by Brenna Ehrlich
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As any music lover can tell you, tunes and location are often tied closely together — every landscape has its own musical mood. For the last six months or so, renaissance man Steve Jang has been tapping into the location-based craze, allowing any music fan with a phone and an inclination to share their musical journeys with SoundTracking.
For those still stuck in the dark ages — you know, sharing filtered snaps and pics of your food — SoundTracking is an iOS app that allows users to share songs (either via search, music recognition or what’s playing on one’s iTunes) with location and a photo attached.
Mashable spoke with Jang about how the app came to be, his inspiration and his myriad stitches — none of which were inflicted in the line of entrepreneurial duty.
Fun Facts: I co-produced music videos for The Strokes and J Dilla , and have produced DJ battles and showcases for more than 10 years. I’ve been a skateboarder and surfer for more than 20 years and have had more than 150 stitches and 20 staples in my body. I learned how to program in PASCAL in 1987.
I find a ton of inspiration in industrial design. I’ve always been fascinated with the emotional power of a great industrial design. I can tell you what my first Sony Walkman, my first surfboard, my Braun shaver, and my first iPod not only looked like, but how they felt in my hands for the first time and what kind of emotions I experienced as I used these imaginative, simple and man-made objects. For example, I collect vintage radios and recently refurbished a 1958 Clairtone wood stereo console, and it was that work that actually influenced some of the UI elements of the SoundTracking app.
When I visualize success for our company, I see us working together, designing and building great products that make a lot of people very happy, including ourselves. I’ve seen teams of really smart, talented people get steered into building products that they don’t enjoy themselves and I think it’s important to not only enjoy what you do, but also love the product itself for what it does. For our first product, the SoundTracking app , we’re really excited about giving people a powerful and authentic emotional experience using their mobile phone, around sharing the music that moves them and connecting with the world via the songs and artists they love. If we can accomplish that, then we’ve done something really cool.
What about your startup idea was game-changing?
My co-founder and I started the company because we were excited about creating new social experiences using the mobile form factor, sensors and social software. With regard to SoundTracking, I think the innovative thing we did was to rethink, from the ground up, how to build a social music service designed specifically for mobile devices and combining pre-existing technology and features to do so. We combined search, music recognition, geo-location and photo capture to create a totally new way to share your music moments in the familiar form of a playable music postcard. We have some other mobile product ideas beyond music that we are excited about as well.
What was the pivotal point in your early startup days?
We’re still in our early days, since we just launched six months ago, but I can think of two moments that really stand out. The day Matt Paul (my co-founder) and I had built the first functional prototype on an iPhone was an important day. When your first prototype performs that one basic function and you say “it f**king works!!!”, that is the most pivotal point in the early days of a startup. The second point was when we hit 250,000 users after just six weeks — it was clear that we had struck a nerve with our app idea and dropped all other prototype ideas.
What was the biggest challenge you faced with your startup?
I think the biggest challenge is always prioritizing the different steps you feel are all absolutely essential to building out your vision. It’s funny because everything seems crucially important when you’re looking ahead from step one in a young startup. Paradoxically, you have to be both wildly ambitious and steadily patient to a certain extent as you try to design, build and ship, often at the tip of an extremely huge iceberg of awesome and totally amazing things you’d like to build.
What are the biggest influences on your business model?
I think we’re squarely in the quadrant of products that are simply just trying to build a great service that people understand, love and use frequently. From a historical perspective, I think there are a lot of great learnings from the Google model. They built a singularly great search engine and developed a business model that allowed them to efficiently connect companies that provide products or services relevant to what people were actually searching for. It was not an obtrusive way of creating a business model, rather it was actually additive in terms of the quality of user experience.
We’d like to figure out a similar way of creating a business model that generates revenue in a way that our user community actually appreciates. In these early days, we have begun testing in-app payments in the form of a song purchase button at the peak of excitement when a user views a soundtrack post they love. We’re seeing 10% conversion after someone taps that buy-a-download button, which is promising but still just early data.
How did your social network of peers influence your business?
It’s been super helpful to have a group of product-knowledgeable and articulate peers to rap with about your vision and question your assumptions and ideas. For SoundTracking, we stand in a Venn diagram of mobile, social software and music, so I make sure to include friends from those fields in our beta test group and advisor list. I’m also an advisor and early investor/shareholder to some great startups developing mobile products, such as StackMob, Animoto, StumbleUpon and Uber, so I learn a great deal from those entrepreneurs as well.
For us, social media is not only important in terms of the typical word-of-mouth and user feedback benefits, but also for measuring actual user behavior data beyond the SoundTracking app’s boundaries. One of the popular uses of SoundTracking is to share your music moments and opinions of songs to friends on Facebook , Twitter and Foursquare . We can see how they share these posts into their feeds, how their friends and followers react, and the traffic flow between our services. Currently, we are seeing great reach for SoundTracking on those three services, with more than 8 million daily impressions posted, and then we can compare that to the amount of measurable activity data that is happening within that social media platform and within our own service.
Try to work with people that are extremely smart, talented and ambitious. If they are missing any of those three attributes, it will show immediately in a startup. If they have all three, they will make a huge, positive impact on not only product execution, but also your startup’s vision. And absolutely don’t BS yourself — make sure you work on a product that you truly love, not that you just kind of like and think “makes a lot of sense.” Think of it as a long journey in a small boat with a few people across a wild ocean. You want to make sure you have the best sea-mates you can depend upon and a destination that is worth the fun, but tumultuous journey.
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