Creativity need’s space
In the context of a university project, we have created a team consisted of 6 members with the purpose of creating and promoting a new idea. We came up with a music site ‘’Giggidy Gig’’. Giggidy Gig is a communication hub where musicians can find venues and venues can find musicians for their live events. Our team will cover and complete every aspect of a band’s gig, from the equipment to the necessary promotion.
Two years ago I’ve met with Katerina Kozadinou . We became friends and had long conversations for our everyday problems. Katerina is a singer/songwriter/vocal coach and speech therapist. Her every day routine includes music lessons, studio rehearsals, live performances and a lot of phone calls to organize all. Constantly communicating with her fellow musicians, sound engineers, producers, venue managers and friends to make sure everything will go as planned. Some of the problems of her profession started to come up every week in our meetings and I wasn’t sure who was to blame. I asked other musicians and it seemed that every one of them was coming across those problems in their music career.
The time needed to organize a gig is three times longer than the gig itself. Finding new venues for a gig requires personal meetings with the venue manager and that means spending night after night trying to get the actual meeting. Organizing an annual program for their live performances is considered impossible and after all that effort sometimes they are not even sure that they are going to get paid properly.
Bookers find their return of investment too small to be interested in these kind of bands and no one can actually guarantee the success of their gigs. It seemed to me that someone should fix those problems .
Few months after that decision, I attended Betty’s Tsakarestou (Assistant Professor, Head of Advertising and PR Lab at the Department of Communication Media and Culture, of Panteion Univeristy, Athens, Greece), AD Discovery Workshop: an experimental peer-to-peer learning, hands-on workshop.
It has been one of the most interesting workshops I’ve attended so far in my studies because of Miss’s Tsakarestou approach of hands on, real life application new skills she was providing us with.
As a project, we were called to create a startup company, solve a real life problem and make sure that we’ll use our new communication skills the best way possible.
My team, Danai Lyratzi, Aasimina Chrostodoulatou, , Panagiots Reppas and Christos Daniilidis liked the idea helping musicians with their problems. Our startup began, and we start working on our ideas, webpage, presentation and research . We’ve started by interviewing members of all kind of profession that we will try to connect using openideo interview toolkit and had weekly meeting’s to evaluate our progress and brainstorm with our new ideas.
By changing the way musicians connect and organize their daily professional activities we could improve their lives thus the quality of music, we thought . Creating a communication hub on the internet sound like the best idea possible. Our vision is to be the company that understands and satisfies musicians needs the best and help create the space for creativity of our users professional an daily life.
with the help of our mentor and the human centered desing thinking methodology that she introdused us we managed to overcome our self’s and find solutions to our problems by asking the right questions. Our project is truly promising and we will keep going until we succed our golds.
You can find more info about our startup on our official website and our Facebook page: giggidygig.com — Facebook page
Read more stories from the team :Charis Zarbalas, Danai Lyratzi, Asimina Chrostodoulatou, Panagiotis Reppas, Christos Daniilidis
