Echo Waves
Who are we?
We are BrandNew and our team consists of three, members: George, Voula, and Anna. On this semester of ADandPRlab, we are going to work on a new lab: The #StartUplab. In this year’s Start-Up lab, we are going to corporate on the project: “The Big Music Bet” with Antenna Music Partners and explore the music innovation field. Our mission is to create a startup, that will solve a real-time problem of the music industry and offers an actual solution, and at the same time, we have to make sure that the startup we are creating is actually sustainable.
How did our journey start?
In order to begin our journey, we had to move on step by step. We knew that we wanted to bring customers closer to music, but we didn’t know how. So, we decided to approach future potential costumers and ask them what do they think about the existing music platforms or apps.: If they are pleased, if they believe that there is something missing out or even if they had interests that no existing music startup could cover. It was important for us to have real feedback because we wanted to create something useful for the customer. If you wish to solve a problem, you have familiarized with it.
But first of all we took a look to some music start-ups and saw what happens to the market. So, we defined what innovation is and decided to analyze Mila start-up. Then we tried to find some key problems of the music industry. So, we found those:
— New artists cannot come to the surface.
— People have the need for new music
— It is expensive for labels to “build” new artists.
Value Proposition Canvas
We summarized the answers to our potential customers and we created our value proposition canvas. You can see the completed canvas right here:
We summarized the answers of our potential customers and we created our value proposition canvas. You can see the completed canvas right here:
a) Costumer Segment
As you can see the customer segmentation consists of three categories: 1) Costumer Pains, 2) Costumer Gains and 3) Costume Jobs.
Costumer Pains: At the current music apps, costumes have to deal with ads, problematic data-signal, huge battery consumption, Memory slot if you have to save the songs and last, but not least very pricey premium packages.
Costumer Gains: The current music apps offer the customer a big range of music from famous artists to listen to, very good user experience and easy navigation and they include very interesting features.
Costume Jobs: People need an app that will be functional, emotional & social. They need many features, easy navigation, UX settings, fast approach and playlists. Additionally, they need to feel the fun and the relaxation that music helps you feel and the social tab of an app, like followers, interaction & communities.
Then the idea was born…
After a lot of brainstorming, we came up with the app “Echo waves”, a name based on soundwaves. But because we wanted to give voice to unknown creators, we decided to twist it into Echo waves. Also, we give a change to the users to discover new music waves — content.
b) Value Proposition
At this point, we knew that our startup had to solve some core issues for our potential users. The costumer Validation also consists of three categories: 1) Gain Creators, 2) Pain relievers and 3) Products and services.
Gain creators: users should be able to rate the content and apart from the freemium part, there has to be a premium. Also, the users have the ability to support the artist through Crowdfunding. The music labels will also benefit because through that the new creators aka artists that start their carriers will already have some fans and followers when they start working with music labels.
Pain Relievers: Customers have the ability to come across new music and artists very often and keep their interest in music alive. Also for the creators the fact that they are going to gain fans, it’s a big pain reliever. This also applies to the music labels, because when they start a contract with an artist, they don’t have to start from zero.
Products and services: A change could be offered for the discovery of new talents. Also it empowers the user. The user rates, supports, decides and uploads. Lastly, the user can also turn into a creator through the app.
So, we concluded to the 2 key-personas and the 2 target groups after asking 45 users and 15 creators, with those needs;
Prototype
After the business model canvas, we moved on to our prototype.
It is important to mention the technical parts of the app. As the customers sing in, they write on their bios some things about them and whether they are creators or simple users. They have the ability to listen to music and upload their music as well. At the same time, simple users can be part of a big community and decide the charts and the next music trends while discovering new music.
