An Agency Story
An Agency Story
Building Brands for the Bands You Grew Up With - BubbleUp
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Company: BubbleUp
Guest: Lee Totten
Year Started: 2004
Employees: 50-99
Working with rockstars sounds glamorous but behind the scenes is a high-stakes, high-pressure world where websites crash, fans demand instant support, and one missed detail can derail a global livestream. In this episode, Lee Totten, co-founder of BubbleUp, shares how his agency became the digital backbone for artists like Jimmy Buffett, Foo Fighters, and The Lumineers.
Key Takeaways
- Why building trust with fans (or customers) matters more than flashy tech
- Why shared experiences, not just content, build lasting engagement
- The best way to turn service slip-ups into raving fan moments
Welcome to An Agency Story podcast where we share real stories of marketing agency owners from around the world. From the excitement of starting up the first big sale, passion, doubt, fear, freedom, and the emotional rollercoaster of growth, hear it all on An Agency Story podcast. An Agency Story podcast is hosted by Russel Dubree, successful agency owner with an eight figure exit turned business coach. Enjoy the next agency story.
Russel:What do Foo Fighters, Jimmy Buffett, and the Lumineers all have in common? They've all worked with today's guest and he's got the stories to prove it. Welcome to an Agency Story podcast. I'm your host Russel. In this episode, we're joined by Lee Totten, co-founder and partner at Bubble Up, a 50 plus person digital agency that's been delivering high tech, high touch fan experiences for the entertainment industry for over 20 years. From running live streams for arena sized crowds to scaling servers under Super Bowl level pressure. Lee's team lives at the intersection of backstage chaos and front row magic. We explore how BubbleUp went from indie artist support to running fan communities for some of the biggest names in music and why being in service to the client and solving the real problems still trumps all the shiny tech. This is a masterclass in humility, hustle, and high stakes problem solving. Enjoy the story. Welcome to the show today, I have the fabulous Lee Totten with BubbleUp with us here today. Thank you so much for joining us today, Lee.
Lee:Thank you. Excited to be here.
Russel:Excited to have you. I'm sure we'll have no shortage of great things to talk about today, and I do hear we share some common Cowboys, fandom.
Lee:We are linked together in, in misery. Seems like, uh, any way the wheels can fall off, they will these days so we're doing our best.
Russel:There's some people out there saying, I feel you too, and there's some people like you, silly Cowboys fan. Just get right to it and then we'll get more to the backstory. What does BubbleUp do and who do you do it for?
Lee:Absolutely. BubbleUp is a digital agency. We've been around for the past 20 years. Our primary market is we do everything from e-commerce websites, custom dev fan communities, uh, fulfillment, uh, and custom application development, primarily in the entertainment space, although we do do a lot of corporate work as well. But we got our start doing it from musicians. Everybody from the Eagles to Jimmy Buffet to Laney Wilson, uh, Lumineers. There's a hundred others I forget. But, uh, we're probably one of the bigger in the space. I deal with a lot of rock stars during the day.
Russel:Just name dropping rock stars, like, uh, like everybody works with rock stars every day. Maybe you've just gotten used to it, but I, I mean, I feel like there could be a podcast episode per rockstar that you've worked with and, and some cool stories there.
Lee:I came from a music background, so, uh, for me this is a great combination of the thing I already love, the people I already like to hang out with, but I always say the pay and the hours are slightly better, so.
Russel:Than being a musician? I've heard that. There is no shortage of musicians turned agency owners, believe it or not. I run into that quite a bit. Tell us about, I'm guessing, what was Young Lee, the musician, what was he doing?
Lee:Absolutely. I actually started out as a, as a writer, writer. I was a traditional English major with a philosophy minor, just to make myself that much more marketable in the marketplace. But I found that writing was a very solitary, lonely art. Spent a lot of time alone and once in a while you might get some feedback. That got me into music. I played full-time for a while, had some success with, of all things, a song about Jagermeister. I always dreamed that someday I would be on National Public Radio. I did not think it would be for a song about Jagermeister, but there we are. But then I ran into some issues and blew my voice out. And I discovered that, uh, it's tough to make a living as a singer songwriter if you can't sing. But in that time I came up in the era when the web was just brand new. My first website, I think was in 92 or 93. When I was playing full-time, I was creating my own website, doing my own marketing. I think we were using MySpace back then even. But I learned how to code. I learned how to build a website. I learned how to market through the internet and all of that. So when I lost my voice, uh, through a series of events, ended up meeting my business partner who was doing a lot of cool technical stuff for Jimmy Buffett, and his idea was, hey, let's do this for other artists, mostly to empower them to be able to control their destiny a little more. A lot of times artists are at the, at the mercy of the labels or their fulfillment partners or their managers, and we wanted to try to give them the tools to be able to run their own stores, to run their own websites and do all of that. That sort of started us on our journey.
