Side Stage Magazine: What were your initial motivations for starting Haulix?
Matt Brown: I was running a metal-music reviewing website back starting in 2001. After awhile, our mailbox was overflowing with promotional CDs. I was noticing how much labels were spending on postage and early leaks were becoming a huge problem too. I’ve always had a strong itch to own a business and be my own boss. I saw an opportunity to solve the inefficiencies of traditional ways of promoting with software.
Were you working in the music industry before launching the company? When did Haulix become your full time gig?
I was a Web Developer before starting Haulix. Programmers definitely have an advantage when starting a software company or even building an app. We can do the (initial) work ourselves and save money. I was doing Haulix full time end of 2009 and I still am today.
How did you initially build your client base? It seems like marketing directly to record labels would be a hard sell.
We pushed our first version out and it wasn’t very good but we needed customer feedback in order to improve the product. At the same time, I was contacting labels one by one via email and asking them to sign up with us. There were already competitors out there with a huge head start on us and at the time, digital promos as a whole were starting to gain popularity. I think I caught a lot of clients at the right time when they were already considering moving to a digital promo platform. They signed up with us and we quickly added features and trimmed off fat as we got more feedback. I can proudly say, the first twenty or so companies that signed up with us back in 2009 are still with us today.
Haulix is known for fighting piracy, which includes the use of watermarks. Can you tell our readers a bit about your efforts to prevents leaks?
If a publicist has a good contact list of people who they know and they use our system, they can greatly decrease early leaks. Using Haulix, they can upload a new album and distribute it to thousands of people all over the world in a matter of minutes. From there everything is tracked and the music is fingerprinted (watermarked) as it’s getting downloaded or streamed. Our customers set strict live and expiration dates on their promos too. Their contacts have a small window of time when they can consume the music and then it’s instantly unavailable. The publicist has very tight control over their promotions and nothing goes out the door without getting a finger print on it. If they find an album illegally leaked, we can scan it and usually let them know exactly who leaked it. They then remove that person from their contact list and that’s one less malicious person they need to worry about next time they send out a promo.
A lot of people believe piracy is no longer the big deal it once was, do you agree?
We have a DMCA takedown service that compliments our watermarking technology. The average album that gets submitted to that service sees thousands of illegal links taken down. It’s still an uphill battle and a big deal — especially after the album gets released to the public.
Your company blog has been teasing a big reveal for this fall. Can you tell us about what people can expect from the next version of Haulix?
We’ve been running for approx. 7 years now and we’ve soaked up a lot of feedback from our customers. The biggest hurdle by far has been email infrastructure. With this new release of Haulix, we have completely rebuilt our email engine and Campaign system. Our customers are sending out over 2 million email invitations to the press each month and so our system needs to be able to handle huge loads like that. Our screens will be using a new technology that allows them to dynamically adjust for smaller mobile devices. We’re also going to be keeping and displaying better statistics. There’s more…. we’ll be talking about other new things soon.
Are you doing anything to add to your current offerings?
Absolutely. A lot of customers expressed how they wish they could send out their press releases through Haulix so that they wouldn’t have to pay to use another service. Our new version will support press releases with a full-blown drag and drop email designer.
You are not the only company trying to help labels prevent leaks, but you are the most recognized. To what do you attribute your success?
We obsessively take care of our customers. I still to this day experience shitty customer service, whether it’s an airline or cable company (I won’t name any names). I vowed I would never run my company’s customer service like that. Word gets around that we take care of our customers and our system is easy to use. We’re also very proactive on social media and the music industry educational circuit. We believe in giving back to the industry because we love our job and we are surrounded by others who love what they do or want to get into this industry.
Education plays a big role in your brand and outreach to the public. Can you tell us why playing a teaching role within the industry is important to Haulix?
We’re in business to obviously make a profit but we also sincerely care about protecting artists’ music. By educating people, we help strengthen the industry while promoting our brand. It’s a win win situation.
Beyond this upcoming relaunch, what can you tell us about the future of Haulix?
We want to continue to grow our customer base and get to the top of the mountain as the industry standard for digital promo services. We’re full steam ahead and nobody is going to stop us from achieving that goal!