Hello there! As you’ve probably figured out already, my name is Andrew Shults. I look forward to hopefully learning your name in the near future. Feel free to contact me with any inquiries, or simply introduce yourself and tell me about what you do.
I created this website to showcase just a few of my creative endeavors, and (hopefully) allow people like you to get an idea of who I am and what I do.
Who I am is someone that is both creative and analytical. I enjoy dipping my toes in many different disciplines and consider myself a jack-of-all-trades type of person. My passion is podcast production. Nothing brings me more joy than connecting people with stories, news, and culture through podcasts, and other audio content.
But I’ve also got a background in digital marketing, music journalism, and language and speech tech. I like to think I simply help people utilize the power of the internet.
In June of 2018 I graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara with a Bachelor's Degree in Linguistics, Language and Speech Technologies, with a certificate from the Technology Management Program in entrepreneurship.
My degree allowed me to study the intersection of language and technology and enabled me to work on some fascinating projects, as well as get my first post-college job at Welocalize working with speech data for voice command software.
The Technology Management program at UCSB sparked an entrepreneurial spirit in me that hasn’t gone away to this day. After six months and a promotion at Welocalize, I decided to break away to start my own digital marketing agency with my lifelong friend and colleague, Lukas Gemeinhardt.
The agency was called Meme Team Marketing and our goal was to help companies connect with millennial and gen-z audiences by creating content inspired by the concepts that make memes successful: relatable, imitable, and sharable.
While we did some great work as Meme Team, we eventually decided to pivot our specialty and change our name to ITB Financial, after working with Check Capital Management, a client of ours who was a registered financial advisor.
We dedicated ourselves to being a digital marketing and web design agency specialized for financial advisors because we saw there was a huge need for this in the industry, especially as the coronavirus pandemic took over the world and forced even more people to conduct business online.
As we continued to work in this field we saw an even bigger opportunity on the other side of the transaction. Rather than help advisors attract new investors, we found that helping investors find the right financial advisor for them would be even more useful, thus we became Finance Friends, an online tool providing exactly that service.
All the while, since 2016 I’ve been running a music media outlet called Redefining Records. Building the website and social media accounts for this project is really what kickstarted my passion for digital media. Over the years I’ve used this outlet as a way to teach myself a multitude of skills like writing, design, audio and video production, social media management, project and team management, and more.
In the summer of 2021, changes in my personal and professional ambitions have shifted my focus toward creating a career focused on podcast production. I’ve since stepped away from Finance Friends and picked up part-time, freelance, and contract opportunities in the field while searching for a full-time position on an exciting team.
There’s a lot more I could probably say about myself but this bio is already running a bit long. I currently live in Seattle with my girlfriend Katrina and our cat Kahlua. I love making and listening to music, watching baseball, playing board games, doing outdoor activities, running, making coffee and cocktails, eating ice cream, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
If you’ve taken the time to explore everything on this website, I sincerely appreciate it. Once again, I’d love to hear from you. Whether you’d like to work together or just chat, feel free to reach out.
-Andrew