Turning Cultural Gaps into a Streaming Business

Jakob Wredstrøm

It will catch up. But again, I get the recording from your side, which also means that at the top of your screen in a few seconds, you'll see like an uploading symbol. And when we are done, that should have been finished uploading. Usually if you have a decent internet, it will be done immediately after or a few minutes after you've stopped the recording.

Faraan / Saarey Music

I do, yep.

Faraan / Saarey Music

Okay, I'm going to try one more camera angle and see if that's better. For a second. Was this better or was the last one better?

Jakob Wredstrøm

I kind of like this one. I think this is, this is quite good. Yeah.

Faraan / Saarey Music

Okay. Okay, let's do that then. All right, we're good to go.

Jakob Wredstrøm

I will start in five seconds.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hey guys and welcome back to the Sound Connections Podcast. Today we have Faran in the studio. Welcome.

Faraan / Saarey Music

Thank you, Jacob. Pleasure to be here.

Jakob Wredstrøm

First time I spoke with you was about I think two years ago and you were working on a business that I found incredibly intriguing and that's also why we're talking about your business today. It's very unique in how it operates and maybe before we get into Saarey and what you guys do for the people who don't know you Farhan, who are you and what do you do?

Faraan / Saarey Music

My name is Farhan Irfan. I am the founder and CEO at saarey Music. I believe South Asian Pakistani Indian classical music is absolutely incredible and the world needs access to it. I've grown up listening to it. I've been working in it for 20 years. My family has been a patron of it for 67 years and I'm the first known artist Pakistani at the Recording Academy. And a few years ago, before I started saarey Music, I wanted to listen to some classical music online. And despite me trying to go to YouTube and Spotify and the likes, I just couldn't find good quality music. And I was really surprised. You one would have thought these platforms would have all the music out there in the world, but they didn't. So I decided I was going to build the future that I wanted to see for my culture and my heritage. And that led me down a journey. To realize that there are others like me across the world who absolutely love this music but they don't have easy access to it because of the large catalog gaps that exist in existing platforms. And I realized that this is out of two billion South Asians. This is actually 300 million people strong market. And so that was enough for us to now dedicate our lives to learn this that not only this, this dedicate our lives to this, because not only is this is incredibly important, but this is also meaningful to a very large population of the world.

Jakob Wredstrøm

And we'll get into your story today, which is going to be the main theme of our discussion today to try and understand your journey. But to begin with the current, for people to understand where you are right now. Tell us about saarey Music, how you are in the market, who's using the platform, so we can just understand the status quo.

Faraan / Saarey Music

Sure, so saarey Music is an audio streaming service for South Asian classical music. So you can think of us like a Spotify, but we're different from a Spotify because we have a 25 year exclusivity on 90 % of Pakistani classical music. And unlike other streaming services where margins are arranged between 25 and 35%, our margins are 97%. And I know you will be jumping into this because this is one of the main reasons we're on here today because of our unique business model. And from a purely user perspective, other than not being able to find the content anywhere else, we've actually built a very culturally nuanced metadata set. So for example, based on thousands of years of heritage, There are different pieces of music that are for the morning time, different pieces of music that are for the evening time, different pieces for the springtime, for when it's raining and so on. And we've built the infrastructure to be able to deliver that really nuanced experience to our users and that they really appreciate. And we have now over a million downloads on Android. We have users across the world. But unsurprisingly, there are in... The US, the UK, the Middle East, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, wherever there are South Asians. But what is surprising is that we actually built it thinking that it would be users who would be 40 plus who would be using it. Surprisingly, 53 % of our users are 18 to 35 years old. And so it turns out it was never about the music, about the genre or the sound being for older people. It was about access. And we've now learned that now that young people have access to their culture and heritage, that they will listen and they will pay extra for it. So people in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh were notorious for not being willing to pay for music at all. Pay us 12 times more than what the average music streaming price is. So we're very happy to be where we are and

Faraan / Saarey Music

It's growing really well. Our retention and even with the high price, I'm sure listeners of this podcast already know that the higher the price, the less the retention is for consumer apps. While the average retention for consumer apps according to Ingrid and Harowitz is usually 10 % after month one, our retention is consistently above 70%.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Faraan / Saarey Music

So despite the high price people are so we're have early signs of product market fit and a clear indication that we're actually delivering something that people really want and need in some circumstances. And our listening behavior has gone from being a casual one off to actually being a ritual. We have our average Usage is close to two hours a day for my users

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm. Wow. So what's really interesting and I'll give the listeners a small insight information. I've been on your mailing list for like investment updates the last two years and you incredibly detailed in digital marketing and in how you look at the consumers and all the numbers you percent. So let's start with that. What is your background? Like why, how do you feel qualified to go into this and why are you taking this particular approach?

