Friday, October 4, 2019

Keep 8th Four Lanes

For quite a while, I was involved in the fight to keep 8th Ave South in Nashville a four-lane road. The city was planning to reduce it to two lanes, which was an incredibly bad idea. I worked with some other business owners along 8th to create a citizen action group to try to prevent it. It was my first real experience fighting city hall and, to the surprise of many, we actually won. 8th Avenue remains a four lane road!

Some of the best press about it was on WSMV, News Channel 5, and the Nashville Ledger.

AdCritter

I've been involved in internet marketing in one way or another since that advent of Google Adwords, but I've never been able to do any programmatic advertising. Like most internet marketers, I've always been dependent on the two big boys: Google and Facebook. Programmatic advertising was, to me, this big scary thing that only mega-corps had access to.

Now programmatic advertising is accessible to pretty much anyone through AdCritter. It's affordable and easy to use. It also does geo-targeting, which I've always knows was possible but had never seen on an affordable platform. 

I've started using AdCritter to promote my various businesses, including Legacy Learning, Learn & Master and even on CrowdGuitar. Is anyone else having success with AdCritter? Comment below.

Note: AdCritter is owned by ceADvisory.

Thursday, May 5, 2016

First Round of Capital

Prior to now, I have always bootstrapped the companies I've started. I believe we're on to something really big with Trinocity, however, so we decided to raise outside capital. Venture Nashville wrote a nice little article on our first round, although we haven't released any details beyond what appears in the public SEC docs. You can also find pretty much anything Venture Nashville writes about me, which isn't much yet. I'll likely agree to an interview after our next round.

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Winning the Billboard Music App Awards

My first foray into software development was an app called the Gibson Learn & Master Guitar app. Believe it or not, we won the 2010 Billboard Music App Awards that year in the Branded Apps category. What a thrill. Here are a few press articles about it in the EO Press, on Gibson, and in the Nashville Business Journal.


Renovation of the historic Acuff-Rose Publishing building

In December of 2012, I bought my first commercial property: the historic Acuff-Rose Music Publishing building. It had been vacant for years and needed a major overhaul, but I wanted to make sure to honor the building's history and preserve as much of the original architecture of the place as possible.

A historical architecture magazine, "The Other Century," did a very nice piece on the project, which you can find here and here. The Tennessean did a nice article when I rented part of it to Brentwood Baptist, as did the EO Press.

Related tweets...
I need to write a longer post about this, but I did break my back snowboarding a few years back. I had just received a GoPro for Christmas and happened to catch the whole thing on video. Believe it or not, I was back on the slopes two months later. Here's the link...
Gabriel Smith breaks his back!

Nashville Snowboarding... in the street

It's not very often you get to do this in Nashville!
Gabriel Smith snowboards in Nashville