From Creaminal.io to Bridge Audio: The Switzerland Of Music Assets

All of them were spending millions into internal tools that none of their employees are liking because it's slow, it's not working that well, but not only it's so, but it's nonsense. It's we need somewhere where you can store your music because that's not what Spotify does. Our industry is in the need of a what I call Switzerland of digital music

asset where everyone would work together on the same to because we are sharing music all day long and we are almost music is owned by only one person. The journey that Clong and Rich AIO has been on is quite interesting. It's about a journey of specializing in a certain ntion, building products internally and then building them out, offering them to

the market. So it's really just an extension of we've done before and I love that journey. You'll hear about it in this episode. Hey guys and welcome back to the Sound Connections podcast. Today we have the founder and CEO of Bridge Audio, Clemont. Welcome, Julia, C for the invitation. This is going to be fun. Uh, because I'm speaking with a guy who's

been entrepreneur for many years, uh, and this is not your first company, but it's a really interesting company that's really getting a lot of attraction. So it's going to be a really interesting found episode today. So we've already had like a chitchat here before the podcast and I can really sense there's going to be some really good deep conversations about entrepreneurship, uh, and sort of your journey as well. But for the people who don't know who you are, well

who are you and what do you do? My name is Clon. I'm French as my accent can say, h, even my wife thinks that I have a German accent, but and I've been working within the music industry for 20 plus years now. I started as a drummer, then a composer, then a u

sing broker, publisher, then uh, supervisor, and now I am in m music in tech. And so I was the founder of Criminal Music Supervision. That's what I did for the most the biggest part of my professional life so far. So I mostly worked within the music for picture field, uh, sync music supervision, running this company

that is a 15 people company, uh, based in Paris and New York, and uh, yeah, basically music and tech and music for picture are more or less the big part of my professional life. Interesting. And tell me a bit about Bridge Audio because it's a really interesting company and you guys have come quite far. Um, but why did you start

Bridge Audio? Was it sort of a spring off of what you already doing in your previous company and then you said okay we must build a tech platform? You must have read something if you say that. Yeah, indeed it's a kind of spinoff and basically when we were acting as music supervisor at Criminal and when I started hiring some people I was really not confortable with the what

we call technical stack, uh, of hours within the music industry that was in fact no stack at all, a mix of we transfer, Dropbox, Google Drive, SoundCloud in private link. And so we were more or less all, uh, downloading, uploading, renaming files all day long. That is not best part of the work I would say and not what, uh, led me to do music

Superion. So, uh, in 200 11 I think we started to build an internal tool at Criminal named Criminal. Just to help us with how to receive, organize and share music and, um, but also describe music because, uh, not only I was not

comfortable with the lack of tool to organize our workflow, but also I was not that comfortable with the lack of tool to describe the music and be able to find the perfect track for the project we were working on. So the tool was thought as something where we could upload music, receive and share, but also describe music very precisely. Uh, we made our own theor of

music description, uh, because we looked at what was done so far, especially in the production music because they were no doubt, uh, very aware of the valious way to describe music, but we in a way sued to make it even better, uh, in the way we were describing music because we noticed that all these people

were always using many different words to describe the music like I don't know, Moody, uh, sad and, uh, and, uh, dramatic, uh, and so when we started to this before building our own solution to the describe music, we understood that very often they wanted to be in music production, they wanted to

be very precise. So that's why they had such a flourish vocabulary to describe music, but in fact very often what was missing was just, um, the possibility to give a note of on every, uh, aspect of the music. So instead of saying moody or sad, we just took the decision to say okay at

Criminal we will only have side but with a note from zero to one or from zero to 100 just to be able to say okay it's a little bit Moody, uh, sad or it's very sad or it's middle side, uh, sad. And so we did that for everything and by the way we had a we made a pattern of this way of describing assets and starting

from that we are the very, uh, powerful way of, uh, describing and so searching music which go up was key in the way to become a bigger music supervision. I don't say we became huge because there are no huge music supervision company, but that's why we were 15 and no just a onean show with

one or two Inn working together. And starting from that, uh, to answer your question because you had a question, uh, we hired more and more traction by the end of the 2010, uh, around 2018, um, from friends working as publishers, labels asting us if we wanted

