Michael Walker: Yeah. All right. I'm excited to be here today with my new friend, Ian. Ian co-founded Hive.co in 2014, and he continues to lead strategy, product, and growth. They've helped users generate over $500 million in ticket sales using Hive, and they combine email, SMS, ads, presales, analytics to help promoters and artists run marketing campaigns around events. So, I'm really excited to talk to him today to hear his take on, as an independent artist or for the future of music creatives, how can you use Hive and build strategies that actually pay a positive return on your spend. And so, Ian, thank you for taking time to be here today.

Ian Roberts: Thanks for having me.

Michael: Absolutely. So, to kick things off, would love to hear just a little bit about your background in terms of founding Hive and what was your motivation, what was your purpose, and what's kind of driving you today?

Ian: Sure. We've been at it for 12 years, so I'll spare you most of the details because we don't have time. But my co-founder and I started the company in 2014, as you said, and we actually started as a ticketing company. So we knew some promoters in Toronto that wanted some, turns out very specific bespoke things, and built a platform for them. And then as we went to try to sell that platform to other people, we realized that no one else needed that specifically. And we also realized that building a ticketing platform is very difficult for a number of reasons, all of which are not technical. And, yeah, we pivoted the company pretty quickly. So we spent maybe eight months as a ticketing platform. Then we actually spent like five or six years working on your side of the world, working with artists directly, primarily their management teams, sometimes the agencies and the labels, but we effectively built probably what was one of the first fan CRMs. And a bunch of that still exists in our CRM. But we built free download pages off SoundCloud. We built contests. We built various landing pages, a bunch of different fan engagement tools that would let you as an artist put something out on the internet that could get fans to leave some data about themselves: marketing opt-ins, preferences, social authentications. And then we would put that into CRM and give you a bunch of reporting on who your fans are, how to market or advertise to them. And along the way, we built integrations to pull in data from Eventbrite as you were selling tickets and Shopify as you were selling merch. And it was cool. It was a really cool product. It was extremely difficult to monetize. I don't know if that was a function of time and place in the industry, or us being very young entrepreneurs, I'm not sure. But one way or another, around 2018, we were kind of getting frustrated, not growing. And we ended up meeting some concert promoters who were using the CRM that we had built and that integration with Eventbrite to build really good targeting and putting it into Mailchimp to send great emails. And that was when we realized that promoters also needed their own kind of verticalized CRM that stored ticketing and music data as it is. Because ticket order data looks very, very different than e-commerce order data or newsletter subscribers, which is how most of the ESPs are built. So when you take ticketing data and shove it into Mailchimp, you can't actually segment on it properly and personalize your emails. So that was the insight that we had that led to Hive as it is today. Now it's a fully fledged marketing automation platform for concert promoters. You can connect your ticketing platform, whether that's Eventbrite or Ticketmaster. We pull data in real time. We let you target people based on the things that they're buying. So it's easy to say: show me people in New York who have spent over a thousand dollars on hip hop this year and haven't bought a ticket in the last three months, and target them specifically. It also lets you do a bunch of automation like abandoned cart, so that as people are adding tickets to their cart and then not completing checkout, you can automatically send them a chain of messaging, which was very difficult before we built any of those direct integrations. We're still one of the only marketing automation platforms with good integrations with a bunch of the ticketing companies, for a bunch of technical reasons. So, yeah, that's kind of our journey. We work with 1500 or so venues and promoters today. I believe that we still probably have 50 or so artists that are around from the old days using Hive. It's not specifically what we're focused on today, but we still have that CRM, we still have the contests and landing pages and all those engagement tools.

Michael: Okay. Cool.

Ian: That's Hive.

Michael: That's Hive. Awesome. Well, thank you for sharing that. So what I'm hearing you say is that Hive primarily had roots serving artists and is primarily about promoters. And it has some unique opportunities in terms of integrations with these event companies that not every CRM platform has the ability to actually integrate directly with Ticketmaster and these different companies. Cool. That's one thing that's like, as someone who, I don't know if I'm just like a ripple effect or a mirror image of you like 10 years ago, Ian, but we've built a CRM platform called Street Team that's for artists, and it's probably very similar to your purpose and heart with what you built originally. But it's something that I've been both surprised by and also a little bit irritated by is how difficult it is for artists to have access to their ticket sales and their data. It is very. And so I'm curious with Hive is primarily for concert promoters, but I think it gives you some unique perspective as well with the ticket integrations. And I don't want to create unnecessary tension between probably some important partnerships with you. You're gonna get us into trouble today. All right. Can we bring in the CEOs here? But I'm curious, knowing that the majority of folks who are watching this are independent artists or kind of focused in that direction, what's your perspective on the importance of fan data, relationship data in the form of CRMs, and how would you encourage an artist who may not have the same opportunities to connect with those platforms to start thinking about owning their data and actually creating a valuable asset?

