Extended Selfie
Described by founder Bjorn Roche as an “an extended selfie,” Shimmeo is a platform that helps aspiring artists to reach the critical mass with minimal effort. But like many other apps, Roche might be hitting a bumpy road.
Shimmeo was originally conceived as a karaoke app, but its developers saw an opportunity to make it into a music video clip app. While in beta, Roche received feedback from test users that Shimmeo would have viability as an app for emerging artists to showcase their music, so the budding company decided to pivot.
The aim to creating an app and getting viral has a greater challenge– to be more than a passing fad.
“We don’t want to have just teen [users] and then be a fad…we are trying to make an app for longevity,” Roche said. The company is doing this by trying to cater to its core users, the emerging artists, while attracting millennials.
With the technology to sync the video with the music selected for the clips. The user would take a video of himself/herself, choose an Instagram style filter, chooses a song that the app has licensing for or uploads their own, then syncs the video with the song.
Released this past July, Roche said artists account for the highest percentage of users. He is now shifting his focus, and is in “the process of licensing a library of Top 40 music…probably available within the next two months” to attract teens, Roche said.
“We want to have viral success,” he said. The number of songs currently available on Shimmeo changes everyday, as artists can upload their songs and make them available to other users, giving them and their music a chance to be discovered.
After its inception, the developers added social networking capabilities such as liking, sharing on other platforms such as Youtube, comments and follows. Roche describes Shimmeo as “somewhere between a social media site and a social media tool.” Even though he said the app includes features that a social media site has, he does not categorize it as social media.
Roche cites normal startup issues such as some of the initial hurdles the start-up had to deal with.
“It’s no longer enough to use lean startup methods of development,” he said.
Shimmeo had to build out and develop the app to appeal to users, iOIS and Apple and to be accepted by these platforms. The app is now available on iTunes.
As of today, the app did not have the required number of user reviews to get an average rating on the Apple store, but the twenty-one reviews that exist are positive.
Users are “very satisfied,” and think the app is “easy to use.” Currently, 4 out of the 16 posted reviews on the Apple store claimed they are artists. The others? Hopefully, for Roche, they are his new target audience of millennials.