to turn this internal tool into a tool for the for the music industry and, uh, but also in the same time and because describing music manually was a huge, uh, um, I was asking us a lot of time, it was more less five to 10 minutes per track. So when we

decide to work together with a catalog of 1,000 I let you make the math, it's huge the time you need to spend to start being good in the way you are pitching a catalog. And so from the beginning I always had a look, uh, at, um, how AI was growing in with the idea of saying maybe, but it was really a maybe with a big

question mark, one day AI would be good enough to make this music description, uh, automatically. And in 2018, uh, we had a French company, uh, named nand nyand, maybe if I say it in with a English accent, that really made the difference and they made something that was for the first time good enough

to say okay maybe this is the right moment and maybe even it will be possible to describe music automatically because once again in 2015 it was not I an option. And so has we had already the idea of organizing files but we also had a massive data set of music not made to

train, just to be good music supervisor, we were in the perfect situation to start thinking about something wider, something biger that not help only, uh, the music supervision companies because we are just a few thousands, uh, worldwide, but maybe the whole music industry. And, uh, so I made the decision of making

interviews of all the personas from the bedroom producer to the guy working in a radio or in a major of the industry and we realize at this time that there was room for something that we help everyone, not something dedicated to anr or promo only or Sy only, but something really wide to

help us in our in our worklow and with the discoverability. And that's where the idea of building Bridge came. So I launched a company in 2021 and before that I sold Primal to the amazing team of Alter K in early 2021. So in the same year I sold my company of Music Superion to become totally free and

focused on this new Endeavor and I started, uh, the new company by the end of the same year, uh, yeah, by Rising the first round of, uh, of Finance, uh, yeah, in September 2021. Amazing. And there must be a lot of things leading out to that and we'll sort of take the journey from the start. What's really interesting if you see your, uh, name on LinkedIn even on

this call, guess can't see that there's a drum in between Clont and your and your last name, uh, so I guess there must have been an identity there, but I'm joking. Walk me through it. How did how did you become an entrepreneur? Because you know Rich Audio third company, what was your first, but what came before that

as well? Uh, so right before that I was a student, uh, and I was studying a business with, uh, a real lack of interest, uh, to be honest. I was not very happy with that and I was doing also music studies with a much more interest, but at the end of my, uh, and I was studying inde drums and Jazz and

composition and at the end of my, uh, University I had the opportunity to make an entrepreneurship, uh, year where we decided with a friend of mine to launch a publishing company. So we worked on it for during the whole year and so it was the way to make combine my, uh, passion for music with the fact that I

learned business and we finished this, uh, we finished this a year of studies in June and we launch the company in July. So since then I am entrepreneur with successes but with fails as well. So but I know nothing else that than being an entrepreneur. I've been, yeah, I've been

intern one time at Universal yeah okay it's interesting because uh I have sort of the same Journey uh I've never had a normal job uh since I was well yeah since ever uh and that's its own thing so I think we'll also spend some time talking about that because being an entrepreneur is uh a par particular lifestyle uh it

it, um, it can be really hard to describe it, but with sad emoji, um, but maybe I think we should we should we should talk a bit about this because now we have two entrepreneurs, uh, one successful from France and one Wannabe from Norway who can talk about how it is to be a entrepreneur. Um, so you started this first company, I guess was that a dance

of roses or like what was the struggle and why did he even stay in it? Because I can imagine it hasn't been easy. Yeah, good question. Um, so the first company was named Madame Jen, a very French name. It was supposed to do mostly, uh, production, label, publishing, but we had no idea about what we were already building and, uh, quite

quickly I met the only guy I knew from the industry that was a friend of my cousin that was a pretty, uh, successful, um, label, uh, manager that he had his own company, the guy that was behind, uh, Goan project, maybe you know that project from France be successful and but he was not

that successful at this same because it was not lunch, but he was already making a lot of music for advertising. And so I thought that it was a very interesting way to make money quite quickly to finance the production of ours because it's good to have the idea of making a label but you need some fuel to do things and as money is

not, uh, reigning, uh, from nowhere, we had to find a way to get some money. So advertising quite quickly became a source of Finance. I was composing music for advertising and feature films and also I was making I was working together with the artists who were representing to start doing a few things like this, but our focus was not that. We were