Ian: I think there's a few sides to the question. There's technically how and what are the ways to go about getting the data. And then having the data on its own is not valuable, right? It's only as valuable as what you use it for. I think that there's a ton of value to be generated, because artists can go and drive all sorts of revenue with that data, as well as just build and advocate a better relationship with fans, which is important. So I do believe that you can generate that value, but it takes strategy and it takes execution on both sides of the house. Both getting the data, organizing the data, and then actually using it for good with good marketing. So we can speak to each. I'm not sure which is most interesting. Maybe we can start with tactics to get your hands on data. We spent a long time in that world, and I think we have some takes of how we might be able to tackle that together again someday with the people who are solving the artist side of the equation. Well, so maybe you and I could chat about this after. I think there's some maybe unrealistic but beautiful future where the artists and the promoter can more effectively collaborate on the same dataset. Both are often doing marketing in tandem to drive sales for the same show. The promoter's doing their own marketing. The artist is doing their own marketing, maybe to drive the presale, maybe just through dark posts on Facebook. But I think getting them more coordinated towards the same goal, because I think everybody wins when the show sells out, is something that is at least conceptually interesting. There are technical challenges, probably political challenges. But we can maybe sidebar that piece and talk about what is in artist control today. I think that there's all of the ways that you can go and build your own data sets separate from live events. You can build a good website with good opt-in forms for email and SMS. I would definitely recommend that people at least start there. Have good entry points across your social, across your website, anywhere that you show up digitally for fans to sign up to hear from you. So I think collecting email and SMS opt-in is important and is an asset that you can just start building today. I think it's also important to welcome those people and tell them what they can expect from you. Because if you just collect opt-in and don't do anything with it for two years, when you go to message those people, you are gonna see really poor engagement, probably a lot of bouncing, lots of unsubscribing, which is gonna create a bit of a technical nightmare on the deliverability side. But it's really easy to take some sort of simple marketing automation tool and let those opt-ins flow into a welcome automation that says: thank you for joining, this is how I use my list. Maybe you'll only hear from me every six months when I have an update on new merch or new album, but this is what you can expect from me. So I think setting those foundations of good entry points to your lists, good welcome series, setting expectations, and a good engagement foundation with fans are super critical. And then you get into the next layer of how can you accelerate building those lists. Honestly, the things that were the most effective five, six years ago, I think are probably still the most effective. Using the things that are engaging and exciting to your fans as incentives to join your list. When you're dropping an album, having a page, like a drop page, that is announcing that the album will be coming in two weeks and you can hear about it first if you sign up here. That's a great thing. Same with events. Where you get access to your own artist allocation, I think that's especially effective there. I think running contests is really effective. So as you're going on tour, saying: we're gonna give away these few tickets and a backstage experience or something if you join this contest to one of the people that have entered. I think that those are relatively low lift and create awesome experiences for your fans and also help you build that list. So those are the tactics that I still see working today, admittedly not being in that every day. I know there's lots of great tools out there for engaging fans and collecting those opt-ins, but I think you'll thank yourself two years later if you start that today.

Michael: Yeah. Yeah. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. Second best time: today. How do you see that? What do you see most effective today to collect opt-ins from fans?

Ian: Uh, yeah, I mean, it's basically exactly what you just said. So first you need to make sure that you have an audience that you're collecting in the first place. You have an email list, you have a phone number list, and that you intentionally think through the onboarding experience when they first come in and the welcome, setting expectations. The giveaways, contests, but making sure it's aligned so that you're not just getting randoms, but people that actually are a good fit to be in your community.

Michael: So, yeah, it's funny, pretty much nothing has changed aside from, you know, the whole world, but the fundamentals are still the same. Okay, so how about, this might be a way to kind of bridge the gap between the world that you're in right now and the artist world as well. Once people are active and engaged and let's say that the artist is connecting with their community and they have regular engagement, how do they turn that relationship into a real business and start to generate income with it? And maybe what are ways that you would recommend that they think about selling tickets to their shows and using their community in order to not just get followers or likes, but to actually build a deeper relationship?

