My venture concept stems from a very open opportunity that I discovered while in college. I started off writing and freestyling music, but I needed a sound engineer to have an instrumental to put my words onto. It took me several months to find someone that did that, and when I did, they ended up moving out of the state. I eventually found someone that didn’t engineer instrumentals, but could record my lyrics and I was very content. This was until I heard the final product and realized that he was not professional at all. I understood at that point that quality is a major factor in music production. This was around the time that I discovered the open opportunity. I wanted to not only engineer instrumentals for musicians, but I also wanted to help record people’s lyrics as well. This was the start of my journey in developing Trust and seeing how all the pieces come together. The first thing I did was think of the demographics. I wanted to understand who else has these problems and desires. I found out that there are many other people who want to make music as well. Even better, many of those people do not know how to make the music, they only know how to write the lyrics, just like I did when I was starting out. This is around the time that I started learning how to make instrumentals and record. My friend Nico was actually one of the first people to get me into it, and he taught me a lot of the basics. I saw that he had all of the equipment necessary to start recording, mixing and mastering. This intrigued my interest. I wanted to learn how to do all of that, but I also knew that time was crucial to getting this idea off of the ground. This is the point where I asked Nico if he would be down to start working together and creating a mini studio for people in South Florida. He told me that he thought it was a good idea and that he was all for it. At this point, we started writing up our business plan and we had to come up with a marketing campaign. We did it, and then came the act of getting all of the equipment together. This required a strategy as well, because we had to create an environment friendly to the customer, but also comfortable to us. Luckily, Nico already had all the equipment and we both had the skills necessary to move forward at that time. Our next biggest pivot comes then.
We started thinking more into expanding the brand, and we located another opportunity right in front of us. It was that of music videos. Music videos were such a big part of the music culture and we really believed it was the next step in making Trust an even more valuable company and brand. We both knew how to make music, but neither of us knew how to make music videos though. We knew that we had to outsource for this skill and it just happened to fall into our laps. I was working with someone who had a company at UF called Roblex. They offered many different videography options and would do small films, ads, and videos for a price. We realized that all of their employees were experienced videographers and this made us realize they would be perfect for our position. We needed someone who could make videos and act as a contractor. They didn’t have to be with us while we were making the music, but we needed them when someone would request a music video. They would then come, hear the vision of the customer, and recreate that vision with a bit of their own twist. This made us a triple threat. There are many studios that record, mix and master music. There are fewer studios that record your music and offer instrumentals. There are even fewer studios that record, offer instrumentals and create music videos in one. We knew that we were onto something, we just had to pitch the idea to our videographer and then our team would be all set.
The venture concept had then arose. We were an all around production company, focused on music, but also providing video services as well. This really helped set our foundation, and it was the beginning point of everything to come. We then all three started brainstorming on how we would market ourselves. We thought it would be in our best interest to offer many discounted deals. We started with buy one, get one free instrumentals, and then we moved onto the refer-a-friend program. That was one of our best ideas, because it helped expand our customer base, retain previous customers, and it gave our customers a bonus for referring us to other people. It was a win win for everyone involved. From this point on, we knew we had to reach people through different platforms. We started on IG, Twitter and Facebook. We started making stickers with our information and logo on it and we started sticking it in different places that we knew our demographic frequented. This gave us our initial first impression, and our discounts and programs started really taking shape. Once we started, it became clearer what our mission was. It was to give people an opportunity that they didn’t have previously in content production. We wanted to allow people to express themselves in whatever way they envisioned. We knew that most people didn’t have the equipment or the skill set needed to create and record music, as well as make music videos, so that was our speciality. We made that the bread and butter to this venture concept and we gave people a voice. This was very fulfilling for all of the team, because we all started off interested in our respective fields and wanting to know someone who had the skills to create these things, but found out it was rare to find those people. Now we were those people and it was a good feeling giving back.
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