Jellynote is the new social platform about music creation and performance: create and share sheet music, tabs and covers! Jellynote is built by musicians who face that problem and want to share solution to the community.
We had an in-depth and very intuitive interview with Mr. ‘Baptiste Poirier‘; Chief Operating Officer “COO” at the France (Paris)-based start-up “Jellynote”.
“Jellynote” is the social platform for musicians.
Below is the full interview that we have conducted with Mr. ‘Poirier’ regarding his internet start-up company “Jellynote”;
1. What is it exactly that you do and what “Jellynote” is all about?
Jellynote is the new social platform about music creation and performance: create and share sheet music, tabs and covers! Jellynote is built by musicians who face that problem and want to share solution to the community. We will also bring a new experience to play and learn music. As you are playing a song, Jellynote will listen to you and will give you a direct feedback in real time. This will make music learning easier.
2. When has “Jellynote” been founded? And what stage is “Jellynote” currently at?
The startup has been founded in June 2012. We have already customer but we will launch our premium offer in October 2013; We have been integrated to 2 French accelerators: LeCamping (http://www.lecamping.org/) and theFamily (http://www.thefamily.co/). it was really great experiences, we met a lot people and they give a lot of advices and support us!
3. What is “Jellynote”‘s business model and how does it work?
We will propose a freemium model like Deezer or Spotify. We will sell our iPad & Android applications for 5$ per App during the first year and also a subscription for premium features (learning tools): 5$/month. We planned to sell between 50 000 and 100 000 an to have a conversion rate of 2% (free => premium).
4. How did your team meet? And who in your team does what?
The team is composed by three engineers. We met during highschool and we are friends since 2008.
• Arthur Lenoir is the ninja frontend developer. He had his master degree at UTC and he also worked at Exalead on a very interesting project: MUMA. It is an amazing tool to search for songs that contain a specific chords’ sequence developed at Exalead (http://muma.labs.exalead.com).
• Adrien Cognee is a talented backend developer. He also had his master degree at UTC and he worked at Logica.
• Baptiste Poirier is the data analyst. He had his master degree at EPF and he also has a master degree on financial mathematics at Dauphine University. He previously worked as quantitative analyst in finance. We also have two hackers interns, allowing to speed up the development of our platform.
5. What, exactly, makes you different from existing options, what will make your product and/or service stand out in the marketplace? In other words what’s unique about you and what’s new about what you make?
We have been working on display the sheet music directly in the browser, thanks to the HTML5 rendering engine. We will also get a set of videos. These videos are very useful to see how other musicians perform the song. This is also very encouraging and inspiring.
Learning Mode
Jellynote shows you what to play and wait for you until you play the right notes. You can play the song at your rhythm and get feedback in real time. http://youtu.be/Vp-lqRuEd2Y
Practice Mode
A Guitar Hero but with real music! Play the song at the chosen tempo, Jellynote validates the notes you play well. At the end, you get a score; you can now follow your progress! http://youtu.be/HTwEN6CnJnk
6. What is your growth like? And what milestones has “Jellynote” achieved so far?
We are now reaching in average more than 200 000 unique visitors every month with a growth of +25% month to month.
The music score market is large and the need truly exists. You just have to talk with musicians to notice that they are waiting for such a service.
We target 500 000 unique visitors for the beginning of the next year.
7. Who are your competitors? And what is “Jellynote”‘s competitive advantage over them?
For our competitors, there are historical firms such as:
• Sheet Music Plus is the leader of music scores selling. In 2009, the firm had a turnover of $25 million and a growth of 10%.
• Ultimate Guitar is the leader for the contents related to guitar. They have a freemium business model, and their traffic represents more than 12 million unique visitors per month.A new generation is coming such as:
• Chromatik who raised $2 million. It is an iPad App which allows you to annotate and share your music scores.
• Tonara is also an iPad App which turns the page automatically while you play.
• MuseScore is an editor of sheet music, but they also have a platform in order to share your sheet music.But none of the current competitors is using a multi-channel strategy as Jellynote provide.
8. What obstacles did you face and how did you overcome them?
The conversion rate free to premium is not known for the moment. We target a 2% conversion rate! For the regulations, we are a hosting platform exactly like Youtube or MuseScore. The users upload the content, and anyone can inform us in case of illegal contents. In such cases, we can delete the content so there is no problem.
9. What are the key things about your field that outsiders don’t understand?
Our value proposition is a better experience to play and learn music, to really ensure a progress. This experience will be available for web browsers / iPad / iPhone / Android. We believe that the future of music practice is on tablet devices. Jellynote is already compatible with every modern device.
10. Why are you going to succeed?
Because we have an outstanding team, the service works great and for the moment we did not spent a penny in marketing or communication. We have identified our power users and we interrogate them frequently in order to improve our service every day! We really take care about the question of our user because the use a lot our product and sometimes they have really great ideas.
11. If “Jellynote” succeeds, what additional areas might you be able to expand into?
To target school music and music teacher, it is another aspect that we want to develop. We think that school music could deploy for each student! We also want to integrate an editor of sheet music directly in the browser! For the moment, a user have to write the sheet music in another software and upload it on jellynote after (Guitar Pro format or XML music or Midi File).
