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If asked to picture an LA-based, music-centric startup with millions of users worldwide, it would be easy to conjure up an image of a hipster team of music snobs focused solely on monetization and big-name partnerships. But the team behind plug.dj, a music-sharing site, is quite the opposite: they are, and always have been, focused on their online community and the people that make it up.
In just under two years, the team has fostered the growth of this community to millions of users in over 190 countries.
The plug.dj team has achieved such fast success not only by giving its users a great user experience (like the cute avatars!) while they chat and take turns sharing music, but also by emphasizing positive user behavior. Compared to other sites used to share music like, say, YouTube that are cluttered with petty comment fights, plug.dj truly values positivity: “Our view of it, holistically, is that positivity trumps any other type of feeling and interaction that people could have online,” co-founder and CEO Alex Reinlieb said.
By emphasizing a positive and collaborative online community, Reinlieb said his team is hoping that they can grow their user base “to the size we know it can get to” in 2014.
“We have pockets of users all around the world, but we know we are just scratching the surface of what we have to achieve,” Reinlieb said.
Since the beginning of 2012 when founders Steven Sacks and Jason Grunstra turned a few “’ah-ha’ moments into a relatively simple, but very dynamic product,” Reinlieb said plug.dj’s user base has had a large influence over the product.
“The first five or six months was iterating and iterating and listening to our early adopters - and shaping it around our community, which is something that we still hold very dear to heart right now,” Reinlieb said. “That is something that is very much appreciated by our audience.”
While still listening closely to first users, the founding team used a largely “hands-off” approach in cultivating their user base, allowing the community to grow organically with the tools provided by plug.dj.
One such tool is plug.dj’s Brand Ambassador program, which was launched about six months ago due to repeated requests from users wanting to help out the site in any way that they could, Director of Communications Sachi Kobayashi said.
“Since the site started we’ve had people who wanted to help us,” Kobayashi said. “Many of them even admitted that they weren’t even sure how they could help us or what kind of skills they had to offer. But we know that that’s a very valuable thing when you have a product that’s technically a for-profit product and people want to volunteer to help make it happen because it’s so meaningful to them.”
Today, the plug.dj Brand Ambassadors provide key internal support, like community moderation and regulation, that plug.dj’s own 10-person team cannot always provide. Up until just a few weeks ago, that 10-person team was a team of five that was “stretched fairly thin,” Reinlieb said.
But now as plug.dj continues to hire (thanks to a $1.25 million funding round in December), team members will be able to explore more partnerships with music labels and brands. For example, plug.dj is currently serving as an engagement platform for the Monstercat community and label, which supports electronic music artists around the globe.
As plug.dj pursues more brand partnerships like this one and grows its own team in order to do so, Reinlieb said that plug.dj’s culture of valuing people and community will never be sacrificed.
“We are obviously looking to build a successful business and a successful product,” Reinlieb said. “But the other offshoot of it is that we feel like we can really have a big impact in the world in the way we connect people around something that is generally liked: music, entertainment and video. We keep that at the forefront in the way we operate online and offline.”
Come hang out with the Built In LA community on plug.dj! (I started with a cheesy LA-themed playlist, but hopefully our BILA members will take this community in a cooler direction.)
