How No Treble Built a Community of 220,000 Bass Players

In 2019, I sat down with KiKi L’Italien on the Association Chat podcast to talk about No Treble, the online magazine for bass players that I’d launched a decade earlier. At the time of this conversation, the site was drawing over 300,000 visits a month and had more than 220,000 followers on Facebook.

No Treble continued to grow after this interview. It reached 500,000 monthly visits at its peak, and I ran it for 16 years before it was acquired in May 2025. I’m still involved as an advisor, and the site continues to thrive under its new ownership.

Looking back at this conversation, the ideas we discussed were exactly the foundation that carried No Treble through all of that growth and ultimately made it worth acquiring. Here’s the full interview, along with the key ideas expanded below.

Building a reader-first editorial model

The idea behind No Treble started forming long before 2009. I launched my first online magazine in 1995, co-founded Squidoo with Seth Godin in 2005 as Chief Product Officer, and spent years thinking about what makes online communities stick. By the time I was ready to build something for bass players, the core idea was clear: build content around the readers, not just for them.

Bass players are the offensive linemen of the music world. Nobody knows their name, but if they’re not in the mix, you’ll definitely notice. There was one dominant print magazine serving this audience, and it was constrained by its page count, which was really limited by how many ads it could sell. That meant only the famous bass players got featured.

The web doesn’t have that constraint. From day one, No Treble was designed to give its readers a place alongside the legends. That editorial instinct, putting the community at the center of the content, came from everything I’d built before. Squidoo was a user-generated content platform on a massive scale. No Treble applied similar thinking to a niche I loved, with a tighter editorial hand.

How featuring readers created a self-sustaining community

We created a series called Reader Spotlight: an interview questionnaire where bass players tell their story. We pick the most interesting submissions and publish one every week.

What happens next is the part I love. A bass player who hasn’t been featured anywhere before sees their name and photo on the same site, in the same feed, alongside the bassist from Metallica or whoever. They get 500 friend requests from other bass players. They email me, and the gratitude in those messages is my favorite thing about running this site.

But I never wanted them to feel like we did them a favor. If you’re doing something worthwhile, you deserve the attention. We’re just the ones pointing the spotlight.

We did the same thing with video. Every afternoon, we featured a bass video curated from YouTube. Our whole team is on YouTube anyway because we’re all bass nerds. So we’d find someone with 50 views on a video, feature it, and the next day it has 10,000. These bass players would reach out to us at NAMM (the big music industry trade show) and say, “You featured me, and my whole world changed.” That’s the web working the way it should.

The Reader Spotlight and the daily video didn’t just build loyalty. They gave people a reason to come back, a reason to submit, and a reason to share. Every feature was content we didn’t have to create from scratch, and every feature connected someone new to the community. It scaled because the readers were the content.

How a sticker giveaway accidentally became a business

I’m a sticker guy. I’ve always been one. So, when I designed a No Treble sticker as a fun little giveaway. Send us a self-addressed stamped envelope, and we’ll mail you one.

They started pouring in. I was handwriting a note to each person on an index card, addressing them by name, and dropping a sticker in their envelope. When it got too many to handwrite, we printed the notes but still personalized them.

The ask was simple: once you stick it on whatever you’re going to stick it on, send us a photo. And the photos started coming in. Stickers on bass amps (expected), stickers on cars (cool), stickers on the actual bass guitar (I wouldn’t put my own sticker on my own bass, but they did).

We posted those photos to Facebook. Every single time, the number one comment was: “How do I get one?”

We linked to the page. More envelopes came. More photos went up. More people wanted in. It was a loop that kept feeding itself, and it was spreading our logo everywhere.

Then a problem created an opportunity. Bass players outside the United States couldn’t send us a self-addressed stamped envelope with U.S. postage. They started emailing: “I’ll pay you for one.” So we opened an online store. Stickers and t-shirts, all with our logo.

I closed the office the day we launched the store, went to happy hour, and watched purchase confirmation emails come in one after another. People wanted to buy our logo and wear it around. I was amazed that they were buying a logo, our logo, to put on a t-shirt and identify themselves with the community.

What the stickers created went beyond marketing. People were wearing our brand at concerts, putting it on their cars, and identifying each other in the wild. My friends and family would send me photos of No Treble stickers they spotted in parking lots. I’d go to concerts and see people in our t-shirts. The sticker was a visual testimonial and a way of saying “I’m part of this.” We eventually printed over 80,000 of them. Sticker Mule featured the No Treble story, and I wrote more about how we built an audience with stickers.

I never intended to start an online store. But the sticker campaign showed me something: when people feel like they belong to something, they’ll find ways to show it. You just have to give them the materials.

Why owning your platform matters more than any channel

The first technical decision I made when building No Treble was to own the platform. The site ran on WordPress. I connected it to every social channel I could, pushed content out to all of them, and met the audience wherever they were. But the home base was mine.

MySpace was actually a huge early channel for us. There were a lot of bass players there, thanks to MySpace Music. When MySpace collapsed, we lost that traffic. We lost that traffic, and we felt it. But we didn’t lose our platform, our content, or our audience. The people who had been finding us on MySpace eventually showed up elsewhere, and because we owned the home base, we just kept going.

I tell everyone I work with: connect on every platform, push your content out, and meet your audience where they are. But do not build your empire on somebody else’s platform.

What 16 years of building community taught me

No Treble started as a passion project, but at the scale it reached, it became the best lab I could have asked for. At 500,000 monthly visits at peak, I could see what was happening with Facebook’s algorithm, with SEO, with email, all at a scale where the patterns were unmistakable. That fed directly into everything else I did professionally.

But the more important thing is what went into No Treble, not just what came out of it. The ideas that made it work didn’t start in 2009. They started in 1995 with my first online magazine, evolved through Squidoo, and kept refining over 16 years of running No Treble. How to build content that makes people feel recognized. How to create editorial that serves a community rather than just broadcasting to one. How to give people ways to connect with each other, not just with you.

“They felt like they belonged to something. And that’s not limited to bass players. People want to be connected.”

The stickers, the Reader Spotlight, the daily video, the t-shirts. None of those were marketing tactics in the traditional sense. They were ways of saying, “You’re one of us.”

When people feel that, they don’t just visit your site. They wear your logo.