Here’s what happened this year.
If you want to learn more about me, my journey as an entrepreneur, and the Recordbuilds story this is for you.
I wanted to start recapping and logging the journey. I will try to post these monthly from here on out to highlight the people i’ve met, things i have learned, and any and all other interesting things that happen in the world of building – This will be a living series of the behind the scenes for the building of a media company in the vinyl records space.
Jan 2024: Giving Birth
I had a few small ideas and projects prior to this but will save that for another day.
In late 2023 I quit another small side project and began plotting. In my head, I knew that this next thing, whatever it was, was going to be my first, real honest, hard effort, “all in” go at something. I got serious. It doesn’t have to work but I sure as hell am going to make sure it’s worthwhile enough to give it that full go.
The idea for Recordbuilds started decently intuitively: What are my skills and what excited me? I choose an overlap of design and vinyl records (I currently work full time at residential landscape architecture firm). As for the vinyl records half – is it a skill? no. Is it my passion, not exactly. But it is something I had decent insight into and some personal experience and I knew I could and was willing to learn a ton more.
After defining that edge (however marginal it might have been for me and maybe for you i.e. not even close to the best designer or most knowledgeable about vinyl records/listening rooms) I searched for a problem to solve at that overlap. To me, there was one big, loud, answer – Entering Vinyl Listening is a relatively high barrier to entry. Its complex. There are people shouting you down calling you an idiot. That great, comprehensive, resources that shows you what to buy, what it would look like, and how much its going to cost, isn’t really there.
Voila. There was a problem to solve. This is V1 and it has stuck ever since.
Feb-May 2024: MVP
Minimum Viable Product
This was the period I started making a ton of rookie mistakes that are a right of passage. Before I tell you about all the dumb things I did early on lets talk about the first versions of the site/product and how they came about.
I did a ton of research for different “builds” basically what turntable goes best with what amp best with what speaker, do I need a preamp, etc. The first set of builds was a very simple, cookie cutter starting point for people to browse through and easily decide what setup is best for them. Essentially, this was a task of organizing the information, linking to the correct sources, and presenting it in a neat way that is easily consumed. Throw in a little pizazz of architectural drawings and a 3d model and suddenly, a product was born.
Now let me recount all the dumb things I did – keep in mind there are probably many more that I am forgetting
Overcomplicating an MVP
In hindsight, this was the biggest mistake. I should and could have thrown everything up in a weekend. Instead, I spent months iterating on the margin size for my text, if the link should be a dark blue or dark grey, do the components go on the right or left column, etc, classic mistake. There were many infuriating hours conversing with wordpress support on things that at the end of the day, had very little bearing on the trajectory of the product.
Instead, it should have been that weekend mockup and then GETTING FEEDBACK FROM USERS, then iterating. Next time…
Not optimizing for search engines
You don’t know what you don’t know. My site might have been ok for humans to read. But for all of the robots crawling my site, not so much.
Paying for Advertising
To be frank, the product was pretty garbage. If by some miracle some poor soul accidentally clicked on my terrible ad copy – they were directed to my site where the chance of conversion was nearly 0 (no one would trust a recommendation from something like the early versions of the builds page) Instead, I should have focused on iterating the product on feedback (there it is again) and trying to grow organically through worthwhile, shareable stuff.
Spreading Social Media Presence Too Thin
I wanted it all. Which is not feasible when its just you. If you have been a long time user of the site you probably remember when we had the instagram, youtube, tiktok, facebook, pinterest, link etc. It was pretty much a full time job on its own keeping up and posting everything on all of those platforms. Instead, I should have narrowed in on one platform where the users I could serve are and try to maximize my efforts there.
June-October 2024: Scaling and Distribution
This is where the fun part for me comes. The puzzle of trying to figure out how to grow this thing. Sure the product is still hot garbage and honestly not that helpful at this point, but thats where we thought we were. Im going to break this out into 3 main categories:
- Build Of The Month
- Blogging
Build Of The Month
For the first time in this article I am going to give myself a little bit of credit. This actually made a bit of sense. When trying to grow a new product or brand, you need something that really resonates with the user base you are trying reach. This was the swing at that pitch and I think I at least got on base.
