| This is a very well written and thought out comment and I couldn't agree more. To the thread OP, with all due respect, I'm not sure if your team is solving the right problem. You mention "We (Mark and Justin) started writing music together a few years ago but felt limited in our ability to create anything that we were proud of." but how does that indicate a problem with the tools rather than your mastery of the composition process? Let me say it another way. The cambrian explosion I have seen in the space of bedroom pop paints a different picture, which is that a sufficiently motivated teenager can jump from wanting to write music to producing polished hits in months of focused effort, and from there, a signed record label contract. This cycle has been progressively shortening over the past decade with the improvement of at home DAW software/plugins and median quality of computer horsepower and entry-level audio hardware. This is also not necessarily hidden knowledge -- across the many forums of bedroom producers, almost every one of them have had a phase where they believed the problem was their tools, which distracts them from improving their composition fundamentals, and which is almost always resolved by forcing themselves to write better songs with even more primitive tools. While this discovery took a bit more time when tools were more primitive, it is a process that hungry early-stage composers hit a lot earlier today given the power of tools and the expected level of sophistication they are all expected to have by the market. Indeed, I experienced this myself formally during university when my college music composition composer forced our classes to write songs with constrained pitch class sets and instruments. The constraints actually forced us to figure out how to use more primitive tools to their full potential by making up for it with creativity, rather than using more advanced tools to less potential by virtue of less creativity. Combined with the rise of streaming audio platforms, it is also the case that the median level of conceptual polish as well as the bar for releasing a track that breaks through the noise has also risen. If every teenager excited about music can go from 0 to professional outputs in several months, then one would expect to see the results of that in the market -- which I have certainly seen. My concern with your platform thesis is that it is optimizing a part of the composer's journey that you felt but which was not a material reality of your target power user's day-to-day for any period of time except the very beginning, and that you didn't do enough research into the market before building around a problem to solve. The comment I am replying to goes quite a bit closer towards solving what I see as the real problem: helping power users dial in closer to the sound they are looking for and already know how to get to, but simply in less time. Given that you have a professional DJ and producer on your team, I find it curious that this wasn't immediately caught and corrected for in your original market thesis. If you do not correct this grave mistake in your thesis about the market, I believe your product is doomed to fail. You'll achieve success solving the problems of users who are doomed to never be successful musicians, but you'll fail to solve the problems of users who are on the arc towards becoming very successful, merely because you haven't made the deliberate choice to focus on them and their specific needs. If you did, I think you would arrive at a very different product. |