Andrew: This interview is sponsored by Haystack. That’s where you’re going to find the right web designer for your next project. Check ’em out Haystack.com.
Hey, everyone it’s Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. And we’re continuing a series of interviews that I seem to be doing here with entrepreneurs that are little known whose companies don’t make it in, on the cover of Wired magazine month after month. Who don’t make it into the big tech blogs, but have successful businesses very often bootstrapped and are profitable and guys who are insanely clever at the way that they do business, including Milan Tesovic who you’re about to meet. Milan Tesovic co-founded MetroLeap Media. He, before that, background is actually interesting too, we’ll be talking about that. He escaped the war in Sarajevo, Sarajevo, Bosnia in the nineties. Did I say that right by the way?
Interviewee: Sarajevo, Bosnia
Andrew: Serbia. You say it, please.
Interviewee: Yeah, I’m from Sarajevo, Bosnia.
Andrew: Sarajevo, Bosnia. I’m, I’m reading my typos directly as I typed them in through our conversation before. Olivia and I, by the way, met and fell in love, met and then went there to fall in love, into, in the Balkans. So it’s changed a lot since you were there, obviously. But we’ll be talking about your story there, not mine. You started the company when he was sixteen. Used an insanely clever way to find his business idea. I love it. We’re gonna talk about that. And today has, well Quantcast says four plus million people a month. How many people are you seeing internally using Google Analytics on your site?
Interviewee: Yeah, so Google Analytics reports about forty million unique visitors. This is globally. About fifty-five percent of the traffic is from the United States. So, on actual numbers, were doing over twenty million unique visitors a month, just from the U.S.
Andrew: Twenty million unique visitors a month. And I’m imagining that most of them are coming in from Google.
Interviewee: They are. However, we do have partnerships with AOL, Billboard, and a few other big ones coming out soon, who send us direct traffic. And also we seem to be doing the right thing, so more and more people come to our website directly every month.
Andrew: Okay, and for people who haven’t been on your websites what’s, what’s the flagship site?
Interviewee: The flagship website is metrolyrics.com.
Andrew: Metorlyrics.com, it’s where I would go if I wanted a, the lyrics to a Motley Crue album.
Interviewee: Exactly.
Andrew: Or anyone else who I want the lyrics to. And are you guys profitable now?
Interviewee: Yeah, we’ve been profitable, actually, since day one. No venture funding. No startup money. It was just bootstrapped and profitable since the first day.
Andrew: Wow, this is gonna be a great interview. This is gonna be great. Alright. Let’s go back in time, actually. I, I mentioned the war. We had a little conversation about it before the interview. Can you tell us a little bit about your experience was like back home when you were growing up before the war?
Interviewee: Yeah, so what happened is, I was born in ’85, the war started about four years later in ’99, 2000. Which is roughly about the time, or the conflict started then. The official war didn’t start till 1991. So what happened was, me, my mom, and my sister, we escaped out to Serbia where we stayed with family. And my dad had to stay behind as a medic. Once he was able to get out of the war in ’94, we applied for a visa to come to Canada. And the way my dad did it is he literally opened up the map and he said, “This is the furthest point away from Bosnia.” So that’s how we got here. I mean, we do still like going back and visiting. But, I mean, we couldn’t be happier the fact that we moved to Canada.
Andrew: What, what’s it like to leave? Were you pissed off? Were you anxious to get away? Were you, did you want to stay in and, and deal with the conflict somehow?
Interviewee: At six years old?
Andrew: I see at six. Well, I remember what it was like when I moved to the U.S. at six years old. And I was pissed off like you wouldn’t believe. Why do they have to have television in English? I kept saying to my parents.
Interviewee: Yep. I liked it. I mean, in Bosnia you get maybe, like, ten different channels and all the channels are usually in English. So coming to Canada and it’s like all of a sudden it’s like I had hundred channels. I mean, I, I enjoyed it. I mean, I was actually quite happy since day one. Especially, coz I have a curious mind. So I love going out exploring, checking out different cities. Especially at six years old coming back, coming from Bosnia to Canada. I mean, it’s a big culture shock and something that I actually quite fairly enjoyed.
Andrew: Wow. Alright and I mentioned that you started your company at sixteen. Were you always entrepreneurial? Were you entrepreneurial at ten? Were you the kind of guy who was, the kind of guy who was selling candy in school?
Interviewee: I think so. I mean, at twelve, what I actually did was I opened up my own computer tutor, tutoring service. And I had my own little agenda where I would write down people and I would schedule them in and they would come over and I’d show them how to use computers, build websites. What happened at thirteen years old is back in the day when
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Interviewee: In the day, when Dragon Ball Z was this big show, I created my like own website which is about Dragon Ball Z. I went out. I needed to get some hosting space. Back then when it was profitable and expensive it was like $40 per month and you get like 100mb of space and 1 gigabyte of bandwidth if you’re lucky. And it costs you $40. At the same time you could rent out an entire server for $200. So actually I, by age 14, I started up my first hosting company, which is actually fully registered with the government of Canada where I had my own hosting service. And that kind of got me started my entrepreneurial path where even Dad [profitable since Mom won]. What I did was I just had a bunch of friends who needed to host their websites. They had massive discounts compared to what the other hosting companies were giving them. And you all had servers to ourselves, pretty much. That’s kind of what got me started. At 16 that company sold and I started my [charter]
Andrew: Really. What did the company sell for?
Interviewee: That’s disclosing. And it primarily sold because of conflicts between me and my business partner at the time. So it was an internal sale. Just my shares over to my business partner. He.
Andrew: Who was your business partner? I don’t mean by name. I mean, what was his relationship to you, outside of the business?
Interviewee: Yeah. So, we met on sitepoint, run by Matt which is a local guy here in Vancouver, as you know.
Andrew: That’s the guy who introduced us. He also did a couple of great interviews on Mixergy. I love that guy.
Interviewee: Exactly. Great, great guy. His website actually got me started on a lot of [buy-ins]. So it’s ironic that I actually got to meet him and find out he’s a local guy here. But his background was pretty similar to mine. He’s, I believe two years older than me. Very tech savvy. Wanted to do something crazy on the internet. Wanted to kind of get into it. Didn’treally want to take the same path as a lot of other young individuals. Where it’s like you have McDonald’s and you are like working as a cook. So I mean we both kind of like saw eye-to-eye at that point in time. But as a lot of people out there know, a lot of business partnerships don’t always work out. Especially when it’s with people you don’t have close relations to or that you didn’t know for long periods of time. So that’s kind of what ended up happening by the end.
Andrew: A lot of people tell me that they got their start on site-point or that site-point helped their forums, helped build up their business. Matt’s business has helped so many other people here.
Interviewee: Yeah. I know. I mean Matt’s a good guy. If you see if next time, tell him to stop losing at credit card roulette.