Faraan / Saarey Music

Great question. I didn't. I didn't feel qualified at all to go into this. Really, I like, I started this because this is an incredibly important part of my life. Has been. This is an incredibly important part of my culture. Has been an incredibly important part of my family. And so when I saw that this was a something that I needed, that the society needed around me. That was the reason that I got into it. I had no idea about consumer apps. So I did my bachelor's in computer sciences, I did have a background in programming, but I had no idea how to run a business, But once that decision was made, that I wanted to do something with it, the next question was, so what do we do? And if the objective is to be able to provide easy access to people around the world, to this incredible genre, what's the best way? Today to do it and the answer to that was naturally streaming. The idea for having our own streaming service was actually not mine. So one of the things that I have done, continue to do is I go and talk to whoever I possibly can about what I want to do and what are the potential pathways to get there. So way back before saarey Music was born at London Business School's Entrepreneurship Summer School, There was a guest speaker who I really liked, who was talking about things that really resonated. And so I went up to him and I said, hey, this is what I want to do. I want to do something classical music. This is my background. I wonder if we could have a conversation and just exchange some ideas. So one conversation, he said, yeah, sure. So we had met once and then we met twice. The third time it was London Business School's... Radcliffe Center, lower ground floor. I still remember it was an L-shaped blue sofa there with multicolored buttons. And I guess, typical cliche startup fashion, we open a laptop and he punches in some numbers and he says, listen, you have a background that nobody else does. And there's a large market out there. You should have your own streaming service. And so the idea of having our own streaming service was not mine.

Faraan / Saarey Music

It was Devon Dave. He then was our first investor and then became co-founder. And that's what got us going. So once then when we decided we were going to have our own streaming service, we said, all right, we have absolutely no expertise on this. What do we do? We went to our networks and we tried to find people who walked in streaming services, spoke to number of people, were one of the people that he seemed like a really, really smart guy. And somebody who we could culturally fit with, who was working in streaming, started mentoring us for a good, three, four months in. And we were so impressed that by the six months, I met him in New York and I invited him to be our co-founder. And so Nick is the one who really knew about me. Nick is the one who worked in Spotify. He's the one who really knew about. Streaming and consumer apps, incredibly smart guy. He's the one who, you know, one of the first questions, he's the one who kind of taught me about a lot of this. One of the first questions he asked was, what's your customer lifetime value? And I was like, what is that? He's like, okay, so it's your customer acquisition cost. I was like, what is that? How do you calculate that? So really the things that we now think are basics. Is something I had absolutely no idea about despite having a business school background. I did my MBA from Columbia, London Business School in Hong Kong University, joined Global MBA, one of the best in the world. Despite that background, I had no idea about this. And Nick is the guy who actually filled us in and all of this. He's the one who's built the entire data analytic infrastructure, how consumer apps should look and feel and how, you know, a lot of really key decisions were all Nick's. So I can't take credit for a lot of this.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Faraan / Saarey Music

I might be the face of the company, but really it's the team that really have brought us to where we are today.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm. So you mentioned it yourself and we also talked briefly about it before this interview is you have a model which I find fairly unique. You're both a streaming service, but you also basically, I wouldn't call it the license owner, but you have some sort of license. Well, you have a long license on the music, which is quite new and most streaming services don't operate that way. So what was the reasoning for this? Is you were trying to the numbers and like how to build this and you would see, okay, it's going to be too expensive to do a traditional way. Like what was the thought process of that model?

