Discovering The Beat Of A Business

Matt Fiedler was a product manager at a tech startup when he and his roommate, Tyler Barstow, had a very analog idea for a company: vinyl records. In 2013, they launched Vinyl Me, Please, now an e-commerce site that, for $29 a month, sends curated records to subscribers, from the vintage (Black Sabbath’s Paranoid ) to the obscure (Watch Out! by 1970s Zimbabwean band Wells Fargo). But, in 2015, Fiedler made miscalculations that led him to an emotional breakdown—and the near-unraveling of his business.

- Yasmin Gagné

 My co-founder and I were in our first year out of college when Spotify came out in the U.S., and we used to send each other songs to push each other’s tastes. We started Vinyl Me, Please as a way of creating a community around music, and of sharing these diamonds in the rough.

I didn’t know much about running a business. We started out doing wholesale, but pivoted to a manufacturing model. We’d find albums and secured rights to them before getting them pressed by our manufacturer. Usually we’d receive the next record a week before shipping, and then we’d ship the albums out ourselves. Right before Thanksgiving 2014, we were waiting for December’s record of the month, but it never came. When I emailed the manufacturer, we were told that it was delayed by six weeks. There was no way we could get it to our subscribers on time.