w/ Andris Zemmers, JZ Microphones
Youtube Interview: https://youtu.be/ZOxFs99yHuA
Ever wondered how to grow a niche brand into a global force? On this episode of The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, we hear from Andris Zemmers, marketing director at JZ Microphones about the success their high-ticket product lines have seen in 10 countries. Dive into the strategies that drove JZ's growth - from lead magnets to audience targeting, email sequences, and more. Hear how strategic partnerships with influencers, personalized customer service, and new product lines are propelling JZ further in their industry. Don't miss out on this episode for practical tips and a relatable experience.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
7/11/2023
Kurt Elster: Welcome back to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, my friends.
Sound Board:
Kurt Elster: I’m your host, Kurt Elster.
Ezra Firestone Sound Board Clip: Tech Nasty!
Kurt Elster: And today our guest is Andris Zemmers, Marketing Director for JZ Microphones. Now, I once spent a summer as an apprentice in a recording studio, and that brief time really made quite the impact on me. I think mostly because I love gadgets and because I have zero musical skill whatsoever, and so I’m very jealous of people that do, and if you’re in that position, recording engineer is the closest you get to having any kind of musical skill. And so, when this came across my desk I was like, “I love it. I have to have these folks on our show.”
And these Latvian craftsmen create top-notch microphones used by huge stars like Lady Gaga, Metallica, U2, and Mick Jagger. Their products are sold in 10 countries and their primary sales channel here is that Shopify store. And so, we’re talking really high ticket items sold internationally, and that’s somewhat unusual for this show, and so I’m excited to get into this. And our guest’s got 11 years online marketing experience and helped JZ Microphones grow their sales fivefold in five years. And he is going to spill the beans on that, share his secrets, so that you too, my friends, can sell high ticket products, too.
All right, let’s dive into the story of JZ Microphones’ success here. Hey, Andris, how you doing? Welcome.
Andris Zemmers: Hey, Kurt. It’s a pleasure to be here and I think you guys have the best eCommerce podcast in the world. I’m a fan. Been listening to six or seven years. Love your and Paul’s jokes. Love sound effects. For me and JZ Microphones, you guys help a lot.
Kurt Elster: I had no idea that you were familiar with the show. That means a lot to me. I appreciate it. Okay, so let’s start easy and at the top here. How did JZ Microphones first get started? And what… There’s a lot of microphones out there. What makes this one special? How did you get started? Why is JZ different?
Andris Zemmers: So, the whole history started around very, very early 2000s when our founder, his name is Latvian name, Juris Zarins, meaning JZ, or J Zed, and he founded a very famous company, actually. Blue Microphones. Blue Microphones is known for like Blue Yeti. All podcasters are using Blue Yeti. And actually, Blue was founded here in Latvia, but then the company was sold to Americans, and then founder created JZ Microphones in 2007. And basically, the secret sauce, the secret thing, the secret technology was that the founder learned all the stuff by making the Blue Microphones, and he invented unique capsule technology. Something a bit different than other microphones use. And right from the beginning, all the stars, all the producers, all around the world was basically taking the mics, because now, 2023, there are tons and tons, maybe 100, 150 microphone brands, but in 90s or 2000s, there were not.
Kurt Elster: And so, all right, when you say capsule technology, that is the physical single component in the microphone that actually does the listening.
Andris Zemmers: Yeah. Well, basically capsule is the heart of the microphone. It’s like a cylinder type thing made of metal. There is a plastic layer inside. And what everybody else is doing in the industry, they are spattering capsules with gold. It’s like a common thing. What we are doing, we are doing more like a jewelry type of thing. We are hand picking little golden droplets and putting it on the capsule. It sounds like something technical, something maybe not interesting, but as the result, our capsules, they produce way more clear and detailed sound. And basically, whenever I send the mic to… I don’t know, any huge artist or producer, what they are sending me is, “Wow, these mics sound so clear and detailed.” And that’s thanks to the capsule.
Kurt Elster: Now, I do want to point out if people are attempting to use your voice for reference, these are not podcast mics. These are like recording studio mics. And you’re using just like… You’re not using a JZ mic.
Andris Zemmers: No. I’m using one of the I think best and the most affordable podcast mics, which is the Shure SM7B little brother, and our mics, they are used in big recording studios, and of course you can use them in homes, but you need proper gear, a proper preamp, the proper treatment to get the best results out of that.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. No, you’re moving up to like Ferrari level kind of thing with those microphones.
Andris Zemmers: Yeah. Something like that.
