On a recent Friday afternoon 25-year-old Mike Salvatore was standing on the back porch of a Lincoln Park three-flat gripping the bottom of a 12-foot ladder leading to the roof. His friend Jordan Shea had just climbed up and was straddling the peak with a staple gun in hand. “Do me a favor,” Salvatore called up to him. “Don’t kill yourself, please.” Then a train roared by no more than four feet from the roof’s edge. “Shit,” Salvatore laughed nervously. “If that ladder slips, we’re screwed.”
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Salvatore got the idea for AudioSnacks in February 2005, a month after he quit his job trading at the Chicago Stock Exchange. “It wasn’t something I was passionate about,” he says. “I had high blood pressure. I was grouchy all the time.” He’d decided to do some traveling and was standing in the basement of a church in Florence puzzling over a plaque in Italian when he was struck by the potential of the iPod in his pocket. How great would it be, he thought, if his MP3 player could be his guide? He could listen to a tour without looking like a tourist or adhering to the schedule–and paying the cost–of a live one. Six months later he was back in Chicago formulating a business plan.
At first he intended to record all the tours himself and market them through electronic kiosks. “The original idea was immense,” he says. “I had electronic kiosks in every park where you could go and upload your tour. But each kiosk would have cost me $40,000 to $100,000, so it wasn’t going to work.”
In June he found his first tour guide. Chicago freelance writer Philip Berger put together a 30-minute walking tour of the architecture of Dearborn Street and recorded it in Salvatore’s living room, using Salvatore’s brother’s eight-track recorder. Berger is an earnest, soft-spoken guide. “In many ways,” he says of the Marquette Building, “it is the archetypal Chicago-school building. But what’s really great about the building is the interior decoration in the lobby. You really have to go inside and take a look. . . .”
So far the site is averaging five to six downloads a day and bringing in about $100 a month. Until things pick up, Salvatore has other means of support. An exhibition during Andersonville’s annual Arts Weekend last fall prompted some interest in his great uncle’s black-and-white travel photos. They’re selling at a rate of one or two a week for $500 to $1,000 apiece.