Ian: This is probably all the basics as well that largely existed five or six years ago that I'm guessing is still pretty prevalent. I think getting a merch store open is easier than ever. You can create these drop-ship Shopify stores where you can just create the designs online and pick a vendor who's gonna print the merch and drop-ship it. So I think creating really cool merch is a great place to start, so that fans can start to represent that brand that they care about. And then I think if you're touring, just building the muscle around actually leveraging and using your artist allocation. I know it's easy to not have the time or the bandwidth to do that, but I think that's a great way to offer value to your fans and to build some higher-margin revenue to yourself, even if you're not gonna price those tickets higher than what might be the GA price. So I think using the presale allocation, saving some of that for really cool experiences that you can either give away or reward high-loyalty fans with, I think is an awesome thing to do. As you get bigger—and maybe this isn't as relevant in the early days—I think if you've built a really good dataset around your fans and you know who's engaged and you know some degree of how they engage with you, how they spend with you, you can start to look at more of the brand sponsorship side and say: we're gonna go to this brand that we think shows high affinity with my brand as an artist and offer some cool activation together while you're touring or whatever. I think that's a bit harder and maybe not worth the squeeze when you're really early on, but definitely as you get to more of a midsize and larger, I think that that can be a meaningful revenue stream. Maybe a thing that wasn't as prevalent when we were on the artist side of the world but is becoming more prevalent is the digital experience side. So being able to do cool, private concerts digitally or whatever, I think that that's a cool thing. I don't know. What else do you see people doing?

Michael: Well, like you expected, I think some of the foundations are still there in terms of merchandising and ticket sales. I would say the two new opportunities that we're digging a lot more into—which, I mean, new, but not really, just reinvented what's always been there—are fan clubs, VIP memberships, communities, those monthly memberships for exclusive access. That seems like an interesting opportunity. And then what you described with the private shows and the private experiences, those have been a really helpful offer to increase the lifetime value of their fans, which, if you're running paid ads, gets especially important. So those are the only other things that come to mind. But what I'm hearing you say overall is that you want to make sure that you have the basics covered with merchandise. You have cool merchandise that people actually want to represent and share. Make sure that you're using the tickets when you're doing live events to actually do things like giveaways or contests as well as selling the tickets. And then starting to explore some of these more innovative, new-edge technologies and things that are starting to emerge. Would love to hear you talk a little bit more about that side of things as well. Obviously when we get into this part of the territory, it's a bit like, I don't know, we'll probably both look like fools five years from now, but would love to hear your take on what are some of the trends that you see that are happening right now and where do you imagine the world going five, 10 years from now as it relates to artists and how they can catch the wave of what's coming?

Ian: Let's see where there's a few directions that could go. My mind immediately jumps to AI. I'm not sure if that's the track that we're trying to get onto, but we can. But I think putting AI aside for a second, I do think just making all of what we just talked about easier and more seamless and more automated for artists is totally a thing. It would be great to see more platforms focusing on and executing that thing end to end, because often artists, they don't either have the technical background on the marketing side or the time or both to go and fit all those pieces together. We can have a 20-minute conversation and make it seem simple, but it is a lot of work to maintain all the entry points and plan the marketing campaigns. So I think it would be really cool to see a platform go and do some of what we're trying to do on the concert promoter side: building out really good workflows, really good automations. This is where I think the AI conversation kind of converges, but using AI to make that stuff more repeatable and accessible. I don't know if there's a platform doing that. Maybe that's what you guys are doing.

Michael: It's almost like you're giving a sales pitch for Street Team, like why we exist. It's great and totally in line.

Ian: That is what you're paying me to do. No. Kidding. Yes, no, but I think I totally see that vision, and it's really cool to hear that you're doing it. So I believe that that's just gonna continue to get easier and more effective for artists, and that's gonna be really cool, because them being able to take more ownership over that fan relationship, I think, is important and powerful. I think technology can play a big part there. So, putting that aside and assuming that those types of platforms will emerge, what I spend all day thinking about and talking to people about is, okay, we've built up that whole tool set for concert promoters, and it is also a lot of work for concert promoters, and they don't have the time or the budget or the team size to execute everything they wish they could. So we're focused on: how do we layer AI on top of that to do the stuff that is repetitive and monotonous that they don't care to do, right? Taking a thousand of those button clicks that could be done by a computer away, so that they can focus on the strategy and the creative, is kind of what we're spending all day on right now. So we're marching towards a world where, as an event hunter, Hive, we're planning out the full marketing plan for you and even kind of scenario planning a couple against each other, given what we know about the budget, and if you're trying to hit break or if you're trying to sell out, and then drafting a bunch of the marketing for you so that you can come in and make decisions. You can come in and think about the creative and how to talk to your users and customers in your brand voice. I think that same opportunity is there for artists and that you will see somebody do that, maybe in one end-to-end platform or maybe as a bunch of point solutions. I think that if you're scrappy, you can piece a bunch of that together today by using the tools that exist. You can take what you know about your users and put it in ChatGPT and say: I want to plan this or that creative campaign. It will give you a bunch of really good ideas. It will give you great copy to start with. You can use it to create cool designs for emails or merch or whatever. So I think I see AI definitely being an awesome tool for the entire live and music industry. But I think there's real opportunities to integrate it directly into the platforms that are built for the different constituents.

