Building a Startup While in College to Connect Artists & Fans [Interview]
Matt (Host): What led you to think there was a need for artists to better engage with their fans?
Asim: My whole life I’ve been a Soundcloud fanatic, in love with low-key rappers. A year ago I went to see one of my favorite artists with 100,000 monthly Spotify listeners preform at a show. When I got into the VIP I immediately started praising him like, ‘man… it must be amazing! you’re blowing up, becoming famous and rich.’ — and he was the first person to tell me “no, independent musicians actually don’t make that much money. I probably need a few extra shifts at my day job.
So I realized that theres a lot of theses types of independent musicians that sustain a strong fan base but struggle financially.
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Hustle Gurus is a series of videos interviewing founders and others involved in youth-led, growing, early-stage startups & businesses in Chicago. Through the videos the founders express the current state of their startup, the needs of the business, and ways for other entreprenurs watching who may be looking to work with a startup near them to reach out. Or Vice versa, to provide young entreprenurs with a window into the early-stage, growing, youth-led startups near them. Providing meaningful work opportunities and connections for the young & talented.
Asim: Hi, I’m Asim, the founder of Bondfire.
Asim, a college student at UIC, is building Bondfire: an app to allow up and coming artists to easily schedule unique and secure on-demand meet-ups with their fans. That could be Basket ball with five fans for an hour. Or lunch with eight fans for two hours. Any experience an artist wants, they can facilitate through Bondfire for free.
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Matt (Host): Who would you say is your target artist? What kind of artist do you think benefits the most from Bonfire?
Asim: It really depends case-by-case with each artist. The best metric we found is looking at monthly Spotify listeners. Any really good musician most likely has their music on Spotify — between 40,000 to 400,000 monthly Spotify listeners.
Then again, we just hosted an event a couple weeks ago with an artist
from UChicago who only has ten thousand monthly Spotify listeners. However, he has a much larger community presence doing shows around Hyde Park all the time, so he was able to sell out tickets really fast.
Matt: I saw that Bondfire is still in beta. What’s left to understand about your users or finish developing before you release an official version?
Asim: If you look at a lot of huge companies like Google Inbox, they remained in beta for almost four years because if something ever goes wrong the customer doesn’t really yell at you. Instead, the customer wants to show you what you can fix. We plan to stay in beta for the next year and that could
definitely be longer, until we truly feel comfortable hosting dozens of events. There’s no harm in staying in beta.
What we want to learn from beta is… what are the really small things involved in making a studio session with five fans go really well? So amazing that everyone wants to come back and do it again! Once we have artists asking “Hey, when can I host my next Bondfire?” we want to stay in beta until then.
Matt: When you hop on the web app how does an artist literally connect with a fan? How does a fan use bonfire to literally meet up with the artist?
Asim: Yeah, so it’s pretty straight forward. On the fan end, fan sees one of their favorite local artists, the artists post “hey jam out in the studio with me for two hours”, boom, bonfire link! Fan clicks on it, they’re taking to the event page in which they see the details, they see the general location (we don’t give out the specific address to the public) and then they can purchase a ticket and from there, they’re sent information about the events and any updates that are made.
From the artist’s side: Every artist has to apply to join. we have a small vetting process authenticating that it’s actually them applying not anybody else. It’s a pretty simple event creation form you fill out in which you can choose like your event, what type of event, the description, how many tickets you want, the ticket price, the time, location, using one of our partner locations, then we send out the location the day of to the fans.
Matt: Why did you decide that this was the right way for artists to engage their fans versus anything else they could do e.g tweeting your fans on Twitter and saying “hey, let’s meet up!” Why is bond fired the right way to do this?
Asim: A lot of people have that question. What’s the difference between Bondfire and Eventbrite? What’s the difference between bonfire and artist tweeting out “Hey! let’s me up over here.” The big thing is that we take care of all the security and logistics of the event, i.e using our partner location so that the artist can purely focus on the experience and nothing else. We like to think that hosting a bonfire is as easy as calling an Uber except it’s free.
One thing we’ve learned through beta testing is that the smaller the artist is, the more that experience matters. So we’ll emphasize that in the app more, saying ‘you’re probably not gonna want to do just like lunch with four fans, you’re gonna want to do something more focused on the activity like a studio session to make sure the fans have a great time. Otherwise, if it’s a bigger artist, the fans are probably just gonna be happy enough to be in the same room with that artist.
Matt: It’s interesting because you have to run the tool for both sides. Do you ever favor the artists over fans or fans over artists in any way? How do you do your best to optimize Bondfire for both fans and artists?
