Greg Vendetti Talks about JointAustin

Greg Vendetti Talks about JointAustin 

Where are you from originally?

Guilford, Connecticut.

What university did you go to?

Loyola University of New Orleans

What brought you to Austin?

My degree at Loyola was in Music Business Studies and Vocal Performance. Austin offered an opportunity to learn and cultivate a career and a place where I could create positive change in my industry. What made Austin different from other cities was its highly creative and entrepreneurial spirit, and in an evolved music business, such a mentality was something that I felt was valuable.

What is your company’s mission?

By partnering local businesses with local artists, our mission is to create quantifiable change in the music industry through innovation and sustainability.

What need does it fulfill?

Joint partners local businesses with local artists in a more efficient form of music sponsorship. As a result, it offers a more cost-efficient and differentiating marketing solution to local businesses while providing qualified musicians with a brand new way to generate revenue from being on stage.

What exactly does it bring to customers?

Joint brings a number of benefits to the table for everyone involved. However, in short, local businesses receive a more cost-efficient way to reach their customers, artists receive a new way to way to get paid on stage, and audiences are rewarded for their love of live music.

Our focus with local businesses is to provide a more engaging and precision-based tool for marketing and promotions. By focusing on artists with similar audiences to their own, businesses can partner with multiple artists across multiple genres and reach various subsets of their customer base effectively and in different ways. 

As an artist, Joint will provide a new opportunity to generate revenue and increase the size of your audience. Whether the money earned is used to subsidize promotions surrounding live shows or buy much needed equipment, we want to provide a balanced approach that keeps the artist in control of their responsibilities, while helping to bolster their audience size and increase their credibility. 

In saying all of this, giving the audience a new way to experience live music is irreducible to Joint’s success. Therefore, as fans walk through the venue door, they receive music content from the Joint artist on stage and rewards from their favorite local businesses. This opens the door for a number of opportunities in expanding how the audience interacts with the artist, and how businesses reach the community. To us, that’s very exciting.

What type of artists/businesses would benefit from your company?

Businesses large and small are able to benefit from Joint as we have made it affordable, rewarding, and convenient. In order to qualify as a Joint artist, you need to play at least one promoted show in Austin per month, have a website and social media efforts, and average at least 30 people at each promoted event. A promoted show would be a performance where you’d expect the largest possible audience to be in attendance. 

What was the most challenging aspect of starting up the initiative?

I always feel like the most challenging aspects of this undertaking are still ahead. Right now, we are still testing our basic operations and how the market reacts to our initial thoughts. But as we begin to introduce elements of technology into the mix and increase our value propositions, we’ll see new hurdles that are absolutely unexpected. Regardless, as it is the case with any long-term project, it’s a challenge to stay focused and motivated toward accomplishing the goal you set out to achieve in the first place. Our remedy has been to keep moving forward in a way that builds value behind the concept and momentum in its importance.

What advice do you have for entrepreneurs?

1.       Persistence is one of the most important tools to have in your arsenal.

2.      Your mission to change the world is important, but balance keeps you sane. Manage your stress, stay healthy, and you’ll be much more effective. 

3.      Everyone has an opinion about how your concept could be better. It is important to learn from others, but it is equally important to be a good judge of worthy critics. 

What Austin-based resource have you found to be the most helpful and why?

There are number of tremendous organizations and groups in this city, many of which have benefitted me and my business. However, (at the risk of sounding corny) I found that the best resource for me has been the city itself. When I first moved to this city, I became addicted to meeting new people mainly because everyone seemed so open to helping you move forward and in the right direction if asked. One of the most important skills I have developed over time in Austin has been the ability to be social and develop genuine relationships. Just like any skill, it takes practice. As a result of all the countless times I’ve said the wrong thing at the wrong time in conversations with strangers, or fumbled over my words, or accidentally alienated someone from the group, I am able to create new opportunities for myself simply by learning from my mistakes and developing confidence in the most foreign of situations.