Montreal Startup: GigTrip Social Meets Music Tourism INTERVIEW

Canadian serial entrepreneur and startup aficionado Jean-Pierre Levac is working on solving the pain points involved in musical festivals, tours and shows. To do this right, Levac found early on that all three stake holders would need to be involved. Musicians, fans and venues. Without all three pieces in the process one stakeholder would end up with an unfair advantage, while another may be left out in the cold.

Levac has spent much of his career in the IT Industry, with the last fifteen years spent in startups. He’s always been interested in the music business, but not necessarily the way everyone else is. Levac wants to take his skill sets and those of his co-founder Artem Mindrov, and fix the back end of the music industry.

Levac and Mindrov are attacking the fan angle first. To that end they are looking for beta testers, especially people who attend music festivals and make travel excursions out of them. To us it seems that there are so many people out there attacking the event discovery problem from the aggregation side, Levac and Mindrov seem to be on the right track to integrate all three stakeholders before the events pour into search engines and aggregation apps.

We got a chance to talk with Levac about what they’re working on at GigTrip. Check out the interview below:

Gigtrip is building a suite of mobile, tablet and web apps for the music tourism industry. Currently trying to figure out the major pain points to bridge the gap between three stakeholders: the fans, the artists/bands and the venues.

Jean-Pierre Levac, based in Montreal, Canada, is an entrepreneurial technocrat with 20 years of experience in the IT industry, 15 of which were spent in startups. Excelling at business development and networking, he loves the startup process and strives to build teams that help ideas grow into marketable products and sustainable businesses.

Artem Mindrov, based in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, is a software engineer that is always eager to learn new technologies and find ways to apply them to real world problems. Always on the lookout for opportunities and a willingness to meet new challenges by putting his background in mathematics and passion for concerts to good use in launching a startup.

We are based in Montreal, Canada with our development is in Russia.

Montreal, Canada is a good place for tech startups. We have a very active accelerator program in the city and access to smart and creative technocrats, entrepreneurs and developers. Although we have several universities producing quality developers we do sometimes experience shortages. On the upside low operational costs, access to a wide selection of good and inexpensive restaurants, low rent and overall minimal cost of living make Montreal the perfect place to bootstrap your startup.

The problem that we are trying to solve initially is improving the overall lifestyle experience through mobile social interactions while attending music festivals and concerts.

What is one challenge that you’ve overcome in the startup process?

Putting the right team together. We are still looking out for a couple of co-founders, at least one more technical front end/mobile developer with a strong UX/UI background would be nice. The main criteria though is you have to believe in what we’re doing. A willingness to grind and a love of music in general are great to have as well.

We think worldwide. Music is global and multicultural thus so are we.

We are grinding hard at building the prototype and are planning to go for a seed round once that’s done.