Faraan / Saarey Music

That was one of the thoughts that went through our head. We wanted to learn the good things about streaming business and see what are the actual challenges of the streaming service. And a consistent challenge that we came across was the fact that the copyright holders take away 70, 80, 85 % of licensing revenues. And that's, we saw and continues to be a real challenge. Mean, for any new streaming service that comes in, that really squeezes out margins. And so how do you really build a business that is successful or the wrong turn? Spotify, of course, have done an exceptional job at this. But we had people at Columbia who had senior projects saying we're gonna short in their financial, know, finance courses saying we're gonna short Spotify specifically because of this reason. And so we dug into it. Why that is there and why that's set up. I'm sure again, the listeners of this podcast already have the history of how Steve Jobs set that initial benchmark and then how when Spotify was being launched when people have seen, I'm sure the Netflix series as well. The copyright holders, essentially the big three record labels said this is the deal, if you take it or leave it, so it was about survival and Spotify needed to do that. So there was no real reason why streaming services, other than the fact that they had strong, the record labels had a strong negotiating position, that this structure was in place. So when we started thinking about how do we ensure that we build a sustainable company that continues to also sustain the ecosystem at large, it has to be a win-win for all parties. And so then we started actually going with a completely clean slate

Faraan / Saarey Music

To the copyright holders and we said, is a structure that works for you? What is it that you need? Not even looking at what the industry does or the Western industry does. We said, what is it that you need and what is it that we need? And how can we kind of find a win-win solution for it? Which is why we have a unique licensing model, which is unlike any other licensing model in the West. And we continue to be able to replicate that, not just with copyright holders in Pakistan, and artists in Pakistan, but also copyright holders and artists in India and across the world. Have the same licensing structure, which is we pay a fixed annual licensing fee, and it's not a percentage of revenues. It actually is a win-win because we add on additional benefits to artists which don't exist in the Western structure and we can dig into that if you like.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah, let's definitely dig into it because again, as you truly said, the reason why we're doing this podcast is I find your business model incredibly interesting. And I think also provoking to some sense, not because of the actual model, but because the you let's even talk about Spotify and the 70 % because right now you position it from a streaming services angle. We said, well, Spotify only got 30%, but in most sort of public discussions, it's like, oh, they take 30 % is too much. Right. But, know, you, you and I both know that it took what 17 years to become profitable. It's so like, it's not because like it's easy to be a streaming service for sure. Um, but

Faraan / Saarey Music

Yeah.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Try to explain what the extra thing is and why is this particularly a win-win because again, I think for most listeners here, what you're talking about would be a quite foreign concept.

Faraan / Saarey Music

Yeah, I can understand. So let me give some context before I directly answer that question. Western structures to take artists, musicians, from zero to one exist. They could be in the public domain, they could be in private domains. Know, brand new artist wants to do something, there'll be some structure available, whether it's education in marketing, education in music, whether it's funding, those opportunities are there. So you go from zero to one and then from one to two and then two to three and so on. So all of those layers and infrastructures more or less do exist. Not true in South Asia. So for example, you would have an incredible artist who is exceptional in their craft. But the only thing they know to do is to sing. And you and I know and listeners of this podcast would know that the industry need, there is more required to be successful in the industry. For example, at the very bare bones of it, you need to know how to get recordings done. You need to know how to then be able to mix, master, edit those recordings. Then you need to be able to publish those recordings, get those artworks get it out into... Streaming platform or YouTube now and then have your in our marketing people who are then promoting you as an artist to be able to get to a certain level of financial security in this and despite all of those structures in place I believe there's a report published in the UK a few years ago it said less than 1 % of artists in the UK make a living from streaming and so Imagine the challenges in the West, despite those structures being in place. And imagine the challenges in South Asia with almost no structures in place. It's not that they don't exist at all, but they're very difficult to find, they're very difficult to access, and they're usually not interconnected. And so what we, again,

Faraan / Saarey Music

Thinking about what we can actually do, not just for the streaming business, but for the entire industry that we have, was how do we get the music of these incredible artists to our people who want to listen to it? And so we needed to build all of those elements in place to be able to bring that music to life in the digital world. And usually it's the artist's responsibility to do all of But in saarey Music's case, do it for them. And so that makes the model very different in that we add a lot of value in that entire value chain and not just being able that, not being just that endpoint which just distributes. And so that makes the model different as well.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm. You know, adding those layers also, you know, would inherently make it less scalable because you have more tedious work and you have more repetitive tasks that can just be digitalized automatically. How do you, how do you circumvent that it becomes a services company almost in that element?

