We’ve got a lot of updates, so we’re switching back to our newsletter format in an attempt to be nice to your inbox. We’ll start with celebrations, and end with some sobering news about our financial situation (not to bury the lead, we have a month’s runway at current operating costs).
DC meet-up
The first weekend of October saw our team congregate in DC 🎉. jodi was in town for the 2024 CLS cohort meeting, and Alex flew in. We met on Friday evening at Sankofa—a co-grantee of the DC co-op impact grant—and said hi to some of our community here in DC. On Saturday we holed up in a meeting room and amid quiche, chocolate, and bubbly water we talked about the future of Mirlo, what we envisioned, how we’d relate to each other, and what we wanted to do in the next 6-12 months.
Mirlo is Mutual blog
We’re excited about the launch of our blog focusing on music industry topics generally as well as Mirlo artists specifically. We’re still developing the spirit of the blog, but look for discussions of the solidarity economy, how musicians organize themselves, a critical lens on the music industry, and spotlights on Mirlo musicians.
Check out our first post about Cyprus Hartford, a Mirlo musician selling their first full-length on the platform.
Merch features
Behind the scenes we’ve been plugging away on new features, alongside the usual bug fixes and support requests. The biggest feature set we’re excited about, and that’s a bit of ironing out away from going live (some artists have already been able to test drive it and have given us invaluable feedback) is the ability to sell merch on Mirlo. Stay tuned for an update on that.
First Kickstarter rewards shipped
This week Simon put 20 totes and 15 t-shirts in the mail, the first round of our merch going out to make its way towards our Kickstarter backers. We’ve printed about 30 totes total, have 40 t-shirts waiting to be shipped out, and have all of our buttons pressed. The pain point for this series of fulfillments is truly the USPS website, which apparently doesn’t like accents in people’s names or international phone numbers. Backers at the swag bag, t-shirt, and button tiers can expect their things next!
Hours worked on Mirlo
In September, worker owners worked at Mirlo for at least 117 hours. This looks like 52 hours on outreach, going to the USFWC conference, social media, and musician promotion; 8 hours on Kickstarter fulfillment; 35 hours on implementing merch; and various other things like running meetings, doing administrative tasks, working on our operating agreement, etc.
The main highlights here are our very exciting time at the USFWC conference, and the work we’ve been doing on merch features!
A look at our budget
Mirlo made $332.09 and spent $3,633.70 in September. A large chunk of this—$1,371.58—was associated with travel to and from the USFWC conference. This was a great event and we were super fortunate to be able to be there. Additionally, we were able to pay one of our worker owners $750 for their work this month. Other significant costs were commuting to and from events in New York City, our server costs, which we had to bump this month, and the purchasing of t-shirts and totes for Kickstarter merch!
We lost some support this month, dipping our monthly supporters to 25, with a total contribution level of $375 (minus Stripe fees). When asked, supporters said their personal finances changed. We’ve had roughly $41 move through the platform in October in forms of purchases and tips. This is a significant dip from last month. This is probably a continuation of the downward trend after the initial publicity cycle we experienced during the kickstarter campaign.
Some significant expenses coming up are all our co-owners coming together in DC the weekend of October 4th, our purchase of t-shirts at Worx Printing for Kickstarter fulfillment and shipping all of those items (which we estimate will cost $1,500).
The main detail to be mindful of here is that this means we’re getting very close to the end of our runway. At current expense levels, we have one month left of operating costs. At the end of the month we had $15,507.05 in our bank account, for which $10,000 is earmarked for the Music is Mutual event we’re organizing in DC in 2025. We almost got our budget estimate correct from our Kickstarter campaign!
To accommodate this the worker-owners have talked about going into winter hibernation until we ramp back up in spring. We still have to iron out the details but don’t worry, the platform will stay up.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://mirlo.space/team/post/101