Welcome to Episode 66 of the Bandhive Podcast.

It is time for another episode of the Bandhive podcast. My name is James Cross and I don't have here with me today, Matt Hose of Alive in Barcelona. Matt is doing well, but unfortunately he is stuck in a blizzard somewhere between Idaho and Colorado.

He was on his way home after attending a family event, and there's a giant blizzard. So since we just talked about winter safety when driving on the road and that kind of stuff a few episodes ago, when we were talking about touring, I told Matt, Yeah, don't worry. Just get off the road, get some rest and take all the time you need to get home, and he will be back in one of the next episode of the Bandhive podcast. But on that note, I have a very special guest if you enjoyed Episode 63 with Steve Martin of Ascending Everest, where he talked about SubmitHub success strategies.

This week we have Jason Grishkoff of SubmitHub. He is the founder and CEO of the company. Welcome aboard, Jason. Thanks so much for taking time to come on the show. My absolute pleasure to be here. James wouldn't miss it for the world. Glad to hear that. It's so great to have you here for some background, which I didn't mention in the past episode. I've been a curator on SubmitHub for a few years, so I've seen how the platform has been growing. And I think Jason is doing an incredible job with developing it and really expanding the purpose of it s o to get right into it.

Jason, you started the platform back in 2015, I think was October. And basically it was out of the need that you saw as the editor and owner of the Block Indie Shuffle, where you were just getting hundreds of emails per day and it was getting so overwhelming. And so that's kind of where SubmitHub started. Can you just go through those first days of where it came from and what your goals were for the site. I'll begin with a bit of attention because it's interesting that about a week ago there was a reddit thread.

The subreddit we are the music makers is pretty active in their discussion around SubmitHub and someone mentioned that SubmitHub had strayed from its original purpose on Guy couldn't help but wonder what their perception of the original purpose Waas and, of course, from their view, SubmitHubs. Original purpose was to help artists get coverage, but, as you point out, Submitted was actually born from a completely different problem that I was trying to solve, and it was a very personal problem I was having. Namely, that my music plug in the shuffle had made its way into so maney mailing lists circulating around the Internet that I was getting roughly 300 emails put a It was totally unmanageable.

What I ended up doing was setting up fake submissions that in the shuffle dot com email address, pushing everyone towards that and then forgetting about it. And once every two months, I would log into that email address just to clear everything out so it wouldn't run out of space on. Then it was just build up again on the downside. There, of course, is that it meant I was ignoring Ah, lot of good music. Potentially, Uh, certainly there was bad stuff, too, but I think I wasn't alone in that.

Many other blog's were facing a similar issue, and what was happening at the time this was probably 2012 2013 was that we were all beginning to post the same stuff, which was great if you were an artist who managed to make your way into that mix. But it got to a point where were just regurgitating the same content. There was very little independent coverage going on, and maybe that's actually why a lot of those artists back in 2011 2012 2013, were able to break out and make careers from it. But there was so many little guys who were getting absolutely no attention from it.

So the goal that cement help was for me to get those 300 emails under control. It was also a reaction to the fact that revenue from independent publishing on the Internet so that's blog's be their music blog's or food blog's or D I. Y blog's whatever it just was tanking Onda. Lot of that was because of the rise of Facebook and Google's efficiency and running ads on that type of stuff. And so I needed to figure out a different source off work off income pretty quickly. So I had this problem 300 emails a day.

I had a desire to learn a new stack of code, and so I decided I was going to learn a couple new languages and build a platform that solved this problem. So I remember furiously. Cutting over about three months definitely was single at the time. It was right before I met my wife, but I do remember spending something like 8 to 12 hours a day on it, in a coworking space by myself, with no friends. Or least I didn't know the people around me. And when I launched in November off 2015, I simply put an order responder on that submissions at Indy shuffle dot com email address.

And I said, Hey, if you want to contact us, check out a new website called SubmitHub dot com before I knew it. The submissions were rolling in at the time. It was completely free. If you were an artist, it still had the system. With two credits that you get every four hours, you can only have a maximum of two. So you gotta be picky about who you want to choose. But I also threw in something a little extra. If you said you were a publicist and I verified that, then you wouldn't have that limit.

And so very early on, I was bringing on some of those power users who were going to be the most skeptical about this initially and encouraging them to use the platform. And then my next step, of course, was to set about and introduced the platform to as many other bloggers I could. And so I started by going through a list off all the hype machine Boggs. And at the time, I think there were 1000 and finding their emails was pretty easy because they were all circulating in these databases.

So I downloaded the database, found the email, sent it out to as many people as I could, and I think from 1000 emails I got about 20 responses, which probably reflects the experience that many artists at the time we're having as well. When I got them signed up and very quickly SubmitHub just started growing and growing and growing. And I think by the time I brought on Dylan to come and help me out in mid 2016, I believe we had close to 50. Blog's on there. It was just blog's no YouTube channels, no Spotify, no nothing, Music Blog's 2015.

That was still kind of where it was at. So that's really the Genesis off. SubmitHub its zone debt and the way that I got that initial bump behind it to actually make it a product that works well. I think it's really interesting that you bring up that Reddit post and that the person who said that feels submitted has drifted because, if anything, I would say that I've seen things shift Mawr towards the artist experience while still aiming to eliminate the problem you set out to eliminate in the first place.

