Amphere — A LinkedIn for Musicians
A quick look at Amphere’s product vision, strategy and latest development efforts.
Summary
Amphere is a project that I started in the summer of 2020. It has undergone many drastic pivots due to market research, MVP testing and new market discoveries. I am committed for Amphere to stay agile, learn from new experiences and pivot product strategy whenever necessary.
On the contrary, the product vision for Amphere: to create exceptional products that enable independent music professionals to thrive and grow their career, will remain unchanged.
This purpose of this article is to present what Amphere is currently focusing on based on the research that has been conducted. However, a more detailed market discovery journey will be available in a separate article where the earlier stages and user research journeys are better explained.
Awards and achievements: Winner of Engineers in Business Fellowship, Finalist of the Imperial Venture Catalyst Challenge & Finalist of the London Mayor Entrepreneurship Competition.
The Product Vision
Independent artists are entrepreneurs in their own right.
Not able to afford a manager, Independent Artists must build a brand, network with other professionals and pitch themselves to venues and records labels on a daily basis. This means that they often have to learn how to build websites (EPK or portfolio), launch marketing campaigns, use design softwares and not to mention learn about how to produce music at the same time. Their career progression is not often straight forward and often at times very lonely.
In fact, 91% of musicians will never be discovered.
Artist who have seen success are either fortunately discovered or a master at collaboration.
This meant off-loading some of the demands such as marketing, production and video production to other music professionals in their early career. In order to achieve this, artists are quick to be involved in all kinds of social and networking events such as open mic nights and community gigs. It is also important to note that the starting point of most musicians careers are often playing at live music venues where musicians are able to earn a living and also gain exposure.
I understand this because I have been a musician myself and more importantly I have worked with a lot very successful but even more unsuccessful artists in the past.
Yet, Instagram is the best platform for them to present themselves to both their listeners and in the professional community. There is a yearning demand for a professional social network that allows musicians to network and collaborate with other music professionals in their early careers.
Other creatives and music professionals
Sound engineers, graphics designers, music producers, film makers, music managers, marketing agents and many more other creatives and music professionals are integral to the music industry and often looking for collaboration. The progression of their careers are often very unclear and opportunities only come by through the word of mouth and constant networking.
Product Strategy
What came first, the musicians or the venues/promoter?
A LinkedIn for music professionals quickly became an obvious solution for Amphere. However, like any other platform startup, the chicken-and-egg problem quickly became a core challenge for Amphere. I decided to narrow our focus to serve two categories of users, the musicians and the live music venues.
Since the career of most musicians starts at live music venues, focusing our efforts in live music will position Amphere in a great environment of early career music professionals.
Amphere strategy focused on finding an immediate problem that the venue is facing, providing value whilst generating some revenue to keep the business running and investors interested whilst building great relationships with local live music venues. Since venues holds the authority over early career musicians has less experience, Amphere can leverage venues to pouring their catalogue of musicians on to the platform.
The Venue and Promoter’s Problem
After interviewing 17 different venues and promoters like The Blues Kitchen and Closeup Promo, I found that on average, events managers dedicate more than 15 hours a week sending back and forth emails to acquire information including availability, schedules and promotional materials from the artist. Any delays in this process will result in less tickets sold and puts the venue at risk of closing down.
In fact, 75 grass roots venues in the UK are at risk of closing down due to inefficient management.
Product Strategy Conclusion
In short, Amphere’s live music events organisation platform is the gateway to accelerate Amphere’s music professional network by providing venues with a tool that helps improve their workflow, all whilst funnelling musicians onto our platform.
Amphere’s Live Music Events Organsiation Platform Development Efforts
Notting Hill Arts Club Partnership
Notting Hill Arts Club is a rennounced grass root venue in West London that has been understaffed because of COVID-19. I was very lucky to have been able to work alongside their events manager to manage the booking system in exchange for a monthly fee. I built a Kanban board that lays out the progession of each event from “penciled in” to “announced”.
Weekly meetings were set up to identify bottlenecks, streamlining and/or automating the process. Email communications are kept to a minimum and the system is improved based on last week’s feedback. This semi-automated process became the MVP of our highly scalable Amphere business with more and more parts substituted by tool made by our developers.
By creating an artist database, venues were able to access the artist’s bio, sample tracks, promotional photos and tech specification, eliminating the exhaustive back and forth emails.
Amphere was able to cut down the 15 hours to just 2 hours a week through automation using Airtable, Notion and Zapier. These hours of tedious administrative tasks can instead be put forward to a variety of other high-level strategic work that directly boosts the business’ productivity.
The journey ahead
Although the partnership with Notting Hill Arts Club has been put to a pause due to prioritisation of resources, their events management team is still using the system that we have set up and we work to maintain a good relationship.
Amphere’s current focus is on gathering the learnings from the partnership to build a scalable product for live music venues. I am exploring avenues of funding and streamlining of features that might enable that next part of the journey. However, that didn’t stop me from developing prototypes and mock ups on how the product vision might look like.