Russel:There's a really a billion cool stories in there. Let's go back to the music career. First, just so I don't forget to ask, what's the name of the song?
Lee:Oh, yeah, sadly, if you Google the Jager song, I still show up. That's the whole thing.
Russel:You don't seem to love this accolade in the end.
Lee:Oh, no, it's, it's fine. I do remember when it, when that song first came out, I obviously as an English major, I write songs about my feelings too. This song was starting to get popular and I got asked to do a big show for a radio station, uh, in front of like 20,000 people. I called up a friend of mine who used to manage Aerosmith, and I said, man, they want me to do this song and do this show, but like, I'm not, I'm not Weird Al Yankovic. I remember he goes, Lee, do people come and see you because of that song? I said, yes. He said, can you play your other stuff after? I said, yes. He said, then embrace it. You're lucky to have something that people want to hear. That's held true through all the agency stuff as well. Take advantage of the wins when you can and, and don't be afraid to, to own them in order to, to grow from there. I've come to terms with it. It's all good stuff,
Russel:All right. Sounds like some therapy, maybe, got you, got you through all that.
Lee:Right? Absolutely. A lot of therapy.
Russel:This darn hit song that you had to endure. I'm not a musician by any means. I can't even play like, uh, tapping my fingers. But I imagine that has to be what a lot of musicians feel like, if I have to play this song one more time, like what all their hit stuff. Or maybe, maybe some of'em do learn to enjoy it. I don't know. But it doesn't seem like an uncommon challenge of having, having to cater to that need.
Lee:What makes it unique every time is the audience. When you're playing a song that you've played a thousand times, if the audience is into it, it's fulfilling. I think it's, it's probably the same as, as we've experienced from the agency side. Have I built a website before? Yes. Thousands. But when you're doing it and you're solving a problem for a customer and you're giving them something, an advantage they didn't have before, it's, it's fulfilling in its own way, even though the work is repetitive at times. It's really about the results, uh, and the people that you're, you're, you're catering to that make it fun.
Russel:That's good perspective. We can apply your whole music career clearly, clearly to agency, uh, all, all your agency work, which is good. Maybe that's why musicians make good agency owners. It sounds like you landed in a niche pretty early. Was that the goal? Did that just come naturally be like, hey, I'm doing music for, for rockstars and that's what I need to keep doing? Or was there some trials and tribulations on that journey and kind of making that part of your focus?
Lee:In terms of us as an agency or me personally?
Russel:I guess both. If they're different.
Lee:I was a musician who didn't have a voice, so when the opportunity came to start a company and bring some income in, I thought that sounded like a great idea. I wasn't sure how long till I'd be able to get back to singing. But we, we definitely started with the idea of, uh, focusing on musicians. Like I said, my business partner had worked with Jimmy Buffet, um, back in the broadcast, uh, FM days. He actually helped Jimmy put a radio station online called Radio Margaritaville, uh, which is now on SiriusXM. We knew a lot of independent artists between us and he wanted to help them have some of those same tools. Back in those days there was no Shopify, uh, there was no WordPress, there was no, um, you know, Squarespace. It was really hard for musicians to build websites. It was always some strange guy driving a Pinto, uh, who was also selling weed on the side, who would try to get you to do a website for you. But we wanted it so that they could sell their own merchandise. They could build their own mailing list. We often say that that, uh, you know, businesses have fans too. They just call'em customers. I think the fundamentals apply across, whether it's the music business or whether it's traditional business, you want to have control. You wanna have agency over your own destiny. The best way to do that is having as much of the website under your control, building those mailing lists, being able to cater direct to the fans and open that communication between them. Music was intentional. We always thought it was about downloads. This was right before iTunes became a thing. We've taken some twists and turns and it's, it's been interesting because we've, we've come to realize that we're really heavy on the technical side. We're geeks, and so we like to solve problems with the technology. We love to build systems that help our clients do what they need to do. For us, that was building, at the start, building a content management system that would cater to fan clubs and to musicians with the discography and tour dates and all of that.
Russel:You've done such an amazing job. I can continue to draw the parallels, but uh, I don't know, was your early stage tagline, don't get your weed and your website from the same guy?
Lee:No, it was, uh uh, I can't actually say it. I'll tell you after.
Russel:You didn't even ask if this podcast was rated, but it must be bad. Fair enough. Now everybody's like, what the heck is he talking about?
Lee:We don't take ourselves too seriously. We take the work seriously, but we try to have a good time and have fun in the process.