Kurt Elster: And at the top of the show I said, “Hey, these are high ticket items,” so all right, I think I really went nuts and I splurged on my podcast microphone. This is an SM7B. These things retail $400 US dollars. It looks like the JZ Microphones start at $1,100 US dollars. 1,000 euro.
Andris Zemmers: Yeah. They are approximately around 1K, up to 2K, and sometimes even more.
Kurt Elster: What’s the… All right, as I’m going from 1,000 to 2,000, what changes? What’s the difference?
Andris Zemmers: The difference is pretty simple. All our mics cost, like standard mics cost 1,000 bucks. It’s the same technology, a little bit different character, a little bit different sound, but the ones that are 2K, in the mic they are basically two mics, because you can get a stereo recording. So, the most expensive part of the mic is the capsule, which is ridiculously actually crazy to make it. So, if you have two capsules, you really need to drive up the price.
Kurt Elster: Oh, of course. And one thing that’s interesting here is you said, “Hey, JZ was founded by the same person who founded Blue Microphones,” who now… Blue sells Blue Yeti, which that’s like became an industry standard for streaming and podcasting because of its ease of use and affordability. What’s interesting here is on JZ Microphones’ website, I don’t see that mentioned. The about us page, the homepage doesn’t talk about that. That seems like a big advantage.
Andris Zemmers: Yeah. I’m a Marketing Director there and I know that it’s a very huge selling point, but we really can’t use it a lot because we have some law things going on in the past, so we are not allowed to jump with this Blue thing on our audience.
Kurt Elster: All right, so it’s… We’re assuming that this is like part of some contract agreement somewhere. It’s just like, “We can’t really do that.”
Andris Zemmers: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Well, and I think at the same time, it’s very different audiences. My 13-year-old who wants to be a Twitch streamer would be thrilled to have a Blue Yeti, versus if I presented a Blue Yeti to Lady Gaga or her recording engineer, they would probably both be horrified. So, you know, maybe an advantage there, but speaking of the fame monster, how did you manage to get so many Grammy Award-winning artists to use these? How do you get… It’s hard enough to make your first 10 sales, 100 sales. How do you get the attention of say Mick Jagger or Metallica?
Andris Zemmers: It’s actually very funny, for example, because Mick Jagger’s story is one of the weirdest stories I think in my life, because three or four years ago one engineer from UK just wrote me. “Oh, by the way, check this link out.” I’m clicking on the link and I’m seeing Mick Jagger’s new song, and I’m seeing our mic, and I’m like, “It’s not possible.” On official video, Mick Jagger and Dave Grohl are using our mics. And I’m writing this guy like, “Who are you?” And then I’m checking that this guy bought mics for… I don’t know, five to seven grand, like full bag of mics, of JZ Mics, like a year ago. And he was not even asking for a discount, which is so crazy.
Kurt Elster: So, it was what, like an engineer, a recording studio person who’s like, “Oh, I want to try these,” and bought just a stack of them?
Andris Zemmers: Yeah. And it’s interesting with our brand, and I think with lots of more high ticket, premium brands, is that there are like fans, like 20% of our audience is buying everything that we make. Pretty much all the models, because it’s a common thing that if you’re an engineer, or a studio, you need many mics, like 50 mics to mic the whole orchestra or something like that. And it’s a normal thing that we have, and sometimes order value is like five or six grand. It’s just the specifics of this industry.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Well, I remember when we were in the studio, one of things you do is like different mics have different tones, different tone, and tone of voice is what a microphone has when you’re switching between them, and so they’d line up like five of them and then they’d have someone, after we got our scratch track recorded, then you’d have the vocalist sing the same track, just a sample, on every different mic. They’d play it back and be like, “Okay, what sounds best here? What’s our best dry track here?”
And so, that’s why you want to have this library of microphones, because five mics that are of similar quality are… One is going to sound the best for one person’s specific voice, or depending on how I’m mic’ing an instrument I might change which microphone I’m using. So, it sounds like this was… It’s a B2B business. It’s really not people buying these for home use. Like sure, there are home studios, but my guess would be it’s very B2B, like I’m buying this for my professional recording studio.
Andris Zemmers: Yes. Around 70% of our audience, the music or engineering is their primary income stream. So, that tells something. But you’re right, actually. I don’t… For me, as a marketer, I don’t like to look at it as a B2B, because I can’t contact the company because there’s still a person, and these persons are still on Facebook, or YouTube, or Instagram, but yeah, usually especially in Europe they’re buying using invoices, which tells that they are a business.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. That’s a little less common in the U.S. What’s the reason why businesses always use invoices?
