I go, we go.
How I learnt from every person I ever worked with.
The year was 2013. A cold winter apparent over Oxford, England. I’m squirrelling away in the corner of a living room, making band website after band website. Literally churning out the same piece of work again and again with a different skin. Mind numbing shit.
Fast forward 2 months, and I’m sat in the Notonthehighstreet.com office in Richmond, London as their fresh-faced Web Designer. I owe so much to this organisation because it gave me the spark I needed to create the thing I love so dearly. A marketplace, with thousands of brands, under one place.
Holy shit, I thought. This doesn’t exist for music? And I’m making all of these band websites, that are the same content, just different skin. Can’t I just make a service that does this?
Fast-forward again to 2014, and I’m in the Forward Partners lab in Old Street. Working with a very talented guy called Matt on a company called Driftrock (who totally kick ass, go check them out), I realised this music platform could be so much more than just a website for your band. Couldn’t we have lots of different things it could do instead? Mainly I was just looking for ways for Matt and I to work together, and his Facebook automation stuff would be invaluable inside our platform (It still will be! Comin atcha buddy)
FP taught me the scale of things, and how big this could really be. It also taught me how to fuck up as a manager, which was pretty useful learning for later. Thanks for being patient guys, you rock.
Final fast forward to September 2015, at House of Radon, Stockholm. The opportunity that these guys gave me by bringing me to Sweden, I cannot thank them enough. I finally found a stable home for the company, and thanks to work with Ericsson, realised that an ‘ecosystem’ was the real way for us to grow as a platform, and incorporate scalability right out of the gate.
Now Bandzest is finally here, and launching in the summer of 2017, (only 4 years late, right!?) Hahaha.
We’re focusing on bringing super awesome tools to the independent side of the music industry. Marketing, release management, events, you name it, we’re building it!
Pretty much, this post is just a massive thank you, to everyone who pushed me, helped me, challenged me, fired me, loved me, and gave me an opportunity. You all rock and I love you all.
To: Gareth Brown, Adam Zytkiewicz, Gilberto Lenzi, Kate Wright, Jonathan Burkett, Peter Alvarsson, Stuart Lowe, Alexander Niesel, Mattias Wiklund, Gareth Garvey, Marco Lopes, Victor Köhler, Sebastian Löfgren, Patrik Alonso, Izak Jackson, Flavia Messina, Kyle St James, Bas Ratering, Kris Aarre, Ashley Stevens, Matthew Burns, Jemma Proctor, Drew Richardson, Tyler Brown, Zavier Bailey, Jamie Conoley, Anthony Allgood, Katherine Johnson and Rebecca Scheller.
May you people be testimony to the fact that there is beauty in this world and you believed in me even when you shouldn’t have and I wasn’t ever going to finish it. Thank you for pushing me, for better or worse.
And to the two who stuck by me, thank you eternally. Ewan & Marco, you fucking rock.