Asim: That’s definitely something we think about and thought about when we we’re starting to build the app. Do the artists come first or do the fans come first? Through beta testing and something we’re continuously learning is that if we can get good artists to come and follow through, the fans will come. So we’re really focused on making sure the app experience for the artist is really interactive and engaging. We can provide you the coolest space in the world… We can provide you with the coolest setup, but if it’s a bad artist and they’re not engaging or they’re rude… then the fans aren’t gonna have a great time and the fans aren’t gonna come back to the app.
Matt: You’re saying if you make the tool work really well for the artist, just having good artists on the app makes it work well for the fans?
Asim: Exactly.
Matt: How do you collect feedback from users i.e fan and artist, and then how do you take that feedback and use it to reiterate?
Asim: In the beginning days I realized that it’s important for me to have a physical presence at all the Bondfires. Hopefully over the next two months when we start drilling in a lot of events — I’ll be there in person before the Bondfire, jumping on a call with the artists asking them “what do you want to get out of this?” Then after the Bondfire, sending out a survey to the fans to ask about their experience. Then jumping on a call with artists again, or
meeting them up to see if they did get out of it what they wanted to.
Matt: What was something that you learned from going to the events yourself and seeing experience firsthand?
Asim: I think it comes down to a lot of small things that make the experience go amazing, or just go okay, or even terrible. One small thing we learned from the last event we hosted was having the artists in the first few minutes and briefing the fans on “hey, this is something different, and here’s exactly what’s gonna happen over the couple hours” — is really important.
Matt: How often would you say you work on Bondfire day to day. What prevents you from working on it more often, that is, if you even want to work on Bondfire full time?
Asim: When I first started working on bonfire I was only getting in a couple hours a week. The more we progress though, the more I found myself working on it. Right now I’m around 15 hours a week, doing technical programming work every week. Every day reaching out to new artists, sound engineers, graphic designers, getting introductions, doing meetings, phone calls, and all that non-technical like business side of things. Just trying to meet artists and videographers, any sort of creatives that can give me feedback on Bondfire. Just out here hustling and trying to meet people.
A huge one is school. I’m a full-time computer science student — —
Matt: Oh wow! Okay, so how is juggling that? How do you manage school into your schedule.
Asim: It’s tough, but it’s not too bad. It’s really just about time management
and holding yourself accountable. 2018 I wanted to fix my sleep schedule so I got two friends and we formed a group chat. Everyday we had to wake up by 8a.m. and message the group, otherwise you owe everyone else in the group $2. As a broke college student, that fixed my sleeping habits really fast haha.
Also, we’re part of the Future founders residency cohort (Future Founders is a Chicago startup incubator for youth-led ventures.) which has been a huge blessing. Every month we set goals and we review them with our other entrepreneurs in the group and that’s been another great way to hold myself accountable in terms of getting into the computer science and startup environment of Chicago.
Matt: If there’s a younger person, a young entrepreneur who wants to tap into that, where would you say they should go? Where did you go?
Asim: I published a medium article called ‘No internship? No problem.’
and it highlights all the amazing resources that Chicago offers. I think
Chicago has an amazing start-up & computer science community in general, and so it’s a matter of just showing up getting your foot in the door.
Matt: What would you say are some short and long term goals that you have for Bondfire? How do you see yourself getting there from where you’re at right now?
Asim: Our short-term goals are just host more events and further validate ourselves to show that we’re solving a real problem. That we do help connect
artists to fans in a meaningful way.
I think long-term goal is just having artists and fans wanting to come back to the app and go to events again, host events again. Another long-term
goal is introducing the aspect of partner locations so that an artist can book a space at a venue on demand, and not have to worry about the security or logistics of the event. That’s like… to me, the real innovative magical part of all this.
Matt: Because Hustle Gurus is all about connecting and adding value to other people’s work around the city — If someone watching wants to reach out, where should they contact you? Are you looking for any specific talent right now to grow the team? Are you open to young people reaching out for internships or positions with Bondfire to experience a growing startup from the inside out?
Asim: Yeah! Right now we’re looking to get feedback from anybody involved in music: videographers, photographers, graphic designers, sound engineers. Looking to get introductions to any artists that might see themselves hosting a Bondfire. If there’s any artist watching this video we’d love for you to go to Bondfire.me — There you can see ‘new artists, apply’. Fill out a quick forum to verify your identity and from there you can start hosting your own Bondfires.
Also, you can shoot me an email at asim@bondfire.me
Or you can find me on social media. LINKEDIN, FACEBOOK. Reach out to me there, I’m more than happy to talk!
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