We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Neema Vedadi a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Neema thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. So, naming is such a challenge. How did you come up with the name of your brand?

There’s quite a few “Bat City (Blank)” companies around Austin these days. I wasn’t really aware of any back in 2017 when I named my DJ/Entertainment company Bat City Beats. I knew it was time to start my own company and I wanted something that connected with me and my vibe on a personal level but was at the same time catchy, recognizable and fitting. First I searched the internet for what other local DJ companies called themselves (I’d worked for a few but I knew there were many more out there). I was immediately jealous of a company called Made From Skratch Weddings. It had a lot of things I liked. A play on words, a nod to “real” DJing (instead of just playing songs from CDs or a computer). It definitely helped get my thoughts percolating. At the time my most frequent non-wedding DJ gig was on Capital Cruises’ downtown Bat Tours. Austin Tour Company would sell the tickets and pay to DJ while we cruised around Town Lake eventually settling by the congress bridge to watch the bats. One evening it just clicked how much these tours had helped build me as a DJ. The guests on these boats had no idea who I was and I had no idea who they were. I received no info on how old they might be, or what kind of music they might like, but we were stuck together on a boat. For at least 2 hours they had to listen and I had to make them dance. Like a comedian putting in the hours on stage, it taught me how to not bomb. How to read a crowd. How to take them from uninterested strangers to a tightly back circle of dancers jumping and singing along and asking me if I needed anything. I knew I could use this! So I told my wife about my epiphany while we were workshopping names. She’s great with words, we freestyle parody songs together anytime we’re in the same room, she’s undefeated at Scrabble and plays Quordle instead of Worldle for fun. She also completely hates and is terrified by Bats (if you catch me in person ask about my Carlsbad Cavern’s story”. But she is a good sport so we bounced around Bat ideas for a minute or two and as soon as one of us said “Bat City Beats” were both were like “THAT’S IT!!!” It was a nod to the Bat Boats, it screamed “AUSTIN” and the “Beats” is a nod to “real” DJing. I’m always telling my other DJs to “PUT A BEAT ON IT” Beats are what keeps people dancing. Some songs or parts of songs have no drums or weak drums so I’m always adding MORE BEATS! The name itself also had its own Rhythm when you say it. The B sounds on Bat and Beats like to kick drums and the two syllables in City like a couple of hi-hats in-between. It stuck, and I still love it every time I hear it :) and I love it even more every time someone I meet who has never heard of me HAS heard of my company! And now we’re also the in-house DJ company for Capital Cruises so we get to make even more people dance by the BATS then ever :)

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I kinda started DJing by accident. I was trying to be a rapper and I wanted to make my own beats. The internet wasn’t what it is today and social media wasn’t a thing yet so I just started going to Guitar Center, and asking friends what I needed. I ended up with a drum machine/sequencer (MPC 500) and a couple of Stanton CDJs with sample pads and a basic battle mixer. At the store they also had a magazine called Scratch that was for hip-hop DJs and Producers. This blurred the line for me between DJ and Producer. I started trying to blend songs together on the CDJs at the same time I was learning to sample those songs in the MPC and built beats with them. To me DJing became live production sessions and producing beats or songs was just slower, more deliberate DJing. I had also just graduated from UT with a degree in Broadcast Journalism but I hadn’t gotten a TV job yet. I was working for a film production company but it was freelance and there wasn’t always work for me. So I kept up with my college job delivering pizza for the Domino’s on Campus. The manager, John, introduced me to DJ Screw. I was hooked! John, started coming over and I would show him some stuff on the CDJs and we started making mix tapes and our version of Screw tapes. I finally got hired for a job on TV but It was in Wyoming so I packed up and left, brought all my music stuff with me but kept it as a hobby really. After my second TV job in Washington State, I realized I hated being a journalist. The industry rubbed me the wrong way. It was way too negative, and the stories they wanted clashed with my core values. So I moved back to Austin and tried to figure out what was next. I tried a few things, Cable Guy, Podcaster, and I started DJing weddings on Saturday’s. The DJing is where I stood out most! I started getting a reputation as the guy who could really mix and keep folks on the dance floor! The company I was doing Cable Guy stuff for got bought out and they dissolved our department. So I took a leap of faith and decided to just start my own DJ company! We provide peace of mind to Bride’s or anyone throwing a party that their event will sound professional, their DJ won’t be lame and their dance floor will be packed.

Can you talk to us about how you funded your business?

As a DJ/entertainer the Human Capitol is the biggest piece of Capitol. There is gear and equipment and a vehicle necessary but I had been acquiring that as a trickle when I was working my day job over the years. The big challenge was transitioning it from a side-hustle to a full time breadwinner status enterprise. My wife just had our 2nd child just 19 months after our first and we wanted her to be a stay at home mom. My day job company was bought out and my department dissolved. They said I could be a door to door salesman or just leave. I pretended to be a door to door salesman for the “ramp pay” for three months while I worked on how to make my DJ business replace my steady salary and benefits. The biggest question of course is “how will we pay rent?”. We got lucky and were brave on this question. My “Father-in-Law” had just bought 8 acres out in rural Leander. He did the thing people always talk about and invited anyone in the family to join him in building a sort of commune. We said yes! We bought the biggest RV we could find, and a 12×20 Tuff Shed as my Office/music studio. I rented a Trencher from Home Depot and dug a trench for an electrical line that we ran from the main house and used guess work to find where the water main was and trenched near it until I was hit in the face by a spray of water from breaking the water main! WE DIYed the utilities to our own little permacamp in the woods! It was a ton of physical labor but we now had drastically reduced the overhead of having a family and we had on-site babysitters (the in-laws who owned the land)! This did happen in July which is one of the slowest months for Event DJs in our area (way too hot!) so even after all that I did have to sell a little bit of gold I had stashed, but after that we were in a great position where I could focus on growing my business from nothing and still shelter/feed my wife and kids!

How did you build your audience on social media?

At first my company Instagram account was just me. I wouldn’t post often but my posts were whole musical productions. It was me taking a vinyl record and cutting a sample from it then building a song/beat around it in real time and back then it had to be under 60 seconds to count as an instagram post! I did a few of these and while it helped build my followers a bit I think the real benefit was the credibility I got from other DJs and from clients who saw them when they were checking into me. The followers really started to increase when I delegated the task of posting and interacting to my admin Tammy. She was perfect for the role. She is about the same age as a modern bride so she has an innate sense of what they want to see and she is also the one interacting with the clients constantly via her admin role so she has developed a great voice/style that speaks to our clientele! She also is way more consistent with it as it is way more suited to an office role. I’m always traveling and gigging and me focusing on posting everyday never really worked out. I needed someone who can make this part of their work flow so I can focus on performing and building the business. So I would definitely say you as a business owner or creative should delegate this to a specialist or someone else on your team with the bandwidth to be consistent. Because consistency seems to be the best way to build an organic following!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.batcitybeats.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/batcitybeats/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BatCityBeats/

Image Credits

Gyp C Girl Photography
The Oberports
Betsy Y