Jeff Ponchick Founder Of Repost Network, Sold To SoundCloud (Vested Capital EP4)
Podcast: https://www.yaro.blog/pod/
Blog: https://www.yaro.blog/
Repost Network: https://www.repostnetwork.com/
The world of music rights is a lot more confusing than I thought.
There are many stakeholders who are all supposed to get a share of the revenue from music used online - from labels, publishers, platforms, song writers and of course the artist who created the music.
Jeff Ponchick worked in the world of digital music and knew well all the paper work required to make music rights work.
He decided to start a company that attempted to digitize the music rights process, and thus make it a lot easier for artists to make money from their work.
Like many startup founders, Jeff first tested his idea with a not-so-scalable, very manual process -- working out all the details by hand, sending emails, making phone calls and filling out forms.
He did this for some test artists, who loved the service because it made it so much easier to get paid for their music no matter where it was being used online.
Jeff then brought on a technical partner, and they went to work to create the more scalable version of their service, to digitize the music rights process.
Thus Repost Network was born.
Jeff's idea proved to be a good one. Artists loved the service and of course loved getting paid for their work.
Musicians began to spread the word and Report Network became a popular choice to help deal with music rights and negotiate with all the different music distributers - from YouTube, to Spotify and SoundCloud.
That last company, SoundCloud, ended up being the company that Jeff sold Repost Network to (the word 'repost' referring to the goal of SoundCloud users - to get your tracks reposted so you can reach more people).
In this interview Jeff shares all the amazing steps that led to Repost Network growing to the point that SoundCloud was interested in an acquisition, and how the deal got done.
Enjoy the podcast.
Yaro