But over the years, so many new features have been rolled out for artists with the growth of moving to the Spotify playlist, Er's the YouTubers Social media influencers labels came in at some point as well. I think that was pretty early with labels. Labels were quite early with all of that, you know, obviously, that's room for SubmitHub to expand. But that's also a new market that artists can now reach because before an artist you know, it's It's not the easiest thing to find in influencers email.

You'd have to hit up there, D M. And if they have 40 million followers or whatever, they're going to be absolutely flooded. And many artists do see SubmitHub as someone of a haven for sending their music out to people to be considered. So how has that changed in the last 5. 5 years? How you view, SubmitHub and what your main purposes, you know, when you put it that way, I think people do take for granted how well the system works. It's a directory where you pay a small amount of money to guarantee that someone response.

There aren't many places you could do that. I can't really think of any besides a couple SubmitHub competitors, but yeah, I mean it Z completely changed the landscape in that sense. And gosh, I've completely about what your question was, because that's where my mind went. Let's all get I was asked me about how the growth in popularity of the platform with artists has affected your outlook on what your goals are for the site. For me, it's always been important to listen to what the users air saying about the website and balancing the interests of the curators and the artists has always bean one of the biggest challenges we have on the website Curator is want to do as little work as they can and get paid as much money as they can, right?

If they don't have to share anything and they get paid $20 proposed and they don't even have to listen, they're gonna be stoked, right? All of this on the flip side, don't want to pay anything. They do want everyone to say yes, and they want all of those Yes, is to actually move the needle. So you've got these two parties who have different desires, and trying to meet them in the middle has has been one of the bigger challenges. So first step, of course, with that is setting expectations and making sure that when people come into it, there's no over promising about what you're going to get on the curator side.

We make it clear this is gonna be work. It's not just free money. You need to put in the effort. You have to write feedback. It needs to be original. If it's not, you're going to hear from the cement of team we're gonna bug. You were gonna know you were gonna be looking at all these measures and occasionally people end up quitting as curator because they go, do you Just not letting me do my thing and we say, That's fine. You can go do your thing, but you can't do it here.

There has to be some sort of balance on from the artist side. Of course, I'm sure you've seen a fair share of this as well, but you have artists to end up walking away quite disappointed by the results because they came into it with their expectations in the wrong place. And for many of those artists, they weren't actually around in the early two thousands in the mid two thousands or 2010 plus and they didn't see how frustratingly difficult it was to actually get coverage on. So they come on these sites and they're constantly bombarded by all these promotion websites that promise guaranteed results.

And then they hit SubmitHub, where the only thing we can really promise you is that the majority of your responses will be a rejection on. It's like a whole. It's a game changer, so balancing those two has always been important. I think after five years and a bit, we've done pretty good job in terms of where we landed. But it's a constantly evolving space, and I'll give you an example of something I rolled out this morning, which was in response to a chat that took place in the artist chat room.

Some artists decided that they knew what I was thinking in response to another artist who was complaining about the lack of approvals. They said, No, I'm pretty sure Jason wants it to be that way. If there were too many approvals, then people wouldn't spend as much money. They just come on here, get what they need it and leave. But if he makes sure that no one's approving songs, we have to keep spending more and more credits to get the results we want on. I thought, Wow, that's an interesting way of looking at it, but I actually don't think I agree from my perspective.

The better your results are, the more likely you will be to come back and use it in the future. And the more likely you'll be to tell your friends about it. I want to try and deliver better results, and I want to have those better matches. So today I rolled out a default setting, which I haven't actually announced in any way. As with many of my features, they just sort of roll out. If you're submitting a song for the first time, there's Ah box under the additional filters, which is called recommended picks, and by default it is selected.

It's just a little bit of code that filters out roughly 60% off the possibilities that would have shown up. It gets rid of anyone who's got a low genre match. Anyone who has like a 1% or lower approval rate, it gets rid of all the people that are probably going to give you a bad first impression on the website. So say you come in and you filter by indie rock. It's incredibly. You get something like 450 results if you filtered by indie rock. And so then with my recommended picks, I boils it down to about 150. Andi.

To counter what this artist was saying in terms of, you know, I want you to come in and spend money. Most people aren't spending 150 credits on their first submission. They're spending 20 or 30 so giving them a smaller group to choose from on. Making sure that that group is well targeted to them is a very recent example off a step that I've taken to try and make the experience better for artists. And hopefully better for the curator as well, because they'll get more targeted submissions. Yeah, I love that.

And that will also you're saying for the curator it'll give them targeted submissions. But if people have a better experience and keep using the platform curator in the long run will get more submissions as well. So just thio note. Today is February 16th. The episode will be coming up in early March for anyone wondering when that update rolled out. That was February 16th, and I think that's going to be really good for anyone new to the platform to have that gentle easing in before they get the brutal feedback that some artists do tend to get.

And I've seen it all. I've seen certain genres, namely rap, but also a few others tend to think that if they miss, label their song as pop, punk or metal core or something, it's going to get approved, and that's just I don't speak for everyone, but for me, that's not the case like I have nothing against rap, but that's not what we share on our MP. So that would be off brain. We can't do that. People would stop following us if all of a sudden we started posting rap instead of pop, punk and metal core.