Faraan / Saarey Music

So it's a double-edged sword. It gives us a moat as well, because if it's not already digital, then now in the world of AI, it can't be copied. And that gives us a very strong defensibility. And given that it builds very good relationships with the artists, because they realize that we are here to actually do good onto them as well, as well as ourselves. So it needs to be win-win, like what I continue to repeat. And once it is digitized, that's when we can start to scale this. So yes, a part of our business is inherently unscalable. Or just in the sense of, not scalable in the digital sense, it is, you know, once we have, as we continue to add more and more people in the team, then we can do all of that faster. But that's the nature of the business. That's an important foundation on which this business is built. Western streaming services don't need to build that foundation because that foundation is already more or less there. But since it's not there for our business, we have to have that there.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

One thing you mentioned is that your streaming service is expensive. Try to explain that. What do mean by that?

Faraan / Saarey Music

Expensive for our users.

Jakob Wredstrøm

He said, you know, in certain areas it's 12 times the cost of Spotify.

Faraan / Saarey Music

Yeah, not the cost of Spotify, but the cost of the average price for streaming in markets. So for example, in India, the average streaming price is $3 a month, or $3 a year, sorry. People pay us $3 a month. And that's the minimum where it starts. And people can choose to pay us anything above that minimum. Sorry, to get you just to complete that thought.

Jakob Wredstrøm

So. 16.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Faraan / Saarey Music

Users can pay anything above that minimum, about 10 % of people buy choice, not because they're anything extra for it. They pay us up to 20 times more than that average price.

Jakob Wredstrøm

So our listeners are mainly from the Western music world. So for me, this is a foreign concept of what are the sort of incumbents in India or Asia when it comes to streaming services. So try to explain the alternatives. What exists in India as a streaming service beyond the majors that we know?

Faraan / Saarey Music

So you have your YouTube, have your Spotify and then you have local streaming services like say India has GeoSauvn and used to have Ghana and there are other streaming services in there as well and Pakistan used to have Patari but no longer there. Streaming services even in South Asia are dominated by the Western streaming service, but there are local streaming services like a geo Southern which are there, but they focus predominantly on either Western music or Bollywood music. I'm sure from your listeners might be familiar with Bollywood, you know, very popular around the world. That's focus. We focus on a genre that is completely underserved. We focus on a market where people want access to this genre and so they want access to the culture and the heritage and which is a very deep part of their identity and therefore they're willing to pay more to get it.

Jakob Wredstrøm

So anyone who knows a tiny bit about streaming services knows it takes years and years and years and years to build. It's, you don't do this in 10 years, you do it perhaps in 25. So, and you guys have been going for a little while, but you know, it's not been an eternity yet. So what are you doing right now? How are you trying to grow and what's the goal with the company?

Faraan / Saarey Music

Well, the goal with the company is to have this culture easily accessible to everybody around the world who wants to be able to listen to it. We're very clear that we are shepherds of this music and this culture. We're very clear that... It has to resonate with the culture and it has to be honestly and authentically represented. Which is why I kind of also shared the few nuances that we have, which is what we make sure that we are able to deliver for our users. We easily see from a purely financial perspective, we easily see this being a billion pound company, if not more. And that's really simply math. We know what our, you know, the market is 300 million out of the two billion. We now know what our customer acquisition cost is. We know what our conversion rates are. We know what people are willing to pay us. We continue to know what our retention rates are, which are, you know, all of those metrics are, compared to the market average, is exceptionally high. We do expect over time that this would obviously not stay at those high levels and come down and we've projected that out. And so really it's simple math which tells us that we're from a purely financial perspective going to be easily unicorn.

Jakob Wredstrøm

And how dependent are you still in like injecting capital into make this work? Like are you close to me, you know having a business that now is profitable? What's what's? Don't think so, but still a valid question.

Faraan / Saarey Music

Is it ever? Is a startup ever?

