3 questions with…Johnny from damntheradio

I was connected to Johnny Hwin this past summer, but it wasn’t until the sale of his company, damntheradio, to FanBridge in January that he came to New York and we finally met.  Shortly after, I emailed Johnny the following questions:

McGinley’s an old dude everyone likes to call “The Goon”.  He worked with Sting and Pearl Jam back in the day.  He runs KROQ’s Almost Acoustic Christmas.  He’s a guest lecturer at the University of Montana School of Entertainment Management.  He also runs a startup called Citizennet.  He’s seemingly involved in everything and knows everybody in Hollywood.  For reasons that I still don’t understand, he liked us, and did everything he could to help us out.  He connected us to The Collective, the management company that manages Linkin Park, and one of our eventual clients.  He connected us to Matt Druoin, the all-star manager of Metric who was willing to try everything to get his band more exposure.  Matt let us do a free marketing campaign for Metric.  We would build them a Facebook fan page with features that would help them grow their fan base.  It took off.  The rest was history.

By May, we released our self-serve platform that let management companies, major record labels, and large artists build high performing Facebook fan pages.  By June, we were cash flow positive.  In July, we joined the IO Ventures, a startup incubator program with office space inside a hip coffee shop known as The Summit in the heart of the Mission in San Francisco.  By October, we had expanded beyond music and were signing up clients like Wrangler Jeans, Gatorade, and CBS.  By December, we sold the company to FanBridge, an email marketing solution for musicians that just raised its Series A from top tier investors like First Round Capital and Jeff Clavier.

2.  Was there an exit strategy in mind during that initial planning? Why or why not?

We started damntheradio as a passion project.  There was no grand exit strategy, just a powerpoint plan to scale users that never went through.  When money became tight, we changed plans, scrambled, and caught a break.  We hit a nerve in the market, and within 6 months had multiple bidders for our technology.  They made us an offer we couldn’t refuse.  Even during the last 6 months, which looked impressive in retrospect, there were times when we’d all feel the foreboding possibility that at any moment, it could all fall apart.  Then all of a sudden, we’d get a call from Gatorade, catch a big break, and breathe a sigh of relief.  In the end, it all worked out in spite of plans.

3.  What benefit does an email marketing company have towards expanding into Facebook?

We found that exclusive content primarily benefits the first part of the conversion funnel (capturing new fans) because of two reasons: 1) it creates a clear incentive for the user to initially subscribe to the page, aka “Like”, and 2) on a product interface level, fan page owners have the option of making the tab containing exclusive content the default landing page experience for users who have not yet “Liked” the page (whereas all existing fans would land on the wall)—thus ad buys, email blasts, and other methods of driving traffic to the fan page increase in effectiveness because non-fans are immediately presented with a high-performance fan conversion page.

Beyond initially capturing fans, however, exclusive content is not necessarily the most effective at engaging, retaining, and monetizing existing fans.

At DTR we explored and experimented with different methods of moving users through the conversion funnel beyond the initial capture, and found that the publisher as the primary way by which to engage existing users was fundamentally limited: a one-to-many communication channel is less direct than a one-to-one communication channel such as email, and therefore the percentage of views and interactions on posts have yet to catch up to the open rates on email.  The implication, however, isn’t too choose one over the other, but to do both at different frequencies for different use-cases: publish with greater frequency than email but make sure to follow up on huge announcements not just through Facebook but through email as well.

Before we met FanBridge, we understood the value of email as an additive channel by which to engage fans so we built email capture tools directly on the fan page with the ambition to develop a one-to-one messaging feature within damntheradio down the road.  Our vision for our platform was to help artists grow both their Facebook fan and email lists through our capture tools and landing pages, and ultimately help artists engage and monetize their fans via a suite of tools enabling both one-to-many and one-to-one communication with the fan.  When we met FanBridge, who primarily focused on the email channel, we saw an opportunity to accelerate our vision and innovate on our platform.

The goal is to forge a personal connection with the fan.  To do that, an artist needs to communicate and interact with fans not just on Facebook, but across all fan touch points, which today includes email, and to an ever larger extent, mobile.  Wherever those channels may be tomorrow, our mission remains the same: to help artists build meaningful relationships with their fans.

Please check out damntheradio and FanBridge for more info.  If you see the impact both or either of these companies have on the music industry, feel free to nominate them for FlashFWD (votes close tomorrow).