focusing on building a label, but then we realize that the world of production M of the labels as we knew it in the end of the 90s early 2000 was promised to a huge change, uh, it was named at this time digitalization, MP3s, not streaming,

it was streaming before that. And so the few project we had and we presented to La major labels, they were interested but we didn't succeed to sell it. I thought it was just because of this, because of this shift in the way, uh, music the music industry was changing because I read it about this digital

digitalization. In fact I think I was not aware about how foro was important in the music industry and we should have said to Sony that Universal was interested in signing our project, but I was too honest at this time. And so seeing that the music industry was promised to a huge change I was say with my partner who said but why are we

even starting to learn something that is going to change so much? And so we took the decision to keep on making music for advertising as source of Revenue and we launch another company in 2000 in the 2000 named Sound Dead that was, uh, what we called at this time a smart radio. It was a radio where you could

decide what music do you want to listen, what style, what mood you are in, so and so it was launching, um, uh, a radio dedicated to what you wanted and so it was pretty Innovative at this time. But there's a pretty big step from that Revelation he had to just start a new company. Like why was just because okay

If you want to be an entrepreneur we need did you something that make sense or that was the thought process there it was more a question of we were feeling that we were maybe not at the right place at the right moment by building a label where at the exact time where CDs were just uh not working anymore and at the same time we were

all uh having a lot of stories about this internet thing and to be honest I was not a geek at all as a uh teenage so I was curious about what was this internet thing and so we I just called some friends that were more aware of that and so we started a new this new company sanate with people that were

coming from the finance field the tech field and so we were five uh partners uh in this uh company and quite complimentary uh and uh and so we launched this solution and we were learning by building it to be honest it was all new at this time we were ripping CS uh we

were digitalizing vinyls of music that was never digitalized before from everywhere in the world so it was pretty fun we were more or less all in our 20s uh nobody made a penny from that we were just doing stuff and having fun and so but because there is a bad but it was

in fact the really bad timing because we just finalized our uh business plan quite exactly the day where uh the first uh explosion of um the this bubble uh came uh and uh and in fact it was it was

pretty complex because we never Su to rise money so we just made it uh in a bootstop way but like I said nobody was paid so we are just uh a band of friends making interviews uh digitalizing music because we also had um interviews and re and

um and uh yeah we were also writing a lot of things on this uh website and so uh um and so that's it but the thing is that we finally tried to make some money but we were not making a lot of money none of our friends were even listening to music on their computer so it was really too early stage so like I

quickly told you about that before starting this interview entrepreneurship in my opinion is mostly about uh the time to market and as an entrepreneur it's pretty easy to think that you might too late on a market I mean it's something that you can understand I was I was not smart enough to start it earlier

but it's very really less intuitive to understand that to might be too early and so this the end of this company was that I finally refused an offer from a French uh radio that proposed a pretty decent price uh finally uh to buy the company but I say no with my

teammates because uh we didn't want to want to work for this compan this company name sty and we and yeah and but in fact it was five years we stopped six years before Spotify started just to give you a number that was the journey R uh it's really interesting I have a question and let's just talk about the um the concept of time to

market because you can understand the traditional way or you can take a new ticket that I'm also just going to bring to the table is the time it takes to get to market that like there's two elements to it because one of the things while you talked I had a few throwbacks to my own career I have been um I'm more focused now but I've always been like very hyperactive and you know help start stuff and

starting stuff was what gave me pleasure a sustaining stuff was more of a struggle I'm better at that now but I have been for example in publishing and started an and ran a publishing company to also as a label and you know I have hands-on experience but also just through studying what's out there and talk to founders sounds like a pretty terrible idea to start a label or a publishing company because the time it takes to get

to market the time it takes to build it up to create anything sustainable is just so immense and difficult what's your take on the music industry when it comes to that like time to get to market good question good question and this is a question that I yeah I have even for my new company because it takes a lot of

time to build a tech solution especially big one I often say that in the tech field you have the one feature product ven mode to name a US based solution that one but two hours so very complex and complete solution where uh you

really need to have a lot of things to really be able to get on the market that's what we call in the music tech in the tech F the product market fit and U and as an example uh noan has a pretty complex J because

they almost dies died so many times before finally being the very successful tech you know and um and so that's a complex question indeed because if you uh if you take too long to come on the market you might die even before starting so that's not an