Faraan / Saarey Music

Yeah, great question. So like I said, our margins are 97%. So for us, it's really dependent on how fast do we want to grow. And because we have ambitions of being very big, very quickly, we will continue to be injecting capital into this for that growth.

Jakob Wredstrøm

That makes sense. So the goal is to have this, know, popular amongst everyone who wants it. But the end goal, I guess, would be to still make a great business. What's the current owners who are on board, what type of owners are that? What type of owners do you have right now? Is it venture capital funds? Is it angels? What's the story?

Faraan / Saarey Music

Absolutely.

Faraan / Saarey Music

Sorry, what type of?

Faraan / Saarey Music

Angel investors for the most part at the moment.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Okay, so I would assume also maybe less so harsh expectations on certain returns, they're happy with being patient and ambitious or like what's the dynamic there?

Faraan / Saarey Music

I think we've been very lucky. We have close to 15 angel investors on our cap table. I would say except for one, everybody has been exceptionally patient, exceptionally understanding. As in any startup journey, we've faced multiple times we've run out of cash. I believe we will run out of cash in the future as well. That's the nature of the business that we're running. And our investors have been incredibly supportive and understanding of this entire journey. And so I'm very, you know, I think it's just, we're lucky in that we've been able to find these amazing people to be on our gap table. You mentioned the fact that, you know, it has to be, you know, really big and also really good business. And I strongly feel that is Those are not. Those are complementary because in order for something to be sustainable in the long run, it has to provide value to its users. And a very good measure of that value is if you can actually build a sustainable business along with actually delivering something really good. And I think saarey Music does both.

Jakob Wredstrøm

So, now that you've existed for a while, where is the complications and cash expenditure for you guys? Is that building a stronger tech stack? Is that acquiring users? Where does most of your cash focus go when you build this company now?

Faraan / Saarey Music

All of the above, right? You can't have one without the other, but also the content. So three main pillars that we have in terms of where we focus. Yes, the tech. Yes, acquiring more users. And the content as well. So. Users love us because of our content, but they also want more and that's natural for any streaming service. We cover, I would believe at the moment, 40 % of the genre ever produced and we want to get to 90%. And this is not necessarily genre or music or content that is already available. This is content that we know are in reels and cassettes that we know are in people's private collections. And so this is going knocking on going from door to door and saying knocking on those doors and saying would you be willing to share this with the world. And so a lot of effort goes into that. We have recently and I wrote a article which yesterday what I'm going to be posting about we've

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Faraan / Saarey Music

About coding in Claude code. So it's been a game changer, honestly. We've been able to deliver in two weeks, which I would estimate would have taken us at least two years to build. But I also want to be clear that Claude code is not just this magical thing that will one prompt and solves everything.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Faraan / Saarey Music

You do still have to really work at it. And, you know, it will take you 60 % of the way there, but you still have to put in the work to get to 100%. I think the real advantage is that some, a founder or a product owner who has a creative vision, this Claude code really takes away the translation tax between the product owner and the creative vision and the developer and the constant back and forth. Between what you envision, what is actually made, and the time that is wasted between those back and forth with developers. And then even if they build exactly what you asked, but then you get some feedback from users that X needs change, should change, or Y should change. And then that, going back to the developers and changing that, all of that goes away now. It's like you just share your vision with it and you can then just do those hundreds of iterations to bring it to that point where you're happy to start sharing it with the world. So the translation tax really is a game changer, I believe.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah, obviously it's opened a lot of opportunities that, especially these sort of more lean pursuits where, you might not be able to get, you know, 10 developers of the highest quality in the world to build something where you need to set a full, not necessarily less, but for fewer and be more lean. You can actually build meaningful stuff. So your background with, as far as I you said, sort of computer engineering, does that also mean you're very hands-on with the product building? And have you been that from the very start?

