Tim Westergen, Pandora's co-founder, grew the platform by emailing users and meeting them in person at libraries and coffee shops Monday through Thursday. What started with two-person meetups eventually drew thousands, creating a direct feedback loop to leadership and attracting advertisers. Sam Parr initially thought it was a waste of time, but Westergen says these in-person gatherings were crucial to scaling revenue.
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So if you want to hear a cool story about that, the founder of Pandora, his name's Tim Westergen. I went and met with him. When I went and met with him, we were— we went out to lunch and he's like, oh, I forgot to do something. Let you— can you walk with me? And I walk with him and then we go and he goes, I got to get a haircut. And so I just sit next to him and this guy's worth probably $600 million. We go to Supercuts, right? And he gets a haircut for $12 and we're sitting there in the barber shop. It's on a Tuesday at 1, no one's there. And he's telling me this story. I go, what did you used to do? How'd you grow Pandora? He goes, here's what I would do. Monday through Thursday, he goes, I had a COO who ran the company. I would go, I would just, he goes, this was before, I think it was a little bit before social media was around. He said, I would email people and I would say, I'm going to be at this library in New York at this time. Any Pandora users in the area come and talk to me. And he said he did that for 4 years. And he goes, here's the first one I did. And he showed me a picture of him at a coffee shop. He goes, 2 people showed up. And he goes, here's the last one I did. And he showed me a picture and it was at the library and there was 2 or 3,000 people there. He goes, I would do that Monday to Thursday. I did meetups everywhere. All I did was travel and I did it for years and it worked out. He goes, he goes, I was like, did it work? He goes, every time I did it, like he was, it would take a little while, but after a couple of years of doing it, I would go to the South or I go to Atlanta and we would see more advertisers come. So it was just like, he goes, it worked out perfectly.
Right.
And because I said the same thing, I go, wow, that's a horrible waste of time. He goes, no, it worked. We made a lot of money off of it and I got to connect with users and I would relay the feedback back to the— right, my CEO, and they would do it.
Yeah. So that case, he's not trying to grow Pandora's active user base. He's taking fans and turning them into diehards and he's, he's generating advertising revenue, which you can get that actually scales enough to where you can get advertisers and he's getting feedback firsthand which is like great for the product to get better. That's a dope story. I love that story.
