Jason Grishkoff is a South African entrepreneur whose music web app SubmitHub makes over seven figures annually. With SubmitHub musicians can easily send music to labels, YouTubers and blogs, and get discovered. Read on for Jason's tips regarding learning to code, building your own business and achieving work-life balance.
Hey, thanks a lot for doing the interview! Could you give an introduction for people who want to know more about you?
My name’s Jason. I spent my teens and 20s in California, most-recently working as part of Google’s HR department. In 2013 I quit that job to travel around the world, and it didn’t take long for me to get stuck in Cape Town, South Africa, where I was born.
I spend my days raising a family and running two companies in the “music discovery” space, both of which have established themselves as go-to resources for the industry: Indie Shuffle and SubmitHub. These days the bulk of my working time is spent coding in React, a library I taught myself in 2015.
What were you doing before you started Indie Shuffle?
I graduated from the University of California, San Diego in 2007 (Political Science and History). My goal was to be a business strategy consultant, and after around 100 applications and many failed interviews, I managed to land a job in Washington, D.C. working at an Executive Compensation consulting firm. Moving cross-country and working a “stiff" job meant that I needed some sort of creative outlet, and so I began a weekly mail-out of new music that I’d found through various BitTorrent sites (the target audience was made up of friends I’d left on the West Coast and new friends I was making in DC).