Andrew: Oh, he’s also credit card roulette guy?
Interviewee: Yeah. I introduced him to it and so far he’s 3 for 3.
Andrew: You know what. Here’s another thing. Andy Lou who came on here, is also into credit card roulette. Sit down to lunch with him and suddenly you could potentially end up paying for his lunch and everybody else’s lunch. No wonder he’s so damn rich and successful. But he has another technique you might want to bring up the next time you’re playing credit card roulette with Matt. It’s called insurance. You come up with these crazy insurance prices and you allow people who are nervous around the table, to off-load the risk to you. Meanwhile you charge them so much that by the end you make a profit off the insurance business alone. I believe that’s how Warren Buffet got his start in insurance. Credit card roulette insurance was the beginning.
Interviewee: Yeah. I like that. I don’t want to give up a good thing, because so far Matt has lost every time.
Andrew: Ah, really?
Interviewee: Yeah. You should ask him about that next time.
Andrew: All right. I will. And I gotta have him down here to Buenos Aires, while I’m here. We’re play credit card roulette over steak.
Interviewee: You’re gonna get free steak.
Andrew: All right. So, at 16 what was the company you started then?
Interviewee: So it was metrolyrics.com. And
Andrew: Actually I thought you had an ISP, an Internet Service Provider around that time.
Interviewee: Oh, yeah. That was around 14 when the hosting company.
Andrew: So the hosting company allowed people, you hosted peoples’ websites and you also gave them access to the internet.
Interviewee: It wasn’t an ISP. It was just a hosting site. We did have an anonymize services where you could sign up for a proxy. Where you can anonymize yourself through our server. Which is a side business of the hosting. We had a lot of servers. We had a lot of computing parts and we just wanted to do something with. So we had an early start in that. They both grew nicely but then I just ended up selling and then some rough things happened.
Andrew: What do you mean? Beyond the business break-up what kind of rough things.
Interviewee: So after I left the position where I as right now, which is a CTO. So I took care of all the servers. I managed, made sure that everything was up. And because it was my company I had no problem getting up at 1 am
uh because the server went down or there was a glitch
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Interviewee: It’s a lot tougher to get them to do similar items. So, the service started going down afterwards which essentially when the server went down at 1:00 AM, the employees were really not there to get up and my business partner at that point in time, did not have the necessary knowledge to correct it. So there was alot of frustrations within the company and I think they ended up selling to another company six months down the line which merged with them, then they took over completely.
Andrew: By the way to contrast that, a few minutes ago just before we did our interview, you sent me a message saying, “Andrew, I think our servers might be going down. I can’t do this interview because I’m going to go and take a look at it myself. So your still to this day, when you own the business, when your the founder, when you own a share in the business, you feel like you have to do … you have to be there on the spot, no matter what else is going on. Even if it’s something as important as a Mixergy [?] interview.
Interviewee: Yes, I mean it’s my baby. It comes first so if it goes down at any point and time, I’m there to take care of it. Luckily, it wasn’t the servers. It was just a network issue at the data center, so they’re taking care of it. I guess after the interview, I’m going to have to check up and see how it’s doing.
Andrew: Alright, so let’s go into the rest of the story. So, the reason that I brought up the first business as you were telling me about the second is, the first inspired the second. Can you tell people how that happened?
Interviewee: Yes, I mean basically with the first one, what it got me thinking about alot is I’m always seeing alot of great companies out there who are making alot of money. It’s like … than the hosting company at the same time is shrinking. I mean right now the hosting is no where near as profitable as it used to be. So it’s really a race to the zero. So when I started doing it, I started doing some research on items that I enjoy doing. I mean one of the things was always, that I did was look up music lyrics and tablature because I used to play the guitar. Now the competitors and the space were doing a really poor job at providing up to date databases and having all the latest songs, and yet it was one of the most searched for items on the Internet. So I was just kind of dumbfounded that market size of this big, can be neglected by so many of the big players. So I saw an opportunity in there, I started up my own. What made it differently is from day one, we made it our mission to legalize it. So from day one we started talked to all the publishers and seeing how we can make lyrics legal, a product and something that the music industry can monetize on.
Andrew: What year was this?
Interviewee: This was in 2001.
Andrew: 2001. OK, we’ll get back to that in a little bit. But, why did you see potential in this business. What I saw when I saw the lyrics sites back then, was beyond the illegality of posting copyrighted lyrics online, I just saw a bad model. I saw a model that was dependent on search engines to drive traffic over. I saw a model where there was no incentive for the user to come back to the site. I saw a model where when he was on the site, he or she were just reading through the lyrics, maybe copying them into a notepad but moving on very quickly and not engaged in the site, not looking at the ads, not at all compelled to come back. What did you see that was different from what I saw?
Interviewee: That’s definitely what did happen. And that’s a result of our competitors. What I saw the potential in it … you have a lot of people who are strongly attached to the songs that they are listening to, to the point where they want to see their lyrics. Now if we get them on our website and they leave right away, we didn’t do our job right. So that’s why we’re there to push them direct contact provided …
Andrew: I see. So, you said right from the beginning, you want to find a way that if somebody comes to the site, you want to hold onto them.
Interviewee: Exactly.
Andrew: How were you going to do it … back then? Not today, but back then, what was the plan?
Interviewee: So back then … well first of all, we wanted them to come back to our website if they wanted music lyrics. So we wanted to be the destination for music lyrics and the big thing that we did is make the database clean and accurate and up to date. Those are the three big items that we focused on, and as a result people just started coming directly. When they were listening to a song, they would come to our website knowing that they are going to find it there. Rather than going to Google and trying to find it, make another website out who may or may not have it.
Andrew: OK, so the first thing you decided was if you gave people good quality, then they would know to come back to you. Because I remember at the time, alot of the other lyrics sites had crappy quality. It was what somebody imagined the singer was saying instead of the actual words that the singer was singing. But that’s still … it’s asking for a lot of forethought from the user. It’s asking the user to say, “I really like this and I’m going to stop my pleasure … stop enjoying the lyrics long enough to think I’d like to come back to a lyrics site in the future and I want to make sure that it’s this kind of experience that I have in the future.” That’s alot to ask of someone and to know that you are the person …
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… the person that served it up to them, when most people would have just assumed “Google” would’ve somehow taken care of it. Next time if I want good results, I’ll go back to Yahoo or Google, or whoever was around at the time that sent them over. So, what else did you think was going to bring them back?
Andrew: We started putting out other products, we started putting out widgets that people can take and put on their MySpace profile, that would show the lyrics of their favorite songs. We started going into social networking and sharing your experience of music and your favorite songs in within other websites.
Andrew: But that wasn’t in 2001, was it?