With that being said and all these changes in development, it sounds like you're already taking some big steps to help set realistic expectations. But then there's still the artists who come in and didn't quite understand what it is. So, for example, for the entire existence of SubmitHub, at least my knowledge you've had a policy against Paola or, you know, paid placements. And some artists come in expecting that because there are other sites who do that, even though it's against Spotify, is terms of service and generally in the music industry viewed as a no no.

How do you go about setting expectations for people like that who are expecting that every single song they submit will be approved? Believe it or not, it's not as big of an issue as you might think. Perhaps that is because I'm doing a good job setting expectations through the on boarding process, the way you submit and the emails that you get after submitting. So we're very upfront and clear about the average approval rate being around 15% the feedback being all over the place and the fact that this is not a place you come for guaranteed results.

The service that we provide is to create a connection and facilitate that. Generally speaking, any service that does function in this payroll of space with the exception off Museo Soup, is gonna be a scam. Museo Soup. I'm also not the coolest with because their model is basically Hey, I like your song. If you pay me 20 bucks, I'll do a blogger review about it. And ah, lot of them are semi reputable blog's who won't join SubmitHub because they feel that their time is worth more money. In that sense, you are actually paying for your placement, and I don't think that's really good.

But all those other websites that say you know pays $20 will get you on 100 playlist scam 100% scam. So it's possible that some of those artists have actually gone through that experience before coming to us. But in general, I actually don't find that that's so much of a complaint. The line of thought you'll often see in the artist chat room is people going. So, uh, you know, I got a 10% approval. What do you guys getting on DSO? I think there's this understanding that it's not about guarantees. It's about targeting well, sending it out to people and hoping that you get some sort of positive experience in return.

Yeah, I do think you do a great job with that because I mean, you post the other day saying how many thousands of active users there were at a certain moment and I can't remember the number, but it was astronomical. I think at that moment in time there were 2500 unique logged in users on the website. That's massive. So if even one person a day were to say, Hey, why isn't this being shared automatically? That's such a tiny amount of the users currently 3000 and 6. 3006. That's amazing. Yeah, we're peak time right now.

We're peak time. I said it because you've got Europe and the States online at the same time. Of course, Africa. So that's why you got so many people. Um, the other reason is because some of these database changes I've been tweaking out mean that when you put it in the background tab, you're still connected to SubmitHub. So you actually still active on there? That's how things stay up to date in the chat rooms. But that's different technical stuff. But, you know, I think a lot of it actually has to do with the fact that most of SubmitHubs.

Awareness is through word of mouth. We don't actually do much marketing. We don't have a logo on would generally not very active there because it has worked so well, organically from word of mouth. And I think many of those experiences are just talking to other artists and saying, Oh, man, I got this new song, You got any tips for how to get it out there on the response would be like, Well, you know, there's SubmitHub but that's a complete shit show and it's gonna make you feel like an idiot.

I'm totally rejected. So yeah, don't use that. And then, of course, the artist goes, Okay, well, I'm gonna go use it. Everyone wants to try and get a feel for what it is, and I think that that communication right there probably solves a lot of the problems in terms of expectation. People go into it and say, Look, submit. Hub is probably one of the most legitimate and realist tools out there, but it's really dude, and you're going to hear from a bunch of people who don't like your music and don't know what they're talking about.

So I think that that mode off growth from a word of mouth standpoint has actually done a lot to temper expectations. and make sure that, in general with you know, this many people using the website, the number of complaints that we get weekly, it's dropped off a cliff and even better, is toe. Look on a place like read it and we are the music makers and see when a thread does pop up and someone's complaining about results are asking what others experiences are. Most of the comments that come in response are not overly positive, but they're not overly negative, either.

They're much more realistic and measured on. I think that's a big step, because for me it would be wrong if all of those comments were coming back and saying, Dude, total scam, stay away from it I mean, there is still that out there, But even when someone does give a response like that, you'll see someone quickly jump in and say, You know, I know it could be tough, but I've actually had one or two good results and I think it's just more realistic at this point. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense, and with people having that negative expectation going in because their friends said, Hey, you know, you could go there, but it's gonna be rough.

You don't have to set those expectations even though you dio if that's how the word of mouth is spreading, those artists are already saying Up front, you're going to get rejected. Now I'm sure that artists, to a certain extent, will say, Well, you know what my songs better than that artists songs. So I'll do OK course, because that's what everyone thinks. You know, What is this right? Which I think is totally fine, like you should be proud of your music as an artist, but at the same time going down that path with those expectations.

That's what Steve was talking about a few weeks ago is he tries to go in and hit a certain approval percentage, and then when he does, he start submitting to more blog's. Until that starts going down. That's his strategy. He targets extremely well and then widens that up, just like somebody who is doing Facebook advertising. You know, you target your core group and then widen it up till it ends up not being profitable. Speaking of all the changes that have been coming about on, SubmitHub, one of the major changes was that last month or two months ago.

By the time this episode comes out, you rolled out guaranteed shares in the influencer space. Yeah, but that's how it works in the influencer world. I want to hear a little more about that because I know for a lot of curate er's and I think knowing you for you yourself, that was a little bit of a questionable move. But how are artists reacting to that? So far? I think most of the stigma around Pale that comes from the curator's themselves. And so I haven't heard any negative responses from artists, and I don't think they've even blinked.