Andris Zemmers: In European Union, we have this VAT invoice, which is something similar as a sales tax for you guys, and basically everything, everything on the store, there is this 21% bonus-like tax, and when you are buying as a company, you get a discount for this tax, but you need the invoice, like a legal invoice. If you’re just buying with a credit card, you don’t have this VAT tax discount.
Kurt Elster: In the U.S., if you want to do a business expense, you just kind of declare it and then hope for the best. I’m not a CPA. That is not official advice. Don’t listen to it. So, do you have your own music background? Or you’re purely a marketer?
Andris Zemmers: Actually, the whole JZ Microphones journey for me 11 years ago started, I was a musician. I finished just university, and I was working random jobs like driving around, selling pizzas, and something like that. But my friend actually was working in JZ Microphones company back then, and I was begging him, like, “Do you have any vacancy open?” And it started from basically nothing, like doing sales calls, something like that. And slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly it grew. But yeah, I’m still kind of… Since I was 16, I’m a musician. I’m actually singer, songwriter. That’s why… They told me, the CEO that time told me that we are hiring you because you know the microphones, because you are in the band. You know the differences between microphones, and you’ve been in the studio.
So, that’s interesting when you’re doing marketing job and you’ve been hired because you are in the band.
Kurt Elster: And so, did you have a marketing background?
Andris Zemmers: Not really. I was just… I just finished university. It’s a three year university. I had economy or something like that degree. But you know, this one is marketing and sales. It’s totally different beast.
Kurt Elster: Oh, so you didn’t even have a marketing degree. You had like economics or business it sounds like.
Andris Zemmers: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: But you had the domain knowledge. You had the experience and authority. You were in their target market. And so, they said, “This will work.” That’s kind of interesting. And so, what do you think… High level here. For JZ to become an international successful brand, but starts as a small Latvian company, what do you think that secret sauce is? Now that you’re looking back 11 years.
Andris Zemmers: The first big thought that I think is under all the decisions in marketing in the business is that we look, what everybody else is doing in our niche, in our industry, and we are doing the opposite. Basically, what all the famous marketers like Jay Abraham, Dan Kennedy is talking about, and there’s an example. Lots of microphone brands, pretty much everybody, they are using other retailers, and they are only functioning as manufacturers, meaning they are not selling directly to consumer. I’m pretty sure that we are the only ones, or maybe there are one or two other companies, that are using Shopify store and selling directly to consumer. And this is totally different game. This helped us a lot during COVID, for example. While every retailer, every music store, every studio got closed, we had a Shopify store which meant we can sell, and sell, and sell to home studios.
Or another example is lots of other manufacturers and other microphone brands, they are using, buying expensive magazine print ads, banner ads to kind of boost awareness. We are doing totally the opposite. We are using info business approach, where my primary KPI is to generate leads, and then using welcome sequences we are warming them up. And again, we have tons of leads, and I think our email list is in the size of top media in our audio industry. Again, we are the only ones with that kind of email list in our industry.
And that’s just… There are tons of examples. Pretty much every campaign, we are looking what every other marketer is doing, and we are doing the opposite, and this gives unfair advantage and unfair results sometimes. That’s step number one.
Kurt Elster: So, I think… So, what I’m hearing here is part of it is look what everybody else in your industry is doing and try to do the opposite. These high end microphones, because they’re sold direct to studios, took this B2B approach and this very traditional, old school advertising methodology, and you took the much more like always online, direct-to-consumer approach, and applied it here, and it worked incredibly well for you. So, you’ve got this… You have a Shopify store. How long have you had the Shopify store? How and why’d you pick Shopify?
Andris Zemmers: I think it was back then, it was basically the only good choice. Now, there are I think other choices that are also nice, but I never look back. I tried once WordPress with all the stuff in it, but no. No thanks.
Sound Board: Eww!
Kurt Elster: You said you’ve got… You drive people to an email list. All right, what’s the lead magnet? How do you get them to the email list?
Andris Zemmers: So, this is one of my kind of… The most interesting part of my job is to kind of be creative and try to find out what the lead magnet can be, because if your product is a microphone then you have to be creative to kind of come up with what’s the lead magnet. So, many, many years ago we just used eBooks about recording, like how to place microphone, how to use microphone preamps, how to mic drums, how to use microphones on your vocals, and stuff like that. And six, seven years ago, eBooks worked very, very good. For the last three or four years, I think it’s everybody… It’s a bit like a cheap trick and nobody is kind of… We can’t get that ROI that we got like six or seven years ago.
