Alec Ellin of Laylo on Navigating Creator Platforms, Rejecting Exploitative Investors, and Moving Toward an Ownership Economy

As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Alec Ellin.

Alec Ellin is Co-founder and CEO of Laylo, a platform helping Creator Economy artists, entertainers, influencers, and brands connect with their fanbases and deepen relationships with followers across different online platforms.

Laylo adoption has proven to streamline marketing efforts for Creators, better measure fan behavior, and improve campaign conversion rates as high as 7X compared to traditional presale tools. Major Creators using Laylo to promote ‘drops’ include Calvin Harris, Dillon Francis, Friday Beers, and ODESZA.

Prior to founding Laylo, Alec worked at Sony’s Epic Records on the Artists and Repertoire team.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?

I’ve been working in music and technology since the tenth grade, when I started a blog called The Laidback Life. I was obsessed with showing my friends great music and it led to me interviewing musicians and writing about my favorite new artists.

For college, I went to Newhouse School of Communication as a Screenwriting major but had been spending most of my days turning my blog into a business. Fortunately, I met Isaac Heymann while in high school and showed him some tunes. In my freshman year of college, he became VP of A&R at Epic Records and called me to come work for him.

After a stint at Epic, I got the chance to work at Velvet Hammer Management and Relativity Media, where I learned the ropes of entertainment. What became clear was that I didn’t love being in big corporate environments, but I did love music and building ideas.

I became obsessed with launching a way for fans to show off their ability to find and spread music, so I started teaching myself UI/UX design and launched Darkchart, an app that connected to users’ various accounts on streaming services like Spotify and Soundcloud and allowed them to create shareable playlists or ‘charts’ with friends and the public. I raised some money, had a few thousand users, and then met Saj who was building a competing app. He’s now a Co-founder and our CTO at Laylo.

All that to be said, there wasn’t necessarily a ‘path’, I just followed my passion around music and technology and was fortunate to find awesome opportunities and amazing people along the way.

Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?

What really sets us apart is that we live and breathe for Creators. Our incentives are aligned with them. On Laylo, we truly help Creators get more sales, streams, and clicks and we have the data to back that up. Crucially, we also make sure that Creators own all their data and can leave the platform anytime with their whole fanbase.

At the end of the day, the big disruption is moving from a monopoly economy to an ownership economy. Creators are building massive businesses and changing culture in ways that only the big companies could do 20 years ago. In the words of Harley Finkelstein, “we’re arming the rebels”.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

How much time do you have? We’ve made a ton of mistakes along the way and continue to. One that comes to mind was getting dazzled by a big-name investor early on. He took me out for an amazing meal, invited me to his incredible Malibu home and then made an offer. I was 22 and even then, I knew we were being exploited. Luckily, we never signed the deal and found people who truly wanted us to succeed. That to me is the big takeaway: ignore all the showmanship, find people that truly believe in you, and look for proof in how they do business.

We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?

One mentor that has made a massive impact on my life is Janine Shelffo, the Chief Strategy Officer at Advance. I was introduced to Janine by one of my best friends early in my career. Janine is this brilliant, warm presence. She was always very encouraging but also blunt. For the first year of the company, we were building a consumer app and whenever I’d visit New York I’d go and see her. She would nod, tell me it was interesting and ask me some pointed questions around why it wasn’t growing that fast or what we needed to scale it.

A couple months in, I came to her office excited about an experimental product we’d built which helped artists find their biggest fans online. She immediately told me to drop the consumer app and go headfirst into that. In retrospect, she knew that we needed to pivot but was guiding me towards the realization myself. If it wasn’t for that guidance, and that excited reaction to the new product, Laylo probably wouldn’t exist today.

In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?

I agree that it’s not always a great thing to be disruptive but that’s usually when someone or something already in power is doing it. You can look at Meta’s impact on the spread of false information and harassment today as a good example of that type of negative disruption. But I would say that it’s rare to see an upstart — whether that be a startup or an up-and-coming Creator using disruption as a force for bad.

Usually, if effective disruption is happening successfully, it’s because those systems or structures were meant to be broken down. I genuinely believe in innovation as a force for good and there’s a million examples of that, whether it be the creation of the internet or the Space Race. There are obviously negative externalities but overall, innovation has made the world a better place.

Can you share five of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.

This too shall pass — There’s this amazing, likely apocryphal, story about King Solomon asking his top advisors to help him find a cure for his depression. After trying various positions, prayers etc., one advisor came to him with the cure. He had made a ring with the engraving “this too shall pass” inscribed. The secret to its power was that it was the perfect lesson in impermanence. Good and bad times happen, that’s life, and clinging onto either are guaranteed to make you miserable — they will both pass.

Not necessarily words of advice but my dad has always woken up with a smile on his face. I’ve seen him deal with personal and business nightmares and the next morning, he’s ready to take on the day like new. I’ve always tried to emulate that.

Reading about growth versus fixed mindsets has also really impacted my view on the world. It reinforced that you can never be done learning and anyone that thinks they are probably won’t be very happy for long.

We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?

I won’t feel satisfied until we’ve helped a million Creators build full-time businesses out of their passion (and at that point the goal will probably be 10 million). We’re going to continue building products that genuinely help Creators and just as importantly, look and feel fun to use.

Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?

This is probably a cliche, but The Alchemist continues to be my go-to. I read it every year or so. It’s a bit hard to explain how a great piece of art touches you but I guess my easy answer is that it’s beautifully written and every time I read it, I learn a little bit more about myself.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“Amor Fati” — I wear a pendant with that quote every day. It roughly translates to “the love of one’s fate”. Essentially, good and bad things will happen, it’s important to value and appreciate both. It’s a simple concept but one that gets more powerful the more you think about it.

One more I love comes from the Tumblr days (shoutout to Tumblr). “If you don’t like where you are, move. You are not a tree.”

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

If I could get everyone in the world to do one thing it would be to read one book a month. I love a good show or movie, but there is something unique about getting to hear someone else’s perspective inside of your head. I think the world would be a much better place if we emphasized that kind of empathy and value on education.

How can our readers follow you online?

I’m @alecellin pretty much everywhere. Follow me on Twitter for random thoughts, or on Spotify for dope playlists!

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!