Michael: That makes a lot of sense. So what I'm hearing you say is that one trend that you think for sure is already happening and is a big part of this next three to five years is just AI making all the workflows that we're already doing that are monotonous or time-consuming more automatic, to take away the monotony so you can focus more on being creative and strategic. This is something that you're focused on with Hive: making it easier for promoters to be able to run their events and sell tickets, but also it's something that you'd recommend for artists to be exploring—workflows and tools for bringing things together end to end to be able to kind of manage those things. Yeah. And curious where, I mean, especially with your background in events, and you talked a little bit about digital events, but do you think that there's going to be a trend towards more and more digital events versus in-person events? For artists, what’s your take on live streaming and ticketed digital events and anything creative that you see happening there to get ahead of?

Ian: I'm definitely not an expert about the digital live streaming side. We don't really work with—I don't know if the concept of a digital promoter exists—but my intuitive hot take would be: there's gonna be more of both. I think that there will be certain consumers that really love those digital experiences. I think that the people who love going out into the world and experiencing things live, there's something unique about that that's not gonna go away. And then there's probably a bunch of people who would like to do both at different times. So I would put my money on more of both, but how the pie shifts over time, I'm not gonna pretend to know. But I think it can be win-win, which ultimately I think just means more art out in the world, and I think that's good for everybody. More artists able to go and have those direct experiences and engagements with their fans, whether it's digital or live, is, I think, good for the world.

Michael: Absolutely. Yeah, I think what you're doing and bringing people together and community formation is probably one of the most important things that exist right now. It's why I love music: it brings people together. It'll be an interesting ride over the next five to 10 years with AI, and I don't know how much you geek out on things like AGI or superintelligence or Neuralink. We interviewed the first human patient who had a Neuralink installed on the podcast. His name's Noland Arbaugh. We created a song together, telepathically, using his Neuralink. That certainly opened up my mind to, I don't know, what you could see a lot of ways it could go wrong. It's like, oh, cool, someone could hack their brain. But it also seems like it opens up sort of a Matrix-esque potential future where maybe events could be feeling in person, but all digital.

Ian: You had me a little out of my depths with just normal digital live streaming, so I'm not sure how the Neuralink version is gonna hit the industry, but we probably have a bit of time to prepare for that one.

Michael: Yeah, that's probably not gonna be like a tomorrow thing. Everyone's like, all right, time for everyone to get brain surgery. Who knows? Okay, so coming back to this world with live shows and promoters, plus artists, indie artists who are starting to connect with their communities and looking to grow their impact. You have a lot of experience with tactical contests, lead generation, CRM functionality. I'm curious if you have any suggestions as it relates specifically to running contests or promotions like that. Are there any examples or ones in particular that you remember that you'd recommend for most artists to kind of add to the repertoire? We've taken things pretty far into outer space, so maybe coming back with some specific examples could be helpful.

Ian: We can go the more creative—how do you create unique experiences—route. I actually think it's more effective to just nail down the basic blocking and tackling, frankly, where you are taking advantage of all of the different moments and offerings that you could be to go and give fans the opportunity to engage and leave marketing consent. So, if you were going on a tour with 50 tour stops and you were to say: I could spend 50 hours planning one crazy contest for the biggest concert that's happening on the tour, or I could spend one hour planning a very simple contest for each of the stops, I would say do that. So I think getting a good recipe down for what you do for each event and just having a little operation and process that's literally written down and you've nailed down the efficiency of building it with whatever set of platforms you're gonna use. I do think, even though I haven't seen that platform that will automate that thing fully end to end yet, you could actually build that out using something like Make or Zapier and connecting an ESP to your fan engagement tool. I'm not sure if people are doing that. I'm sure someone's done it. I think that stuff's possible with some of the ESP platforms that are out there today. But anyways, I think coming up with those repetitive, boring, I'm just gonna do this every time I'm in a different city, is really important. And then having, for example, good marketing automation on the back of it. Every time you run a contest, you're collecting opt-ins. There's a winner who's gonna have a really good experience, and then there's a bunch of people who aren't. That's an opportunity to still give those people value and thank them. So just nailing all that down, I think, is actually more important than the: can you come up with the crazy creative thing that somehow goes viral. To speak to that thing, though, I do think if you can put together a few separate things—you're, you've got a big show that's happening in a big metro, and maybe you've released an album recently—I think that you can use those things and use different channels and content across your socials. You probably want to put some ad spend behind it. Combining that stuff with backstage experiences is always really killer, and I think fans care a lot about it. You certainly open your audience by making it possible for people to travel. Some of the biggest contests I've ever seen are going and running a full, at least national audience, if not global, and saying: we're gonna take $1,500–$2,000 of budget and offer a night in a hotel and flights for two people. I think that's a great way to break out of only having people locally signing up for the contest. You're probably not gonna have budget to do that for every show, but I think if you were looking for that showstopper—how can I go collect 50,000 emails in one contest—that is often how I've seen it done, because it just gives you access to a far larger audience. So there's a few answers, but I do think getting back to basics is just a good foundation to build.

