HITRECORD's video: HITRECORD: From Production Company to Platform

There’s something I’ve been working on - along with everyone here at the HITRECORD office - for YEARS. But we haven’t talked about it publicly yet, until today. Some of you know what HITRECORD is. Some of you don’t. (Psst check it out here: https://hitrecord.org/) It’s a deeply meaningful thing to me. When I first started it with my brother, many years ago, it was just a hobby, it was a message board we ran, and this little community started to form, where people would make little videos and songs and stories and stuff together. And I don’t mean they’d just share the things they’d made on their own. Everyone was collaborating. In 2010, we launched it as a new kind of production company, where anybody with the internet could collaborate on all kinds of art and media projects. Since then, we’ve made short films, we published books, we put out records, we made a TV show that won an Emmy, we made stuff for tons of different partners. And whenever any of those productions made money, we paid the contributors. Now, I’m incredibly proud of our community for everything we’ve done as a production company. But I’ve also been thinking for a while now about the limits of being a production company. There are only so many productions we can do at a time, and so there are only so many people who can be a part of each one. What I really want is for HITRECORD to be a place where anybody could come and have that experience of being creative and collaborating with other people. In order to make this possible, HITRECORD is going to evolve from a production company into a new collaborative media platform. So what’s the difference between a production company and a platform? As a production company our focus was on me or people in this office starting projects and leading the community to collaboratively finish them. As a platform, our focus will be on empowering the community to start, lead and finish their own projects. I don’t have a background in technology. Neither do my co-founders. But a few years ago, we started educating ourselves. Meeting the right people, networking, studying, and learning what it would really take to build a platform like this. I didn’t want to rush it. Like I said, HITRECORD is my baby, and I wanted to get it right. I started taking meetings with tech investors. We’ve never had investors before. We’ve never needed them. I paid for the company for the first few years, and then for the last 5 years, the company paid for itself. We knew that to take this huge step we needed both outside capital, and guidance. Raising venture capital is a hard thing to do for any company. The odds of success are really slim. But things went well for us. I’m happy to announce that we’ve raised our first ever round of funding. We raised 6.4 million dollars. That’s a testament to all of you, because we were only able to raise that money because of what we, as a community, have managed to accomplish over the years. I wish there was a way to let you guys hear all the nice things the investors said in those meetings. So recently I actually recorded a conversation with our lead investor, Alex from Javelin Ventures. If you’re interested, you can watch that video here: https://bit.ly/2MGcoTX I only wanted to accept investment money from people that I genuinely connected with, I’ve spent a lot of time with Alex now, and I think he’s a really good guy. He really understands and appreciates who we are. So, the next question is: “Okay, you raised all this money. What are you going to do with it?” Well, the first thing to make clear is, none of that money is cash in my pocket, none of it is extravagant bonuses for the staff, nothing like that. We’ll be using the money to build out the new tools and new platform to support our community and make it grow and to bring as many people as possible the experience of creativity through collaboration. To do that, we’ve started making some new hires: adding a few people to our creative, community, social media, and tech teams. And more big changes are coming, and I think you’ll like them. Now, for those of you watching who have been part of the HITRECORD community for a long time. I know that growing can sometimes feel scary, and when something’s dear to you, your initial instinct can be that you don’t want it to change. But I really think that the thing we all love about this place, that’s not changing. We’re just building better tools that’ll let us do, really what we’ve always wanted to do. Make things together. And yeah, as our tools get better, hopefully more people want to come and use them, and that’s a good thing. When Dan and I first started HITRECORD, the whole point was to put this thing out there that was meaningful to us, and see what other people would do with it. I’m so grateful to everybody who’s been a part of us getting to where we are today. The best is yet to come. Excelsior. Thanks again.