Cohort 14 Spotlight: Taking Music to the Extreme with SoundSwell
In Blue Startups’ Spotlight series, we highlight the people and stories that make startups possible. In this Spotlight, we interview Nick Vandenberg, co-founder of SoundSwell. SoundSwell designs ruggedized waterproof earbuds for athletes to bring audio where traditional headphones can’t.
What inspired the creation of SoundSwell?
I’ve been a lover of music and action sports since I was young, so I have always been familiar with how much more engaging sports and activities become when you add audio entertainment. When I was studying math and minoring in entrepreneurship at UC San Diego, I was always looking for a pain point in my life that could inspire the creation of a company. One morning during my senior year, I went surfing just down the hill from campus, and I was sitting in the ocean with a song stuck in my head. I started thinking about what it would take to listen to music while practicing water sports.
At first, I just looked online at existing solutions, because I just wanted to purchase something that would enable that. I noticed that at the time, pretty much every waterproof audio product was an old MP3 player that was waterproof. I realized that with the rise of streaming services, like Spotify and Apple Music, that was a pretty antiquated solution. So, I started sketching up what I thought a pair of ruggedized, wearable, earbuds would look like, and realized that if this problem existed for me as a surfer, it is pervasive for anyone who spends a significant amount of time in the water.
What’s your long term vision for your product? And how do you hope to achieve that?
My long term vision for SoundSwell is to build the most versatile earbuds in the world, and collaborate with athletes to build something that adds value to their everyday experiences. And in the same way that when you think of a waterproof camera, you might think of a GoPro, I want SoundSwell to be the first name in waterproof headphones.
This is my first company, so it’d be amazing to come out of it with success. I think the best way to do that in the short-term is to have a successful crowdfunding campaign and sell our IP to a multinational audio company like Bose or Beats, someone with a vested interest in the audio needs of athletes and a strong distribution network that can extract a lot more value out of the invention than we can as a small company.
What are some hurdles that you and your team have had over the last few years?
Everyone has heard the phrase hardware is hard. So when we raised our first bit of pre-seed capital, we had really aggressive projections on our timeline. We were thinking we could get the product launched and then market in roughly four or five months, because we had been hard at work prototyping. When I took the initial samples from our manufacturer out surfing, they had all sorts of issues from waterproofing to Bluetooth connectivity. Due to the COVID pandemic, we couldn’t go over to China to work directly with the manufacturer, so I just had to iterate the design with our engineering team until we had something that could pass as a minimum viable product. By the time we launched, it was just before last Christmas, and the supply chain was just a nightmare. But through the pandemic, we’ve improved our supplier relationships, product, and outreach and have been selling direct-to-market for a couple of months now.
How has Blue Startups helped SoundSwell in achieving its goals?
I’ve been really impressed with the network that Blue Startups has cultivated over the years, and the resources that we have access to. For example, after I mentioned my plans for a Kickstarter campaign, one of the mentors who gave a presentation to our cohort introduced me to Eric Migicovsky, the founder of Pebble smartwatches, who practically invented the modern smartwatch as we know it and had the most successful Kickstarter campaign of all time. The opportunity to ask him a few questions over email was super valuable. The workshops have also really been able to kind of help me reframe how I think about my product and business from a first-principles perspective. I’ve been really grateful for the opportunities and guidance that Blue Startups has been able to offer while we begin to raise seed capital, iterate our product according to what our users want, and grow.
To learn more about SoundSwell, visit their website.
Blue Startups is a Top 20 Accelerator in the US (TechCrunch) focused on helping scalable-technology companies compete globally. Blue Startups aims to stimulate economic growth in Hawaii and create new business opportunities by providing promising entrepreneurs with mentorship, access to business expertise, product testing, peer review, pitch development, introductions to investors, and seed funding.
