At a glance
Role: Content lead and principal · Sector: Music, media, live events · Location: Chattanooga, TN · Started: December 2015

Media sponsor — Nightfall, Chattanooga Film Festival · 3-month startup accelerator · From app concept to operating media company

The Challenge

Undaground won Best Overall Idea at Will This Float, Chattanooga's startup competition, on a pitch for a 24-hour on-demand platform streaming audio curated by local musicians. Radio station in an app.

What the win produced was a name, a three-month accelerator seat, and a room full of goodwill. What it didn't produce was a product, an audience, or a reason for anyone to care the following month.

I know, because I pitched against it. I entered the same competition with a local-access streaming model and lost. The night of the finals I joined the team that beat me.

What I Did

I took content and public presence, and I built the thing the app concept was pointing at.

The first move was recognizing that the product wasn't the product. Streaming a catalog was the pitch; being physically present where the music happened was the business. We morphed into a media company using platforms that already had the audience — Facebook, Instagram, live video — instead of waiting to build one.

Then I made the brand impossible to ignore locally. We produced our own events and became media sponsor for Chattanooga institutions including Nightfall and the Chattanooga Film Festival — showing up with cameras, capturing the weekend, and producing live streams and live podcasts on site. Every piece ran through me: what got shot, what got cut, what got posted, what the brand sounded like.

At the 2017 film festival I programmed a block of regional music videos that drew the strongest response of anything we ran. That block is the direct ancestor of Fresh Cuts, the segment I went on to build for the festival itself.

I also brought in a community lead to be our face on the ground — the difference between a few guys with a logo and something that reads as an organization when you walk into a room.

Results

A startup pitch became an operating media brand embedded in its city's music scene inside eighteen months. Undaground got booked, sponsored, and let in the door at the events that mattered locally, and by April 2017 we were being interviewed on air as one of the outlets defining how local artists reached an audience.

The music video block became a recurring festival segment. The relationships became the next round of work.

The takeaway: the winning idea was an app nobody had built. What made it real was showing up every weekend with cameras and publishing before anyone asked us to.