Faraan / Saarey Music

Absolutely, yep, I have. So, yes, I have 20 years of background in classical music, but I also did my bachelor's in computer sciences. And I way back did programming in C++. And so once we started building it, I think one of the advantages that we had was because I was, also I have a CTO hat on when I'm working on developers, I can still give them direction as to what is the best. Where to go about building what we're building and then challenging them as well. So that also, so I've always been very involved in the product and the development of it. And now with Claude, that's just become easier because it's actually, feel like I'm, when I'm talking to Claude code, it feels like I'm talking to developer. Honestly, I say, this is what I wanna do. And they come back to me, it comes back to me and says, you know, this is what I've done, et cetera, et cetera. I said, no, this is not the right direction. This is not the right function to necessarily use. You know, explore and research more and find a better option there. Honestly, it feels like I'm talking to just a team member and I have been hands on with this absolutely from the beginning.

Jakob Wredstrøm

You

Jakob Wredstrøm

So as I understand the business, again, I've done a tiny bit of research behind it, but I don't know everything. The way that I understand it is that most of this catalog have been relatively untouched and you come and activate it. Now, when you've started this pursuit, I can imagine that there must be some competitors in the market that have seen this gap that you're seeing. What's going on in that space?

Faraan / Saarey Music

Yeah, so even before we started we already had a competitor in Saragama Classical, we had a competitor in HCL Music. After we started we have another competitor that's come in that called Raghya. From what I understand, I'm in touch with the founder of Raghya, great guy. I'm in touch with Saragama, I have been, I've tried to get in touch with HTL Music as well because I truly believe that this is a huge market that can easily have space for multiple players. They have different, again, as much as I could find out, they have different challenges in place in what they're doing. And I think that's mainly because of their structure. Saragama is actually a record label. They couldn't really focus on music streaming. HCL is not a music company. It's a huge conglomerate in India that does a lot of stuff. Music is for them a philanthropic venture. And Raghya is the only streaming service that is focused on music. What really helps us win is the fact that we're completely focused on this, this is all we do. And so we're actually now in talks to collaborate with a lot of these streaming services and see how we can really work together to build this industry and grow it.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm. So if you were to try to sort of be devil's advocate in what you do, what would be reasons you could fail in this pursuit?

Faraan / Saarey Music

That's a great question.

Faraan / Saarey Music

I would say... So, you know what I say to my son whenever he's doing something, I would say think the same thing would apply. Every morning when he goes to school I say work hard, smart, So one, if we stop working hard, two, stop working smart so you can be the hardest worker in the world but if you don't work hard, work smart, you will still fail and you have to be true. And you have to have the highest level of integrity. So that's the only reason that your team will trust you, your investors will trust you, your consumers will trust you. And hey, listen, you don't always get it right. Don't, you know, you there will be a lot of mistakes made along the way. But as long as you stay true to what you're doing, being honest, transparent and upfront in what you're doing, people can see it and people can feel it. And so If you have those elements in place, you can only see success. The reasons for failure would be a lack of any of these. I believe all three elements need to be in place. And we continue to instill that culture in the company, in every person in the team. And so far we've been very successful in delivering that, making this into something really valuable.

Jakob Wredstrøm

They're really interesting, a great answer, and thank you for that. One thing that sort of comes to mind is obviously there's some mixed external forces and contributors, one being if you run out of cash, you need cash, so investors would be critical to it. What has been the general perception when you try to sort of preach this opportunity to investors? Like, what's been the general reaction or what have you met?

Faraan / Saarey Music

Everything. From you don't know what you're doing, this makes absolutely no sense. And this is people who, you know, of course you come across investors that you know, just not, does not fit for us, and I'm excluding those people, but people who are potentially fits to people who say, you know, this is too early for us. All of the above, we've experienced everything. I mean, I've spoken to hundreds and hundreds of investors. We continue and my team continues to reach out to people all the time. I think the reason we've been able to raise funding is again, I mean those three foundational pieces, working hard, smart and true. Investors can tell when you're honest. Investors can tell when you're working hard and they can tell when they're when they see that you find novel solutions to even the smallest of things. And I think that resonates with them and think that's why it works, this works for us. We continue to face a lot of challenges in that fundraising journey. We, you know. I'd say the success rate is less than 1%. But I'll repeat what I say when I go speak to students about fundraising and intra-entrepreneurial journey. We look at these things as funnels. So you have people who have different risk appetites. Some people are willing to take a lot of risk early. Some people who... are willing to invest when it's just an idea. So there are some people willing to invest when you have something built, then when you have some users and when you have some revenue, then there'll be a hundred thousand in revenue, then be a million in revenue, and a 10 million revenue. So for us, these are all different funnels. So you need to build those funnels for every single stage. And then for example, if you have a hundred in one funnel, they will then filter down to one of that person, for example, investing.