Russel:That's all we can do. That's all we can do. I'd be enthralled, but maybe, maybe you were on the music scene. You're kind of a star yourself. When you were working with, I don't know, who was your first big shot client and was there, were you starstruck at all or what, what was that like?
Lee:Jimmy Buffett, Margaritaville was our first. I had grown up a Jimmy Buffett fan. To get to work with him, um, and to realize just, I always say, you know, the image of Jimmy Buffett's pretty cool, but the real person was even cooler. To get to work with him and to see how his mind work and his, his acumen for business, his ability to connect with the fans and to carry sort of his personality through all of the different things that he had done was really cool to see. Then from there, I think our next one was, uh, uh, Big Rich from Music Mafia, uh, country music guys. I don't necessarily get starstruck, but, but if you don't appreciate the fact that you're in the presence of some of these folks, I think you're not living life quite right. We got to create a, a series called Live from Darryl's House with Darryl Hall, where we actually filmed a bunch of concerts from his house in upstate New York. I remember being in the room for one of the first ones and Darryl Hall is singing, and I mean, no matter how much I've been around people like that, you can't be in a room and Darryl Hall singing and not go, oh my gosh, that's Daryl Hall singing. It's incredible. It's been neat in that respect. I don't get starstruck, but it's, it's really cool to realize that a lot of the folks that succeed work really hard and are very talented. It's not an accident for sure.
Russel:What a perspective. I can feel the sense of appreciation. I've heard Hall and Oates and, I can't imagine what that's like, just like, almost like a private live performance from a great musician. Gets the hair on the back of my neck standing up a little bit. Obviously some of the output of what you're doing from a work perspective, you know, probably is different, right? We're not creating fan pages for, um, investment business or something along those lines. I think you said you did some work outside of the music space, but what is the unique part about other than who they are, I guess you could say, about working with musicians versus the typical business world?
Lee:My short, sort of humorous answer is the phone rings at all hours. They don't have business hours, so you may find out late on a Friday night that something's being announced Saturday morning and you have to adjust. We've got a team that's pretty used to that, and the music business does not have normal hours and a lot of things happen fast, uh, and unexpectedly. That's always a challenge. Otherwise it's really no different than any other business, uh, except obviously the, the profile of it. One of the, the really fun things is because we run the fan clubs, we run a lot of, we do a lot of customer service. We work with the fans themselves and they've come to know us. I've actually been at shows where I'm trying to help somebody or see somebody struggling with something in, in the ticket line, and I'll talk to them and say, I'm Lee from BubbleUp. Can I help? They go, oh my God, you're from BubbleUp. We love BubbleUp. I told some folks the other day, I'm like, how often is it that people know the, the agency that does the website of their favorite artist?
Russel:Probably next to never.
Lee:That's a testament to the customer care folks. My business partner, his dad was a mechanic who, uh, auto mechanic in small town Arkansas who really put a, a focus on taking care of customers. That's what has driven us. We'll go above and beyond to try to take care of customers. We have a saying, pick up the phone. Don't just send an email, pick up the phone, and we'll do that with fans as well. That's sort of the through line, through everything that we do and that's what's helped us have this connection with fans where they know who we are.
Russel:Okay. And then just more curiosity in this line of work, similarities and differences is, do you kind of have a, a tried and true recipe of, generally speaking, all musicians need to have this, this, and this? Or is it just so very unique based upon the, the musician themselves and their, and, and the fan base and everything is a completely new recipe when, when you're looking at it across the board?
Lee:I think it runs, it runs the gamut. It's different for every artist depending on their situation, but it's also constantly evolving. Where we were 10 years ago or 15 years ago, where you'd say your website needs to be this big evolved thing where they can find information about everything. Now of course, this, it feels like every social, um, network is its own outpost where you wanna push information and maybe the website is more of a hub. It's constantly adjusting and constantly having to figure out what works for each artist and their needs. Do they have a huge fan base? Are they a legacy artist that has a huge discography in which case we're going on? We're gonna want to allow fans that may have just discovered them to dive deeper on the website, but at the same time, you know, as I like to say, uh, you know, a, a really expensive website isn't gonna make people go there. Just'cause you build it doesn't mean they come. It's an important tool, but not the only tool in the toolbox. One challenge that is different, I forgot about the music business is you don't get, uh, in a lot of the corporate world except maybe the Super Bowl, I guess. If we're doing something for the Academy of Country Music and they announce it on television, um, that puts quite a, quite a website strain on the infrastructure. We've gotten really good at learning how to handle that, but uh, the first three times are scary.
Russel:Do a lot of server scaling there at, uh, at a BubbleUp.
Lee:A lot of service scaling, a lot of, uh, you know, predictive stuff and a lot of, a lot of stress testing in advance'cause there is nothing like a TV hit.