Interviewee: No, that wasn’t 2001. In 2001 the idea was very simple. Let’s make a database that people can trust. And that took some time to get there. 2003-4 we started looking more at interaction on the websites, so adding in comments. And actually that took up quite nicely. Like I mentioned, they have an emotional connection to the song so deep that they want to know exactly what they’re saying, they want to sing along. When you get that kind of emotional connection, you want to share your experience. So as soon as we put the comments on, every tenth person on the website, at that point in time, made a comment for a song. We were getting a 10% conversion of you see a lyric, you post what you see about a lyric. And that started going up very nice. Over time as social networks developed and commenting became too common out there, that has decreased, but we are still seeing that kind of connect. If you look at our comments today, you’re going to look at a Miley Cyrus song and for each person that says “I don’t like Miley Cyrus” you’re going to have a 100 people that sign up on our website and say “No you’re wrong, Miley Cyrus is the best.” There’s definintely that connection, and it’s up to us and the other lyric site webmasters to find out how you can do it. I mean, it’s a challenge, but it’s not impossible.
Andrew: Alright, let me float this theory out and give me an honest answer on this, if I’m wrong tell me. Is it possible when you were 16, what you saw was a lot of traffic going to lyric sites, the ability to monetize that traffic by throwing up some quick ads, I think within months you were bringing in (from the research that I saw) $5,000-6,000 a month in revenue, which was almost all profit for you. So you weren’t thinking, “how can I bring people back?” but you said, this is an easy piece of the business for me to jump into, I will make money now and I’ll figure out the rest later.
Interviewee: You’re 90% correct. It was definitely a lot of people were going through lyric websites, but I was upset that there were doing a poor job at it still. My goal was definitely to make money, just like a lot of other entrepreneurs, however I was always thinking about the accuracy of the database. Even then, in 2001, you had thousands of lyric websites. So how am I going to get those visitors over to me? And the key to that was, and this is what I thought when I was younger, let’s put up a good database. My goal at that point in time was definitely not how can I make this into this massive thing and as big as it is today. I mean, I never envisioned myself being where I am today. But it was definitely, how can I get visitors to the website and how can I make money from it. It was about a year later when it started actually picking up, when my business partner joined me and we really had a look, there is a huge opportunity here, so let’s sit down, put our thinking caps on and go forward.
Andrew: And by the way, you consider him a co-founder, even though as you said right now, and as I saw in my research, he didn’t come on board until after the business was already up and running.
Interviewee: He’s the co-founder of the company that we formed around it, Metrolyrics. Exactly.
Andrew: What size revenues are you doing now?
Interviewee: We don’t give disclose revenues, but we are a multi-million dollar company.
Andrew: How much, a ten million dollar company?
Interviewee: A multi million. So it’s more than a couple of million?
Andrew: Can you give me a neighborhood, is it Beverly Hills, is it Brentwood? Are we talking about five-to-ten million or one-to-five million?
Interviewee: It’s between three and ten.
Andrew: Three and ten, okay. And the profits are about 50% net?
Interviewee: It varies, this year was a bit rough, so we were doing a bit less than fifty. When times are better we get up to 60% profit margins. At other times it goes down to 10-20%.
Andrew: Wow, so at your height is sounds like your profits were over $5 million.
Interviewee: At the height was a year and a half ago when we were doing less revenues. We’ve done very well financially.
Andrew: Fair to say 3-5 million profits at your height?
Interviewee: Less than that.
Andrew: Less than three?
Interviewee: Yeah.
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Andrew: Where did the revenue come from, in the beginning? When you’re 16 years old, if my research is right, you were bringing in six thousand dollars a month right?
Interviewee: Yup.
Andrew: . . . from a website. Where did that revenue come from – was it affiliate programs, Google Adsense I don’t think was up at that time, was it something else?
Interviewee: Yes, Google Adsense was not up at that time. I mean, my primary partner back then was value click media.
Andrew: I remember value click media . . .
Interviewee: Exactly, yeah, back (then), they did perform much better. And then Google Adsense definitely, we had a very fast uptake on it since that came out. Just working with better networks. I mean, even today we use tribal fusion who has been with us for quite some time. They’re by far the best performing networks . . . network for us.
Andrew: What kind of ads were you running from value click? They had tons of different things, everything from co-registration to affiliates, to I think maybe everything except for impression based ads. What kind of ads were you running with them?
Interviewee: We were just running their standard ads. I mean all the different standard banner sizes, pop unders as well. I mean they were big on pop unders and pop ups. Luckily we got rid of those quite some time ago.
Andrew: But there was a time when the search engines didn’t care. Today, if you do a pop up, the search engines aren’t gonna link to you the way that they did back then.
Interviewee: Yeah. I mean people care about pop ups and pop unders. I mean, it’s no longer acceptable like it used to be. I don’t think we ever did any CPA campaign or affiliate programs. I think it was always just CPC, CPM . . . I mean, CPA, I don’t even think was really, very an idea back then.
Andrew: All right, guys if you are watching us live . . . tell your friends to come watch us live too. Do what K.H Patel who is watching us live right now, who is saying he’s having a great sandwich, listening to mixenergy interview and he’s in heaven right now.
So tell me what you’re doing. Tell your friends to come watch us. We’re talking about real dollars and sense here and how a kid, 16 years old, build up a business that ended up doing three to ten million dollars in sales. Actually guys, leave out the three too, just say ten million dollars in sales, it will . . . if you tweet that out, we’ll have more people come watch us, I need more of an audience here . . .
Andrew: All right the data base, where did you get the data? Where did you get those lyrics that were so clean back then?
Interviewee: Yeah. So . . . we started up by just grabbing a database from our competitors. . .
Andrew: scraping . . .
Interviewee: … scraping, exactly. What we did back then though, which was kind a start a new idea is opened it up to the public to submit their lyrics. So we were getting a lot of submissions from other people, especially websites started getting pop ups. I mean, garage bands were jumping on board, fans of others. . . which is actually another good point as to why people take care of our lyrics . . . because, we started putting up songs even though if we didn’t have lyrics to them. And what people would do, within our first couple of hundred views, people would start submitting lyrics . . . and they would submit like maybe the first ten lines and another individual would come by and they would submit more. So, it was almost like a mini Wikipedia type back in 2001, 2002 . . . .
Andrew: But it wasn’t user edited. You guys will have to take it and piece it together right?
Interviewee: Exact . . well, it was user edited. So, we had moderators in place, which was essentially other power users who just wanted better status recognition. And they would go through and they would just moderate it. Users can just click on edit and they would get the entire song and then they would change it around . . . and it would go off for approval and then we would go live back on through the website.
Andrew: Ok, that’s the database.
Expenses. We talked revenue, we talked database . . . what kind of expenses did you have at the beginning?