Michael: Cool. Super smart. So what I'm hearing you say is that to start with, you'd recommend just having a solid foundation with a cycle for each event where you have a good game plan or strategy that you're iterating on. Every time you do an event, you start to get a checklist. You are crossing your T's and dotting your I's for each event. One thing in particular you see that's working well is backstage, VIP types of experiences for giveaways, especially if you run it on a wider scale and you actually pay for people's travel to come to you. Now you can reach a lot more people that are signing up for your mailing list than if you're just doing it for a local audience.

Ian: Yeah. So I think those are cool things. I would say it's equally important to—we're talking about it in a touring context right now—it's equally important to think of it seasonally and thinking about having good engagement opportunities at the right cadence. Let's say you're touring for half the year, but then you're not touring for the other half of the year. You probably want to plan at least a few things during that season where, whatever, maybe you're running a contest to win some merch, you're running a contest to fly out and visit you somewhere, you're running a contest to have a cool, unique digital one-to-one experience. I think those things can often be very low budget and very low lift and keep your relevancy up and keep the engagement with fans, because often it's hard if those lists go cold for half a year, eight months. It literally can hurt your deliverability technically, where you might have been hitting inbox before, and then you let it go cold for eight months and you try to send someone an email and now you're in spam. But it's also just important to keep top of mind, so that when you have that next tour that you're announcing or that next album you're announcing, you still have that relationship fresh.

Michael: That makes a lot of sense.

Ian: So I think literally just planning a calendar out. What's the thing that I'm gonna do each month? Maybe half the year you're touring and it's easy, and the other half just go try a few of those things.

Michael: Yeah. Got it. There's a concept around events in general that I think is really interesting, especially as it relates to marketing, but of course in your world with concerts and shows and event planning. Basically, it sounds like what you're saying is that it's important to think through your events and your calendar, whether that's an in-person show event or your releases—your releases can be events—or these contests for sure, like events that are happening. So you wanna have something pop up.

Ian: Events.

Michael: And to stay engaged. You wanna make sure you don't wait eight months before there's an event or something for people to get excited about. Especially with your background with software development and management—I'm about to go off the deep end here—but Einstein's theory of relativity: time, space, it's all based on events. It does seem like there's some real magic that happens when you can crystallize around doing events and having events, and some things we might not necessarily think of as events act like they are events. So I think there's a lot of value to pull from what you're just saying. I think we've pretty much cracked time and space. Neuralink, we got it.

Ian: We can talk about crypto for a couple minutes if you want.

Michael: Web3. Yeah. There we go. NFTs. Yeah, everyone loves that.

Ian: We haven't done Politics Corner for a couple minutes, although I'm Canadian, so I don't know if I have that much to say.

Michael: Who do we want to make really angry and who should we make this as polarizing as possible? No, I think we're about ready to wrap the conversation. Cool, Ian. Cool. This has been a lot of fun. I really appreciate you taking the space and time to be here, and I know you're a busy guy, so it's very appreciated. It's cool hearing your background both with your roots with music, and what you've built with Hive is amazing. I would love to personally explore too more what we're building and potential integrations.

Ian: Yeah, for sure.

Michael: And thank you for being here. For anyone that is here who maybe is in your world or is interested in event promotion and Hive as a platform, where's the best place for them to go to connect more?

Ian: Hive.co is our website, so you can find us there. And there's also about 30 other companies with the name Hive. So if you get the wrong URL, you can find anything from crypto to project management to thermostats. So make sure you've got Hive.co. And, yeah, I really appreciate you having me. This was fun. It was cool to kind of go back to thinking about the artist side.

Michael: Yeah. Boo.