Russel:Gosh. I know we had some experiences like that, so we worked with the Dallas Morning News and if there's a big major Dallas blow up, we had to do a lot of that, but I can't imagine just on a right, on a regular, somewhat, I don't know if constant basis is the word, but, uh, a regular basis. They're getting a lot of press, so I can see where that's a quite a skill for you guys.
Lee:It's easy for us all to, to criticize when your, you know, your favorite ticketing site goes down. But I think any of us in this business know how hard it's to keep those things up when you're, you know, everybody in the world is going to the exact same place at the exact same time.
Russel:Refreshing it a thousand times, which is exponentially multiplying, the people there. That's fascinating. I'm curious if you've got this answer to this one, obviously very tied and rooted in the music biz, little fame yourself, it sounds like, as a business and an agency, which is a really cool thing. What's, like, your biggest success story of like, oh man, that, that was really cool. We did a really cool thing there.
Lee:I think there's a couple of them. Number one was Live From Darryl's House. We actually won a Webby for that, which was pretty exciting. Just creating something that people talk about still to this day. It's just neat to sort of have that legacy out there. One of the other fun things we did was, uh, Jimmy Buffett wanted to do a show where he played a bunch of songs, um, that he doesn't always play. We actually did an online contest where fans could vote for them, um, of all, and he made this long list. He rehearsed a crazy amount of, uh, time to learn all these songs again. Then we did a show in Key West Florida. At first Jimmy wanted to sell tickets for$5 a piece, you had to show up and buy them. It's a small 300 seat theater. We try to explain to Jimmy that you can't do that if you're Jimmy Buffett because too many people will show up and not near enough will get in. We ended up giving away, uh, all 300 tickets. He did this, this great show, we call it the Key West Set List Show, where he played a bunch of songs he doesn't normally play, told stories to an intimate audience of 300 people, and then we live streamed it to almost a hundred thousand at the exact same time for free. It was just a really sort of a neat, iconic kind of an event that we got to do. I think the other success story was really the pandemic. A lot of what we do revolves around the touring world, um, and fan clubs are driven primarily by ticket sales. When the pandemic hit, there was not a lot of that going on. As a business, we pivoted to doing live streams. I personally ended up running three or 400 live streams over the course of that pandemic, uh, and our entire team would work all day long. Then at night they'd all show back up online after dinner and we would do customer service and run live streams. That was quite the adventure as well, especially, uh. when you're doing stuff for, like, Foo Fighters. We had one where we weren't sure we were gonna get a satellite feed for the internet even 20 minutes beforehand. It was a lot of fun. I'm really proud of the team that we have, that we got through that. A lot of crazy stories at times.
Russel:I'm just even trying to run through like the arsenal in my mind of just all the things you gotta be ready and prepared for and really build in as a capability. You're part PR, part, you know, social media gurus, part, part a lot, server scalers. That couldn't have been an easy process to bake all those capabilities at a, at a scalable level into the business. Give us some insight on what's your, what's your secret sauce and magic there?
Lee:We started out fairly small just doing the fan communities, which is mostly a lot of coding, and then obviously the customer service component. As the industry has changed and as social media has changed, um, we've just sort of, we've, we, we're very good at adapting. We've managed to find the talent that we need to find in order to, to supplement the areas that, that we're lacking in or that we need to be, be strong in. I always like to say I don't, I don't wanna be the smartest person in the room. I love hiring people who are way smarter than me, um, from the music days. I called it my bass player rule. I don't want a bass player where I can say, play this, this, and this, because then it's only gonna be as good as I can play, which is not very good. I want a bass player that blows me away so that when I say, give me something in this feel, um, they give me some great ideas. And that's what we've done is, is really try to find the right people, talented people, multidisciplined people who can do a lot of different skills, uh, and who are able to keep up with the pace that we're, we're working at.
Russel:How many folks does it take to make this whole operation work to where you're at today?
Lee:Right now we're, we're just over 50. We've got three offices, so one down in Houston, one up here in New England, and then one in Nashville, Tennessee. It runs the gamut from hardcore backend developers, custom app developers, data analysts. Marketers, folks buying keywords, uh, Google ads. That's obviously not my strength as you can tell because I don't even know the nomenclature, um, designers, uh, and a whole bunch of customer service folks, uh, and ongoing account maintenance folks who will, who will deal with our customers on a day-to-day basis. Because I'm sure much like the agency stuff you do, you get a customer in the door, you build the website, you get them set up. That's usually just the beginning of the relationship. We've got artists that we've been working with for, for 10 years plus where we've gone through multiple album cycles, multiple managers, and so there's always something new coming up that we've gotta adjust a website for, adjust a social strategy for, um, just a lot always going on.
