Girl Talk: Giving Voice to Women
In the framework of Startup Lab by Ad and Pr Lab in Panteion University, we had the chance to create our own startup from scratch. The goal was to bring innovation to audio and radio and for that we worked closely with a team from Antenna Music.
The initial idea
After giving this challenge a lot of thought, all the members of our team agreed on one thing. We need new blood in the radio and audio industry and we need to offer the chance to young people, who have loads of talent but no business connections, the chance to shine. So we decided to create a space where they could share their talent (music & podcasts) with the rest of the world!
Value Proposition Canvas
Our first timid steps in this huge effort to become actual start-uppers began with research regarding audio and radio innovation. Then followed the value proposition canvas of our initial idea. The reason we decided to make this canvas was because most companies tend to fail to deliver to the expectations of their customers. It doesn’t need to be this way and we for sure wanted to avoid this result. All we needed to do is to visualize, design and test how to create value for our customers and the value proposition canvas helped us on that.
The value proposition canvas is composed of two parts, the customer segment and the value map. With the customer profile we tried to write down the jobs that our customers try to get done, the pains that annoy them and the positive outcomes they need, the gains. More specifically, about the jobs, we spotted the fact that the customers need to share their passion about music and podcasts with the world and they want to share all that easily with their friends. On the pains, we found that the content on the radio is very much the same and constantly repeated. It’s also quite expensive to listen to the radio online using MBs and the apps are expensive too. In their gains are included personalized experience, popularity, interaction and the willingness to discover new artists and content.
The second part of the canvas is the value map. With that we hypothetically release our product by which we believe that we are going to offer the pain relievers customers need to face and minimize their pains and, of course, create the gains and benefits that customers expect, desire or could be surprised by. Our product is going to include an app and a web page which are going to include new music, playlists, podcasts and covers and it’s going to be an actual pain reliever for our customers. More specifically, the product was going to be offered online for free, the content is going to be auto compressed and new indie producers are going to upload new content and the music and podcasts are going to be organized in various categories. All that is going to create the expected gains to our customers: new organic content, giveaways, recommended content, a personalized library, the ability to like, comment and share the content they want and the chance to stream live on the radio. This kind of canvas really helped us better understand our customers and get the actual insights so as to create the product that they need to.
Little did we know that a few weeks later we were going to take a step toward a more niche category.
Business Model Canvas: The switch
After finishing our value proposition canvas, our next task was to create the business model canvas in order to have a fuller image of the startup , which we were creating. The feedback and the comments from our colleagues and from the Antenna Music team, which we received after showing the value proposition canvas, were very helpful in order to move on to our next step. We decided to go a step further and to make our proposition clearer.
Thus, we decided to make a change and focus on promoting women creators instead of having a more generic audio application. The core of our value proposition this time was to empower women. Female creators will have the possibility to express their selves through our app, which will be dedicated to them. They can upload digital content like podcasts or their own music, presenting their work to the audience of our app. In our application someone will be able to discover new Greek artists and listen to only new, organic content, escaping for a while from the mainstream music, which most of the radio stations and music apps offer.
So, our customer segment is composed by women creators for the most part and of course by those who love music and audio in general. Through our application we want to relief the audience from the pains, which we presented in the value proposition canvas, and offer to them the corresponding gains. The relation which we would like to have with our customers is to create a community with them and make women feel comfortable and that they belong somewhere. Organizing a giveaway seemed like a great way enhance the relationship with our customers. The giveaway will take place during the weekend through the radio shows, which will be presented by the most popular podcasters who will result from the application, each week. These shows will go live from Easy’s and Rythmos’ frequencies, which are ant1’s radio stations. So Anttenna Music is our key partner in that entire project.
Our main channels will be of course our website and our application which will be available on the App Store and Play Store. Our revenue streams and cost structure didn’t change much later on so we will discuss them in the section below.
But what exactly our app offers to the audience? In our key activities we added personalized experience and recommended content according to the taste of the user. Moreover, the terms of privacy and copyright for the creators and the audience will be taken very seriously and, as we mentioned, the best creator each week will have the chance to do a live show on the radio.
So, after finishing and presenting our business model canvas we had a better structure when it came to our idea but we still needed to make some changes and adjustments in order to perfect it.
