Start- up Lab/The Music Bet

At the very first lesson of this year’s Start-up Lab, our tutor Mrs Betty Tsakarestou introduced us to our new companion, teacher and mentor for this semester, Mrs Skreta, an active member of “Heaven Music” and a person with great knowledge of the “backstage” of the music industry. Providing us with useful information and numbers directly from insight of the targeting market, and of course motivating us to search for more, Mrs Skreta introduced to our challenge for this semester in ADandPr Lab. We were assigned with The Big Music Bet, which simply consists of an innovative idea our teams has to come up with to cover a need that revolves around not only the music industry, but the music world, meaning eveyrone who interacts with music, aka all of us.

From the moment we learned about what this lab was about, all of the memebrs of Trend-X, our team, started thinking about ideas that could potentially solve problems, offer entertainment, and being useful in general. We had of course to be stopped by rational thinking. We shouldn’t come up with ideas that could potentially be irrelevant, basing them on assumptions. We had to do our research!

A good and useful starting poing for our research was a detailed list of innovative start-ups that are taking action in the market right now. We examined the list, got a taste of what’s out there and started in a very shy way visualizing what could be done about certain issues.

Weeks passed and we were introduced to two exceptionally useful tools concerning our project, these being the Guerilla testing and the Consumer Journey Map. Briefly, these two techniques, are meant to show you if your application/website is easy to use, based on a one to one interview and prototype testing with a prospect user, and the steps a customer had to make in order to complete his journey using our product.

Useful tools indeed but first we needed an idea! Which came to us pretty naturally. As i was doing my shift at a local cafe a client was complaining about how he would love to make more money by exercising his profession. The young musician told me he was performing live at a bar some times a week but the owner of the bar did not pay him on time so he had to quit.

So, what if there was a platform that would connect this young, aspiring musician with a place that needed him to perform. Sounds like a win-win situation. This is where everything clicked. This is where “Commusicate” came to life.

In brief we thought of creating an application based platform, later we would move on website as well, that would connect musicians that would like to perform at bar/cafe/restaurant or whatever, with the owner of the place, an online booking tool. Both the musicians and the owners of the stores could make accounts on this application and through tags that would “decorate” their profiles they would find one another.

Sounds great but, will it work?

We had to find out. We carefully made our personas and designed two customer journey maps, one for the musicians and one for the store owner. After a lot of consideration and planning we went out reaching to as many as possible musician we knew at first, and then relevant business owners to ask some questinons, find out how they solve the problem our app wants to solve, we observed the market and made our conclusions.

After many insightful conversations and a lot of prospect users’ feedback we headed to proto.io shape our vision.

After making a prototype of the app and completed the business model canvas, finding our revenue streams, mainly from monthly fee subscriptions after free trials, and premium features, we tested our product. Most artists, being young in their majority, could easily navigate it, though some of the businesses owners, being older, had some problems, that we eventually sorted out and fixed. “Communicate earned positive feedback, being a promising filling to a gap in the market.

On Monday 10 of June, Trend-X will have 4 minutes to prove why their product will thrive.

Stay tuned.

Danai kiritsi, Giorgos Zervos, Lamprini Harmantzi, Pashalis Nastos, Eugenia Kolovou