And you mentioned this earlier. People go on other websites. They see Paola and I think that's okay. That's how it works. And we, as the curator is, tend to be the ones who frowned upon that. It was indeed something. I struggled with a lot my first step there, so I think we started signing up influences in January of 2020 so it's been just over a year on when we initially had them on the website, they were part off the curator's list, so when you went ahead and did a submission, You would say doing a submit to curate er's or labels, and if you chose Curator is it would show you all of the instagram people on.

I think sometime around the third quarter of last year, with foresight towards the fact that I was gonna make a change like this, I decided to spend the influences out into a separate category. So my thinking here is that if you completely separate them, you call one curator on the other one influences. It's much easier to create that delineation between the two, and we're saying, Look, curator Zehr held to a standard. Their job is to find and surface the best music. They've got ears for this. Their audience relies on them for that taste, etcetera.

Influences for 99. 9% of cases are not influences because of their taste in music, and that's not their stick. Their stick is that they've got a really nice body or they tell jokes, or they create sad memes or whatever it is that they dio. That's their thing, and the music that they're selling on the side, that's their influence that they're using right so if they put a song on this, more people are gonna be aware of Andi, I think by splitting them out into a separate category became much easier to say.

Okay, these guys have a different pricing model. So the first step we did there was actually to say, influences get paid less when they decline, but they don't have to give feedback. And I created this really confusing epic formula that basically shaves off amount of money and put it in a little piggy bank. And then when they do approve, they get that amount in the piggy bank. And so you've probably seen a little bit of this. There's like submitted dot com slash calculator, which explains how it works.

It's a bit confusing, but I think most of them tend to understand how it works. But the idea that was initially to say Okay, cool. You guys do operate on this mentality where 50 cents or a dollar to share a song is totally not worth your time. You charge $1000 blah blah, blah cool. We recognize that. So here's $3. Here's $5. Here's $12. 50 on Now with this latest change we can actually say the oddest. Okay, listen, influences thing totally differently here. They're not looking for the best new music. They're not trying to tell their audience how good they are.

Their reputation doesn't rely on their ability to find the best music. Their reputation relies on something completely different. And for these guys, their expectation is that if you want them to share your song, you're gonna pay them for it. So the guaranteed shares allow you to do that, and it's in a completely different section. And essentially, you could say Cool. You can either send normal submission to this influencer for two credits, or you can offer them 20 credits for a guaranteed ticktock on. Then, if they say yes, they get your 20 credits.

If they say no, you get your 20 credits back. So the system has bean sort of a gradual evolution towards this. Judging by the number off complaints from influences, it seems to be working because that number is very love. Right now, I have to say, I think personally that move makes a lot of sense because that's just how that world operates, you know, That's as if you walked into McDonalds and said, Hey, you know what? Give me your food. And if I like it, I'll pay you. That's not how it works.

You pay up front and then you get the food. I can understand how a lot of curator is who haven't really dealt with that world would feel about that. And so it's really interesting to hear that the curator Zehr the ones that had the pushback more so than the artists. But it also makes a lot of sense on it. Sounds like now that you've had that in the works for a while, you had no problem coming to terms with Hey, this is what we have to do for influencers.

Is that right? I would say so. And furthermore, I'm actually excited about the future possibilities that it could bring because for a lot of these influencers who do say they charge $50 or $100 whatever it is, they're not actually selling a lot of that. And part of the problem is that there is no middle man. There's no escrow. So let's say I'm a brand and I approach an influencer, and I say I've got a new type of hair gel I want you to try out on. I said cool.

Well, I charge $500 a post. What's gonna happen at that point is that hair gel company gonna pay me $500 upfront or they're gonna wait until I do the share and it gets into this tricky space where no one wants to take that risk up front. So this is where sort of an escrow service comes in handy where we said, Okay, cool. Well, facilitate this. We're gonna hold that money in the middle. If they don't share, you get it back on. If you share, you get that money. And so we become the independent party on the plan, then is to pivot this out and say, Okay, if you want to contact these tic tac guys, you can do it through submit.

If it doesn't just have to be music, you could be. Any product you wanna pitch will be that middle man for you. That's amazing. I think that'll be huge in the long run. I'm going at it with tempered expectations here. I think one of the difficulties is sourcing those actual products and sales going into it with physical goods will be difficult because that just gets really messy shipping products. Hey, if it is a hair gel cool, the influencer has to wait for that hair gel to show up.

And that gets a little bit tricky, right? I think we need to find a niche of what these digital goods might be, whether they're audio books or ah, podcast or a website, or I don't know what it is that people want to promote. Haven't figured that out yet, but I think part of it will actually be for the influences themselves to get to a point where they feel comfortable linking to SubmitHub as their way off processing these payments. So if you want me to promote your product, you could do it through submitted well without side tracking too much from the music here.

I'm really curious about this because I know over time SubmitHub has gotten major labels to sign up, and it seems like every couple of weeks I see a new label who is quite well known that ends up submitting to us. But let's say there's a massive brand like, let's say, canon cameras if they wanted to work with an influencer. They probably you're gonna be one of those companies who is so set in their ways like you were talking about earlier. You had another example where people just didn't want to change.

