And here’s to the fools who dream
Crazy as they may seem
Here’s to the hearts that break
Here’s to the mess we make
I trace it all back to then
Her, and the snow, and the Seine
Smiling through it
She said she’d do it again…
The song that missed the Oscars by a little says a lot about NVC.
While LemonBox fulfills ours needs to be healthy, we need more music to be happy. For all musicians and fans out there, Waaves could be your Seine. When JC Chang was writing the account below about his idea and the team, he did not know if Waaves would be selected or not on that Thursday. Reading the following, I have no doubt that even if the team didn’t make the cut, he’d do it again… Fast forward and Waaves was selected to compete in NVC, but I think it is important to give credit to everyone who submitted a feasibility summary: “the hearts that break and the mess we make” lead to our future success. Here’s what JC has to say about his company’s NVC journey so far…
This past month, my team applied to the New Venture Challenge (NVC) and we wanted to share the story of why we started Waaves, why we applied to NVC, and how we have continued to make progress on Waaves – amidst the heavy anxiety of waiting for NVC results to come out.
We are Waaves, the premiere recording studio in the cloud. We are building a music collaboration platform in order to bring musicians around the world together to create new, original music using our real-time collaboration tools. We decided to make Waaves, because we were passionate about music and identified a critical opportunity in the music industry. In particular, we saw independent musicians such as Chance the Rapper were more empowered now than ever before to create and distribute music, yet found (Chance aside) many musicians often lacked the network, tools, and focus to create something great. Most recently, in our exclusive concept test of 20 live users, we were able to connect a singer/songwriter from Lithuania with a guitarist in Washington D.C. to create a new song within the Waaves platform.
Over the school year, we have made concerted efforts to apply the numerous opportunities available at Chicago Booth in order to actualize our vision for Waaves. More specifically, at the guidance of past NVC participants, we took Waaves through Building the New Venture with Professor Deutsch in order to hash out our business model and get in the weeds about what it would take to run a start-up. Chris Yi, another second-year and co-founder, also developed our MVP through Application Development under Professor Betina and created a fully functional web application for Waaves on Ruby on Rails. We are currently taking Entrepreneurial Selling with Professor Alter, which has helped us define our sales strategy and identify the “right” prospective partners that would help us acquire users.
In addition to our coursework, we partnered with Designation.io, a UX/UI bootcamp, to conduct six design sprints, which has helped us test real-life prototypes and wireframes with live prospective users. These designs were helpful to further refine our vision for Waaves and give us clarity into what features we should prioritize in our product roadmap. Most importantly, we have been deliberately growing our team to expand our skills. Currently, our team consists of four Boothies (me, Chris, Hilary Gerstein, and Tim Yamaya) and two UChicago Lab School student software developers (Campbell and Ashwin), who we met through past NVC finalist, Wanqi Zhu, CTO of Willowflare. In each of these steps, we felt more and more strongly that we are solving a real customer need and that maybe, just maybe, Waaves has a chance.
We are applying to NVC in order to advance our business under the leadership and guidance of the Polsky Center’s vast network of leading academics, entrepreneurs, and alums. In many ways, we view NVC as an opportunity to be mentored, receive constructive criticism, and pitch in front of prospective investors. From a personal standpoint, I have long aspired to participate. As a prospective student two years ago, I recall attending the Entrepreneurship Symposium and listening to Professor Deutch and Professor Meadow talk about the entrepreneurship programs at Booth and how oftentimes the experience culminates with NVC.
I also remember sitting in the audience for last year’s NVC finals and being inspired by Booth companies like Riviter and TransparentC, where you could feel the students’ passion and sacrifice for their businesses. On a more personal note, NVC also represents validation — a stamp of approval that we have a real chance to do something meaningful through Waaves and that the number of hours spent on Waaves has been justified.
Although applications for NVC were submitted in early February, we did not want to lose a month of progress, so continued to advance Waaves. In particular, we have focused efforts in two key areas: (i) customer acquisition and (ii) product development. We have a goal of 10,000 total users by the end of June for a public beta release. Over the past month, we launched marketing campaigns on Facebook/Instagram. We reached roughly 7,000 people and got 100 people to click to our website. However, of these 100 people, 0 signed up. Our response has been to revamp the landing page so users have a better sense of what our platform and vision is. Previously, we had higher touch marketing, where we individually emailed and explained to each of our 20 concept test users and overlooked the importance of a visual, informative landing page to help prospective users make an informed decision to use our platform.
Further, we also determined Google Analytics was an insufficient tool to understand user behavior. As such, we evaluated user behavior analytics platforms and determined to implement Amplitude Analytics, which would enable us to better understand where users were spending time and where we might be losing users. Concurrently, we have been preparing for a public beta release at the end of June and have been working on creating the next version of our product. From our concept test, we received a lot of great feedback on how to improve our product.
As a result, we have continued to build features on our site such as integration with other media platforms such as Soundcloud, improving our onboarding process, and enabling users to make detailed profile pages. We are excited to be releasing these new features over the next two weeks. At the core of Waaves, we are working to create an environment, where musicians have fun and are inspired to create, and this guides each decision we make.
Overall, we have been particularly appreciative of many classmates, professors, and designers, who have graciously helped us shape our vision and provided necessary feedback. We are appreciative of all the musicians, who joined our concept test and design sprints, and gave us a chance in our mission to change the music industry. Though we have found this process to be very taxing and have often had to make difficult trade-offs between working on Waaves and other commitments, I have learned to love the grind and feel this has given me a lot of clarity in how I perceive life after Booth. We earnestly hope that this Thursday bears good news for Waaves and wish all applicants good fortune.
– Contributed by JC Chang, Chicago Booth Class of 2017