Faraan / Saarey Music

So the larger you can build the top of the funnel, the more likely it is that you will actually find somebody at the bottom of the funnel in that stage. And which is one of the reasons that we sent out that monthly update. We have people on there which are, some are not even investors, some are late stage investors. We've had, I would say of the funding that we've raised. I'd say 80%, 80 85 % has come from cold outreach and about 50 % has come because of those regular updates. So people have reached out and said, we love what you're doing, I've been following you for a year. Like you said, I've been following you for two years and I'd love to invest and I have.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm. That's really interesting. And I think that persistence is something people miss a tiny bit when they try to raise capital. Like they think of it as like a one time thing. Um, I think what's, you know, we, Ample's Adventures, we haven't been raising capital for a while, but, uh, the last year I've been sort of in my home office, obviously I got, you know, access to Cod and, you know, and sort of been building things together with my team for a long time and I've just been home. But me and my business partner, we decided, okay, let's go out and meet people again. So we've done international conferences, but we haven't done local. But most of my owners are local. So we went out and we went to an event yesterday and everyone sort of knew me by a name that I didn't know knew me. And it was just like, wait, these sort of relationships have filled over many, many years. Now it's sort of like I've become a part of something. And that's really what it is raising capital. Like those relationships, just you need to tend to them over years and years and years. And there's no such thing as like a one time sprint. Yes, you might get some results, but it's just a continuous investment and top of funnel. Which is what a lot of founders miss in this process. Like, you know, since you've started, I can imagine you've been raising capital from the beginning and till now. And it's, an ongoing process. That you just need to accept and maybe even just sort of say, it's a good part of it as well. Like it's an exciting part of it and just continuously do it. Yeah.

Faraan / Saarey Music

Yeah, echoing what you're saying and to add on to that, probably everybody has heard this, you know, have to invest in lines and not dots. And the way to put that into real practice, put some meat on those bones is a dot is when you meet somebody for the first time. And then when you meet them again, that's a second dot. And then when you join those dots, that's then become aligned and you have multiple dots and you join all of them, that becomes aligned. And what that means in practicality is every interaction. So an interaction can be meeting them in person, an interaction would be sending them an email. And when people see consistent behavior over time, that builds trust. And they know that you are committed to this mission, and then it increases the probability of conversion.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm. Are you surprised about the persona that's joined your investors or did you have some sort of foresight with who you believe would be the ICP?

Faraan / Saarey Music

I'm very surprised. So, sorry.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Try to paint the picture a bit. Who's a part of the ownership?

Faraan / Saarey Music

So when you go out and start raising capital for the first time, the typical advice that one gets is that you reach out to people who understand your business, who understand your market, who have a similar cultural background. So if you're working in music, that naturally means go to South Asians who are in music already or who are patrons of music already, and they will understand what you're doing and they will have people who will invest. And so naturally that's what we started to do in the beginning. We didn't get much success from there. And so what turns out is that you, and this is contrarian, is that you need to widen your top of funnel. So do not be restricted by specific ICPs on who you go and speak to, you will be very pleasantly surprised as to who this might resonate with and who would be a good fit for you because again, I'm sure everybody's heard this, it is a long-term relationship so you want to only get into a long-term relationship with people who you really like and respect and value. So widen that top of funnel, widen that net. Be open to speaking to people because I would say truly relevant to what we're doing out of the 15 investors, maybe three. The rest are all come from all different backgrounds. There's one person in FinTech, this one person who's a professor of entrepreneurship, some relation, I guess that's still related. Then there are people who are in AI. No relationship to music. Then there are people who are in financial markets, no relationship to music. And you know, I can go through the list of all of these people who are seemingly, you know, don't fit that ICP for somebody who would invest in a music tech business focused on South Asian classical music. And so,

