How I managed to find problems by working backwards. Using fake solutions to discover real problems.
Listening to music shouldn’t be like McDonald’s.
There is a niche of people looking deeper for interesting and or rare music. There are a bunch of FB groups, Youtube channels, and Reddit communities with passionate people.
I wanted to test a few hypotheses I had about this niche in a cheap way. Pretty common I would say. Just bare with me, things get interesting.
There are two types of audiences when it comes to people searching beyond popular music:
Lazies — people who want to go beyond “discover weekly…” but don’t want to put in the time to dig for unfamiliar gems.
Nerds — people who find value in spending lots of time shuffling around until they have that serendipitous moment of “ What a gem!”
My role was to check if the ideas I had are relevant. Basically conducting experiments to see which one sticks.
With a super small budget, mostly for running a few ads, buying a few templates, and getting a few licenses I decided to start taking action.
Is there a need for a place where people can discover rare music gems that most probably are not found on any popular music platforms like Youtube and Spotify?
This was the initial hypothesis. I know that I have this problem and there is enough to start making something in order to test my assumptions. I am one of the potential customers. First, let’s see if there are some similar ideas out there in the market.
Yes, there is one, which is really old but it just works.
I started my first bet by publishing an article reimagining how this existing platform could work. Of course, it was all fake but I have used it to see how it resonates with people. The article kind of blow up in the communities and this led me to the next experiment
Here’s the link to the article if you want to read more.
Which led to the next one, how can we start capitalizing on the buzz we are making as soon as possible?
Serve them a curated list of gems in a weekly newsletter.
Every week, seven gems straight to your inbox from your soon-to-be favorite DJs and collectors, not from fancy algorithms or marketing campaigns.
The newsletter got some traction and led us to the next bet.
Generate leads through landing pages and recruit participants for interviews through (interactive) surveys:
Surveys I used to screen participants:
After talking with a few people I rapidly jumped to the next bet.
Create an MVP to get people to use the product. Basically to see if I can create some sort of stickiness and have an actual product that people can use regularly.
Build a streaming service of unfamiliar gems curated by people passionate about digging and sharing.
If you want to learn more about my approach to creating the MVP you can read it here→.
The result:
Extremely low retention rate, and very big bounce rate. So clearly this wasn’t working well.
This led to the next bet. Refine and iterate based on the results above. increasing retention rate and decreasing bounce rate.
This worked much better. I even got a few “super fans”. Got some donations.
Up to that point, I managed to get:
400+ organic subscribers for the weekly newsletter.
Support from DJs, both local and global, and related communities like poolside.fm and foreignrap.co
50% of the music is not available on Spotify.
Support from music journalists.
More than 80 hours of music are provided by the community.
I didn’t put any $ into ads or any other form of marketing. What I’ve gained was mostly through word-of-mouth.
Naturally, this led to the next bet. The question now is: “How can I extract value from users?” More exactly, how can I generate revenue?
Experiment with ways of creating value for the “nerds” through prototyping various scenarios and using them for interviews.
I will share more insights about what I did next in another article because is not really relevant for this one.
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