Final Pitch: GRL coming to life
After many weeks of constant feedback (which wasn’t always positive), trial and error we finally had our product. Our final idea was to create an application that would give voice to women through podcasts. We wanted to create a community to empower women, a safe space where they can express themselves freely. That is GRL, which is an abbreviation for Girl Talk.
Our target group is women aged 18 to 60, since this is roughly the age when they are the most active in the workplace. Thus, before finalizing our product, we conducted both secondary and primary research, asking those women for their opinion on our application.
Firstly, we stumbled upon these charts that show the chances of a woman being your boss around the globe (Greece is not even in the chart) and the pay gap between men and women for the same job in Europe. Our opinion is that these charts should not exist and that equal pay and equal opportunities for women are non-negotiable.
After that, we conducted some qualitative research and asked women face to face about our app. The overall feedback was rather positive and it really gave us courage to keep going. Some women said that they liked our idea because they felt like they had no place to express themselves while some others argued that, even though they can share their thoughts and opinions via blog posts, audio is much more personal that text. All of them agreed that they surely need some more motivation in their lives and that they would love to see the world through the eyes of a successful woman.
Thus, our application offers two paths. One option is to become a creator yourself and share the podcasts or the music you record and produce with the rest of the world. If our users like what you do (which is measured by likes, shares and comments) and you are among the most popular creators of the week, you will have the chance to perform live on the radio, on Rythmos and Easy radio stations, at the end of the week. In this way we are rewarding our users by promoting the best ones and giving them the chance to be heard by a larger audience and we are creating an ongoing loop of promotion between the app and the radio.
If the creator life isn’t for you, you can obviously use our app to listen to what other users produce and share that content with your friends in the app or in the social media networks of your choice. You can browse through several categories depending on the music genre you like or the podcast topic that interests you, listen to the trending tracks and pods or get personalized recommendations from us based on your preferences and add your favorites to your library to listen to them whenever you like.
Furthermore, you can pay for our premium podcast, #GirlTalk, that features a different successful woman each week as a guest. Female leaders from various areas (scientists, CEOs, artists etc) will be interviewed each week and share their thought and tips about success, work-life balance, female power and so on. We chose the name Girl Talk in order to make our product less impersonal and make it sound like those women, even though they are so successful and busy, come and sit in our living room a chat with us once a week.
You can pay our monthly fee, which is 8€ and includes all the premium podcasts of the month, unlimited downloading and offline streaming of the free music and podcasts that our creators upload the chance to watch the premium show live and then discuss with our guests. If you don’t feel like doing any of that, you can pay an individual fee of 2€ for each of the premium shows. Each user will receive a free premium show (“freemium”) in order to try our product and come back for more.
The rest of the material in our app will be offered for free, which enables social media sharing, and there will be a monthly fee for the creators. Other than that, our revenue streams include income from strategic product placement in our premium version and the tickets of an event we are planning. The event will start with a panel that will include the audience’s favorite premium guests and will end with performances from the most popular creators and tons of rosé.
Our expenses include our Headquarters, the studio and tech equipment from the premium shows, the salaries of our web and app developers, the cost for advertisement, the salary of our hosts and guests for the premium, the cost of the event and the cost of a giveaway that our most popular creators will run on the radio. The prize will be a trip to the music festival “Coachella” with all expenses paid.
We have estimated the cost of all this at approximately 80.000 € for 2 years.
Now, regarding the market, we have concluded that our competition are apps and podcasts like #BlackGirlsTalkSports, Between Us Girls and She Podcasts which, however, don’t combine all the elements that make GRL unique but have other features that set them apart.
Finally, our strategic plan includes launching our app, gaining popularity through advertisement and inflluencers, reaching our first 100 users, reaching our first 100 paying users, taking feedback from them and making changes and offers, reaching a few thousand users and thus attracting more sponsors and potential partners. Right now, we’re at the beginning!
All in all, this has been a memorable experience and we learned so much in the process. We are grateful that we were given the opportunity to work on something we believe in and we want to thank Mrs. Betty Tsakarestou and Antenna Music for mentoring us and guiding us through every step of the way!
Viral Vixens: Marina Karvouni, Elena Tsakiridou, georgia flaouna