So, now we are using… One of the things actually that work very, very good is an anniversary giveaway, where engineers all around the world can participate and sign up to win the mic. We have a webinar where I’m talking about this microphone technology. Then another thing, what we did is actually a thing that I suggest everybody is doing, is as we have a huge list of Grammy Award-winning producers, I just… During early January this year, I just wrote them and asked, “Can you just suggest any tips for young musicians, young artists, young producers?” So, I got hundreds of tips, and I created 20 days of tips. Basically, you can as a producer sign up and get professional, Grammy Award-winning producer tips from them. And I just plug sales sequence after that, and these things work very, very good.
And actually, one interesting campaign that we did last month was I had a goal, like we needed to generate lots of leads in very, very short time, and not only leads, but we needed the sales too, and close leads in three to seven days. And what we came up with was basically the shortest funnel ever built, which is an ad on Facebook that basically says, “Sign up and get X amount off and bonuses.” It’s a sales ad but it doesn’t go… It doesn’t push people to the sales page. It’s a landing page.
Kurt Elster: Oh, a lead gen ad. Was it a lead gen ad? Or do they stay on Facebook?
Andris Zemmers: We tried both. We tried with lead forms, and we tried with external landing page, but still, it’s a lead gen ad. And again, it’s crazy ROI. But you know, there is no funnel. It’s just an ad that sends you a discount code. It’s like what the popup window in the website does, but you just use the same thing on Facebook, and it works.
Kurt Elster: And so, it still seems like the hard part there is the audience signal, like are we remarketing to people? Are we doing lookalike? Audience interest may work for this market.
Andris Zemmers: In the early days, I think lookalikes worked very, very good. But then my favorite approach now is like Facebook gives me professional audio as an interest, like if you’re a producer, musician, there’s this professional audio, or it was pro audio, something like that, and this is a very nice audience. It’s a huge audience. It’s probably way bigger than any Facebook marketer would suggest me to use. But it works very good.
Kurt Elster: One would think, given all the fancy tools and the AI, and the machine learning, that interest-based targeting would not work as well as it does. But I have consistently had a lot of success using just what seems low tech now by comparison, but just like plain old interest-based targeting. And then occasionally you could layer stuff over it, like if you know your audience demographics, like interests plus typical, like these are the people who typically buy. It’s worth trying. It can work surprisingly well. And so, we have a very… You give them a very direct offer, which is like, “Hey, there’s a sale.” And then they get pushed to a welcome series, or like a nurture sequence.
Andris Zemmers: Yes.
Kurt Elster: In email, which I love. What are we using for email? Klaviyo?
Andris Zemmers: Yes. Klaviyo… Many, many years ago I was using Mailchimp, but then Shopify kind of… You guys mentioned that Klaviyo is a good thing, and I tried, and never looked back.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Yeah. I like Klaviyo a lot for their marketing automation and just the tight integration in general. So, what’s a good nurture or welcome series look like for you in Klaviyo?
Andris Zemmers: I think the minimal amount of email is like four emails for us, and the first is definitely some kind of lead magnet delivery. It’s like the first one. But then, what I like to do is immediately after that my main goal for warmup sequence or welcome sequence is to just blast audience with reviews, with Mick Jagger, with Metallica, with tons and tons and tons of Grammy Award-winning producers, with YouTube reviews, and I’m using very heavy weapons in this case. And after I talk about how others are using, then, only then I kind of talk about product.
First, I want to give them the sense that everybody else in the industry is saying good words, so these mics are the main thing you have to hear about.
Kurt Elster: We’re leading with that third party social proof. But in your case, you get to go insanely hard. You have these very real celebrity endorsements, and not just like a celebrity who claims they use it. Here’s the audio track that the celebrity recorded with it. You can go hear it if you really wanted to track it down. It’s quite incredible.
So, because it’s a high ticket item, it’s expensive, we’re selling something that costs as much as a high end laptop, and yet they may not have heard of you. And so, you have to build trust with those customers. And so, it sounds like we start with that third party social proof, and yeah, you said we’re using heavy weaponry here, which is great. And then from there, where do we go? We’re starting to craft a story here.