Russel:Like you said, 20, it's a 24/7 biz. Somehow, some way you've gotta have a, something in place to handle that. You mentioned three different locations. One makes total sense, maybe even two makes total sense. But why the, why the locations that you have, just in case it's not as common or, or intuitive as I might think?
Lee:When we first started, it was just my business partner and myself. He lives in Houston, uh, and I lived up here in New England and I had a young daughter and he said, I'm never gonna make you move. I've held him to that. I've got my design team up here in New England. But uh, Houston is probably our biggest office. That's a lot of our marketing team, our marketing folks there, and also our technology folks. The, uh, backend coders and all of that. Then we have Nashville, because Nashville, the music business in Nashville is really a small town, uh, and having a presence. We've got a building right on Music Row. You almost need to be in town in order to, to do business there. We've been there, um, I think over, over 10 years, 15 years now.
Russel:On Music row even. You're just right in the thick of things there.
Lee:we are.
Russel:I'll quit, uh, stargazing into this awesome life you're leading.
Lee:I love talking about it, man. It's funny sometimes. When you're knee deep in a deadline, it's easy to lose sight of what it is you're doing and, and how cool what you're doing is. And it's not often until I'll go into a, a, a, a store somewhere and I'll look at the, the shelves of, of the music section and be like, oh, we work with them, we work with them, we work with them. It's nice to have a chance to reflect and have some perspective on, on what it is we do and how lucky we are to do it.
Russel:I remember that feeling when we first started getting some, more prominent companies in the Dallas area and like, you go buy billboards or right, be in a conversation and someone would be talking about, you know, this particular business or whatever, and it's like, oh yeah, we built the website for them. It's a pretty cool feeling. I can only imagine what it, what it's like in, in your world as well. We know your roots into the agency per se, but how is your role in what you're doing and your focus, how has that evolved over time
Lee:I liken it to getting an MBA on the job. I never went to business school, but I feel like I've learned so much. I never envisioned myself managing a team of people. I've gotten to the point now where I feel like my primary job is getting work done through others and, and helping tear down the barriers that they run into. When my team runs into an issue, I'm the guy that tries to solve it, to keep them moving again. I feel like it's, it's really in service to my team, um, is, is how I approach most days, and it's a little bit everything. Today I was on several design calls, a couple internal meetings. We're trying to problem solve a challenge we came up with in one project, you know, what's our best way around this? And then also working on pushing forward some designs with the team, reviewing those and providing my input. I joke that I'll touch in the course of a month, 40 or 50 different projects. Which makes, uh, timekeeping really a pain in the butt for me, but it's, uh, it's fun. I don't get bored. It's very rare that I get to sit down and work on one thing for six or eight hours, but I, I don't know that I'd have it any other way.
Russel:And you're still loving every minute of it, or is, like, you see that settling down anytime soon? What does that look like?
Lee:No, I absolutely love it. I tell you, we, we just had a holiday party down in Houston for, for the team down there. What makes it great is we've got this amazing group of people that, um, you know, I joke I'd hang out with, even if I wasn't working with them, and that, that means that when we go through these challenges together, we have rough days or, or different things. It's great to be surrounded by people that you just like and admire, um, and are, and just they're all really, really bright. It's a pleasure to get to do that every day, so whatever I can do to help them.
Russel:It often points back in so many of these conversations I have with folks of just fundamentals, right? We're not often missing some big, miraculous element or piece to this business, but it's about, you know, knowing exactly who you can be best, most valuable for. Doing all the things from server scaling to make sure we deliver that value and deliver it in a timely quality like manner. And then be a servant leader and take care of the challenges, remove obstacles for our team. It's those basic fundamentals it sounds like you've, you've gotten really well into your business.
Lee:I think that technology is easy to get lost in all of the tools that we use, but to your point, the, the fundamentals, the simple, what we're here to do is solve, is solve problems, especially for our customers. That problem is gonna be different for every time. We both, I'm sure, know agencies that always have a one size fits all solution, uh, but as we know, businesses and musicians and everybody else, they all have unique, slightly unique problems, and we need to figure out which collection of these tools is best for that. But it comes down to just listening, you know, listening and being attentive and taking care of them.
Russel:There's a Seth Godin quote that's really resonating with me lately, and I dunno if I've even brought this on the podcast before. We don't find customers for our products. We find products for our customers, and if we have a group of people we're serving well, we can always be answering that question. That's really the key to a good business. Sounds like you guys have really embodied that notion. Maybe you gave that quote to Seth Godin, I don't know.
