Meet Dan Ware of Breakr

Today we’d like to introduce you to Dan Ware.

Hi Dan, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I am an equally half-right and left-brained kid raised by Chicago and eternal champion of the culture. FAMU grad, Alpha Man, and “universal adaptor”, I’ve always strived for every project I execute to scream “All Power To The People,” with insatiable curiosity and need to ask “why not”, I am fortunate enough to have made a career of getting these visions off creatively and articulate and tastefully infuse culture in a way that just puts a very fashionable and hypeworthy bow on a brand. In a world where every brand is trying to find their cool and be relevant to the people who create the trends, I’ve always strived to empower the people of the culture and have been lucky to have been a driving force behind crafting cultural overhauls for some of your favorite billion-dollar brands.

But after doing a bunch of dope campaigns, on both agency and client-side, for major brands and partners like Mountain Dew x NBA, Coors Light, Foot Locker, Pepsi, Courvoisier, Lifewtr, etc., I now have my set sights on the music/tech industry and leveraging my cultural, creative, commercial and digital marketing expertise to co-found and launch, Breakr alongside a few of my best friends and long time business partners. Breakr is a seed funded – music-based creator-to-creator marketplace that connects content creators to emerging artists. Breakr’s tech facilitates transactions between artists, influencers, content creators, gamers, DJs, A&Rs and Music Fans to promote new music across various social media and digital platforms.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It has certainly not been a smooth road, lol. We started off as what felt like an ugly duckling, over the last few months we’ve remerged as darlings in Silicon Valley.

Career-wise, constantly being the kid asking “Why Not?” has always come with a complimentary side of hand slaps and failure. About a decade ago, as a fresh wide eye graduate constantly bragging about my low-effort Magna Cum Laude status, I started my career at Pepsico, waking up at 4am to drive a delivery truck to local grocery stores in Miami. With crust always in my eye, hammering energy drinks (caffeine fiends wya), I couldn’t help but to think about all the sexy job offers I turned down because I just KNEW I was talented enough to finesse my way to developing a Pepsi Super Bowl commercial (Spoiler alert it eventually happened). But when I was there, I learned a philosophy that I live by to this day, “Fail, Fast.”

“Fail, Fast.” is just that, it’s about doing that wild crazy thing that will never work, failing but being a bit closer to actually getting it right. My career was rooted in failure. I skipped the senior career fair to go to a meeting about producing an absolute flop of a homecoming concert (a very public failure). At 28, I also opened a bar/lounge in Chicago with some of my closest friends, that bar was unjustly and publicly shut down in just burning fashion by the city, with “lifesavings” (hah I was 28) down the drain. I could go on and on about the flopped pitches and dope af marketing ideas I created that senior management didn’t understand the feels.

I take all of those failures as the most important part of my story and ironically if some of those things wouldn’t have failed, in a multiversal branch reality, I would be still doing some of those things now and wouldn’t have had the time, eureka moments or desperation to be in the space I’m in now. So basically, if you don’t have any failures, I don’t trust you.

Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Breakr?
While creating music and gaining exposure has become easier than ever, breaking through the clutter of the sheer volume of new music is becoming increasingly challenging. Over the last year, it became clear to all distribution platforms that cater to independent artists that music production skyrocketed. Today’s artists need to be much smarter and more strategic about how they release and market music, and my co-founders and I created a solution.

BREAKr, a tech-enabled automated music promotion marketplace connecting content creators (DJ’s, Gamers, A&R’s, Influencers, etc.) to Artists to facilitate the breaking of new music across all digital music promotion outlets. BREAKr enables artists to break their music to newly engaged audiences when and where they choose, on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Twitch, and YouTube. Influencers generate real value for artists, track their impact, and develop a portfolio of successful campaigns that they can continue to market.

There is a massive untapped market of creators, influencers, and deejays who are willing to integrate new music into their content. However, no platform exists to organize the sourcing, filtration, and payment process for micro-to-mid-tier influencers looking to participate in the music promotion business. It’s well documented that micro-influencers have 5-6 times better ROI than macro-influencers on paid promotion. The exciting part is that with BREAKr, artists can now connect with micro-influencers directly at a price point they can afford.

Additionally, as black creators continue to help drive the creator economy both creatively and economically, unfortunately black creators are compensated the least. At breakr, we have strategically partnered with various black creator houses and creators of all size audiences to make sure they get capitalize on this new way to monetize their audience and command the price they deserve not based on race but pure analytics and market demand. In my role as Head of Marketing & Growth, in the five months that breakr has been live, breakr has acquired 30K musical artists and 15K creators, generating hundreds of thousands of dollars paid out to users.

Although a sad statistic, Breakr is among the 1% of all founders that actually raise institutional capital and of that 1%, only 1% are Black founders, of which we are 100%. As of today, Breakr has completed an oversubscribed seed round from some Silicon Valley’s best VCs and the Culture’s biggest investors. But what I’m most proud of is Breakr currently has a staff of over 25 people of which 22 are people of color and over half are black women with various leadership positions in the company. My plan alongside my co-founders is to make sure that we continue to hire the best diverse technical and cultural minds at each stage of the company.

Any advice for finding a mentor or networking in general?
So I recently saw a tweet that said something like, “Networking is so important, the fact that you can become a millionaire off of having the right conversation is so underrated”. Probably butchered that but thats exactly right. I have had pretty much the same business partners across so many different initiatives because we networked with each other, then networked across.

In a digital world, it’s just so easy and the fact that the best advice can be a DM away is nuts. When it comes to mentors, I have many, some are more involved and I look to get actual advice and some are much more inspirational in nature where they are like, “You’re dope, I’m dope. I got you.” and you can look to those types of people to just watch their moves. With that said, you don’t ACTUALLY have to meet somebody or have a convo to have them as a mentor. For instance, HOV is DEFINITELY my mentor and the closest I’ve been is floor seats at OTRII. But I look to him, his lyrics and study his moves and take some of them that are applicable. We have YouTube, you don’t need to meet people anymore.

Last thing I’ll say is that mentors don’t always have to be more senior or older than you. Mentors can have seasons. I look to my friends a lot that are my age or slightly older, but in certain aspects of their life and career, they can have PHDs, why would I seek and apply their advice? My boys do it with me and vice versa.

Pricing:

• Free

Contact Info:

• Email: [email protected]
• Website: musicbreakr.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dwarelaflare/
  https://www.instagram.com/musicbreakr/

Image Credits:
@shaunandru / @0514design