Interviewee: So, I mean, I started off as a programmer. And what I did is, I programmed for my friends, they gave me a design back in turn. I did my own slicing of the layout. I mean you have the database, the slicing, the idea and the programming, you put those together and you got a website. So I did, ended up doing all the work. So as far as expenses go, it was just my time which, at sixteen is really worth five to eight dollars an hour. So it wasn’t that high. At the same time, I did have the hosting company thing and the knowledge with the servers and by January I had a pretty good network of friends. So when it was about to launch mature lyrics, when I needed the hosting thing, again I rented out a server, I put my website on it. I hosted a few other friends and we just shared the expenses.
Andrew: Ok, before we go on past this stage in the business, I mentioned earlier that you were clever about the way you discovered this business idea and you started out telling us but I think I might have interrupted. What you said that, you examined what you were interested in and lyrics were something that you were interested in. But you also looked at what people were doing through your system. . . through that anonymized browsing feature that you offered people right? And so you saw where they were going, what they were interested in and lyrics kept popping up.
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Andrew: from popping up.
Interviewee: Actually, we never kep track of anonymized software and that was prmarily for legality reasons. And we didn’t really want to go into the whole tracking thing. So, we did truly offer just completely anonymous services. Related to something the I always looked for and I was often frustrated because a lot of websites didn’t have new songs. Didn’t give me really an option to add it, especially for tabulatures, and I had to go forms to do it. And I can’t remeber really was form. I think it might have been on SitePoint but a lot people started talking about it. Oh, wouldn’t it be great if there was one website that could actually do a better job at this. Because you had AZLyrics which updated once a day and they would add five songs, yet there were hundreds of songs released every day. So you just kind of had to hope that those five songs are the ones that you listened to. So, the idea was to set up a website where we would add all the hundred songs and other people could then submit lyrics as it goes along and just make in more into a community base. But, I mean, just doing the research, I mean, I had a look at the Google top ten keyword searched items. And especially my first website, which is the Dragonball Z website, I had a look at SEO. I had a look at how many clicks go through it. I think the Omniture keyword suggestion tool, back then. They kind of gave me ideas and lyrics was always, was the number one search term for God knows how many years. So, I mean, it kind of made me jump into that area.
Andrew: It’s interesting, the, there a handful of search terms that just keep popping up. I did an interview earlier in the week with the founder of WonderHowTo who said that, “Three percent of all Google searches are how-to.” And if he could just dominate that space. Start off with video and then later go, go into text, he could have a big slice of what people are looking for online covered. And you did, you did something similar. You saw lyrics kept popping up and jumped on that.
Interviewee: Yeah, I mean, and it is the exact same thing. Lyrics, I mean, was this big pie. And I figured if I could collect a small portion of it, you still have a big pie. So, today it’s like we got the biggest pie of the big pie, so pretty happy.
Andrew: Ha. Andrew Fashion is watching us live and he actually tweeted out, as I was suggesting, that, that, he tweeted out, “The creator of Metrolyrics.com, age 16, ten million in sales per year.” Thank you for sending that out there. Did he just lie, by the way, to his followers? At some point you hit ten million in sales, right?
Interviewee: Yes.
Andrew: Yeah, so Andrew Fashion you’re not lying.
Interviewee: Well, we’re getting there.
Andrew: Oh, so you’re getting there. So you’re close to ten million.
Interviewee: Yeah, we’re getting there.
Andrew: Over, over nine though right?
Interviewee: No.
Andrew: Oh. Andrew you might have lied to your, to your audience but I just corrected my, my lie to my audience. Alright. But we got a good sense now of where the revenue is. And we understood where the expense was in the early days, the database. Where the idea came from. Let’s talk about how, about some of the milestones. Five thousand, six thousand, seven thousand a month is great but it’s not, it’s just a home, it not a. Sorry, what am I saying. It’s just a base hit. We’re not talking about the home run yet. Can you talk about some of the milestones on the way to where you are today? Like, was it comments that you first added to the site that increased engagement? That grew your, your users’ time on the site? Was it widgets that you used and, and helped increase your promotion and brought more people in? Was there something else?
Interviewee: Yeah. I mean, it’s all the products that you see on the website that put it together. As far as milestones go, we’ve never created a single milestone for revenue. The reason being is we were always profitable. We had a modest lifestyle and it just wasn’t about money once you’re making money. For us, our goal.
Andrew: By milestone I don’t mean, like, what goals did you set for yourself and acheive.
Interviewee: Yeah.
Andrew: I mean, there are always these little things that, that give you big leaps in results. Little experiments, like maybe adding comments suddenly increases your traffic by ten percent, which grows your profits by fifty. Or increases people’s time on your site and recognition of your brand. What kind of, what kind of big steps did you have like that? What kind of.
Interviewee: So we had a few. I mean, we’ve had a lot of experiments that we tried. A lot of them failed. A few of them took off. But, I mean, that was always, kinda like our philosophy. I mean, you’re not gonna success in every single thing that you try. I mean, we had widgets, which is definitely one of the bigger ones that helped us out. It’s not as popular now because there’s a wear out factor on pretty much every product on the internet. We had, this year that we added news to the website. We added pictures and these are all licensed. So I mean for our news, it’s the same guys who provide content to TMZ that are writing for us. We have pictures from Getty Images. So, we get pictures within hours that there taken of at any event or any major event.
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Interviewee: Any event or any major event. We’re adding more social features on there. But going back in time, I mean, SEO was a big one. So it was always kind of okay, it’s like, what do we need to do to better, to get better at SEO. Widgets, comments, registration.
Andrew: And that’s before people even knew. That’s before people even knew that SEO meant Search Engine Optimization. Before they even understood the value of it to their sites, you’re saying that you jumped on it?
Interviewee: I mean, SEO is definitely one the fairest ones, cause I mean I used to look up lyrics going to Google. So, when I sat down and I thought, how am I going to get toward my website. It definitely wasn’t going to be from me spending massive amounts of money advertising on Value Critic. At that point in time, it was going to be through search engines. So, I started doing research, I was like, on site points. How, how can I get my website to rank higher than AZLyrics, or how can I get it to be number one for this song, for this artist. So that was definitely one of the primary calls at the beginning.
Andrew: What kind of techniques worked back then?
Interviewee: There was a lot of on-page factors from what I remember back then. Not so much today. I mean, keyword… Well, I mean, the more links you had, it was the better. The higher page rank, page like actually meant something back then. It’s really tough, I mean it was a long time ago, so…
Andrew: How’d you get links back to your site?
Interviewee: So we did partner up with other lyric websites, and especially when you have, at that point in time, hundred of different lyric websites getting started up almost everyday, it wasn’t that tough to find relationships. So getting to the page like three or four was kind of tought. Dmaz, the big directory, that actually meant something back then, was very instrumental. And I was lucky enough to get into that. And I was actually editor of a couple of different categories. So just communicating with other webmasters, and, I mean it was a slow process. It had a process to it of how to get there. It was primarily through Contact Us forms and just talking to other people.