Faraan / Saarey Music

We started with an ICP, but then we had to make it work. And there was no choice for us but to then start talking to everybody. And that's when we realized that one shouldn't restrict oneself to this. You can think of it as, know, when they say, you know, spray and pray. I would say there's an element of spray and pray in this.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Faraan / Saarey Music

Because we are reaching out to a lot of people, but we do focus on investors. We just don't focus on investors who are in a particular, have a particular thesis. We said, if you're an investor, we'd love to.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm. No, I agree to that sentiment and I strongly disagree in most advice about finding deep domain, expertise investors. Have a lot of podcasts covering this in depth so people can go listen to those investor episodes, but I believe it to be very true. Even in our ownership group, we've sort of slowly gone away from music just because we have much more success in other industries. We still of course work a lot in music, but of all of our owners, We have one for music and we've been preaching music as the investment, you know, tech pieces. So they're true. We sort of closing in on the episode at the end, I have a few more questions I want to ask. And I can imagine, you know, a person like yourself with your academic credentials and your career, which is, we haven't talked much about, but you know, I can see from LinkedIn has been. Quite good as well. There's a lot of personal financial sacrifice you're doing here. Like you're forfeiting what could be safety, what could be a good life. How do you navigate what you've said no to in the pursuit of some crazy idea?

Faraan / Saarey Music

Great question. It has to come back to what do you want to achieve in life for us, for me. And I'm sure everybody's heard all of the people, the Jeff Bezos of the world say, you know, what is it when you're 90 and you look back at your life, what are the things that you will least regret? And so I put a slightly more positive spin on that and say, what is it that I want to leave behind as my legacy for my family and my society? What is it that I can do that will make my parents and my grandparents and my forefathers proud of the work that I'm doing? And so this has naturally become

Faraan / Saarey Music

The confluence of all of that, this is something that my family has been doing for decades. This is something that my culture is in a very important part of my culture, has been a very important part of my life. And this is a place where I feel that I can make a difference for not just myself and my family, but also the society at large. We didn't get into this and I know this closing but I want to kind of share this story about one of Ustad Ashif Sharif Khan, Ustad Shabazz Hussain. One of the best sitar players in the world, one of the best tabla players in the world respectively, sitting me down in Lahore and saying to me that it is now your responsibility to do this because if you don't it'll die. And they were specifically talking about the work that my family has been doing in the past. And so that was one of the catalysts that led me to do the work that I chose to do. And so when you have that as a background of this being incredibly important and meaningful, then the financial aspect of it becomes less important. It's absolutely important, it's absolutely there. I want to make a lot of money and I want to make a lot of money for my investors, which is why I'm doing this. I just take a more long term view of being something really meaningful and even if I'm sacrificing

Faraan / Saarey Music

A lot now. Over the long term, I see potential for far more returns than I would have if I were doing the straight nine to five job. I think, I believe. And that's why I'm doing this. I do also want to touch on that word that you used of a secure job.

Faraan / Saarey Music

I believe in this world that there's no such thing as a secure job. That's just a framing around a potential pathway that gives you the illusion of security. So, you know, we all know that you can just be kicked out of a job at any point in time. We all know that you can be in a job for years and not have any appreciation in your pay. Even while there's inflation going on, actually what's happening is that you're earning less and less every single month or year or however you want time frame you want to measure it in. So I don't think there's actually any real security in even a standard job. But maybe that's just the way I look at it. I think the only security in the world is where you're doing something that delivers real value to the world. And then people will reward you for adding that value and building something that is meaningful.

Jakob Wredstrøm

This has been such an interesting conversation and I believe it's very, very academically interesting as well to hear how you can do a streaming service in a different way, serving a different audience and also have this sort of social and cultural impact side to it. I hope that this will succeed and I hope that investors will keep on backing you. I think this really deserves to become something great. So thank you so much for being on the podcast. Thank you for sharing your story. And even though we've only had a small hour, I'm very, informed and inspired about your way of doing it, which, you know, to be honest, first time I met you was very, very skeptical to what you were saying. But, I've been, that's how I am anyways, but you've definitely convinced me of being on a very good path now. So thank you for taking your time.

Faraan / Saarey Music

Now remember.

Faraan / Saarey Music

Jacob, pleasure was all mine. Thank you for having me.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Okay, thanks. Great, I'm just.