 2015. You booked and rescheduled I think about 10 times with us, and this is the end of the year, we’re finally getting to do the interview for 2016. In my early days I would have said, “This guy doesn’t like me. He doesn’t think much of my work.” Today, I know that there’s something else going on. And I’m curious, what was going on?
Pascal: Well, on the stack of my priority, I felt this interview was too tactical for the time I had. So I thought it was a good idea. I think your product is great. I think you have the right energy to be conducting those interviews, so I think you’re creating something of quality. But it’s like I always try to focus on what’s going to be really impacting my business immediately.
So speaking as an entrepreneur is useful, but not as useful from my business as [inaudible 01:07:18] closing a deal, and I’ve been flying like crazy. I’m doing so many deals, and anytime I’m on a time zone, in a different zone and so forth, I don’t want to do these things from my hotel room. I just dislike doing that, so that’s one thing.
The other thing is it’s also about timing because I listened to one of your interviews, and basically those interviews are a snapshot in time. So I knew that we were unfolding a number of things, and I knew there are . . . I didn’t want to be in a position where I’d be talking about one of our concepts and so forth. I think now the basically post-production as a platform and the advances we’re doing and all the momentum we have, I think it gives a good picture.
But I think we’re in a good space, and so I think this story is good because it feels very early into it, but I can already tell you that it’s going to make a dent in the market. It’s successful enough that you can extrapolate and see it’s going to become . . .
Andrew: I can see it.
Pascal: . . . a permanent offering in the market space.
Andrew: And I get it. I actually often prefer, not often. I always prefer for entrepreneurs to do the interview after they sold company or after they’ve walked away because at that point they could really look back and reflect and talk about it. But we got this email from Ron Kadish, who emailed us and said, “Look, you’ve got to get to know this person. Pascal’s built an incredible company.” He also said that you’re Canadian, and for some reason, he asked me if that’s okay. Of course, it’s okay. We love Canadians here. I want more people outside the US, so it’s more than okay.
And so since he brought it up and told me how you guys were doing, I said, “Let’s get this interview done right now before . . .” I don’t know what, before . . . let’s get it done while it’s hot. And I’m glad that you’re able to do it anytime and the company for anyone who wants to check it out is LANDR, L-A-N-D-R dot com. You can upload any file to it and see immediately what the difference is, what the LANDR difference is to it, and I’m going to try with a podcast. And Pascal, good to have you on here.
Pascal: It’s been a pleasure, Andrew.
Andrew: Same here.
Pascal: I’m looking forward to listen to this cast.
Andrew: Thank you all for being a part of it, and the two sponsors are cloudsponge.com/Mixergy. If you need somebody to help you grow your user base using email cloudsponge.com/Mixergy, and if you need a developer, go to Toptal.com/Mixergy. Grateful to them for sponsoring. Grateful to you, Pascal, for being here, and thank you all for being a part of Mixergy. Bye, everyone.