I got it. So here's what Cannon is gonna do. They wanna work on an influencer campaign. They're going to approach an agency. Probably gonna approach one of the bigger ones, right? They're gonna say Cool. Can you run this campaign for us? The agency's gonna come back and say Great. We can line you up. Of all of the influences in our network, it's approximately $1000 proposed. We're gonna get you on 50 big ones who each have five million plus big reach. So that's $50,000 for your campaign and Cannon is gonna go cool.

That sounds reasonable. There's a lot of money right now. The trick here is not to go to Canon. The trick is to go to the agency and say, Why don't you just shave off one or $2000? And instead of coming back to Canon with 50 shares come back to them with 349 of them are from your network of big people. But you also just got a bunch of micro influencers to share it for $50 each. I think that's the angle that we want to take. Easier said than done. But I'm poignantly aware of the fact that actually connecting with the brands requires a sales team, and that's not something I want to get into.

So rather find the sales team, that agency themselves. They are the sales team. So go to them and say, Listen, you're out there making these sales Just shave all 5% of your budget every time and come spend it on SubmitHub So I think that's the angle to take care. And I got to be the first mover on that because I don't know off many people pulling that off successfully. There definitely are influenced your submission platforms, but I think we're in a uniquely well positioned space to be able to accelerate into that quickly.

So that's kind of the next pivot. I just need to make sure that everything else is solved and then I can work on that. Yeah, definitely. I have one more question since you say everything else is solved. But before we go there and I should say one more question on this topic, I've got a couple more questions. The reason I'm so intrigued by this process is I instantly had the thought of What about artists? Sponsorships? So, let's say Ernie Ball strings. They do a lot of sponsorships having people, artists who are already on SubmitHub, submit their music to Ernie Ball and then Ernie Ball says, Yes, we like your music.

We like your social stats will sponsor you. You know, we'll send you a case of strings. You post about it because that's essentially the same system except instead of influencers. You're using the artists themselves who are your core users. And that's just where my mind went with this. Have you had any thoughts about that kind of system? No. That's the first time I thought about it on my initial response. There is a lot of direct sales. Someone's gonna find only balls, set up a partnership with them, get it going.

But I'm sure they also have an agency that does their advertising. So yeah, it's an interesting one. It's definitely a big thing, but hopefully something that maybe in the long run down the road. Years from now, we'll see. Come about. At least that's my hope for artists to be able to get something out of the experience rather than saying Hey, here's our credits. Here's our song Fingers crossed. We get approved that they'll be able to say, Oh, hey, look, we got some extra credits to submit, Thanks to whatever x Y Z sponsor.

Do you know where that is? Actually happening? Is with the distributors. So most of the major distributors have approached us asking for some sort of sponsorship, and in general, it's heading the direction off. Okay, why don't you give your users something on the Savannah? Be it a coupon? Or actually, that's the one we're leaning towards now. So let's say a muse comes along. We said, Cool. You could just offer all of your users amused 20 which gets you 20% off if you're amused. Member, that type of thing. So it's a similar idea, definitely hadn't thought of the one you come up with.

But my main hesitation there would initially just be the liaison between the two. I think What's so beautiful about Samantha right now? on. What's so important to me is that the infrastructure I've created allows all of this to just happen, and our goal is to try and identify a lot of the problems and make that as easy to manage as possible so that it's automated and you don't actually need people on there. For the amount of users and submissions going through the website, the fact that we have so few employees to me is a good sign on.

I don't want to have to hire more employees. I would rather have it all worked magically. With more employees, comes more responsibility and with more responsibility comes more stress on emotions and people to deal with. And that's exactly why I left Google because I didn't wanna have to deal with that all the time on. I don't want my current team to have to deal with that either your proposals cool, but I think it creates a whole lot of work and I think the beauty here is to create a system that just works automatically without having to create those individual partnerships again.

This is where I really struggle when distributors to approach me looking for a partnership Many of them want to get into something pretty deep, and I tend to avoid that. Want to run away from commitment because it's asking me to sort of take my attention from the direction I want to go on the stuff I want to do and stuff I enjoy doing, and suddenly now I'm beholden to someone else on. I have a responsibility towards that. So I think the beauty of submitted to me right now is that in many ways it is a lifestyle business.

It takes care of itself on myself and my team. We don't have massive responsibilities. It's very difficult for any of us to drop the bowl. You're not gonna mess up your presentation. You're not gonna miss your deadline. We don't have deadlines. We don't have presentations. We don't have meetings. So I'd much rather it stay that way and then everyone can do what they want. I mean, yeah, I could definitely see that just because it is like you say magic people are able to connect, and for the most part, you don't have to step in on that note.

Since you brought up Google, you posted that article a few days ago in the submitted chat, which I'll link to in the show notes at Band I've Got rocks slash 66. If you want to read that article of the link, will be there, as well as all the other links to SubmitHub and anything else Jason mentions you worked at Google. Can you talk a little bit about that? And how that played into starting, SubmitHub as well, Going back a little further before everything started. I was working for a consulting firm in Washington, D. C. And I was doing what was called executive compensation.

So what happens? There is a bunch of companies who want to pay their executives hire a third party consultancy to come in and verify that the amount that they're going to pay their CEO is reasonable on. They do that in case any sort of audit comes up, be it from the board of directors or shareholders or the I. R. S. Right. They want to say when it comes along and you say, Well, your company made $1 million last year, but you paid yourself $750,000 a salary. They can say, Oh Well, here's the report from the consultancy that demonstrates this is reasonable.

