Our journey for creating an innovative music startup
As marketing and communication students, it is a very common phenomenon to be told about startups and the impact they have in creating new jobs .However the startup community is very competitive and challenging,resulting in almost 90% of new startups to fail.This is the reason why so many courses at Panteion University’s Marketing an Communication department have to do with startups and digital entrepreneurship.Our most recent challenge ,has been to create an innovative music startup that deals with significant problems of the music industry.
No matter how easy it may sounds,considering that most of the people like music ,the task proved to be a huge challenge for all of the teams.To achieve success in the startup community you don’t only have to be innovative and deal with problems ,but a great amount of empathy is needed as well.The reason why the majority of startups fail , is exactly due to lack of empathy and the ability to create strong values.More specifically,it seems easy to spot problems and difficalties around different business fields,but to efficiently deal with them, you have to be able to get in the people’s, that suffer from these problems, shoes.
Two out of four of our team’s members happens to be musicians , a fact that has helped us a lot with our project.Both of them have been studying music since their childhood and gave us great insight about the industry.During the interviews we conducted later, we spotted some crucial factors that affect a musicians professional development such as his/hers social circle,the place he/she leaves,their everyday responsibilities and more.All the above facts,can stand as obstacles for someone that wants to evolve in the music industry.That was what inspired us to move on with our project.
Our value proposition to deal with such problems , was to offer to these people a place to socialize with other musicians and be able to make collaborations.That would be possible,by creating a platform where music professionals would be gathered in ,offering them the ability to chat,exchange files ,find new talents and more.Simple users and record labels would also be able to navigate and find new artists .
However,as stated above ,creating a successful startup that deals with real problems in an efficient way, is not a piece of cake.In our case,we realized that we should remake our business model and value proposition canvases during one of our university presentations.While presenting and answering to questions ,it became clear that had “over-empathized” with different groups of people (musicians,record labels,audience)and tried to solve different problems but not clearly and efficiently.
The feedback we got that day,helped as a lot to realize that we should focus on dealing with one problem at a time.As a team, we have already started working on our new musician-centered value proposition and are planning to create our platform based only on the need of musicians’ to collaborate with people all over the world and gain professional work experience.Our vision is to offer musicians equal chances to stand out and help them gain experience by working with people from all over the globe.More is coming…
Our team consists of :
Raed Raees (Γούργουρα Χριστίνα)
