Sparkart cranks the volume on bands

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Not much — except that their web sitese are all the work of web maestro and serial entrepreneure Naveen Jain andhis .com. Founded by Jain in 1999, Oakland-based Sparkart is a full-servicw digital agency, specializing in the musif industry, which manages web site designn and branding with its Clique Tools Accordingto Jain, Clique Tools is a key part of success at the 35-personh company: “Most platforms force you to do thinge in a cookie-cutter way. (but) our system is very creative-friendly and develops web sites that are totally Through the software and close collaboration with Jain has grownthe company’ds revenue 42 percent over the past three years to $7.
1 milliob in 2008. Though eagere for more growth, CEO Jain currentl has 40 clients and continues to addclientse slowly. “Every client we take on is a risk becaus e you never know how the relationshilp is going toturn out,” he “so we’re trying to be smart aboutt how many clients we take on so we can continues to provide excellent services, because as soon as we providde something that sucks we’re going to fail.” In any good relationships with clients are but in the entertainment business, bad ones quickly becomee a battle of titans. “In entertainment, sometimes the personalities are just as volatilew as they appear to Jain said.
“Sometimes you can believre what getsprinted (in the tabloids).” Although many of Sparkart’ds clients are musicians, the client base has growh to include other types of entertainers, including magician Cris comedian Denis Leary and online store It has also worked with companiesz like the Ultimate Fightintg Championship and organic skincare line Pangea Sparkart looks for clients who are persistent and passionate and who are lookint for a partner rather than simplyt a vendor.
“We reallg take the time to understaneour clients, we try to understand how they want to presen themselves and what their aesthetic preferenced are, and once we get in their we try to represent that,” he Jain said he is sometimes invited to boarr meetings because his employees are considered part of their client’s team. Sparkart and MetroPark, for instance, have a partnership-stylwe agreement that lets Sparkart get a share of what is sold througgh theonline store, but Jain woulcd not disclose details of the deal. Jain’s 35-person shop has spliy into engineering, creative and administrative teams.
The Sparkarg team not only helps to design web sitew for theirmany clients, they also act as counselors for the technologicallty illiterate — “when clients don’t understand how the onlinse world works, we explain ... what’xs happening, what techniques work from a marketing perspective, which companiese to partner with,” said Jain. This team of nocturnalo techies is led byJain himself, a 28-year-old San Franciscoi native who founded Sparkart when he was only 18.
Jain studiefd computer science at Purdue University in Indiana but droppedx out becausehe couldn’t handle the Midwestern He continued his studies at Santa Rosa Communityu College, but when Sparkart took off, he left to manage it full Sparkart is the firsft of four entertainment companies Jain founded or co-foundee — vDream Inc., Clique Here NKJ LLC — and has helped some of his other startupsz get their break.
VDream, a Facebook car racing application that lets users buy and race uses Sparkart’s Clique Tools as its As for Sparkart’s Echo Music was bought by Ticketmaster and MusicToday was boughtt by LiveNation, leaving Jain’s company as one of the few small, independent firms in this “They have far better resourced and more capital, so that’sd an everyday challenge,” Jain said. “But we are one of the few who are focused on theweb — we’re not tryingf to promote concerts — and the focused peoplde are the people who I think are goinvg to win.
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