The app will have 2 versions add, the freemium version where our surfer (as we call our users, because they are waiting for the next music waves, which is the next song, and the creators are the beginners’ surfers who are trying to catch the music waves). will be able to enjoy new music and rate it as they like, but unlike the premium version in this one, the will have and won’t be able to skip more than 10 times in a day to a song on a playlist. In the premium version, there won’t be adds and the surfers will be able to have as many skips as they wish. Also in the premium version, they will be able to edit a sound file and make a podcast. In the premium version will cost 4euros per month. Now, about the revenue streams, except the premium version, in the freemium version will be adds and the users will be able to donate to their favorite creators through crowdfunding and Echo Waves will keep a service fee. Finally, they can take notes & see the lyrics to every song.
So, let’s take a deep look to the app.
When you open the application, it leads you directly to the Sign in screen. You can write your e-mail & password and move on to the application. Also, there is a choice to sign in via Facebook or Google accounts, if you have used them for your signing up. You can see a helping button, in case you forgot the password and a button that leads you to the signing up page, in case you don’t have a profile.
The sign-up page is like every common page like this. You write your personal info, your password and you have to agree to terms and the privacy policy of the app. Moreover, there is a choice to sign up via Facebook or Google accounts, that makes your navigation easier and quicker.
Then, the app leads you to the first page, the home page. You can see the menu bar that refers to home page, trending surfers page, discovering page, playlist place and my profile. Also, in every page you can the logo that leads you to home page for usability reasons. Up and right, you can check your messages. The home page is about the tracks and videos that upload people who you chose to follow.
The next tab is the trending surfers tab. Every week the surfers with the best ratings will create the top 50 of the trends. The opinion of people matters, so we gave them this power with the star button.
So, let’s see what happens in the page that the song plays. You can comment, you can minimize it, you can pause it and play it again and you can skip 10 songs max per day. Additionally, there is the opportunity to share the song to the social media, add it to your playlist and rate it. Rating is based on a 5-stars climax. 5 is the stronger rating and 1 is the weaker.
Then, we have the discovering page. Without any settings, this page show you the songs that fit to your common music selection. But there is a filter button, where you can choose the date, the music style and the duration of the song.
And we move on to the playlist. In this tab, you can see gathered all the songs that you added. You can skip max 10 songs per day as we said. It appears the song, the artist and the rating.
Of course, you can select and delete any song.
So, the last page of the Freemium has the profile settings. The profile has some stable features like photo, follow button, name and a bio. But there are 4 tabs; songs, followers, interests & contact. By clicking the songs, you can see all the songs that the artist has uploaded.
By going to the followers tab, you see the number of followers and following people, who they are and some recommendations, based on your music choices. The interests’ page shows you the things that the creator likes and in the contact tab you can send a message to him.
Finally, we have the Premium that has some extra features, like Podcast, lyrics & notes saver and favorites list. As we said, Premium gives you unlimited skips and you can see all the lyrics of the songs.
User Experience
We wanted our app to be user-friendly, for this reason, we made sure to use colors that are easy-going for the eye such as black and purple, moreover we put a home bottom and a profile bottom for easy navigation and used symbols known to everyone. Then we gave it to some people to test it, through this user experience testing, we kept that we need a 20% student discount at the premium price and that they would like to have some recommendations so they won’t have to search all the time, furthermore those who tested the prototype gave as one last feedback that they would like to have some contact information.
Feedback of using the prototype
Business Model Canvas
Then it was time to create our business model canvas. The Business Model Canvas is a strategic management model for developing new or documenting existing business models. This is a visualized summary of data, data describing the value, infrastructure, customers and financial data of a business or product. It helps businesses align their activities with imagining possible compromises or even making strategic decisions and we basically use it as a map, before we start the platform it is better to make the canvas to apply your plans to have a little taste that where one’s idea can lead, because “a key element in entrepreneurship is to coexist the risk of instinct with the stability of data!”.
To become more clear, we took a close look to 9 factors, the key activities, key resources, key partners, value proposition, customer relationships, customer segments, channels, cost structure, revenue streams.
