How One Entrepreneur Changed Her Business Model in the Pandemic

Then, of course, the pandemic happened.

Yet for Geojam, that wasn’t the end of the story. While the pandemic vastly curtailed live events, which like the hospitality, restaurant and travel industry ground to a near halt, the company and the artists found a way to come together.

In March, Ms. Figueroa decided to use her company’s technology to directly connect artists with their fans, with a similar engagement model. More social media interactions around a particular artist equated to greater reward points for fans, who could exchange them for interactions with an artist, like one-on-one FaceTime calls, Zoom cooking classes or even an appearance in an advertising campaign.

What Ms. Figueroa, her two co-founders and investors were able to do isn’t going to work for everyone. But their pivot may offer useful lessons to other entrepreneurs regardless of their wealth and experience. And those lessons may come in handy as coronavirus cases rise again and small businesses that have made it this far struggle to get through a tough winter.

Have multiple lines within a business. Geojam was not Ms. Figueroa’s first venture. At age 26, she already had a hit (Undorm, which she started while in college to advertise apartments to college students and social organizations), a miss (Lenzjam, which she called a too-early version of TikTok) and one so-so venture (One Box Agency, a music marketing agency that gave her the idea for Geojam).

She was eager to test the concept of rewarding fans for their enthusiasm while compensating artists and turning a profit. In the live event model, there would have been plenty of sponsor cash to support Geojam’s planned data mining of fans’ reactions to sponsors’ marketing efforts. It was the kind of microtargeting that sponsors are eager to have.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/06/your-money/entrepreneur-pandemic.html