So that's what I was doing on it sucked. I hated it. I started in the shuffle around that time. It was an outlet for me to actually do something I was passionate about, and I was recently out of university, and so I was under the impression that jobs suck. You do job so you could get rich one day and retire and then do the stuff you love. But I was doing in the shuffle on the side. I actually remember my boss telling me that I should stop doing in the shuffle and focus on the things that matter which in my career stop wasting your time with your little blawg so things weren't going well there.

And I was on a performance review on the way out. They were looking for ways to fire me. The writing was on the wall, and that's when someone reached out on Lincoln from Google and said, Hey, we're trying to hire someone for our internal executive compensation team. Are you interested on? Of course, I wrote back saying, Yeah, I mean, executive compensation is being a passion and a dream of mine for all these years. It's definitely the thing I excel at the most. My boss is really happy with me.

Things were going fantastically When can we do the interview? And so I started doing the interview process with them because, as you might imagine, there aren't that many people doing this in the US and so the pool of candidates was quite small. It probably wasn't more than 50 people that they were not just interviewing, but actually sourcing. And so I made it to that. And one of the standards for them was the fact that I had this music blood going on back in 2010. The big kicker Google was this idea of Googling nous, which no one could really put a finger on exactly what it meant.

But they would often use examples of, you know, he's an excellent person in his job, and he also runs this orphanage on the side, or she does fantastic stuff here, and she was also an Olympian, so they're looking for someone who could do their job because everyone could do their job. But you also have some sort of accolade, and they would use that to boast, to say, You know, Google's got the best employees, we do the coolest stuff. And so obviously in the shuffle doesn't compare to an Olympian or, you know, like they had Vince so fucking there who was one of the inventors of the Internet like that.

You know, that's a different level, but they're looking for these things and they thought the music blood was cool. And I think in the shuffle was actually one of the main reasons I got hired Google. I remember on the day I went to go do my in person interviews, they flew me from D. C. To San Francisco to do these interviews, and I had lunch with a group of three people, and they were all going to Coachella that afternoon, and we just kicked it off straight away.

That sort of indie shuffle twist made them really interested, so I think that's one of the reasons they hired me. So what was it like working at Google? I worked in executive compensation, which meant I got to interact a lot with their executives. But it also meant that it was a really high pressure role where everything was a fire drill. If Sergei or Larry comes with a question, suddenly you've got to drop everything, get him the answers, make it look impeccable and do all of this stuff.

And also we were reporting to the board of directors to, so they wanted nice summaries of everything going on at the executive level. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It was really high paced and intense, and when I started, I was quite intimidated because I knew I was on my way to being fired at my previous job, but they didn't. So I already had this sort of low self esteem. And then I also knew I was surrounded by people who graduated at the top of their class at Harvard.

They didn't. But that's what I thought initially when I was hired. So it was quite intimidating. And I think that actually helped in a way because I just went out at being like, I'm gonna prove I could do this and that worked out really well. Over the course of three years, I tripled my pay. It was crazy. So it's running up that corporate ladder really quickly. But I was working from seven am to nine PM every day and a little bit on weekends, and you were on demand at all times.

You had to be able to drop everything. When the you know the head of human resource is calls you or you got a meeting with Eric Schmidt tomorrow or whatever, it was pretty intense. And as a 25 or 26 year old sort of heading into that code of life crisis of trying to figure out what you want to do with your life. The part that really bothered me was this stress and sense of urgency for something that I could not in any way feel was Riel, You've got to get an Excel spreadsheet to someone.

Why am I stressing out about this? What does it mean in the great scheme of life? And I was having these existential crises about it, and all this while in the shuffle was growing and growing and growing on the side. So I was learning a lot of stuff very quickly, high paced environment. But it was burning me out, and I didn't enjoy that pressure off performance reviews workplace politics. Obviously, the faster you grow, the more people you're going to run into as well, who are also trying to grow fast.

And Google's hiring a bunch of people who are, you know, very motivated to do that type of stuff. So competition with Steph and I couldn't deal with it. So 2013, I signed a big deal with Spin magazine $180,000 a year. That's what they were gonna pay for complete control of indie shuffles advertising. It worked out to something like a $5 CPM guarantee on our advertising, which at the time was pretty reasonable. The big difference here was 100% fill, which was crazy, so they were going to guarantee 100% fill $5. CPM boom signed the contract on a lot of us did hype machine.

Did they signed on with them for obviously more money? Stereo gum got bought out by them. They're basically targeted The top 20 blog's in the world and signed deals with all of them. They never ended up paying us. They went bankrupt, but I didn't know that at the time. And so I took this money and I quick google. I thought, Geez, man, $180,000 a year. I'm gonna call about $100,000 of that towards employees and hiring upon the dishy technical team on. I'm gonna have $80,000 a year for myself. I'm gonna go travel the world.

I'm gonna work from wherever I want $80,000 as a 27 year old bachelor. That's great. That's awesome. So there I was and I was living that lifestyle. Unfortunately, I had a nice buffer from when I was working at Google, because you don't have to pay for your food when you transport or anything like that. So employees that work of Google save up a lot of money really quickly, except for the ones who had bad drug habits. But that was a different story. E can think of a few people who save no money because they loved cocaine.

