Startup #5 - OneEPK - Justin Rahardjo

OneEPK is the fifth startup in my 12 startups challenge. It is a platform for DJs, performers, musicians and artists to create and manage their online EPK with ease.

The idea

As an artist, if you wanted to play at larger venues, music festivals or be considered by labels, one of the items they ask of you is an EPK. An EPK, or electronic press kit, is a collection of promotional materials and information about an artist or band that is used to promote their music and upcoming events or releases. It is typically a digital document, often in the form of a website or PDF, that includes things like a bio, photos, videos, music samples, press clippings, and contact information. In other words, it is an artist’ version of a résumé.

For most emerging artist, creating and then maintaining their EPK is one more thing that takes them away from what they should be working on, their music. So I wanted to create a platform that makes it a bit easier for them to do so.

Competitors and market

To see if this is something that is worth building, I spoke to a few DJs that I know of as well as created a survey that I posted on reddit and shared through my own socials. I also had one amazing person reach out to me via LinkedIn who provided a really great insight into the music industry and how something like this could be a great stepping stone into larger things.

There are a couple competitors out in the market, and these are the issues that I’ve found both from testing it out as well as from my conversations.

It was created a while back and has not been updated
Not mobile-friendly
There’s a focus on expecting everyone to be on their platform, therefore they shy away from integrations to other platforms

Based on these, I believe it should be possible to create a better version of what is already out there and attract some customers.

What I built

Creating a platform that does everything an EPK can possibly consist of is not possible for me in a month’s time with other commitments. So I reduced down that feature set to something more manageable but it should still provide some value right of the bat.

I made a platform where an artist can sign in using either Google or Spotify and then create an artist’ page. As part of the creation process, they can choose a unique link that they can use to share anywhere. This page can include their stage name, bio, a cover photo, contact details, links to other social channels and an embedded Soundcloud/Spotify playlist.

If you’d like to see a demo, there is one on the OneEPK homepage.

For those interested, here is the tech stack:

Serverless backend using SST
Landing page and public site is a SSR (Server-Side Rendered) Astro site
Web app is a Vite powered React app

How will this make money?

This will not make money in the near future. I made a decision that I wanted to create a tool that will support artists and so I did not want to charge them to use this tool. I am hoping that my other projects that I have and will launch will be able to support this project to keep it free for all artists. If I had to charge artists, it will likely be to do with merchandising where I can take a percentage of any income created through the platform, or potentially by selling access or data to the record labels that manage these artists.

How have I marketed this?

So far here is how I’ve launched this:

Posted on LinkedIn, Reddit and my own socials
Sent invites to DJ friends to see if they would try it
I went and created a basic EPK for different DJs that I found on instagram and then emailed them a link to see if they would be interested in using the platform themselves

Results

After 1 week since launch, here are the results:

4 users signed up
Received feedback that I will need to allow for extra details, primarily the statistics from different social platforms in one place

What’s next?

There are certain features that I may need to add in, the primary one is statistics from other social platforms, so that they can see how many followers they have on instagram, twitter, spotify, etc. The next one is events, being able to let artist add in their previous and upcoming events. So that their fans can see what is coming up soon. So I will likely be adding these in at some point. The other thing would be to integrate this better with Festack, my earlier project, so that it can better share that SEO love.

That’s number 5 out of the oven! I’m almost half-way and it’s been amazing! I’m really enjoying this challenge and hopefully you are too! If you’d like to chat about your own project, or ask any questions around my processes, please do reach out!