Baris Sarer, co-founder of Gigsby.com - the professional network for electronic music industry - pitched at ER 34. We asked Baris to tell us a bit more about the company and their product:

1- What is the startup's product? How is it used?

Gigsby is a professional network for Electronic Music industry that allows music people to discover and connect with new talent. It is an invitation-only web service where users set up their professional profiles, use our intelligence tools to discover new talent, and connect with each other to do more business.

2- What problem are you solving?

Talent discovery and networking. Music is a tough business and has recently experienced a major disruption due to digitization and the Internet that it still has not fully recovered from. There is a need and an opportunity to use smart technologies to improve the historically low-efficiency talent discovery and business networking processes. Gigsby does just that. We crunch fan data for 15,000 artists everyday and create reports showing which artist is getting popular and where. This data is invaluable for A&R people, promoters, agents, and publicists - anybody scouting for talent.

3- What is your business model?
Gigsby's business model is "freemium". The free part is the professional network where music people can set up their profiles and connect with others. The discovery reports, access to historic fan stats, and geo-based data are paid services. We have built tremendous amount of content that started creating traffic to our site so further down the line, advertising may also become another revenue stream for us.

4- What's your current status; ie. how many users? profitable? Previous funding? Looking for funding?
We are in Private (Invitation-only) Beta stage. We have about 1,000 users test-driving the website. The service is free for now. We will start charging for our stats and reports when we open the doors to general public which will likely happen in a couple of months. We are bootstrapping right now but we are definitely interested in connecting with investors who can bring funding and relevant experience to the table.

5- Who are the founder(s), their backgrounds?
The two co-founders are Bora Celik and Baris Sarer. Bora looks after the product and is an event promoter/hacker. I look after marketing and operational stuff and am a musician/songwriter and B2B business development person.

6- Any other message you want to convey?
We profile artists that we discover through our own Gigsby intelligence reports on our Facebook page. If you love good music and want to stay up to date on the best new acts, you should definitely follow us on Facebook.com/gigsby.