The 19-Year-Old who built a Vinyl startup with nothing—Just Fire
Entrepreneurship
Spain
19 Years
Hi, I'm Alice von Krosigk and I always had a deeply-rooted passion for entrepreneurship and decided to pursue my dream of being a business owner straight out of High School. At nineteen, I moved to the U.S to embark on my entrepreneurial journey and founded my first startup, Sync Collective - an independent music publisher offering physical format releases to musicians completely free of charge.
The idea behind Sync Collective first took shape in California, where my co-founder and I brainstormed ways to address the growing demand for income opportunities among musicians.
We observed two interesting trends in the music sector: on one hand, the significant increase of emerging musicians seeking ways to monetize their music, and on the other hand, the strong resurgence of vinyl records. We recognized a huge potential in this vinyl revival and decided to take part of it with our own, innovative concept.
Our approach was simple yet disruptive: we developed a print-on-demand model that made vinyl production, which is usually a costly process, completely free-of-charge for musicians. This would be possible through a crowdfunding-like approach, in which artists would sell digital mockups of their vinyl records to fans, friends, and supporters before production even began. This way, we could generate sales without the records physically existing yet - and once a minimum order threshold was hit, we would move into production: almost like dropshipping, but combined with the timeless appeal of vinyl.
"I view each 'you can’t' as another reason to push harder, rise higher and shatter expectations."
What’s your mission?
They said I couldn’t—so I did. That’s my mission: to turn doubt into my blueprint for success.
I have always been a strong believer of hardship being the ultimate driving force in the pursuit of greatness. Throughout the course of my life, I have observed highly driven and goal-oriented people around me and have noticed one significant common denominator: they all come from hardship and have had to face key challenges in their pursuit toward achievement.
One of my strongest beliefs is that we are all given challenges for a reason, and that we can choose to either ignore, accept, or conquer them - and to me, being a true winner means not only facing challenges, but welcoming them with open arms and allowing them to strengthen one's mindset and vision.
Over the years, I have begun to view adversity as a gift rather than a burden, and have allowed it to fuel my inner fire and determination toward achievement. While I have been very fortunate to be surrounded by so many supportive and encouraging individuals in my life, I have also had to encounter a lot of doubt from people in my past. Although this has often hurt me, I now take it as a major inspiration in my pursuit toward achievement. In fact, proving people wrong has been the leading factor for my personal drive and it is something that gets me out of bed every morning.
In my opinion, success is built on doubt, and that is why I have started to keep a list of motivational quotes close by me - not the kind of positive affirmations that you might find in business guidebooks, but rather words of doubt that have been expressed toward me by people over the years. It might sound unusual, but to me, it’s fuel - I view each “you can’t” as another reason to push harder, rise higher and shatter expectations.
How old were you when you started?
That depends on your definition of “starting”.
I started dreaming of owning my own business as a young girl already. When I was in primary school, I used to buy candy from a closeby vendor for ten cents a piece and would resell it at school for double the price - unfortunately though, I mostly ended up just eating it myself, so that wasn’t a very profitable business (and actually a major reason as to why I was quite the chubby kid!).
However, over the years, my dream of being a business owner intensified, and my entrepreneurial vision truly started to take shape when I moved out of home at age fifteen. After spending a year in Canada, I moved to South Africa independently at age sixteen to complete High School. This was where my major personal transformation occurred - in school, my academic performance was a top priority to me, and although my aim was to excel in every subject, there was something particularly drawing me toward my business studies course. I began to devour my business textbook and spent countless hours researching beyond the curriculum – and this is where I realized that business, especially entrepreneurship, wasn’t just another school subject: it was my personal calling.
According to Mark Twain, “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why”. Living in South Africa by myself enabled me to experience that second day and discover my calling toward a career in business: something I am forever grateful for.
So, when did I start? I’ve been drawn to entrepreneurship for as long as I can remember - from my initial failed candy hustle in primary school to finding my personal purpose in entrepreneurship at age sixteen, and ultimately launching my first company at nineteen. It is a dream that has evolved and intensified over the years, but has been within me since day one.
What inspired you to start your own business?
Something I recognized early on is that we all have a purpose in this world, but that our time to reach this purpose is extremely limited.
Imagine laying on your deathbed one day, and surrounding you are the ghosts of unfulfilled dreams and abandoned goals. They stand around you, collectively saying: "We came to you, and only you could have brought us to life. Why didn’t you take action? Now, we must die with you."
That thought alone is enough to shake me to my core! I believe that every person has one major fear in their life, and mine is definitely never reaching my full potential. The idea of settling for mediocrity and living an average life is deeply repulsive to me and has been one of my biggest motivators over the past years: It pushes me to excel in everything I do and to chase my goals and ambitions relentlessly.
This apprehension of falling short of my potential has also been one of the reasons I started my own business at nineteen - I realized that if I did not take every opportunity to come closer to my personal calling, I would one day look back at my life with regret. My goal (other than proving people wrong), is to make myself proud, and I can only do that by pushing myself to my absolute limits to reach my utmost potential.
How did you turn your idea into a business?
When I started my business, I honestly had no idea what I was doing. Being young, you tend to believe that you’ve got it all figured out - but once you take the first step toward your dream, you quickly realize just how little you actually know.
And that’s exactly how I started - with no experience or guidance but a crazy degree of delusion. However, that early sense of uncertainty gave me the level of confidence I needed to kick off my business. I believe that it is always better to start earlier than later, even if it means starting with nothing and building your knowledge through a practical approach.
The early stages of launching Sync Collective were all about relentless research, day and night. I needed to determine whether there was a demand for our concept, and more importantly, whether the timing was right. I devoted around two months toward deep research before deciding to move quickly and launch the business. I'm not one to delay things—once I commit, I go all in. After pitching the idea in August, we officially incorporated at the end of November 2024, and we’ve been growing steadily ever since.
The first few weeks after starting the business were challenging on both personal and professional levels. Right before launching Sync, I made the decision to drop out of university because I wanted to pursue my entrepreneurial dream full-time. Although I know this was the right decision, it wasn't a particularly easy one at the time,, as I found myself working on my startup around the clock without knowing where to begin. I had little guidance or experience and didn’t understand what I had to do to get the ball rolling - so, in the first few weeks, it was pretty much all trial-and-error.
Over time, I began to develop effective strategies of running the business: speaking to many older and more established entrepreneurs and mentors was absolutely invaluable in the initial stages, and seeking feedback truly helped me to understand how to navigate my startup. Each week that passed, I gained a better understanding of key business practices, and although I have seen huge improvements in both my personal way of handling day-to-day business operations as well as substantial progress in the company’s achievements, I recognize that this is an ongoing learning process. There’s still so much to learn and improve on, but the past few months have been a critical first step for me.
How did you get your customers?
Initially, acquiring customers was one of our key challenges. We hadn’t effectively defined our target market and were basically promoting the concept to everyone in our TAM.
However, we quickly realized that this approach was way too broad and decided to take a few days to fully understand our target audience. We analyzed the market in detail and created several in-depth customer personas. Developing effective sales strategies to speak to each category of customers has significantly helped us in closing deals over the past months.
Instead of trying to promote ourselves to every musician out there, we now target a very niche sector of the market and have started to focus on more established names in the industry.
Our current two main customer acquisition strategies are cold calling and working with designated talent ambassadors who have existing industry connections to reach out to - both of which have proven to be very effective for us.
How are you funding your startup?
One of the main advantages of our print-on-demand model is that we don’t have an upfront investment for our projects. This has enabled us to completely bootstrap the business and eliminated the need of seeking external investment to start off.
How are you doing today and what plans for the future?
One of our biggest realizations in the past months was that a key factor in the success of our business model was focussing on creating a community around our brand. We began nurturing a network of artists and started hosting regular events on behalf of Sync Collective, which has been a major success – our most recent event in February attracted almost 100 attendees and we are now partnering with other startups in growing our musician network: and, quite unexpectedly, this has lead to more conversions for us, too.
Our main vision for the next two months is to go all in on customer acquisition. After developing effective sales strategies, we are now ready to put 100% of our focus on acquisition. Our target is to achieve 500 artist conversions this year and expand our reach to hosting large-scale festivals for creatives of all kinds. Our upcoming event on April 11th is the first step: we are partnering with FENLES, an event management plattform, to create a larger, recurring event featuring keynote speakers, live performances, and industry networking opportunities.
What advice do you have for budding founders?
My biggest advice to aspiring entrepreneurs is to just start - go for it, even if you think the time isn’t right or your product isn’t ready. Create an MVP and try to get feedback from your market as quickly as possible, without fully building your final product. Don’t waste time fine-tuning something that might not sell. Instead, test early, embrace failure, and fail forward. This will enable you to learn, adapt, and move on faster toward success.
Are you currently hiring?
We are always open to adding new talent ambassadors to our team - this would be anyone with connections in the music industry and preferably experience in customer communication, especially with musicians.
Otherwise, we are also looking for someone to support our cold acquisition team in contacting new leads.
What’s the most unexpected thing you’ve learned about entrepreneurship?
I used to always believe that putting in enough hours into my startup would make me successful eventually. However, I recently realized that time and effort does not equal success - it is the results that count, not the time you spend working on something.
Although I work somewhere between 16-19 hours a day, I’ve realized that this alone won’t make me successful. However, spending significant amounts of time in combination with efficiency will. I have started to spend less time on in-depth research and detailed analyses, and am now working at a much more general level, which is saving me a lot of time. Unexpectedly, this is currently giving me the best results.
Where can we find you?
Book Recommendations
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The 4 Pillars of Success by John C. Maxwell