Andrew: I see. Back then, you could trade links, back then you could be the moderator of one of the big directories online, Dmaz as you said, and then link to yourself from there, and have all the value that comes from those links, and then link to your friends who will then link to you.
Interviewee: Or, I never quite cheated at Dmaz. I mean, I always wanted to keep it fair, it’s like I thought of it. I mean, I got in it and it made my company grow. And the website. So, I took it actually quite seriously, and put in all the accurate ones. But, what it did allow me to do, was get in touch and get closer relationships, and do better research for the backend of the bigger guys who know what they’re doing. And you can see that in Dmaz, obvious in their page drive, based on their linking, based on their descriptions, how they describe their website. And the titles and different techniques that they use. And it was definitely learning every step of the way, no matter who you’re looking at, or what it is that you’re doing.
Andrew: Okay. You mentioned that you had some failures. What techniques did you use that didn’t work out?
Interviewee: So anytime you create a project, I mean, especially back then when you’re not making as much money, bandwidth was a big issue. So, I mean, our first widget just ate up so much bandwidth, I mean, we hit negatives on that project. We lost way more money on it than it made us back. To the point where it almost hit negatives for the company. So after that we started being a lot more bandwidth concious. So going forward, optimizing our images, optimizing our flash files, optimizing anything possible. Other than that, I mean, it was always servers scalability. Something, we’re doing tens of billions of small hits every month. So just making sure we have the server infrastructure, load balancers, how we scale out the database to support it. And also content on the website.
Andrew: So making sure that…
Interviewee: That the content is appropriate. That what the users are submitting as lyrics is not malicious, just for the sake of getting it up there. And just securities. I mean, we worked in a very competitive space with a lot of savvy individuals. So they were always looking for bugs and loopholes on your website that they can exploit to either take your website down, or inject something into your database. So, it was various items that we kinda had to pick up on and get smarter about.
Andrew: Do you remember when you made your first million?
Interviewee: No. And I think that, it’s. I mean, it was, I mean I remember the first year where the serials went over one million. But where my total networth went over that. Actually, I don’t even know if it’s up today, cause a lot of the money we just there kind of keep in the company…
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Interviewee: … we don’t really take it out so…
Andrew: I saw a smile as you said, do I, do you remember when the first, when the business made the first million? Can you describe that moment when you realized that?
Interviewee: Yeah, so we didn’t even actually kind of keep track on it coz I mean, we don’t keep that much track of revenue so the accountant just kinda gets to check, keep us the check in, matches it with the account to see if per logs into value, click to make sure that it’s the right amount. And then it was year end, and we weren’t expecting it to be that high coz we were never quite that much about finances and then we had a look at it and it’s like, “This can’t be right.” So we actually had to go back and we did kind of like a mini-audit to make sure that we did everything correctly, and then we’re like, it’s like, “Ah!” It’s like, OK, it’s like, high five, I guess. It’s like, it, it…
Andrew: And a lot of the articles that I saw said that the reason you wanted to start your own company is so that you can have enough money to buy a car. And now, as I read it I said, “Yeah, that’s a reason but really, the guy’s an entrepreneur, he wasn’t in it for the material goods, wasn’t in it for the asset, he was in it because he was an entrepreneur and wanted to see how big he can make the business.” Where’s the truth in this? Is it because of the car or does that just make for a great PR story?
Interviewee: it makes great motivation when you’re aiming for something. I mean, like every other entrepreneur out there, you set yourself some goals, what is it you want to achieve. For me, it was a car. I mean, I turned 16, I mean with our Bosnian background, my parents couldn’t afford to buy me a car. They had a car but the thing is they were always using it, and I was one of the only students in my high school who didn’t have a car. So I did enjoy making things and putting up successes but I mean, one of my big motivations is that, for a time, that pushed me. It’s like, OK I gotta work overtime to make sure this happens faster, and it’s one of those astounding things, coz I mean, back when I was 16, I could put out a website in a couple of days. Today, to put out a website I need to, I couldn’t possibly imagine it being a couple of days, but I think that’s all because of Web 2.0 and more careful planning and better products. But I mean the car was one of my motivators, but definitely not the main idea behind the why I started it out.
Andrew: All right, and then I read at one point that you were thinking of getting a Lamborghini or some other car. Did, was that serious, did you end up getting a car?
Interviewee: Definitely not a Lamborghini. One of the nicest car that I have is a Corbet, and I love that car. And even that one is yeah, I mean, coz I took up race track, racing at the track, which is just a great rush. I’ve always been fascinated with cars. I mean, I’m sure every entrepreneur out there has thought about getting a Lamborghini one day, I thought about it, probably not the best investment. So luckily I had some smarts above me to make sure I don’t take out that mortgage and go with the right decisions financially.
Andrew: I see a couple of people are tweeting out what Ramit Seyde [?] said. He said that MixerG has the best entrepreneur interviews I’ve ever heard. Andrew Warner could charge tons but it’s free. I should charge tons. How am I gonna get myself racing cars and all kinds of other stuff if I give this stuff away for free? And Casey Allen [?] wants to know, with so many lyrics sites back then, wouldn’t it have been more profitable to be an aggregator sending traffic to other sites? I know my answer to that, what’s your answer to that?
Interviewee: To be an aggregator and send a… coz I mean, one of the ways that actually I used to promote it back then, and again this is one of the back in, the phenomenon that was big then, it’s not, it’s no longer big now is a Top 100 lists. So you send traffic to the top 100, they’ll send it off to other ones and you rank on their… I did have a few of those including one for the lyrics, which is one of the driving factors, and then when you do that you build up the page rank on that one with that you help build up the page rank that on your website. Now, so I guess I was somewhat an aggregator, but I mean my goal, I mean was to be the next AZlyrics, which was huge, I mean it had so much traffic and it was really admirable that as soon as they posted a comment, as soon as they posted a song, I mean they would influence hundreds of thousands of people. So that’s one of the reasons why I kinda never went into that. There is a company lyricfind, who did start off as a lyrics website and what they ended up doing is being the aggregator of lyrics for licensing today, but that’s more than we ever quite went after.
Andrew: All right, we’re gonna talk in a minute about the Gracenote deal that you made I guess on April 3rd of this year?
Interviewee: Two years ago.
Andrew: Two years ago, the look on my data year [?] is all backwards. But, let’s go back way to the beginning. You were really, between you and me, this is the get real portion of the interview – you were really putting out copyrighted material without permission back then. Not just you, you and everybody in this business – true?
Andrew: What inspired you to direct the film?
