Interview with Mikhail Trutnev (Ultimate Guitar) about business, team and strategy

    New release of our Mobio Talks show powered by Getloyal , an automated retargeting system for mobile apps!

    The protagonist of the program is Mikhail Trutnev, executive director of the world's most popular service for musicians Ultimate Guitar with a monthly audience of more than 30 million people. In the paid section of the App Store USA UG application ranks first.



    In an interview with Getloyal CEO Alexei Pisarevsky, Mikhail Trutnev spoke about non-standard approaches to organizing business processes, working with a team and just to life.

    The interview discussed:

    • Management and growth in UG;
    • Rituals in the team;
    • Leaders turned on multiple growth;
    • Self-development and personal effectiveness;
    • Marketing and markets;
    • Strategy and vision for promoting Ultimate Guitar;
    • and much more.

    Full text decryption can be viewed here . Or read short notes under the cut.

    Mikhail Trutnev began with a story about how the Ultimate Guitar business model developed. The UG website was founded almost 20 years ago; in the first 10 years of its life, it worked on an advertising model. That is, users monetized through advertising. Since 2010, they began to monetize users using premium services and mobile applications. And today, already 70% of revenue is revenue from people who pay the Ultimate Guitar service, and not at the expense of advertisers.

    Ultimate Guitar as a company is very interesting not only in terms of monetization of music web and mobile services, but also in terms of business management.
    The three main reasons for the rapid growth of Ultimate Guitar are rituals, that is, business processes, people and the team, and leaders.

    Everything in the company is saturated with efficiency: each employee is turned on multiple growth. “We, as a team and the people who work for us, are crazy people, and that's ok.” To propose ideas, test hypotheses and run experiments to increase profits is the team’s direct responsibility. In addition, the company does not work "triplets." It was decided to part with those who pull the team back and do not contribute to effective growth.

    Today Ultimate Guitar is working on developing new versions of existing services, as well as developing new products for guitarists. Launches a new model that will allow you to distribute access to all songs and tabs for free. Thanks to this model, the number of users of mobile applications will grow by an order of magnitude. That is, the majority of users who do not download the mobile application now, but use the website or mobile web, will switch to the mobile application because they will have the same thing, also for free, but only with better quality.

    Also in an interview, Mikhail Trutnev shared his plans to conquer a new market for UG - the notes market.

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