Our Founder, Matej Harangozo was recently featured on the Radio Entrepreneurs Podcast where he discussed his upbringing, Digital Science Media, as well as how COVID has affected business & our distinct competitive advantage. 

Here is an excerpt from the podcast:

Jeffery: Hello everybody. And again this is radio entrepreneurs. My name is Jeffrey Davis of radio entrepreneurs as CEO president. So maybe you'll see you'll see that up on the top corner or bottom corner and also the host of the show. Our next guest I'm pretty excited to talk to, Matej Harangozo. Founder of Digital Science Media. Welcome.

Matej: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Jeffery: Digital Science Media sounds like something I'd watch on Netflix at night.

Matej: You might perhaps

Jeffery: Tell us about it.

Matej: So Digital Science Media is a new innovative and progressive digital marketing agency for the entertainment industry. So we mainly work with medium sized record labels, independent artists or any digital entrepreneur if you want to call that. Anybody that creates content for entertainment or even educational purposes and wants to get their brand out there to the next level. But not just market their brand and their products and services but also treat their art like a business. We really infuse a lot of business education into our services.

Jeffery: So tell us about your history, how you got into this?

Matej: Well I guess you could say I'm a serial entrepreneur in the true sense of the word. Came to the U.S. from Eastern Europe, from Slovakia when I was twelve. Did a lot of little side hustles in high school that would allow me to make you know a little bit of extra money on the side. Went to school for engineering, mechanical engineering. I did drop in my third year because I decided I didn't want to be an engineer, drawing up AutoCAD drawings or working at an engineering company. So I started a real estate company with one of my really good friends and been a business partner to me for a lot of different ventures. So we went from real estate, then the market crashed. We got into energy efficiency, into software development, websites and to guerilla marketing through being a part owner of the Arrow Advertising franchise who has 45 franchises worldwide. And as we were having some successes I've always wanted to get into the music industry back since I was in high school.

So, In 2016 unfortunately we had to shut down our most successful company today which was GreeNEWit energy efficiency. I had a choice to either I guess go get a job working for some company or you know see if I could still make it with another venture so I got into a music industry full time. I also partnered up with my development team out of India where we formed a new company called Codaemon, which I also own and focus on full time. But we focus on e-commerce buildout. E-commerce management for Fortune 500 companies all the way down to startups. But you know, 2017 I got into the music industry full time after kind of dipping my toe in it from 2013 to 2015 or 2016 realizing how much of a wild wild west of an industry it really was. And then once I got into it is applying the range of different entrepreneurial experiences that I had being an engineer, having experience and understanding of different industry sectors I combined all that knowledge applied it to the music industry and it's been working wonderfully. So out of pure demand of my entrepreneurial brand online as a music business influencer, an educator, a lot of demand started coming down the pipeline asking can you also perform these marketing services for us. So we formed Digital Science Media because initially I was going to launch a music artist incubator, which is still in the works. We have a digital version of it called the indie artist accelerator which is part of our service offering. But in short, two of those are the main focus of Digital Science Media, educating artists on the music business and helping them with the marketing and branding particularly on the startup level.

Jeffery: So has COVID help changed your business at all?

Matej: I'm fortunate to say that both my companies, both software development and Digital Science Media has grown during 2020, which is a blessing for sure. I'm not surprised honestly but it's been a good run in 2020 despite not being able to go outside.

Jeffery: Have you changed your marketing at all. Are you regionalized?

Matej: We're nationwide, in North American & Western Europe. The entertainment industry, I would say we had a few clients out of like London, Canada even South Africa. But we're primarily North America because where we specialize and grow your brand is in the US first. But you know, nationwide because of COVID especially, my employees are working remotely. So that same way, we can take a client pretty much from any state in the US or Canada.

Jeffery: Interesting. Are there any new trends in the technology?

Matej: Both good and bad. Yes I would say more exploitation is going on with kind of, if you wanna call them, business vultures preying on uneducated entrepreneurs offering them perception based marketing tools which don't actually create any useful function in my opinion. But also you know, the trend in technology especially for the entertainment industry, definitely people being innovative with figuring out how to grab more of their revenue from digital streaming platforms, online concerts, really focusing growing their brand in a particular way online so they can convert their influence into sponsorships and endorsements. So you know, definitely some innovation in other sectors because we deal with e-commerce companies. I'm certainly seeing large companies realizing that they're able to get through 2020 remotely. I see a trend of shedding these leases and bringing onboard project management systems and services and more for sophisticated CRM's to help manage their entire staffs from the cloud essentially. A lot of companies got the kick in the ass this past year to focus on that online management and bringing in more online systems to help with the growth or at least make maintenance of their company, I would say.

Jeffery: Is the industry that you're in help mostly small businesses or large companies? Is your particular focus make you more agile? What's your competitive advantage?

Matej: I think we are definitely agile. Our competitive advantage is that we actually teach the music business, which a lot of our competitors don't. Especially in entertainment industry. Put it this way, I think that major labels don't necessarily like my model. Because I'm empowering independent artists to be better business men and business women and to kind of succeed independently. The major label traditionally leaves and there's some new ones that are starting to smarten now. But traditionally they want to get the artist and exploit them while they're not as business educated, while the talent is there, if you know what I mean. So we do specifically focus on medium sized labels. Some of them may have relationships or venture partnerships with major labels but I would say mostly we focus on the independent side on purpose. So I think that's our advantage. There's a huge market gap where there's a lot of independent artists already creating decent sized revenue but don't have the business knowledge to really take things to the major level and they still need major labels. We're hoping that through our marketing and business education, we can help them get there without a bad deal from a major.

Jeffery: All very interesting and we hope we get to interview you more than once this year to talk about things. If somebody wants to know more about Digital Science Media, I can think of a couple of people I'm going to want to talk to. How would they find you?

Matej: DigitalSciencemedia.com. Simple enough or if you wanna follow me, you can follow me on Matej_h_entrepreneur.

Jeffery: Thanks for being on radio entrepreneurs today. Continued success and remind everybody, we're gonna be streaming more stories every day on radio entrepreneurs.

Matej: Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

To learn more and listen to the podcast, view it down below.