Silicon Valley. Now, like you say, all the stress that is on the teams there at Google, so I'm sure that does not help. There is a lot of pressure in the Silicon Valley in general to stand out and be amazing and do these epic things, and that pressure is probably most poignant on people in their early twenties for whom you know the world is your oyster and you have to accomplish this stuff and you need to find meaning. It's definitely not as appropriate. Once you hit your thirties and forties and you've got kids, your whole perception of what life is shifts on work is no longer about how quickly you can climb the corporate ladder a bit more about life.

So Google was awesome, But I'm not going back. Yeah, from what you're saying, I absolutely don't blame you for going back there. Even if you didn't have SubmitHub, I would say, Why do that to yourself? But now that you have SubmitHub, a lot of people saying Running your own business is the most stressful thing ever, and I'm sure running Submit. Hub can be very stressful, but it seems like you take a very laid back approach to it. You're the sole developer of the site, so ultimately things fall on your plate.

Even though you have four other staff members, they're not the ones doing the coding. So how do you handle the challenges that come up along the way without getting too stressed? out about it. For many entrepreneurs, I think one of the most daunting and challenging things upfront comes on the finance and Texas side. It's a complete distraction from what you actually want to do, and it's a very technical thing that has to be done right on DSO Hankou. My CFO does a fantastic job there. I mean, he's got a background in finance.

He knows what he's doing. He enjoys doing it, and that is actually a big step in taking off that initial stress. And I think for me what's important as an entrepreneur, as the person running this company is to make sure that I'm still doing stuff I enjoy every day, which is why I mentioned earlier I don't wanna build up big team. I don't wanna have all this responsibility and stress because that distracts me from what I enjoy doing, which is sitting down and coding and interacting with people as well.

And so I've done a pretty good job of maintaining that over the last five years. Staying stress free is huge. One important rule don't roll out code before going to sleep. Actually, now that we say this, I rolled out code right before our podcast. So let's double check submit. Hub is still online. Looking good. Yeah. No, I've been messing around with the survey, trying to get things running smoothly so that the chat room step today and everything is connected. And anyway, I'll deal with that after the it's pretty stress free.

Though I've had very few moments of complete and utter stress, I can think back to a couple in 2018, are a host and published an article on Always Take About SubmitHub, which was not overwhelmingly positive. That was stressful. Yeah, I can imagine. Generally, I've gotten a lot better just being a bit more Zen about it. And I think the trick is to just avoid getting yourself into situations that end up being stressful. We've learned a lot over five years. We've learned how to deal with different issues that come up the best way to respond to customers how to avoid conflict, that type of stuff.

And so once you can put that into place, actually execute on that. I think you dio find yourself in a much better headspace. That's great. And I hope that for any artists listening think of it that way. I don't know how many artists will be able to relate to running a software company, but they can absolutely relate to what you were just saying about not letting it get to you. If there's a way as an artist, too, go out there and not let things get to you and stress you out.

That's going to make you so much more capable of making good music because stress is going to kill your creative ability. So, Jason, just two more quick or perhaps quick, depending on how detailed your answer gets questions for you and then I'll let you go because I know it's getting late over in South Africa, The first thing is, are there any submitters who have really stood out to you because their campaign was so out of left field and creative and unique? There's a publicist named Mikael who owns a company called Purple Bite, who I specifically remember created Jeffs with his artist, and the pitch was in that Jeff.

So he actually brought his artist into a studio, and then they would hold up signs with, like riding on it that actually was specific to each blogged, and they literally did this for every single person I wanted to pitch, and that to this day stands out as a really labor intensive but effective way of doing it on. He put that in the bio on the song, but he also sent me an email to make sure he's like I sent this to one SubmitHub. You can check it out there, but I just wanna make sure you sold this Jif a swell and I saw it.

I was like, almost makes me want to publish the song even though I don't like it, but I didn't publish it. My integrity is too strong, but I thought that was a really big stand out in terms of a really effective technique for grabbing someone's attention, not direct answer to your question. But I always said it's for an artist who is resubmitting to a curator who has approved them in the past. The best thing you can dio is to message them through the already existing chat, but don't link them to your song.

Just say, Hey dude, just a heads up have released a new song I sent it to you as a premium submission or even I sent it to you is a standard. Hopefully, you find it in your feet. I love that. The first thing I do when I get that is I just go over to my feed, save it for later on. Give it a focus. Listen, but it's the thin line to walk because as soon as that artist says, Hey, thanks for sharing my lost song. Here's a link to my new song, Dude, No, you're not respecting the process.

So that's actually really easy and effective technique that I think a lot more people should use once you've built up 10 or 20 approvals, if you're going to resend it to someone who showed your song, give him a heads up that you sent it the way that they wanted to be sent. I never thought about that, but I think that's amazing because for the block I run, there's two of us taking submissions, and we just trade every other day, and that's how we switch off and you know, we'll leave notes like, Oh, hey, you might check this song.