Something that lives in most audiophiles and casual record enthusiasts alike is a desire to share their listening space, records alike with a community of people that can appreciate it. Whether its an old favorite they are spinning, an incredible deal on a new record, or a handed down piece of equipment. There seems to be a willingness with the community to post and share that online.
This is especially prevalent in the reddit communities of r/vinyl and r/turntables which is where I saw a lot of the users for this product. So, the ask was simple, create a space for people to be able to share their stuff and give them an incentive to do so. The result was a photo contest, which is a little bit more organized than the reddit feed, and introduces an element of fun, game theory, and competitiveness to your personal listening room share.
Although not reaching gargantuan scale…yet….I spoke to a number of people that entered the contest that it seemed like a good idea and they enjoyed being able to present and show off their unique listening room pieces to a community of like minded individuals.
The best part of this whole experience, hands down, was the money I lost. No, in all seriousness while we were operating with the top prize giving away a free vinyl record (where the winner would pick their top 3 artists and I would source a record from one of them), I loved being able to surprise them with more than they bargained for. If you won any of the initial contests you know what i’m talking about. I went above and beyond on these prizes, picking one or two albums from those favorite artists along with an additional record or two that I thought fit the bill for your taste in music. Also just to give them an extra thank you, I attached a handwritten note. I got some great responses and easily the best part of this journey has been the excitement and gratitude I have received from these winners an what a simple act of gifting someone a few vinyl records (which sure was expensive and shipping costs adds up) but is what this building thing is all about.
Blogging
Back to that idea of making your website good for robots to read…I went down the rabbit hole of SEO optimization. The result? Organic SEO traffic. Who would have guessed?
So, there is no use in explaining/breaking down SEO here, there are many agencies and youtube channels that dedicate their entire business to it which would be a far more useful explanation than anything I could put together. However, to summarize, I bought Ahrefs, did keyword research, and wrote articles that were helpful and contained a human touch (differentiating from AI generated blog posts). This became a strong funnel to let people find my site organically through the vinyl related topics they were searching on google.
November-December 2024: Revamp
So that brings us to current day.
The site looks way more beautiful now. I attribute that to my good friend, and Head Of Design, Chris Kupka. He is a digital product designer I met through landscape architecture that has jumped on board to help with all aspects of Recordbuilds. It has been great to have another set of eyes and brain on everything regarding the site and strategy. I will just say again, you don’t know what you don’t know and you don’t see your own biases. If you are in the tech world, like what you see on this site, and looking to hire a talented designer, reach out…
The holiday season was definitely good for us in terms of traffic and making a respectable amount of money. We have always been pretty lean but there are many days where your business costs seem like you are shoveling your savings into a fire, so I am glad that stopped at least for a bit.
Chris really upped the game on all the current products/offerings/design (the revamp), but looking forward we want to add a few more key pieces, and then the focus will be getting this in front of more people.
Thanks
I have also met a bunch of amazing people in the industry along the way…going to throw them a quick shoutout and some link juice below:
Portfolio Pilot – AI-powered personalized financial investment advice.
Rich at deepcut. Beautiful handmade vinyl accessories, featured them in a post, and was able to connect.
Megan – we have “builds” for various creators in the works and Megan was the first we connected with on this project.
Jesse Mueller founder of Bluescreen Computer Services – We connected through one of his older, audio related posts. Was awesome to explore the small business/newsletter community he has created for himself.
Eric Seay, Co-Founder of AuxNYC – An UI/UX branding company I randomly came across from an old blog post. Everything on their website is downright beautiful. They host a B.Y.O.V. (Bring Your Own Vinyl) events at their studio headquarters in NYC – that is added to the bucket list.
Huge shoutout to Scott at Boundless Audio, Felix, owner of Recordroots, and Brandon, owner of Vinyl Moon. These are the three sponsors for January’s Build Of The Month contest. The initial contact for all three would have been a blog post where I featured their products. Thank you all for sticking your necks out and partnering with a small operation like us, means the world.