Lee:No, that wasn't me. But, uh, Seth and these quotes, I've got some from him. It's hard to keep that focus on the customer. Sometimes it's very easy to get distracted by all of the cool technology, but we have to remember again, the technology is just the means to the end. Fundamentally, we need to solve the customer's problem. We need to help them feel good about the solution. What collection of tools we use for that almost doesn't matter as long as it does the job.
Russel:Don't let the tools get in the way of the end goal and the value. Good takeaways there. Just given what you do, you gotta keep your eye on the horizon, what are things you have to pay attention to that when you're looking at the future of the biz and those you serve.
Lee:I think we have to look at how, how fans are going to interact with musicians and how they're going to consume music. When I first started playing iTunes wasn't a thing. Then it became a thing. We all had to learn how to do that. Now apparently nobody buys CDs, but I still have a very large CD collection of Lee Totten's CDs. I'm hoping they'll come back in vogue, like finals someday. It's constantly evolving. We are always doing our best to try to look around corners or at least be aware of what the changes may be. I think that's true even in the non-music business. Are we gonna be going to more headless CMSs? Are we gonna be going to more, um, PWA type applications for, for the web? Is a website going to be as integral as it used to be? Or are we gonna wanna push that content across all of the socials? Are all the socials even gonna be there after next month? Who knows? We just do our best to try to, to, to read a lot and stay up on the trends. And try to predict what's gonna happen next. I don't know that any of us can predict accurately, but I think at least having some ideas and some game plans in your mind of what you wanna do next, uh, is a good way to be prepared for whatever comes up.
Russel:We can't predict a future, but we can look around the corner and, and keep our eyes open. As is my Homer Simpson version of what you shared.
Lee:Much like the Homer Simpson simulcast last night, did you watch that?
Russel:I saw it pop up for me and I didn't watch it. I did you watch, how was that?
Lee:I watched a little bit of it. Again, as a technology geek, I was just impressed with how they pulled that off, where they're taking the actual football game input and converting it to characters and adding their own Simpson esque background to it. In a little bit of a delay, but it was still pretty impressive to see.
Russel:Why didn't I watch this? My wife loves the Mannings and so I think she pushed me to watch the Manning cast instead of the, the Simpsons cast. But I should have.
Lee:That's a great example though of like, look how many different ways now we can consume a football game. You would assume you would just watch the broadcast, but now we can watch the Mannings talk about the game in their own unique way. And I think, you know, again, the world is constantly changing and we, our job's to try to keep up with whatever the consumers want.
Russel:It is so true. I've gotten caught up lately and I'm having trouble getting all the Cowboys games here, but first when I wanna watch a game, watch, I say, uh, especially the NFL that I don't have access to and I'm not, I'm just at this point I'm not gonna get Sunday ticket. I'll watch like the live stream of someone watching the game, giving kind of a, a secondary commentary. It's even pulled me in when they're saying like, you know, you know, type one for a touchdown or whatever, first down, something I never thought I would do, but here I am interacting with this random person on YouTube that's, uh, live streaming the, uh, game or live, live commenting the game, I guess is a better way to put it.
Lee:It's always interesting too, how as the technology evolves, it has all of these unintended consequences. On the surface it's like, great. In the evening, if I have some time, I've got 150 different channels that I can watch, uh, entertainment on. The hard part is trying to figure out which of those 150 channels actually has what I want. There's no centralized source anymore, where in the old days, you could open up a TV guide and the 33 channels that you had, I would tell you what was there. I feel like we're doing a lot of that these days, even with the internet, which is, you know, oh, here's this new rule, or here's this new law, or here's this new way of doing things. How do we adapt in order to keep up with that?
Russel:I was telling someone this recently, I, I missed the days when, when something came on at a set time. Generally, if you didn't watch it that time, you were gonna be screwed for a good long while until it came on on VHS or A DVD or whatever. But I love the efficiency that that caused in my life of, right? We've gotta have dinner done and all these things done so we can be on our couch watching whatever we're watching at 7:00 PM. No pausing. I'm missing that in my life.
Lee:We've struggled with that on the music side of things because there's a difference between say a live webcast at a certain time with an artist where it's a shared experience and everybody is in chat, experiencing it in real time together, versus an on demand concert where people are watching it at all different times, you don't have that shared experience. We found that, that trying to bring those shared experiences, a real event, uh, to the online space is a lot more meaningful for the fans and for the artists. But it's, it's hard in an on-demand world when folks wanna watch it when they watch it.
Russel:My wife is very into Taylor Swift as many people are today, and she was live streaming the, the her last tour, concert, I guess is what I'm hearing, uh, on Sunday. She was just totally enthralled, or when my daughter, when she lived or died by One Direction and, and she would watch, she would stay up all hours of the night watching the live stream of their concerts. I don't think she'd been interested in in a recording or anything along those lines. It was being there in the moment was very important.