Interviewee: Great question. It’s a long story, but I usually…
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Andrew: You were really, between you and me, this is the get real portion of the interview you, were really putting out copyrighted material without permission back then. Not just you. You and everybody in this business, true?
Interviewee: Yup, absolutely.
Andrew: No permission?
Interviewee: I mean, yeah, it’s not something that I quite thought about when I was younger. I had to add extra lyrics and it’s like wow, you guys can’t really copyright this. I was a bit naive when I was younger.
But later on the very next year when I started making bigger when my business partner joined me we definitely sat down and said, “OK it’s like this. This is not right, we’re going to have to change it.” Yeah, but it did started off illegally it’s one of those things that when you’re 16 you don’t tend to think about as much.
Andrew: You’re not the only one. I think that it’s one of those things that’s not talked about much in business that big sites very often get big by just going in the beginning and not try to spend a year figuring out the legalities of everything. You and I both have had friends I’m sure.
Tell me if I’m wrong here. Who they want to start a business and the first thing they do is they inspect every frigging legality of the business and they spend for ever. CAn they really incorporate this way, should they get permission from this guy, should we first do a patent search and make sure no one has a patent on our first idea and they never get off the ground, true?
Interviewee: Yeah, absolutely. I mean you waste a lot of time with that. It’s not always … I shouldn’t use the word, “waste,” but you spend a lot of time on that. I mean if you have a great idea do a bit of research but after that if it’s a good enough product somebody will buy you out. Even if there’s a patent on it. I mean they’ll contact you, usually it’s part of their due diligence to inform me about it.
If your product is good enough you have a chance to be in the choir by then because they just want to absorb it. So I mean it’s a never ending role but I think people really always, especially in the start up stag, gets really bogged down by investing a year to to do the research and by the time they finish all the research sometimes it’s almost too late.
Andrew: Then who knows, really if that’s the business I got to tell you, my kid brother and I, When we were really getting started there were these articles about voice over IP, Internet telephone, everyone was excited about it. We found a way to…he found a way I just rode his coat tails on this, he found a way develop it to make phone calls over the Internet. And we sold it. And we made pretty decent money especially back then all for that.
But a lot of other people would have said, “Well, someone must have a patent done voice over IP. Somebody must have the rights to this. Let’s go out and make sure we’re allowed to do this.” Meanwhile, they would have spent forever, thought it was a great idea with huge potential which it might have been, but it wasn’t for us. We weren’t able to grow it into this gigantic business. It was just a nice product that brought in money.
Interviewee: It brought in money?
Andrew: Yeah.
Interviewee: I’m sure those IP guys already went to the telephone companies soliciting them for their opinions and the telephone companies sort of pushed back and said, “No,no. You can’t do that.” Because they want to watch out for their profits. It happens, quite often, I mean I’m not saying people shouldn’t do their due diligence but I think they should bunch it up appropriately and not get overwhelmed by their legalities before the business.
Andrew: Right. Mark Suster, the venture capitalist from GRP who I interviewed here a while back recently said that when you start up your motto needs to be JFDI, a variation of “Just Do It” from Nike. I’ll let people figure out what he means by the rest of that. JFDI people.
I’ve talked about here how a big motivation for me in building my first business was I was a big frigging nerd, I couldn’t get dates, I couldn’t get laid, I needed to build up an empire I thought so girls would pay attention to me. So here you are at 16, pulling in nice money, how did it impact your dating career?
Interviewee: Not that well. I was a 16 year old who was still ambitious I sort of kept my head down at the keyboard and typing away. I was a nerd. Still, I’m a nerd today I mean especially a gadget geek. So I don’t know, that’s actually kind of a weird question to ask since I have to think back to when I was 16. I mean it got better once I got the car.
Andrew: [laughter]
Interviewee: So, that’s …
Andrew: Are you dating somebody now?
Interviewee: I am, yes.
Andrew: You are? How long have you guys been together?
Interviewee: About a month.
Andrew: Oh wow! Alright! Just to be clear here, you’re not saying you’re a virgin though, right?
Interviewee: No.
Andrew: You’re how old?
Interviewee: 24.
Andrew: 24 alright it’s been a while. And how old were you when you got the car?
Interviewee: 16.
Andrew: Oh 16! So things got better at 16!
Interviewee: Yeah!
Andrew: Oh.
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Interviewee: Yeah. So, I mean, I got the car around two months after I kind of set out to [sounds like score]. And I don’t even know if I want to admit what car I got but …
Andrew: No, you’ve got to now because I was about to ask you and we brought it up. Was this the Corvette?
Interviewee: No, no, no. At 16, um, I mean my goal was. Okay, a Mazda MX6.
Andrew: I don’t know enough about [simultaneous talking].
Interviewee: At that point, I was really looking for and two doors were in and there were a lot of nice body kits, a lot of nice interiors, stereo systems when you came down to it. So, that’s what kind of got me into the car scene. Um, even today, I sort of actively compete in sound quality in car competitions. So, these are competitions where you go out and you put yourself against other cars. You put in your own sound system and judges sit in it and they judge what car sounds the best based on a preset criteria. So, at 16, that’s kind what I got started to and that’s probably my oldest hobby going back eight years now.
Andrew: Wow. Um, I’ve seen those on A&E or Discovery or whatever channel happened to be on in a hotel that I was in. This is a really serious competition. People are spending a lot of money, a lot of time building these stereo systems in cars.
Interviewee: Yeah, yeah. I mean people have full time jobs just making their own one car. I mean and they spend years on it. I mean it’s insane what people will do to their cars to make it sound better. I mean you’d have people cutting holes in their firewall between the engine and the compartment in the ground of their car, in the trunk. I mean they cutaway at metal to make it wider and sounding better acoustically. So, I mean it’s quite the crazy sport.
Andrew: Hm. Let’s see. I want to get back into business. By the way, anyone who’s listening to us live or recording, I’m intentionally building a conversation geared into these interviews and, maybe, veering a little bit away from business to try to make it a little more interesting. I keep trying to see what works in these. Give me your feedback. Is this working or is chatting about cars and Andrew being a big nerd in school, is that taking too much attention from the main goal here of building a great business? Or is it firing you up to hear that a 16-year-old was able to come up with a great idea and build it up? I want to hear back from you. Let me know.
Okay, I said earlier, I mentioned a grace note deal. Let’s get a little deeper into that. For anyone who doesn’t understand the significance of it, can you fill us in?
Interviewee: Yeah. So, what happened was, um. Well, just to go back historically. I mean even though lyrics were illegal and copyrighted back in the day, publishers were never against it. We never received a single cease and desist letter and had we, we would have shut down instantly. Um, what we were actually receiving from publishers is support that they wanted to talk, that they wanted legalize it and often music memorabilia. So, I mean, we put up lyrics to an artist and we’d contact publishers about it saying, “So, how can we make this legal?” And they’d say, it’s like, “Now, is not the time. We’re busy with this. But definitely let’s talk later.” In the meantime we started doing this promotion for this artist, have a free autographed guitar that you can go out and give to your users.
