Ryan Leslie gave every fan his phone number. It’s (646) 887-6978. 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 R&B 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.
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Superphone Profile on Crunchbase
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