Building Your Startup into a Globally Adored Brand
The fractional Chief Growth Officer for music and tech.
I am the Entrepreneur who built Grooveshark, one of the music industry’s pioneer music streaming services, into a globally recognized brand with thirty-five million users and fifteen million a year in revenue. I provide sales and marketing leadership for music and tech startups to predictably grow traffic and revenue.
About Me
Hi! I’m Sam Tarantino and I’ve worked in the music and tech industries for 18 years. Some of the most common problems I see:
“Build it and they will come” but traffic never comes.
“Marketing is a waste of money” but the press never covers you.
“Our product is great!” but your revenue stays stuck quarter after quarter.
With me as your fractional Growth Officer, those issues become opportunities.
Grow organic traffic to your site or app.
Turn your marketing efforts into a profit center.
Create repeatable, predictable growth.
Build a sales team to solve your customers’ problems.
Let’s chat to see if I can help you grow!
Let’s create a profitable sales & marketing team that reaches more customers, who need what you built.
How we’ll do this:
Setup or correct your messaging & positioning
Map out your customer and their journey
Manage KPIs so your sales & marketing team makes you money
Implement systems for your team to achieve revenue and traffic goals.
Create your marketing and sales strategy
Lead existing and onboard new marketing team members
A fractional Chief Growth Officer is the part-time leader who runs your sales and marketing teams and is responsible for all of your revenue and traffic outcomes.
Chief Growth Officers can be expensive costing businesses $400k+/year. However, without solid sales & marketing leadership, growing traffic and revenue can feel like a game of luck. I provide the strategy and leadership drawing from two decades of experience so you can gain predictable growth at a fraction of the price of hiring a full-time Growth Officer. Rest assured that your sales & marketing initiatives are handled by an experienced professional.
Case Study: Growing Grooveshark from Zero to Thirty-Five Million Users
After launching a few complex early versions that required a long signup process and email verification, my team and I focused on getting a first-time visitor to play a song in the least number of steps. We eliminated the need to signup and let web visitors play a song in just two steps from arriving on the site: search and play. This led them to create an account to save their music, which converted the maximum number of registered active users from raw traffic. Then, we made sharing a song a one-step process leading to SEO-optimized sharing pages consequently ranking us in the top results in Google searches for artists and songs being searched. This led to even more raw traffic inbound leading to more signups and the loop grew virally at about half a million new users per month. Plus, because we simplified the user experience, people raved about us.
Lesson: Always give your customer the path of least resistance to solving their problem.
Fractional Growth Officer Services
Half Day Consult
With a few weeks of prep via email and a 4-hour session, I’ll put together the customer journey and essential next steps for your sales & marketing department.
Growth Advisor
With weekly check-ins, your team will stay on track and campaigns will continually improve and goals will be within reach.
Fractional Chief Growth Officer
You’ll get a comprehensive marketing strategy with prioritized campaigns. I work with your team daily to execute the strategy.
What People Say About Sam
“Sam is a swiss army knife. He can lead, code, sell and figure anything out.”
— Sina Simantob, Highland City Club
“Sam is an absolute monster when it comes to strategy, branding, & building in any facet of the music industry.”
— Elan Morrison, Multi-Platinum Music Producer
“World-class strategist, analyst, and builder.”
— Stephan van der Mersch, Ruane Cunniff & Goldfarb
“Sam is a great leader who is able to inspire a team of peers to believe in something larger than themselves.”
— Andrew Wise, Former COO, Grooveshark
“Sam helped us get our marketing house in order across the board. From SEO to user re-engagement to partnerships, his diversity of skills and strategic vision putting these capabilities together were invaluable helping us establish a marketing presence for the first time.”
— Roneil Rumburg, Audius
Build a World Class Team
It can be so frustrating to have big goals and be bogged down by traffic that isn’t growing or revenue that has flatlined. Or overwhelmed by how to find customers for your business.
I experienced it on the way up to 35 million users and $15M/yr in revenue with Grooveshark with both failed and successful marketing strategies.
I love solving marketing problems by building teams of people who didn’t even believe in themselves. Book a call with me to see if I’m the right Fractional CGO fit for you!
Case Study: Growing Grooveshark from Cash Strapped Startup to Profitable Eight Figure Enterprise
As Grooveshark’s traffic grew exponentially in 2008, so did our expenses to run the service. Since free to paid subscriber conversions were only 1-3% we decided to build a direct advertising sales team to craft custom brand ad solutions for clients looking for our highly coveted young and engaged demographic.
We built the sales and fulfillment teams and by 2009 we scaled revenue by 40x in the first year, 8x in the second, and 2.7x in the third reaching over $15MM in revenue in 2011. We ran campaigns for some of the largest brands in the world and saw higher-than-industry-average engagement and clicks giving our advertisers a reason to keep buying with us.
Lesson: Deliver an amazing experience post-sale and you’ll not only retain clients, but they’ll be your best marketing team.
Get the Sales & Marketing Leadership you need to grow.
Delegate your sales and marketing outcomes to an expert to take back your time and see a greater ROI on your marketing budget. Let me create predictable revenue growth from proper sales systems and automations.
What is it like to work together?
Reliability.
Delegate all your marketing outcomes to me. Each quarter you’ll see reports on what’s happening and the plan for the next quarter.
Leadership.
I’ll create a collaborative culture in your marketing team, and lead people to their flow. If we’re missing pieces then I’ll fill the roles with people who believe.
Execution.
I’ll run the team to achieve real outcomes that turn your marketing from a drain to a profit center. The rest of the team will see us as a support system.
Hire Me as Your Fractional CGO
1
Chat
Schedule a 15-minute call to see if hiring me as a Fractional CGO is a good fit for your business.
2
Strategy
We get on a longer call to deep dive into your challenges and needs. Then, I’ll share the steps I recommend with a proposal.
3
Marketing Transformation
In the first 30 days, you’ll have a comprehensive sales and marketing plan and the leadership to execute it over the rest of the quarter.