Andris Zemmers: Yes. So, as the first step is third party social proof, the second and the third step is I highlight two main products that we have. Because I don’t want to say that, “Here’s the social proof and here are all products that we have.” Because they still have to choose the right microphone. So, email number three is like we have the Vintage series, which is the most popular microphones that we have, and I talk about differences. Again, I plug lots of YouTube reviews. And then email third is where I talk about different product. And when I get these three checks, like loads of social proof, then I introduce to Vintage series, then to a Black Hole series, which is another product. Then, I can start selling something or give any kind of discounts. And this is like email number four.
Kurt Elster: All right, so email four goes out, and that’s like, “Hey, we’ve proven that we’re legitimate. We’ve shown you these are the bestsellers. These are the products you might consider.” And then the fourth one is, “Hey, if you’re ready to buy, here’s a coupon code.” Roughly what discount are we doing?
Andris Zemmers: We’ve experimented a lot with the discounts, and unfortunately, we are a bit dependent on discounts because we just started that way, and it’s very, very hard to kind of go other way around, and we experimented with from 20 up to actually 50%, and I can say that 40%, 50% works the best. 20%, not so much. What I would like to say is that as we are selling directly to consumer and we are the ones who are making the mics, meaning we don’t have any third party costs, we can be very, very flexible with the pricing, which is kind of a win-win for us, and still make good margin here.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. That trap of discounting doesn’t hit quite as hard when you’re the one manufacturing the product, right? You control all the inputs. So, you’ve clearly… You’ve got the marketing, high ticket items, you’ve nailed it it sounds like. Looking at other people, what do you think are the common mistakes people make when selling high ticket items?
Andris Zemmers: I think if there would be one marketing strategy or one marketing trick for every business, but especially high ticket business, it’s you have to use other channels as your biggest marketing channel. Meaning I think it was Tony Robbins who said it. The best way to influence people is by using channels that already has the influence on them. So, when we started, it was full on. We used YouTubers, podcasters, media reviewers, influencers on all different channels, and they were talking about us. They were pushing the message. And only when we had like, I don’t know, 10 YouTube reviews ready, or 10 communities talking about us, only then we started using Facebook ads, or ads where we are talking about ourselves. So, yeah, my biggest suggestion is use other channels, because it’s so much easier.
For example, we are working with YouTubers in our pro audio niche, and YouTube is very, very popular thing in pro audio because everybody is listening, and everybody is looking how others are recording albums and stuff like that. And just give them your mics. It’s crazy how cheap something like… These channels are not expensive.
Kurt Elster: Oh, product seeding.
Andris Zemmers: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: So, you identify like good vloggers on YouTube. And you’re right. In setting up my own stuff, it’s technically complicated, and so in setting up my own stuff I had to watch a whole bunch of YouTube videos. And you just type in this is the gear I have, and like setup, or tutorial video, you find a whole bunch of them. And then you listen to it. You’re like, “Okay, if they have the sound I want I just follow that guide.” And so, you identify those people, reach out to them, and you go, “Hey…” What’s the pitch? Hey, we love your stuff. Can we send you a $1,000 microphone?
Andris Zemmers: The thing with lots of businesses, especially with cheaper products, like drop-shipping ones or stuff like that, it’s hard to push your products. But if you have a $1,000 mic, 70 or 80% of universe never asks for money. You just send your… I like your channel. Here’s our mics. All the time, they already knew our mics. And I’m just asking like, “Can we send a mic for a test?” I don’t need a review. I just need your opinion. And 60, 70% of times they are making videos, and what I also like to do is not only… You know, it’s level one. Making a YouTube video or seeding the product, you just level one. But when you have a fan on that side, when this YouTuber or community organizer, if it’s a fan, if this guy or girl, if they love the product, you just need to dig deeper. Try to push email blasts to their audience. Try to push community boosts.
You know, all the stuff that we are doing as marketers, try to make them to do the same stuff with your product. I can say the best results in the 10-year history, the best results that we’ve got was with one small Facebook community with not more than 1,000 members. This small community, these guys bought like 200 microphones from us.
Kurt Elster: Whoa.
Andris Zemmers: Without any cost from us. Its ROI is through the roof. It’s 1,000 people community and 200-plus something sales. It’s just crazy because we were seeding the mics. These guys loved the mics. We were there on Q&A sessions and that’s it.
Kurt Elster: That’s incredible. You’ve been doing this 11 years. It can’t all be roses and sunshine. What are some of the growing pains you’ve faced here?
