The Story behind Followmusic
Followmusic wanted to change the way you get updates about your favorite artists, concerts, new albums, music news and upcoming events.
Martin Gammeltoft is co-founder of Followmusic together with his sister, the famous Danish DJ and radio anchor Le Gammeltoft who has a sublime network to musicians around the world. This sounds like a perfect cocktail for a team behind a music tech startup, however something went wrong.
They ran out of money after two years down a bumpy road, and did not manage to finish their product or secure extra funding. We had a talk with Martin about Followmusic, what went wrong as well as what he learned from the experience.
The Stepping Stone
Bad music services was the key stepping stone behind the creation of the web service Followmusic, because Martin could not understand why the current music services’ data was so bad.
”The idea came when I noticed how bad the current music services was. The services were slow and you would often not get the information about a concert until it was sold out. There had to be a better way to stay up to date! I talked the idea through with friends and started working on it in fall 2011.
The idea was to create a highly customizable music service tailored for the individual, which could collect music news from all over the world.” Martin said to Daniel Laursen, the host of the Podcast on Trendsonline.dk
The development
As a founder, you take some choices and when you look back, you can believe you took that road instead of the opposite direction.
”We thought the development of the service would be a lot smoother. It took a lot of time and money to get the database to work, because it had to be fast to live up to the user expectations. The database should be able to validate and send info about new tickets or concerts, to the users in 30 seconds.
Our focus was on the backend resulting in us neglecting the frontend. Whenever we showed our product to people, they would ask if we did not have an app or at least a mobile version. We should definitely have used the mobile first principle or at least have spent more time on the ‘lean startup’ philosophy! We ran out of money in the end, before we could develop a decent user interface. We could have made an amazing product with only 500.000 DKR. more.” Martin elaborates when he talks about what went wrong with Followmusic.
The funding
Every startup gets funding! That was Martins approach and he could not understand why they had so many problems raising an investment round. The VC’s wanted a fully functional product, users and traction and angel investors were very reluctant to get involved with the music industry.
After having worn down several pairs of shoes, an angel was sent from the sky, or was it?
”Fundedbyme”, a crowdfunding platform that wanted to spread the risk between lots of potential investors, contacted us and said they would send word out to 30.000 potential investors. We had to offer ownership to potential investors, which can be hard for some investors to relate too.
This whole process with “Funded by me” meant that we placed all our eggs in one basket, and had to follow this process to end. In the end, we never reached the amount needed.”
Followmusic still exist today as a B2B supplier of washed and validated data.
”Other digital services can use our database, and we guarantee the information will be spot on. The revenue from this cover our expenses”
”The concept has been adjusted, as I’m now working within the business and have a clearer picture of what would make a succes, so I still believe in this idea and hope that I someday find myself in company with investors willing to make it happen.”It would not require much, as all the groundwork has been laid down”, Martin said in the end of the interview.
