We were lucky to catch up with Gibran (gibs) Wirjawan recently and have shared our conversation below.
Gibran (Gibs), looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. So, let’s imagine that you were advising someone who wanted to start something similar to you and they asked you what you would do differently in the startup-process knowing what you know now. How would you respond?
I think read up on financial, management and structuring material as soon as possible. I spent most of the first-year of building my business without any pre-knowledge and just winging it. Once I got more serious about learning financial modeling, management strategies, it cleaned up our operations so much faster and made it a much more consistent and efficient process.
Gibran (Gibs), before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I run a production company that develops music, films, and events. Usually in the realm of Indonesian and other third-world country cultures. It’s where me and most of my friends are from, so it feels like the topic that I resonate the most with. So for us it’s about how can we package an experience that can help share the stories of these cultures, or help bridge the gap to western cultures.
Can you open up about how you funded your business?
Hustle hustle hustle. I was playing gigs almost 7 days a week, to crowd or no crowd. From the initial capital that I would save from these gigs I would invest it into assets/processes that would help snowball the business (which would lead to more capital). This could be from hiring an assistant to start building the team, or to videographers that could shape up my portfolio better.
What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?
Consistent quality in our product (in our case the music, the films, the events), making sure that we earned the respect of new audiences by making sure we did our work to prepare as best as we can, and to explore new material that would touch new audiences.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gibs.dnya/