Lee:We did a lot of, so Jimmy, Jimmy Buffett was unique, but he was very forward thinking. At the time, he was selling out a lot of concert tours. His idea was, I'm gonna broadcast every concert live for free on the radio. And then in the later years we evolved that into we're gonna do a live video broadcast of every concert free. In the traditional, you know, wisdom in the music business is, well, you don't give it away for free'cause then people won't buy tickets. But people would show up in droves to watch these things. It became almost a secondary community. You have folks in California and you have folks in New England and you have folks in Texas all gathered together at seven o'clock to watch the Jimmy Show from wherever he was and they're having virtual cocktails together. It was a real sense of community and it was a creating a, an actual event in a virtual world. That was a pretty cool thing to do.
Russel:I love that thought. I imagine we can, we can navigate that to even an agency world of build the audience first. Not about what we can always sell to them or get them to buy, but build the community and the audience and then they'll, they'll buy whatever they need to buy. I don't think you have to worry about money if you really create that, that tie and that that community with folks. Such a great lesson.
Lee:Give them meaningful experiences with that brand or with that company. Make those interactions mean something. Make it something that's important to them. I think if you do that, you've got customers for life at that point, you know?
Russel:There's the takeaway, there's the mic drop moment, right? As an agency, if we wanna pull this back to an agency, is how many meaningful experiences are you creating that don't come on the other side of a transaction or if the expectation of a transaction? And that's not necessarily always the easiest. You could argue a musician can create that more easily than an agency. But if you think creatively enough, I bet there's plenty of opportunities to to do exactly what you said there.
Lee:I think it can be as simple as the customer service experience. Even if I bought something, if I run into an issue but I have an amazing customer service experience. With that company, that's gonna make me more a fan of that company. I'm like, alright. They get it. They take care of their customers. Whereas if I have a bad experience, maybe next time I would choose a different brand. I've had both sides of that coin recently with different companies, uh, and one of them was phenomenal. People were attentive and listened and I could actually reach a person, which was great, and they solved my problem in a way that was, was helpful. It made me think, all right, these guys are, are, they're doing business the right way. Those are the folks I wanna spend my money with.
Russel:I dunno. Now you're giving an idea like, should every agency intentionally screw up?
Lee:No, no, I do not recommend that.
Russel:And then just do a awesome job on the backside of of cleaning up the mess or whatever? It's not weird if it works. Could be a thing.
Lee:I don't know. You know what? The unintentional mistakes are bad enough, so I'm.
Russel:To the point, you're gonna get your opportunity. Just remember that's a great point of, uh, just, just serve extremely well. Probably any business out there can get their best review is not when just things go nice and smooth and easy, but when, when something otherwise unpredictable or bad happens and you follow up in an amazing way, great lesson.
Lee:I have become a lot more empathetic. When you get the email that comes out after the initial email from a company that says, oops, we made a mistake. I'm like, yep, totally get that. One time I sent an email out, um, to a rather massive, um, company list. It was, uh, probably in the 600,000 range. I sent a promotional email out and I accidentally had it come from my business partner's email address instead of the corporate email address. He was able to get all of those bounces responses and was unable to use his email for two weeks, I think.
Russel:Oh man. Maybe that was a nice little vacation moment for him. Or I imagine stressful.
Lee:We tell our devs now to make the important buttons bright red so that we don't click the bright red buttons.
Russel:There's a reason why, uh, uh, the, the military puts the, in the movies, at least, I guess, I don't know what it looks like in the real world, is you gotta use the key and unlocking all that.
Lee:Got the plastic over it.
Russel:Exactly. We kind of talked about the future of technology and, and the business itself, but, or I guess you could say the industry itself. But when you look at the business, what's the future look like for you? What's the five year, 10 year plan as they like to say?
Lee:I think for us, obviously continuing to try to stay ahead of the trends, but, but it's interesting to see how the tools are changing. AI is obviously, I think, gonna be a, a big influence on all of us in terms of how we do business. I'm not necessarily scared of it, but I think it's a matter of how do we use it most effectively to solve the problems that we need to solve. We've already seen it in examples of where, you know, hey, I need a script that does this. And we can generate that with AI that's pretty close as opposed to having to start from scratch to generate that code. Certainly with, with images, um, you know, a lot of the stock photo agency now is, are build building AI right into the stock photo thing. If you have something that's close to the image you want, but it's not quite exactly right. In the old days, of course, I'd have to hand it to a designer and make him go, you know, take that dock out and put a boat there instead. Now AI will do that for us. I think it's, you know, the future is how do we better leverage these tools and do it in a way that, that still has the integrity that we're looking for.
