Blacksburg developers create a rockin' startup 

BLACKSBURG — Asad Yusupov was talking to a Virginia Tech developer one Thursday evening in February. The 20-year-old entrepreneur had already started two companies, and now he had an idea for a third.

By that Friday, the Northern Virginia native was living in Blacksburg. Three months later, he was a cofounder of the town’s latest software startup.

This is the way things go for Yusupov. He’s always on the move, trading up for bigger and better undertakings. It’s not clear how much longer he’ll be able to sit still in Blacksburg, but for now he’s one of the most recent out-of-towners to find his way into the community’s tight-knit group of entrepreneurs.

He has teamed up with some of the area’s more battle-tested developers to build TourCommand, a Web-based application that organizes logistics for band managers. It’s another example of the entrepreneurial tech start-up movement burgeoning in Blacksburg these days.

When musicians perform on the road, someone has to let the crew know where they’re going next and what they need to do when they get there. If a manager pays for the $35 a month subscription to TourCommand, he can put all that information in one place. The application can handle hotel reservations, equipment checklists and angry messages trying to figure out who trashed the green room.

Yusupov was tight-lipped about how many subscribers have bought the service since it went on sale June 1. But he did say almost 200 bands have at least signed up for a free trial. Roc Nation, a record label with high-profile clients like Jay-Z, is one of those taking a test drive. Miguel, who recently won the Best Male R&B/Pop Artist honor at the 2013 BET Awards, is a paid subscriber.

“It’s cool because there’s all these different people we grew up listening to and hearing about, and now they’re interested in actually trying us out,” Yusupov said. “That’s what makes this so unique. It’s software, but it’s music-based software. So we’re still in the entertainment industry, we’re still having fun.”

Yusupov and his three fellow cofounders work out of TechPad, an incubator whose previous tenants make up the who’s who of Blacksburg startups. Koofers, Heyo and VirtualU all began in the desks around them. Yusupov says it’s the perfect place for TourCommand to take off.

“The community here is designed so people like ourselves can really grow their company. There are a lot of resources because people here want you to succeed. You don’t get that in Northern Virginia,” Yusupov said. “Here, people approach us to help us out. And that’s really what drew me to Blacksburg.”

As soon as he settled in, Yusupov connected with a friend from back home, Ivan Veskov, and Blacksburg locals Brian Putt and Joshua Gunter.

Putt and Gunter were two of the three cofounders of Heyo, a company that designs social media campaigns for its clients. Things went smoothly for that startup as it became one of the fastest growing in Blacksburg. Today, Heyo is a million-dollar company that employs 16 people.

But after two years of working there, the pair was ready for a taste of something new.

“There were a lot of trial and error things we did wrong at Heyo,” Gunter said. “Things we’re now doing right here. Things we don’t have to mess up on this time because we already know.”

TourCommand was ready for customers 27 days after the crew came together.

The rush was a challenge, but the team said they didn’t have much of a choice. They serve a touring industry that heats up in the summer and is all but gone by winter. If TourCommand was going to work, it had to be now.

“It’s typical of a successful startup to give everything you got,” Yusupov said. “We were able to build a product in less than a month and go to the market with it. And that’s because the amount of hours and hard work we’re putting behind it.”

Their headquarters has all the signs of a typical startup: a table overflowing with empty water bottles, elaborate whiteboard drawings and beanbag chair that is used more often as a bed. The team is allowed to start playing music at 5:01 a.m., but by then they’ve already been in the office for hours.

Bob Summers, founder and director of TechPad, said it’s not unusual for him to find the TourCommand crew asleep in the office when he shows up in the morning.

“They have incredible drive and they are focused,” Summers said. “Focus means it’s hard for them to stop working. Sometimes that means working late, late nights. There’s lots of Red Bull and pizza — the calling card of a startup in a development phase.”

But Yusupov is no stranger to the startup lifestyle.

He launched his first company, EMG Management, with a former business partner in 2010, when he was 17 years old. They began by booking appearances with the cast of the MTV reality show “Jersey Shore.” If the event sold tickets, EMG would get 70 percent. If the show bombed, it paid the losses.

From there the company expanded and started promoting shows in more than 20 markets. By 2012, EMG had enough money and Yusupov was ready for something bigger.

He and his partner took the money from the promotions business and bought three tour buses they would rent to traveling musicians. He wasn’t exactly shy about claiming that one of his clients was Macklemore, a hit artist who has topped the charts since he burst onto the scene earlier this year.

But Yusopov said that’s all finished now. He plans to sell his buses when they wrap up their final trip later this summer. From then on out his sole focus will be TourCommand.

But that doesn’t mean Yusupov isn’t already looking ahead to his next venture.

“We aren’t just going to stop at tour management,” he said. “We’re going to expand to artist management, ticketing. We’re going to expand to the social media side of things, the fan pages. We have so many things that we want to incorporate. But right now our focus is tour management. We build relationships with the clients, the artists, then we expand.”

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