Andrew: Wow.
Interviewee: So, we actually had a lot of different contests that, um, where we would give music memorabilia to our users that was provided to us by publishers even though we were putting up copyrighted material from them for free. So, it was a gray area. I would say it wasn’t completely illegal because the publishers didn’t mind it cause it was doing promotions for their artists. I mean, imagine how frustrated you would be if you were a Brittney Spears fan, you wanted to read their lyrics and you couldn’t find it anywhere. I mean, it doesn’t do really anybody any favors. So, going back now a couple of years, I mean we’ve been pushing and pushing and pushing for lyrics for legality quite some time.
So, two and a half years ago, we finally inked a deal which was in negotiation for well over a year with Grace Note and prior to that, I mean, we had more discussions with various publishing companies. And, we struck a deal for … we even paid retroactively … So, going back to what we would have paid them had we been paying from Day One. So, that’s one thing that we did that was interesting. And I don’t know how many other websites have done this. For us, we thought it was the right thing to do. I mean, we didn’t give any pushback. We were quite willing to do that. Um, and I mean two and a half … yeah, two and a half years ago, I mean we struck that deal and, um, actually we just renewed a couple of weeks ago for another three years that we’re fully licensed.
Andrew: Wow. Alright. And I know that a little while ago, they started going after lyrics sites. I think it was maybe three months ago, a few lyric sites were hit hard with lawsuits?
Interviewee: Yeah, exactly. I think it’s going to get worse for the lyric websites next year for the illegally operating ones. I mean, right now, the model that’s on the table can be applied to everybody. I mean, I really don’t know why lyric websites wouldn’t convert over to a legal model. There are a few restrictions. I mean, we can’t allow our users to copy/paste certain lyrics.
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Interviewee: We can’t allow our users to copy/paste certain lyrics. We can’t allow certain lyrics, to be printed. So, if you are on our website. And you click file/print. And you get a print out of everything, but the lyrics. I’m sorry, that’s up to the publishers. But, we do our best to notify the users. Even if we have print icons, that were disabled. Then when you hover over, it would say that it is due to our contractual obligation. We can’t allow you to print these lyrics. So that’s one advantage illegal websites do have over us. As well as, some publishers and some artists out there have said, we don’t want to license our lyrics. We’re just going to run it on our website. Certain artists out there, we don’t have any lyrics for. Illegal lyric websites do. In terms of them, staying in business. I would really encourage them to convert over.
Andrew: Why don’t they convert? They could have the exact same deal you do. Is it that they would have to go back and pay, retroactively? And they don’t want to do it?
Interviewee: That’s potentially one of them. I don’t know if that’s any longer a requirement. But I think the big one is there is a monthly minimum. To make a licensing deal with a lyric website that would bring you in five dollars a month. Just in the accounting cost. Setting up everything, would not necessarily make it worth it. So I think the monthly minimum is something that other lyric website owners are afraid of. Because, if they were to get removed out of Google for example. And they were stuck with this contractual obligation to pay a monthly minimum to the publishers every month. It scares them.
Andrew: I see, so this is good for your business. Now basically what they have done for you. Is put a moat around your business. It means the little sites that might have come up with a clever idea. But would have taken a little while to build up. They can’t come in and compete with you. That’s great for your business. Warren Buffet would love this. He loves moats around businesses. It also means people who are on shaky ground with their businesses can’t come in and compete with you. And it means that you’ve got a bigger stronger warrior out there. Going out there and pushing out of your business the no-good-nix.
Interviewee: I am not going to go out and finger point at any of the illegal lyric websites. They don’t have an opportunity to convert over. I would say 80% of the big guys who can afford it, don’t. So, those guys are going to get [xx].
Andrew: 80% percent of the big guys aren’t? A to Z? Are they paying or not?
Interviewee: They are not.
Andrew: They are not paying. The biggest competitor who you wanted to grow bigger than. They are not paying?
Interviewee: Exactly, that I do not get. They are making plenty of money to easily cover their licensing fee. They could continue going on with their business. Yet they choose not to.
Andrew: Who is the CEO or founder of that company?
Interviewee: It is completely anonymized. I think the website flopped over a couple of times. So, I have never met the individual.
Andrew: I will say to the individual right now. Come on Mixergy. We will do an interview. I will treat you with a lot of respect. Maybe find out a little bit about your dating background. No, I am willing to take that off the table. Let’s come on here, and find out why you guys aren’t willing to do it. Maybe there is something here that we can learn from. What about this, the AOL partnership that you have, what is it?
Interviewee: Yes. AOL used to be a competitor of ours. They used to have lyrics offerings on their website. The thing is, they couldn’t grow it. It’s all because they didn’t do [xx] search engines. But I think the idea behind it was. When people on music.aol.com or other AOL music properties. They were not necessarily looking for lyrics. Like they would on our website. They are looking for more the editorial experience.
So what we did. Is we said to AOL, you have great content that our users would like. You guys are AOL. You have awesome content, great writers. We don’t. But we do have lyrics. And we excel at lyrics. And we have better products than you at lyrics. So why don’t we take your great editorial , our lyrics. Put them to use and create a better experience for the end user. So, at the end of the day. We‘re helping secure our position as a dominant lyrics website. And we are helping AOL promote what they do best. So it is kind of taking the best of both worlds and trying to put them together. To make a better experience for the users. But it also makes up, because it is mutually beneficial for us and AOL.
Andrew: Is it money changing hands. Or is it just support back and forth?
Interviewee: There is no money exchanging hands. Actually, a few weeks ago. And this is going up live in about two weeks. We have a very similar deal with Billboard.com. SO on our website people can look up chart histories. And look up charts. Or look at teasers. Or go back to Billboard and want to track more of it. Or if you are on Billboard and you are curious about the lyrics. You can hop over to our website easily.
Andrew: How did you get the AOL deal? I know we are coming up at the top of the hour here.
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Andrew: Hour here, and I want to let you go back into work but how did you get that AOL deal?
Interviewee: We were fortunate enough to be contacted by AOL, one thing that actually that we were pleasantly shocked at how quickly and creative AOL can be. They were actually the ones who pushed us initially and contacted us, and we were ecstatic to be working with them. We never went to them because we wanted to … well first of all we were sort of growing exponentially and we wanted to really secure our market place and secure the products that we have before we go out to anybody with a 75 percent done idea. So when they contacted us and said that they were interested in something, we were very happy to talk to them. From the first discussion it couldn’t have gone better, they were very willing to work with us. They loved all of our ideas, we loved all of the different integration possibilities, I mean going forward I think you’re going to see more closer relations between us. Because they have the AOL sessions which is exclusive to them, so great, unique video content. More unique editorials, so …
Andrew: Was it tough to negotiate to them, Casey Allen is asking. Was it intimidating? Were they pushing? Did they show you their size, or was it easy?
