Ryan Leslie gave every fan his phone number. It’s (915) 600-6978. But instead of a million unwanted phone calls, it’s making him money and giving him deeper intelligence about his listeners than anyone in the music business. That’s why A16z’s Ben Horowitz, Betaworks, and more investors just put a $1.5 million seed round into Leslie’s startup Disruptive Multimedia. It’s turning the SMS-based CRM and direct sales tool called Superphone that Leslie coded himself into a product any celebrity or creator can use to galvanize and monetize their audience. “We’re building a way for artists to own their relationship with their fans” Leslie tells me. Beyond his own hip-hop and RnB recordings, Leslie rose to fame producing for artists like Snoop Dogg, Cassie, and Usher. “What I started to find was that social networks were anti-social networks” the musician says. With platforms like Facebook and Twitter proving unreliable ways to reach fans, and the mobile generation sidestepping email, Superphone builds a bond on the most powerful piece of contact information: the phone number. There’s now 2700 Superphone private beta clients across verticals, including musicians like Lil Wayne and Kevin Jonas as well as authors like Bonin Bough. For a fee based on how many text messages they send plus a 5% tax on ecommerce payments, they know exactly who each of their fans are, how much they’ve spent, and can send them personalized messages and sales offers. Here’s how Superphone works. Celebrities and other clients can distribute a special phone number connected to their Superphone account. Any time a fan calls or texts it, or buys something on one of their online stores and fills out a form, they get a welcome message prompting them to provide some personal info. That could include location, biographical info, or any data type the client wants to segment their audience by. Superphone creates a next-generation phone book that’s actually more of a customer relationship management tool. For now it’s a web tool but the Superphone team hopes to have native apps available in the next few weeks. The Superphone dashboard lets clients view charts and graphs of who is paying for what so they can hone in on their most important fans. Source: Tech Crunch |