When you start a small music brand, every dollar hurts. Tony and I have now spent about $42,000 on Casamoré over three years. A lot of that was smart. A meaningful chunk of it was dumb. Somebody emailed me last week asking 'what was actually worth it?' and I thought it was a good enough question to write down.
Worth it #1: the headsets. Silent Storm Pro 3s, 200 of them. $14,000. This is the entire brand in one line item. We did not cheap out. We bought the actual top-tier model used by festivals, and three years in, we have replaced exactly four out of 200 headsets due to damage. If we had bought the budget option I'd be replacing 40 by now. Spend the money on the gear. Nothing else matters as much.
Worth it #2: the EcoFlow battery. $1,400. The single most overlooked piece of kit in the whole operation. It lets us run the entire show off a single charged battery, which means we can set up anywhere there's legal access — beaches, parking lots, rooftops, friends' backyards — without ever touching a venue's power. That opens up venues we otherwise couldn't play. One purchase, doubled our bookable locations.
Worth it #3: paying a lawyer $600 to write the rental agreement. The temptation when you're scrappy is to download a template off the internet and change the names. Don't. We hired a friend-of-a-friend lawyer, gave her the whole story, and she wrote us a two-page rental agreement that has held up three times when clients tried to push back on damage fees. That $600 has probably saved us $4,000 so far. Not fun to spend. Correct to spend.
Now the wastes. Waste #1: the custom Casamoré branded lanyards. $1,100. We thought it would be cute if every headset had a little lanyard with the brand on it. It is not cute. It is one more thing to lose, clean, and replace. Nobody has ever commented on the lanyards except to say they are fiddly. Never again.
Waste #2: the $800 Instagram ad campaign we ran for Sunset 01. Zero new ticket sales that we can trace to it. Every single ticket we sold came from word of mouth, the email list, or the website directly. Instagram ads are a terrible fit for a local small-brand dance event. Spend the ad money on sending real free tickets to real interesting people instead.
Waste #3: the branded hoodies we made for Tony and me to wear at gigs. $340. They are hot. It is Florida. We wear them once a year in February. I look at them in the closet every morning and feel my wallet shrink. If you're starting a small brand: do not buy branded clothing for yourself until you have actual customers asking to buy the same clothing from you. That is the order. I learned this the hard way.
So there's the ledger. Spend big on the thing the customer actually touches (the headsets). Spend medium on the thing that protects you (legal, power). Don't spend a dollar on vanity until somebody asks for the vanity item by name. That's the rule. Three years in. Still true.