We launched Smores - an AI music discovery app 🎉 | Part 1 - The Problem

Hi everyone! My cofounder (Andrei) and I are super excited to be launching our music project, S’mores! We have recently crossed the 100 DAU’s mark and over 20k new tracks have been liked, and with our subscription launch coming soon, we thought it would be a great idea to share our story of how we got to where we are today.

Here’s how the next series of posts will be structured:

Chapter 1: The problem, assumptions and observations we made

Chapter 2: The Idea

Chapter 3: The MVP (validation)

Chapter 4: Growth/Marketing

Chapter 5: Where we are now (metrics)

If you want to skip the story, here’s the app to try out: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/smores-music-discovery/id1626768775?ign-itscg=30200&ign-itsct=apps_box_badge

Still here? Awesome, let’s begin.

Chapter 1: Initial Observations + Problem

It all started on May 1, 2022. Andrei and I were frustrated with the current methods of discovering new music on Spotify. We started talking and realized we both had very similar problems:

Problems:

1. It was time-consuming — With millions of songs on Spotify and over 60k songs being uploaded everyday, digging through that sort of volume is impossible. This type of content overload has left people trapped in a corner not even trying to listen to new music, or worse, stuck in an echo chamber. Current discovery tools in streaming apps only scratch the surface.

2. No Transparency + Control — We wanted a way to customize how we were actually getting our recommendations, and there wasn’t much control over it.

3. Discover Weekly/ and Radio wasn’t cutting it — While Spotify has some great tools, we did notice repeat recommendations that we either liked or heard before

4. No real discovery platform existed for smaller artists — The recommendations algorithm prioritized mainstream artists and songs.

Observations over the year:

1. Whenever I’d be in a car with someone, within 20 seconds of me playing a song, they’d ask, “omg what song is this?” or take a picture of the radio to save for later

2. People Shazam-ing songs in clubs, coffee shops or parties before the song even ends. Shazam’s popularity proves that people want to know the name of songs from just listening to a short snippet of it.

3. When a Tik-Tok video has a good music snippet attached, most of the comments would be asking for “What’s the song ID?”

4. When actively searching for songs on Spotify, many people, including myself, would listen to the 5 seconds of the intro of a song, then move the scrubber to the middle and listen to the next section to quickly preview that song

5. This led us think that you don’t need to listen to a whole song to know whether you like it or not. You just need to listen to “the right snippet.”

6. People’s attention spans is ever-decreasing these days. TikTok, Instagram stories etc. have made focusing on anything above 20 seconds seem like a difficult task. We think the same is happening or will happen for music discovery too.

The initial reaction to S’mores seems to validate our assumption.

With this knowledge, we started brainstorming and came up with our idea :)

Stay tuned for part 2...