Andris Zemmers: I think the biggest pain as a manufacturer is that you somehow… You have these two things on your hands. One is like selling stuff and one is manufacturing stuff. And they will never be on the same level. For example, during the COVID, it was very hard when your factory is almost closed. Luckily, here in Latvia the rules were not so strict, but still there were months where for two or three months the factory was closed, and we were just… For the three years, we were always, all the time, sold out. And you know, you have to sell mics, but you also have to make them, and now it’s a bit different story. We have a huge factory and during the COVID we kind of grew our muscles as a factory, and now it’s a bit different. Now we have… In our warehouse, we have more product that we can sell. But this was like at the moment.
Now, the biggest challenge is to push the product in the market again. And we never needed to do that for three or four years.
Kurt Elster: With a high ticket item, with incredible growth, customer service becomes a pain point, and with your brand, with a premium product like this, I think the expectation for customer service goes up. And so, have you found that to be the case? And how do you approach customer service?
Andris Zemmers: Again, when we look back at the number one rule I have, which is look what everybody else is doing in the industry and do the opposite, nobody has customer support. You can’t even reach companies like Facebook or Amazon. You can’t even reach them normally. For us, it’s totally different. For many, many years I was on the side doing customer support. Luckily, now I have my friend. She’s doing customer support full time. And I can tell you that one of the things, one of the first things that our clients will say about us is that you guys have very good customer support, because we are picking up the phone, we are calling them, because we are a small company. We don’t have millions of orders per year. I can still sometimes pick up the phone and call a client if he or she is in Euro.
And that’s kind of… My number one priority is still generating leads, but priority number two is being there for a client.
Kurt Elster: We’re coming to the end of our time together, but you name checked a few people and some various resources. I want to know. Things are always changing in online marketing rapidly. How do you adapt? Where do you get your info? What are your favorite resources?
Andris Zemmers: First of all, my main knowledge source is podcasts, because I’m living an hour drive away from capital of Latvia, where is our factory and main office, so I’m driving there two times per week, and this gives me a few hours to listen to podcasts. Of course, there is number one is Unofficial Shopify Podcast and I’m not kidding. It’s really like-
Sound Board:
Andris Zemmers: I’m listening to every episode, and I like other podcasts. I like actually… What’s the guy? I think he was on your podcast. Jason Portnoy?
Kurt Elster: Jason Portnoy. Yeah.
Andris Zemmers: Yeah. He has actually very nice stuff. I like Perpetual Traffic Podcast when it comes to ads. These are three main things that I’m listening to. But of course, books. Books, books, books. I think I’ve read all the marketing books that we have out there. But it’s very tricky with education. It’s very tricky. Because somehow when you’re reading a lot or listening to a lot, you don’t have time to implement it. And the whole education slowly becomes a procrastination tool.
So, it’s very… You have to be very, very careful. You don’t have to read too many books or listening to too many podcasts, because you won’t have time to implement all this stuff.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I always call it drinking from the firehose, right? There’s so much out there and that is a blessing and a curse. You could dedicate your life to just consuming content about the thing you want to do instead of doing it. And 80 years from now, you will have only scratched the surface, right? At some point you have to just say, “All right, I’m ready. Let’s take action.” But if you don’t know what you don’t know, I understand the necessity of doing the research and going through it. But it can get excessive at some point.
All right, coming to the end of our time together. What’s the future hold for JZ Microphones? What’s the next big thing for you?
Andris Zemmers: The next actually big thing for us is I really want to make sure that we are making also more mid-ticket, low-ticket products for home studios, and gamers, and podcasters, because I think… Yes, it’s a crowded market, but there’s always room for the best, and I think that we can take what we learned working with U2, Metallica, Mick Jagger, and hundreds of Grammy Award-winning producers, and just put this technology in a smaller, cheaper box, and make a podcast mic or a mic for gaming. This is very interesting. This would be more like… A bit different market with totally different approach, but this is kind of… This keeps my fuel burning here.
Kurt Elster: I would kill for a JZ podcast mic. I think that would be the coolest thing. And you have a YouTube channel of your own, right?
Andris Zemmers: Yes. This year, early this year I started my own YouTube channel because I have lots of friends here in Latvia, and you know, all the time someone is starting a business, starting selling this or that, and they are usually calling me somehow for advice. And like, well, I will just film a couple of videos, and now I’m filming one video per week, and if the audience wants to check, the channel is called What Works In Marketing, and I’m sharing lots of stuff that we’ve tried, all the real life case studies that we’ve tried and that work for us in JZ Microphones, and of course some other stuff that didn’t work as well.
Kurt Elster: I will link to that in the show notes. Andris Zemmers, JZ Microphones, thank you so much.
Andris Zemmers: Thank you, Kurt.