I’m a strategist with a penchant for product, community, and culture.
🔎 Current focus areas
I’m working with music entertainment brand COLORS to integrate its community and extend its platform to become more impactful.
My work is multi-faceted and combines DAO leadership with product management, community management, project management, brand development, and business strategy.
I’m also the founder of MUSIC x, a popular newsletter about innovation in the music business, and occasional contributor & writer at research DAO Water & Music.
📨 Contact
The best ways to reach out to me:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grasmayer/
- Threads: @basgras
- Email: bas@grasmayer.com
🌳 Background
These are four of my most formative professional experiences in my past.
For a detailed background, check out my LinkedIn.
Director of Product, IDAGIO (Apr 2017 - Aug 2019)
First product hire at classical music streaming service IDAGIO, founded in Berlin. The role combined product management, project management, strategy and organisational design.
Together with the founder / CPO we built out engineering and product teams. From 10 engineers & 1 designer, to 25 engineers, 5 PdMs, 5 designers & 2 customer success managers. This meant scaling from an organisation of generalist product people, to developing specialists on topics like user research and onboarding funnels.
IDAGIO has been featured in The New York Times, Financial Times, Bloomberg, Vogue, and Billboard.
Product Lead, Zvooq (2012 - late 2014)
Created & executed a new multi-app product strategy for Zvooq, a music streaming service focused on Russia & CIS with $20M in funding, whilst rebuilding and rapidly scaling its team, going from less than 10 people in early 2013, to over 30 by mid-2014 and hiring key people like a CTO and Head of Content.
Our flagship app Zvooq, reached number 1 in the App Store in Russia & Kazakhstan, our focus markets, and topped the music apps charts in most of the former Soviet Union. This helped solidify the service's comeback and helped re-establish the brand as the leading music service in Russia and surrounding territories.
Our app Fonoteka, with a subscription tier as low as $1/month, reached number 1 overall in the App Store in most of our markets. It had a never-seen-before model, which you can read about by clicking the Why We Made Fonoteka article below.
BA International Communication Management (2011)
My studies in The Netherlands provided me with a lot of tools and frameworks for conducting research, developing strategy and managing projects. It also provided me with the time for exchanges and internships in Bulgaria and Turkey, where I learned about topics like intercultural communication, and organisational communication and design.
My graduation thesis focused on what musicians can do to thrive despite piracy. It contained two parts: a definition of the problem and a suggested solution. The problem was not piracy itself, but rather the fact that we had transitioned from an age of distribution channels to an age of distribution networks. This new networked reality has its own rules to optimise for. The solution focused on fan retention through community-building and constructing business models out of that.
I revisited the topic in this 2021 article, as it’s more relevant than ever:
Campaign Manager, Pirate Party Netherlands (2010)
In the run-up to the Dutch parliamentary elections on June 9, 2010, I helped develop the organisation, communication strategy and campaign of the Dutch Pirate Party. This was my first major leadership position, stewarding a community of hundreds of active people and garnering the support of tens of thousands of people across the country.
This experience taught me a lot about community building and developing grassroots organisations, plus the organisational bottlenecks that will emerge when trying to scale up an organisation fast.
✍️ Selected writing
🛋 Selected reading
🖥 Selected viewing
Images
Videos
⛓ Crypto disclosure
Header image:
Profile picture:
Primary addresses:
- basgras.eth (0xe807E7362cadc640e1F7ca21B9C99B8f7775FB2c)
- hot wallet (0xe612d9C2a9bA0Ff4403F4f7Ea87D5bE4290aC7B9)
DAOs: