How record label Sold Out distributes songs 30x faster and saves 75 hours a month with its own internal operating system

Sold Out is one of the biggest record labels in Latin America. Its current roster includes artists like Nio García (6M Spotify followers), Miky Woodz (5M Spotify followers), and over the years has worked with Wisin y Yandel (10M followers) and Bryant Myers (15M followers). Sold Out also produces events worldwide, running tours for artists like J Balvin (41M followers). Vice President, David Restrepo, had a background in systems engineering before going into music.

David Restrepo rebuilt the label's internal operating system on Hercules in a week. The company that used to run on WhatsApp, Excel, Google Drive, and email now runs on one integrated app. A song's paperwork that used to take 5 hours now gets finalized in 10 minutes. Tour logistics that kept him up past 3am runs on autopilot. The platform he built was so valuable that one of the world's largest record companies already offered to acquire it.

Today the whole company runs on the platform I built with Hercules. I can pull out my phone and draft a contract or a split sheet in minutes. I automated everything.

Distributing songs 30x faster by automating document generation

Releasing new songs on streaming platforms requires legal approval by the Sold Out team. This process was traditionally bottlenecked by paperwork: each song needs several signed documents like a producer agreement, a label waiver, a revenue split sheet. Each document took ~1 hour to create and could contain mistakes. With 30 songs going out a month, that meant 100s of documents and 100s of hours of work. What's more, it was a poor artist experience: when an artist finishes a song they want it live that day. Paperwork could often delay this by several days.

With Hercules, a song's full paperwork is finalized in 10 minutes. David built a Hercules app with every artist, producer, and collaborator, and all of their details (name, email, phone, payment details, etc). Now, releasing a song is as easy as picking the participants, setting each participant's revenue share percentage, and clicking submit. Hercules generates all the required documents automatically.

A revenue split sheet used to take me an hour. Now, it's instant. And it creates the producer agreement and the label waiver automatically. It's incredible.

Saving 75 hours a month by automating tour logistics

David used to have to work until 3am to finalize tour logistics. Sold Out's artists tour the world. Every tour requires David to organize hotels, ground transport, drivers, flight numbers, and passenger details for each city and performance. Previously, David managed this in one master Excel document that was only accessible to him, meaning he had to do all the legwork.

David has saved about 75 hours a month by automating all these logistics with an app he built on Hercules. He used Hercules App Connectors to connect a flight-data service: he enters a flight number, it pulls the full itinerary, he selects the passengers he has pre-saved, and it outputs a clean PDF. He automatically checks his colleagues into flights by uploading their boarding passes to Hercules and using Hercules AI to read each one. Finally, each colleague gets their own travel portal to manage their documents, passes, and flights meaning he doesn't have to answer any questions or organize logistics in person. He can now work 8am to 5pm on tours. Some days, he finds himself with nothing to do because he has automated so much of his workflow.

Before, I'd stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning to get everything done. Now I work 8 to 5, and some days there's nothing left to do, because it's already finished.

Why Hercules

David tried using Base44 at first but it didn't let him build what he wanted. He then tried Hercules and within an hour he was sold. As a trained systems engineer, he knew how to code and build large systems, he just didn't want to have to manage it himself. He could tell Hercules was far ahead of the other platforms and would let him build exactly what he wanted without having to write code, manage servers, or hire developers.

I looked at Base44, but it wasn't letting me build what I wanted. I tried Hercules, and within an hour I'd already decided.

What's next

David is now building out Sold Out's bookings and sales flow through Hercules. He is starting with the artist-booking form he built into the platform. To drive inbound, he is running both paid ads and organic traffic through SEO and redirect pages. David has also started showing off what he has built to other people in his industry. When he showed what he built to a manager at one of the largest record companies in the world, the manager even extended an acquisition offer. As David puts it: "Honestly, Hercules is so perfect. You tell it what you want, and it builds it for you."