“ENTREPRENEURSHIP MEANS TURNING A PASSION INTO A CAREER”

“Entrepreneurship requires persistence and patience,” believes pop singer/songwriter Audrey (Proulx, MSCS/MBA ’17). Music has been a part of Audrey’s life since she began playing violin at age three, and today she’s pursuing her music career like a startup. Below, she discusses her entrepreneurial approach in the music industry, including the importance of identifying and understanding your target audience:

“For me, entrepreneurship means turning a passion into a career,” shared Audrey. She spent the past year writing and recording her new album “Colors,” which was released in July 2015.


“Rather than just moving down to L.A. and hoping someone will discover me, I’ve decided to take a business approach, where my ‘startup’ is my music career and my product is my album, which I need to market strategically.” She’s tackling the marketing with an entrepreneurial mindset: using analytics to find and learn about her potential customers. Her four key steps:

1. Determine the product’s target demographics

“To do this, I used Facebook ad campaigns to do A/B testing and figure out which demographics were most responsive to my ads, which I found were 13- to 17-year-old girls,” she says.

2. Then spend time with and learn from them

“I did a lot of market research, conducting personal interviews and running focus groups to better understand how teenage girls discover music. I also did usability testing where I observed these girls using my website and made modifications to the site based on how they navigated through it.”

3. Be open to new opportunities to build awareness of your product

This August, Audrey’s music was featured at fitness centers across the country. “At the end of the campaign, I received data on who had subscribed to my newsletter via these machines. To my surprise, it was balanced, 50/50 male/female, and the age range of subscribers was uniformly distributed from ages 13 to 75. I concluded that while social media was bigger for younger girls, my music itself appealed to a wider audience.”

4. Iterate

“I then iterated my approach by interviewing middle-aged adults and found that they liked the positive message that my music sends and my image as a positive role model for their young children.”

“My approach of using data and conducting market research, as one would do in a startup, has helped me better understand who my customers are and how they behave,” she says.

NOTE CREDIT: http://stanfordbusiness.tumblr.com/post/132092399484/entrepreneurship-means-turning-a-passion-into-a