Russel:There you go. Just keep doing what you're doing. Wonderful stuff. Last big question for you, Lee then, is are entrepreneurs born or are they made?
Lee:Nature versus nurture? I think it's a combination. I think that you can have people who have the predisposition, uh, and the, and the talent to do it, but may not have the skillset. I think you can also have people who have the skillset, but maybe don't have, don't have that talent or the drive. I think it's a matter of recognizing early on that, that being an entrepreneur is something you wanna do and have a passion for. Although I'm not sure any of us truly know the, the likes of that journey and the ups and downs that come with it. And then I think it's a matter of, of learning as much as you can. Like I said, I don't, I don't ever wanna be the smartest person in a room. I try to learn from every situation because there are always areas that I can improve and get better at. Learning from the folks who've done it before and seeing how they navigate the, the unsteady waters of being an entrepreneur. I think it's a combination of both. I think it's something that we're born with, but then I think it's a learned thing. I joke about it with music as well. The guitar players who think they're the best usually aren't, uh, and some of the best musicians I've ever met are still humble and, and recognize those that are greater. The moment that we feel like we know it all, we probably don't. I always try to keep that beginner's mind of, you know, let's, let's learn what we can from this and, and always try to be getting better every day. Long answer.
Russel:Beautiful answer though, because I mean, I almost want to create a whole nother podcast episode with so many things you said there, but I'll, I'll, I'll just pinpoint just, you know, the learning process and, and the gap between maybe where we are and where we want to be is a lot of learning and, and not just even surface level learning Like you said, who, who, who can you pick it up from? What book? Can you read? And just context and, and build around whatever you're trying to solve. That is the name of this game, uh, among many other wonderful things you said.
Lee:I liken it to when you're learning new software, which I mean, again, I'm, I'm of an age where everything was learning new software because it was always something new coming out. The difference between those who figure it out and those who don't is often not how smart they are, but how persistent they are at pushing through that. Of course now we have a ton of resources online to be able to find these things out, but it's, it's something I tell my kids all the time. Look, when you're doing something new, when you're trying something you've never tried before, there are going to be challenges. There are going to be moments when you go, why am I even doing this? But if you persist through that, um, that's usually when you get to the good stuff. It's just a matter of, of being persistent enough to get through that.
Russel:You'd think I would remind thyself because I want to get into pickleball, but I'm just so darn intimidated by, by my lack of pickleball skills that, and there's some rough folks in there that I'm just not sure if I'm gonna willing to overcome some of that learning curve.
Lee:My 17-year-old took me out the other day and humbled me quickly, so yes.
Russel:I'm worried about getting humbled by like an 80-year-old. But not to mention, I'll definitely wanna get humbled by a 17-year-old. That's a me problem. If people wanna know more about BubbleUp, where can they go?
Lee:BubbleUp.com, uh, everything is up there.
Russel:Easy enough. There you go. Wonderful journey. Thank you so much for taking the time to share and giving us a little glimpse into the starstruck life of working for some great musicians, but so many great lessons learned along the way, including the fundamentals and just serving those you serve in a compelling, thought driven, value driven way. So many great takeaways again today, and I really appreciate you taking the time to share that with us, Lee.
Lee:I wanna thank you as well. It's fun because I feel like a lot of times as agencies we're so isolated in working on the projects with the clients that we have. But we all do the same magic trick and it's nice to be able to talk to other folks who know how to do that magic trick too, and share stories, horror stories and adventures and everything else we've all been through to get to this point.
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Lee:We were brought on to do a live stream for the Foo Fighters from the Roxy in Los Angeles. Los Angeles, as we know, does not have great cell coverage, um, and the venue did not have particularly great internet, so they brought a satellite truck in, in order to hook up to the internet for us to do this live stream for a lot of people, a lot of people had already signed up for this live stream. I got a call about 30 minutes before the stream was supposed to start from the guy in the satellite truck, and he said, everybody's bugging me. I can't get a lock on a satellite. There's too many buildings and they keep interrupting me. Having been through more than my share of crises before, I said, lock your door and tell them to call me. You work on finding a satellite. We've learned that you can't simultaneously fix a problem and update people on the problem. Let the people that can fix it, go and fix it. I'll take the heat from the clients in terms of what's going on, and you just work on finding a solution. That's what he did. He locked his trailer door, uh, and about 10 minutes before it's supposed to go live, he finally found a satellite and all went well, and, uh, nobody knows how, how frightened we were in the process.
Russel:I guess it's not Dave Grohl banging down your door of trying to get answers on this, but.
Lee:I've had a few calls from musicians. Once in a while. Some are very involved.