So, we realized the importance to approach each target group differently, our users and our creators, because not everyone has the same needs (customer segments and value propositions). Moreover, the tremendous need to find key partners such as content creators and social networkers for smoother results to our platform, and people to handle the key resources, which in our case are legal advisors, finance, software and licensing agreements. According to our incomes and outcomes, those would be the cost structure (salaries, operation cost and licensing fees) and our revenue streams which would come from Ads (for the freemium version), the premium version, which will be priced about 4$ per month (and there will be a special discount, 20%, for students) and last but far from least there will be a crowdfunding, more specific, users will donate to their favorite creators any amount of money they please and our app will keep a share from this donation about 20%. We knew from the beginning that the channels would have a decisive part because as we said earlier we talking about a platform, so web-mobile channels and pc software would be an Inevitable.
Competition
In order to realize your competitive advantage you need first to identify your completion. What do you offer and how are you different from the competitors that work at the same field? Why should a potential client choose your product and not the competitors product? There are thousands of music apps out there, apps that offer a great range of services and each one of them solves a problem. Echo Waves is a music app that wants to give voice to unknown creators and helps the music lovers to discover new music. It helps the user to control what he wants to hear and discover more and more content. But are there any other music apps that might do that ? In order to answer at that question we had to do research.
There are of course Spotify and YouTube that are huge in the music app industry and many users , even those who like to listen music from not that famous artists , usually use if they want to listen at music. But those two are not that helpful for unknown artists, we usually don’t find in those two apps infamous artists and also if you are a person that wants to discover new music , not just the “hits”, you won’t find the solution in these apps. Also YouTube is an online video streaming app, so most user when they use it for music , usually end up having issues with their mobile data.
Another smaller competitor is the music apps “Discovr”. The user can use this app to discover new music instantly and explore the ones that enjoys listening to. It allows the user make the maps of similar artists and songs to access a specific type of tracks quickly. Also the user can save his favorite artists to access them with ease and is able to stream songs from YouTube as well. It’s an app that helps the user to discover music, but Echo Waves differ because they also allow the listener to rate and help the artists that he likes via crowdfunding.
Music Memos lets the creator record snippets of ideas for future compositions as they pop into his head. Those could be vocals, pieces of guitar, piano, or so on. From there, the creator can name everything, tag it, and perhaps most importantly, rate them. That lets him immediately identify which ideas he wants to focus on when they return to them later. The app also allows the creator to hear what his new idea might sound like with a lush orchestral backing track, perhaps a drum, or maybe even more bass. This will help him when it comes to ranking everything, and before he knows it, he may have hundreds of ideas, but just a few on their way to becoming finalized songs. It’s a really great app for creating content, but It does not offer the creator/ artist to come in touch with his audience.
Most of the music apps that we found online offer a great variety of tools that help a beginner or a real artist to create quality content and record his music etc., but while our research we didn’t find any app that helped the artist gain audience and followers. Also we found a lot of apps that might help the listener discover new music, but yet again those apps are based on trends and they don’t allow the user to support and help their favorite artists.
Communication plan
For our communication plan, we chose to construct a strategy based on social media. Our target group has a big part of their lives connected with the social networks, so we chose to use them.
For this reason we started an account on Instagram, in order to promote our app. We will use some posts and paid ads, in order to attract more and more people. Organic results are going lower and lower in our days, so an investment in social media is needed.
There will be some promoting posts;
So how we gonna attract our first 100 users?
By giving the first 50 users a 3-month-free trial to our premium and then give everyone a 9-days trial. Psychologists say that every person needs 9 days to accept or stop a habit. So, we hope that we will be their new established habit.
Next steps
So, for the future, we have 3 next steps. First of all, we want to organize a festival as an experiential activation. There, people will meet their new favorite artists and learn more info about the application. Furthermore, we want to collaborate with some labels. Labels cannot spend money to build a strong image to a new creator. However, our app help him gain fans and followers and those companies can take advantage of it. Finally, we want to add some new features to our application, especially to the Premium part to keep the engagement high. We had a proposal to add a tab for composing songs, after using our app. So, we will try this and more new capabilities.
Thank you for this music journey!!