Interviewee: AOL was actually surprisingly quite nice. They definitely weren’t flexing their muscles and saying, “We’re AOL, this big corporation over us.” They were very … Barry Crandell, General Manager of AOL Music, great guy. I mean we flew down to New York, we had lunch with them. I mean it was a very friendly atmostphere, very good talks from day one. Definitely, I never felt intimidated and we did push back. I mean when you go into negotiations, you have to look out what’s best for you, they have to make sure what’s best for them, but I mean … I think the end result …
[phone ringing]
Andrew: I’m sorry, somehow I’m getting calls here. I don’t even want a phone in this office. I’m sorry, I’m doing an interview, can I call back? OK, thanks, bye. [hangs up the phone] I actually asked them when I got this office, I said, “I don’t want a phone, I don’t need a receptionist.” All I need is just a desk, but sorry about that. I’m going to have to figure out how to unplug it now.
Interviewee: That’s ok. Yes. I never felt intimidated, they were great from day one. They were very good company, we’ve talked to other big companies and I’m not going to put any names, but I mean those are the guys you saw flexing their muscles.
Andrew: [coughs] Yahoo?
Interviewee: Not naming any names.
Andrew: Alright. I don’t know if it’s Yahoo or not, I just tossed the name out. Alright, any advice for anyone who’s 16 year old or maybe they’re 36 years old and they want to build up a business?
Interviewee: Yes, the one thing I wish people would stop asking me for is, “You made money on the Internet, how can I make money on the Internet?” And this is from people usually who have very little Internet experience, and that’s a really tough one to answer. For people who are on the Internet, the best thing that I can always recommend and this is based on everybody that I’ve talked to, is to go after something you’re passionate about. Because I mean, there’s a few benefits to that. I mean one, your not going to look at it as work. I come into my office sometimes at 6:00 AM because I love it, I stay after work and it’s fun for me. I mean everyday after work, it doesn’t feel like a chore, I mean of course you have the bumps but it’s a fun thing to do when it’s your passion and it’s a project that your very deeply interested in. If you’re trying to start up an Internet company just for the sake of making money, but you have no either experience or passion for it, I think you’re going to face a lot more bumps along the way than if its something that you trully love.
Andrew: Well said, absolutely. Somebody else will be watching you make money lyrics, and they have no interest in music let alone lyrics, and they start copying you – there’s no way they’re going to do as well.
Interviewee: I mean, we’ve had a lot of tough competition. Even today we have dozens of lyric websites getting launched every month. We have MTV, Yahoo, AOL who used to be our competitor, Disney, Clear Channel, I mean we’ve had massive, massive players jump into the industry just for the sake of trying to grow their own business yet not too much music experience in some cases. And it just doesn’t go anywhere. Our closest competitor is 40 percent of our size. So I mean there is obviously something that we’re doing right and I think it’s the fact that we are not looking at lyrics as here’s a webpage, and we’re just going to put some words on it that matches the song and that’s it. We look at the lyrics more about emotional experience between the user and the song, now how can we build a music experience around it. And going forward, the more interesting things you guys are going to see from us is music discovery …
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Interviewee: … music discovery, powered through lyrics and the song itself, rather than the model today where its just music lyrics based on the different songs that people are listening to.
Andrew: All right, lets leave it there. Two more things before we say goodbye; let’s leave the chunk, the heart of the interview there. Two more things: first of all, anyone who is interested in doing an interview with me what do me say to them? Recommend it? You hate it? Avoid it?
Interviewee: I’d recommend it. I mean some interesting things that you make us think about, like going back to sixteen years old and thinking back towards dating life. I haven’t thought about that quite some time so I mean it’s something new today. I mean I enjoyed the experience and I enjoy the fact that other people are listening and hopefully they are getting something out of it. To be honest, I don’t think of myself as anybody extremely knowledgeable but if there’s anyway that I can help anybody, people can feel free to contact me at metroleap.com or metrolyrics and I’d be happy to answer any questions or just even listen to any ideas you have. But I mean, the interview was good . I enjoyed it.
Andrew :How can they connect with you? I want to make sure the transcribers get this clearly.
Interviewee: So they can go on metroleap.com, or metrolyrics.com and just use the “contact us” form.
Andrew: And that would go to you?
Interviewee: Yes I read all of them. So even if its hate mail I guess you can send it through there.
Andrew: All right. And second, Matt introduced me to you. I keep getting my best interviews through past interviewees, through guests like you. Who do you know who’s a rock-star entrepreneur who I should interview? Someone hopefully who is a little under the radar.
Interviewee: I don’t know how familiar you are with Hootsuite?
Andrew: I interviewed him, yes.
Interviewee: OK, OK, Mobify Me?
Andrew: No, I do not know them.
Interviewee: OK. Great individual, great product. We are using them, m.metrolyrics.com is powered by Mobify Me. So its mobify.me. Great individuals, amazing product. You can make your own mobile website within minutes of using their product.
Andrew: Actually, I use them for “Hacker News.” When I want read “Hacker News”on my iPhone. It’s an entrepreneurial news site. They created this great little mobile phone, perfect size website for me. All right, I gotta hit you up after this interview for an introduction. Will you introduce me to him?
Interviewee: Yeah definitely. I got a lot more so, Quickie another guy from L.A.
Andrew: Who’s Quickie?
Interviewee: A few interesting guys that I would like to see interviews from as well.
Andrew: Perfect, I will email you and we ‘ll get these introductions done.
Andrew: All right, let’s say goodbye to everybody here. Everybody who is watching us live, who is listening to us recorded, thank you all for watching us. As always I want your feedback. The more feedback you give me the better I can become. I’m now a better interviewer today than I was a year ago, and believe me I’m still a little shaky. I introduced your home country, the place where you are from, completely off. But I am better now than I was a year ago because of the feedback people give me and I hope I keep getting more feedback.
Number two, connect with him. Connect with everybody who I interview. Especially when, if you listen at the end of the interview, they always give you a way to connect with them. Say “Hi,” start a conversation. You’ll end up with a business relationship at some point. We are gonna be in this industry for years. I don’t want people listening to me who are just in it for a quick buck. I want the people who are in it for a long time. And if you are in it for a long time, you want to build the kind of relationships that will help you today and in the future. That’s a long rant there.
Finally number three, click around Mixergy, tons of other interviews for you to learn from. Thank you all for watching, I’m Andrew, and I’ll see you in the comments.