You know you might enjoy it because we don't have identical music tastes. But if artists were to do that every time, they can obviously message the person who approved that song, not just the block in general, but the specific person. And that way I know. Hey, check right now, even if it's not my day, Look for that song and pull it out. That's, uh, that's a wonderful idea. Yeah, and by telling them that you sent it the normal way, you're respecting the process. There's nothing that bugs me more than someone putting the link there because I'm going.

Look, I'm ready listening to submissions. I'm not gonna stop what I'm doing to listen to your song. But you're not making me stop what I'm doing. You're saying it's there when you want to, just a heads up and I'll actually jump in and save it because I don't want anyone on my team responding to it before I get a chance to listen exactly well, to wrap things up here for someone who's brand new to the site, how do you recommend they start? I know you talked earlier about the new system you've rolled out to show them.

Just the top recommended curator is, but first day on Submit. Hub. Where should an artist start? Well, you wanna go to submit app dot com slash Submit upload your song. What I would have said yesterday was, Make sure you're focusing on people who have a genre match above eight out of 10. If they're slightly lower than that, give it some close fault and avoid anyone who's quite, um, approval percentage. That's below 1% pick, possibly even below 5% on. Now that recommended picks Button just takes care of all that. So my actual go to advice is no longer pertinent.

Eso you go to advice is don't uncheck that button. Go to advice is don't uncheck that button. Yeah, still definitely focused on the highest genre match. I mean, it's very important to get your genres right. And I think if I would give any artist big tip, it's probably actually to go listen to your interview with Steve. He has some excellent guidance on there about the way to approach SubmitHub and techniques that you can use to maximize the cost effectiveness off your time on SubmitHub. Well, I appreciate that.

I'm sure Steve does, too. If anybody wants to check that episode out, you can find it at Band. I've dot rocks slash 63. That's the numbers six and three. Jason, thank you so much for coming on the show and talking about this for anyone listening. I know it's a little bit different than the interviews we usually dio, but I wanted to get Jason on here to talk about the realistic side of SubmitHub and where he is coming from in creating this site. This service so you can have a better understanding of what SubmitHub does and how you can use it and the background of it.

If you should use it, yeah, if you should use it, you're right. You don't have thio. It should just be one tool in your toolbox is what I would say. There are so many different ways that you can market your music. Anyone who relies entirely on SubmitHub is probably doing it wrong as greatest SubmitHub is I would have to agree with that. You go into a recording studio and you use different mix. You don't just use one mike the same thing with SubmitHub. Instead of recording, you're sending your music out there.

You don't just use one microphone you don't use just one tool. So all that aside, Jason, thank you so much. If people want to try, SubmitHub. They could go to SubmitHub dot com. Are there any other links that you want to throw out there? You know, in the shuffle dot com obviously, is your blogged. But anything else Do you want to shout out? Obviously, yeah. We're trying to grow that one. Make blogging Cool again. Right down with the corporate Spotify telling you what to listen to.

Do you want to listen to the algorithms and the corporations Or do you want to listen to human decisions? Music? Blogging, my friend. It's back to the future. Wait, Let's bring Bring the God make music Blogging cool again. I don't know what it is. I still think it's pretty cool, though, and it does suck the amount of power that Spotify has. Man, this whole new thing where you could give up your royalties and they'll help promote your music. I mean, come on, come on. Don't even get me started anyway.

I always wonder what's gonna come off to Spotify because if you had asked me in, say, 2000 and 11. What was gonna come after Soundcloud? I'd be like, Dude, What do you mean? What comes after Soundcloud and Soundcloud? Is it? How could there be anything that comes off the soundcloud? Ups was wrong. So what's it gonna be off Thio? Spotify? I I'm putting my money on music plugs, but not much money, like $5 because I'll probably lose it. Uh, well, I think there will be something that comes next play within the next 5 to 10 years, and I hope that it's music blog's.

But I don't know if I put my money there. Yeah, and I don't know if there will be either. Google's being around for a long time. I mean, once you really settle on a system that works, those systems tend to not go away. So Spotify might not be going away. The biggest threat is that they pull things too closely into their ecosystem. But that's a whole different discussion. And I don't actually know if I'm well informed enough to make accurate predictions there. I wouldn't say I'm an expert either, but I do know that Spotify is chasing podcasts quite a bit.

Do you even listen to podcast? Does anyone listen to what is a podcast? I mean, come on. I should listen to more podcasts as a podcaster, myself and to all the listeners who are listening to this podcast. Thank you very much. Yeah. If anyone's made it this far. Dude, what are you doing? You probably have it on two XP, don't you? That's the smart move. Well, just pat yourself on the back on. Thank you. All right. Well, Jason, risk off of SubmitHub and Andy Shuffle. Thanks so much for coming on the show and taking the time to share your thoughts.

My pleasure, James. That does it for this episode of the Bandhive podcast. Thank you so much to Jason Grishkoff from SubmitHub for taking the time to talk about his experience with Submit, Hub and Google and running a block and everything that we chatted about during this episode. It was a real pleasure to get to talk to him. And here's some of his tips for artists on SubmitHub. If you're listening in apple podcasts or iTunes, it would be super appreciated if you could go and leave us a rating and review for the band.

I've podcast because that helps immensely getting the show out there for other people to see and learn and further their music careers. Thank you so much again for listening. We'll be back with another new episode next Tuesday at 6 a.m. Eastern. Until then, have an awesome week. Stay safe and, of course, as always, keep rocking.