12. Why did you choose this idea and concept to build “Jellynote” based on?
Because we are musicians! Arthur plays the piano, Adrien the guitar and Baptiste the sax. So already face to that problem everyday, we started few years ago to develop a prototype but only for us. After few months we have been integrated to a french accelerator and decided to go 100% on our project!
13. What have you learned so far from launching your idea?
It is not so easy to launch a startup… But it is really excited because every day we solve new problems and we are directly in contact with our customers. We learn a lot about administrative tasks and it is absolutely not the funniest part but it still important to understand every area of our firm.
14. Six months from now, what’s going to be your biggest problem?
We are still thinking of what are the ways for reaching more customers. For the moment we did not spent a penny for marketing and advertising. But with the premium features we will try several not free approaches. Because on the web it is really hard to “make the buzz”! And we think that we need to be in touch with important people of the music industry (maybe an artist).
15. What’s the benefit for the customer/user?
An unlimited access to a large music scores catalogue.
Available for web browsers / iPad / iPhone / Android.
Better experience to play and learn music, to really ensure a progress.Learning Mode
Jellynote shows you what to play and wait for you until you play the right notes. You can play the song at your rhythm and get feedback in real time. http://youtu.be/Vp-lqRuEd2YPractice Mode
A Guitar Hero but with real music! Play the song at the chosen tempo, Jellynote validates the notes you play well. At the end, you get a score; you can now follow your progress! http://youtu.be/HTwEN6CnJnk
16. How did customers / users find out about you?
The acquisition strategy is pretty clear; it is the principle of viral marketing. A strong integration with Open Graph allows people to easily share music scores with their friends on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. A link to Deezer and Spotify on every score allows musicians to readily listen to the original song. The effect of this strategy of communication is already really efficient.
17. Who are your current customers / users? Who are your target customers / users?
There are more than 150 million musicians in the world and seventy five percent of musicians express difficulties to learn new songs. Accessing music scores is difficult. In fact the score market is archaic and does not fit current needs:
• Songbooks are like CDs, you are interested in one song and you have to buy the whole thing.
• Musicians need to see.
18. Where do new customers / users come from and what makes new customers/users try you?
Most people search music scores on Google, so Jellynote is fully optimized for search engines. A strong integration with Open Graph allows people to easily share music scores with their friends on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. So a lot of our users share our service (mostly on Facebook and now on Google+).
19. What do your customers / users say about your product and/or service?
For our communication we use the social networks, so the location of our users is very diverse. It’s really important, because we have several growth areas for our platform.
For example, since the beginning of the year, our visitors come from:
United States 217811
Russia 67102
United Kingdom 65576
France 45098
Canada 44238
Germany 41277
Australia 39404
Ukraine 23229
Netherlands 23001
Italy 21755
20. How are you going to scale?
We need to make some local events! We want to develop partnership with concerts or festival in order to make live demo of Jellynote, the public could see in real time their favorite band using Jellynote. And we also need to understand the specificities of each area and adapt our marketing/communication.
21. What’s the biggest missing feature? The one thing customers/users keep asking for?
The biggest missing feature is the translation of the website. Because our customers come from all around the world and some of their do not speak English very well! At the beginning of Jellynote, we just want to have one version of the website in English. We already translate the website in French and we measure the impact on our traffic.
22. Are you going to internationalize? And if yes how are you planning to expand your start-up’s operations accordingly?
We really want to go to the Asian market. For that we need to hire several employees who speak chinese & japanese. The social networks on these countries are really closed to foreign people so if you want to have business here you need to have an office an locals employees, it one of our future big challenge.
23. How big do you think you can get? Why? And how you are planning to achieve your goals?
There are more than 150 million musicians in the world. According to Srañana Mitra the score market represents $1.1 billion and states: « I see, however, the potential for building a $100 million company rather rapidly» (http://www.sramanamitra.com/2009/11/11/deal-radar-2009-sheet-music-plus/).
Our ultimate goal is to be the reference for learning music via our website site and mobile app!
24. Are you looking to hire a new workforce? And if yes, what job vacancies do you currently offer and where can potential applicants contact you at?
At short term, we want to hire some business developers in order to contact school music & music teacher.
And we also want to hire a really good designer in order to improve our UX.
After that we want to penetrate Asian markets in order to multiply our growth. Music is a universal concept so our product is really worlwide.
25. Are you looking for partnership opportunities or funding from Venture Capitals (VC) or other funding sources? Or your business is self-sustainable? And if the first option applies where can potential partners / investors contact you at?
We are currently looking for funding around 2.5 million dollars from VC. We already had several contacts but we still looking for other opportunity. We already have raised money around 80 000 $ from friends / family / works contact in a little round in order to have a good start and hire some interns.
26. What advice do you have for fresh entrepreneurs?
To follow their dreams and to not be so afraid to try! Some people will advice to not quit your job in order to launche your own business. But if you are convicted that your idea is really good, go ahead it will be an amazing experience. You will learn a lot about yourself!
27. Finally, do you have any other comments that you would like to add?
Note: There is a rating embedded within this post, please visit this post to rate it.If you have any questions do not hesitate to contact me on baptiste@jellynote.com
