CEO
Founder
Product Owner
Startup
Management
Japan
Work Visa
Live Music Production
Concerts
Event Organisation
Ticketing
Marketing
Sales
Celebrity
Crowdfunding
Alive was a crowdfunding platform for live music that helped international musicians tour Japan. Japan is a very risk averse market and in the early 2010's promoters had very few mechanisms to assess artist popularity; the result was a lack of touring opportunities for international artists. I founded Alive to solve this problem. The concept was simple; create a crowdfunding project for a band to tour Japan and set a public ticket sales target that had to be reached by a given deadline in order for the tour to go ahead. The business captured the Japanese imagination leading to features with national broadcaster NHK, GQ Japan, Nikkei Shimbun, The Japan Times, J-Wave, InterFM, Nylon and many others. During 7 years of business, we organised hundreds of concerts for thousands of fans and all manner of artists such as; Bay City Rollers, The Animals, Gang of Four, Stiff Little Fingers. Sales grew to an excess of 7 figures. Unfortunately, the occurrence of the coronavirus pandemic forced business activity to be curtailed.
Tour & Concert Production
I produced the tours and concerts working closely with artist management, crew and venue staff to plan and deliver first class live music events. As part of this I became deeply familiar with live music production techniques, translating technical documents, stage management, venue security, logistics, event staffing and the Japanese work visa system.
Japanese Promotion & Marketing
I oversaw the promotion and marketing for the tours, working with our Japanese team to create content for 3rd party ticketing companies, radio stations, print and social media. I also oversaw the implementation of a segmentation strategy to solicit sales via email from our existing customer base.
As the founder of a small business, I directly managed the company, planned our finances and was responsible for recruiting, hiring and firing. The result was a profitable 7-figure revenue business, serving thousands of customers and prospering in the notoriously difficult Japanese music market.