In this lightning talk at Hustle Con, Matt Fiedler, co‑founder of Vinyl Me, Please, walks through the evolution of his record‑of‑the‑month club from a skeptical concept in late 2012 to a sustainable business serving over 2,000 subscribers in 35 countries. He describes the initial validation process—collecting ~100 emails via a LaunchRock landing page and converting 12 early paying members—followed by slow, bootstrapped growth driven solely by word‑of‑mouth. Facing a lack of revenue and a small team, the founders made a decisive pivot: they overhauled packaging, redesigned the website, refined messaging, and aggressively pursued media coverage through cold calls and emails. These strategic changes sparked accelerated growth, eventually reaching exponential subscriber acquisition and full‑time operation for a four‑person team. Fiedler concludes with entrepreneurial lessons about embracing criticism, maintaining reckless abandon, and acting without waiting for perfect validation, urging listeners to build now rather than wait for the “right” moment.
Chapters
Uh, our next speaker is Matt Fiedler. Matt's the co-founder of Vinyl Me, Please!, a kick-ass record of the month club with over 2,000 subscribers. Matt, uh, is flying in from Boulder, Colorado to be here, which is awesome. And, uh, he's gonna describe some of the things that he's learned while growing Vinyl Me, Please!. And, uh, just a reminder for the lightning talks, there will be no Q&A, but they're all gonna be hanging out throughout the day, so you can ask all your questions then.
Hi guys, my name, like Sam said, is Matt Fiedler. I'm one of the co-founders of Vinyl Me, Please. So Vinyl Me, Please is a record of the month club designed to create an experience around music. Every month we feature one record that we believe to be essential and package it up with a custom cocktail pairing and a limited edition art print and send it out to subscribers worldwide. So every month we ship out our records worldwide to more than 2,000 subscribers. In addition to the record, subscribers get access to something called The Standard, which is a weekly digest covering the latest in music and lifestyle. So when we first started this idea back at the end of 2012, we had, like many of you, a kernel of an idea. We wanted to get feedback from it. We wanted to understand what people thought about it, what— if they were interested in a service like this, and more or less if they'd be willing to pay for it. So we solicited a lot of our friends, families, coworkers, and whatnot, trying to get their understanding. And what we got back was a lot of negative feedback. People said that they weren't willing to pay for something like this, that they were skeptical of getting a record that they may or may not like, or that they potentially already had. Labels said that it just won't work, that people have tried to do it before and failed pretty miserably. We even talked to an executive at the country's largest vinyl pressing plant, and he basically said, "That was a dumb idea, but thanks for trying." So, as you can imagine, we were pretty demoralized by this. We had put ourselves out there, we had an idea that we believed in, and we really wanted people to be as excited about it as we were. But we didn't get that. But it's OK, because we were young and stupid, so we decided to do it anyways. So toward the end of 2012, when we were getting ready to launch this company, we created a landing page using LaunchRock and basically just tried to collect as many email addresses as we could of people that might be interested in this service. We shared it on our personal Facebook pages, asked some friends and families to share it as well, and ended up collecting about 100 email addresses at the end of the month. So when we were ready to launch at the beginning of 2013, we sent an email out to all those 100 people asking them to sign up. Of the 100, we got 12 converted into paying subscribers. So this may not sound like a lot, but we had 12 people paying us real money. That was like— we were totally blown away by that fact. We couldn't believe that people would trust us to send them music, let alone with their credit card information. So this was something that was really cool for us. It really made us realize that maybe there is you know, maybe this kernel of an idea, there's something here, that there are potentially people that would be interested in paying for something like this. So as we kept going, we started to grow pretty slowly. We got from 12 to 25 to 40 to 50. Eventually by the end of the summer we got to about 100. And we, we, it was just my co-founder and I. We had bootstrapped the whole thing. We hadn't spent a dollar on marketing. We relied solely on word of mouth. And so fast forward to the end of the year, we have 250 subscribers We have a team of 4 people, and it's still a pretty cute side business. It's nothing to write home about. We're not making any money from it. It's nothing that we can sustain 1 person, let alone 4 people on. So we kind of had to have a gut check. We had to think about, is this something that we really want to do, or is it just going to be a side project forever? And what we ultimately decided is that we were going to pour everything that we had into this company. We decided that we were going to overhaul our packaging, redesign our website, refine our messaging. We were going to put ourselves out there even further. Doing cold calls and emails and trying to get as much media coverage as we could. And eventually some smaller things started to hit and we started to grow a little bit quicker. And then some large-scale things started to hit and we started to grow exponentially. To now where we're over 2,000 customers in 35 countries worldwide, and it's sustaining 4 people full-time. So as I look back at this, it's hard not to think about where we came from. And, you know, in thinking about this, we— We learned a lot, and we have grown a lot, and we've done a lot, and we still have a lot of things to do and a lot of stuff to learn, but we've built something that people really care about, and that's what matters to us. And so what I've learned through this process is that as you're building a business, you're always going to have critics, and you're always going to have self-doubt, and you have a choice as an entrepreneur. You can either show up and try and build something and deliver, or you can go home and cave into the pressure. And as an entrepreneur, you have to have some sort of reckless abandon where you're going to force yourself to pursue through the discomfort and build something that you believe in. And that's what makes you a true entrepreneur. So if I were to leave you with anything, it's don't wait for the right time or the right idea or the right validation on your product. Just go and build something today because you never know where it's going to take you. It could bring you to a stage like this in San Francisco, in a place where you've never been before with 400 brand new friends. So thank you, guys.
