Jeb Banner On Turning Passion into A Platform
Words and Photos by Lydia Norton
Jeb Banner’s passion for music took root early. While attending Indiana University, he worked at Second Story Nightclub in Bloomington as a bouncer. He later worked under the mentorship of the club founder and lead booking agent, Lee Williams, gaining valuable experience in the music industry. Since then, he’s grown into an entrepreneur, building businesses in the auction space, launching the strategic consultancy SmallBox, serving as the CEO of Boardable and Opendate, sitting on multiple boards, and founding or investing in several nonprofits. His latest venture, Bounce.fm, is a one-stop shop for recording musicians to store their files, create playlists, manage their projects, receive feedback, and collaborate with other creators.
Lydia Norton: What is Bounce.fm?
Jeb Banner: Bounce.fm came out of my desire to have a solution that combined some of the tools I was using into one platform. I was using Dropbox for file storage, SoundCloud for playlists, and text messaging and spreadsheets for project management. It was just frustrating to me. I make music with a lot of different people, so I wanted to organize it by project and have different collaborators on separate projects, and that wasn't available to me. And so, I started building it myself using an AI coding platform called Lovable back in March because I wanted the solution. I invited some friends in and received feedback and thought, I think I may have something here. I raised some money for it, and the last six to seven months we’ve been building a team around it.
LN: Who is your target audience?
JB: Our audience is people who are writing and recording music. There are about one hundred million of them around the world. To be honest, the primary market's probably going to be Gen X’ers, coming up from being in bands in the nineties, still playing a lot of music with their friends, but no longer aspiring to be rock stars. They're more interested in making music with people they care about, and they’d love that music to be heard. Otherwise, they want to have a lot of fun making music, they want to make more of it, and they want to make it with more people. And that's what Bounce is enabling.
LN: How is your experience building this business different from your past ventures?
This is an experience I want to have. That's the thing about Bounce.fm that's different for me than a lot of businesses I've built: it's the first business where, regardless of whether it is successful or not, I will keep using it and working on it because I actually use it every single day.
Everybody that I know uses it the same way. Even if we don't succeed as a business, we're not gonna stop working on it because it's the thing we rely on to make music, you know? It's an indispensable tool for me and the people who use it.
LN: Can you describe the social aspect of Bounce.fm?
JB: We're building something called the Bounce Lounge, which is a platform for people to come and share music with each other in a social space. People can join and say, “Hey, this is a new song I'm working on. I'd love feedback on it.”
There's an app I loved about twelve years ago called Turntable.fm, and it was a space where you could play music for your friends, but it was all music from the existing catalogs. And I thought, wouldn't it be great if it were us sharing our own music? In these different spaces, you might have a songwriter's lounge, you might have a hip-hop lounge, or you might have a lounge for each artist where they could sit and review mixes and get feedback.
LN: When do you hope to launch Bounce.fm, and how can people get involved?
JB: We're looking to launch before the end of the year, if not early next year. We have about 100 beta users testing the website now, and we're still accepting users. It's free to use, and the feedback is valuable to us. Eventually, we'll be in a paid model starting at $5 a month. It'll be very inexpensive. We have a lot of plans, but we need to finish some of the work to get it ready for launch, and then we'll take the next step.