option but no I have no real SP for that you need to you need to be aile to be uh to start having something to present um whatever you do if you are a tech company or label you need to start

being able to do things with uh small cost because not all of us are able to be fed for instance uh criminal that was my biggest success so far was totally boot so I was alone I started it in my room and then we were two and three and up to 15 was a very nice office but it was

easy to launch because what I what it requested to launch this company was just a phone to play people and saying that I had some very interesting artists and Legos I was working with but uh when it's more costly to start a company yeah you need to find some finance because that's the idea

of the original idea of PC St finance before making real money of it and some project needs that it's really interesting and I hope you allow me together with you to dive into it I'll just give it analogy so I'm really good at the music industry uh I would say myself you know it's been my obsession for 10 plus

years and I pretty much know what I'm doing in this space so for example we also have consultancy Army at amplitude where we where we work with a lot of small some larger companies when it comes to consulting instr aspects and around uh I've been working a lot with AI and we do a lot of AI stuff more than just the traditional I work with AI like we do some pretty exploratory stuff where we have some pretty interesting

projects but I started programming for example to two months ago uh just as an example uh with I've programmed it before when I was young I also did one year as electrical engineering so like I know the general context of programming um I started programming two months ago and now our consultantcy right now is earning more money programming products

than for a music tech consulting in two months work and for me that's just I learn really fast and of course my brain is wired that way I'm I have a degree as a to me audio engineer so like it's not the same but like there's mentality structures that is the same and for me that redru like I think this morning just like sending bills for a project we did it's just like this took me two months of work to

order to charge that and they're happy with the delivery and it took me 10 years to do the other thing and I charged less and it's hard to get clients I just like I'm going to stay in music industry that's what I'm going to do but like that frustration is also so evident like the same we had this talk about you know this morning I've been building music and music tech companies for many years I did for fun with a couple of co-founders build just normal tech company and off the bat

six weeks already started we had three major clients we like we were about we were about to raise money but we didn't need to anymore because we have paying clients and that is just incredibly frustrating as a music tech founder seeing that difference all over and I can imagine with you building a tech product in the music space where capital is generally speaking hardest to get and the amount of

customers it doesn't exist at the same scale as other you know consumer product or other the industries where there's more like free capital to actually invest in SAS products what's your take on this do you have an internal conflict on it I definitely have but again yeah that's a very good question um I have many ideas coming when do you say that but when I was building

criminal. so the tool that inspired me to build buo I more or less spent 1,000k every year in this tomb so for music the music business it's quite a big uh amount of money and for me it was no doubt the

best investment I made at the moment uh sorry for my all my employees but I love them much more than the t part of it but the takech part is something that is very uh that helped you to structure your business as well and so I need never regret uh to have spend uh 1,000k every year so I more L spent 1

million in criminal. and uh and I was very happy because it made us more productive so we won a lot of money on that now that I am uh selling a SAS solution so Bridge is a solution where you need to pay a monthly fee of course we are not asking for from

our clients 1,000k a year whereas what British does is even much powerful than what criminal iio was doing but and I don't want to make enemies by saying that but we are not in a very uh geek industry the music

industry has pretty special relation with st I would say because have te we've been producing music with Ste for years now and we are pretty geeky when we are talking about how to produce music but in the music business not the production music part it's St AG um and it's

pretty surprising because yeah you are bringing something that is just that has a massive amount of value for the people you are talking to and even with that sometimes it takes more energy that I was expecting to convert everyone today we have more or less 40,000 use users at

brid since the launch in May 2022 it's a lot of people and uh but sometime especially for the big ones is you it's I guess you have seen uh the playlist uh the TV series on SP and it didn't change that much when you are talking to big players

it takes a lot of times they are pretty uh complex to convince and um and yeah that's very surprising because what we bring for instance to that kind of industry let's say let's take Universal as an example Universal they have as you know million of trucks okay

what we bring with bridge is not only to ease the way to receive organize and share music but also to amplify their discoverability it means as soon as you are uploading your music on your Bridge audio workspace everything will be described but really well described I mean gen subj mood and so on it means

that for instance I will take the example of the Sy department of these uh companies they will be able to BR within their own catalog like never before today in France F the guy that is behind uh that is working at the S department for years that is a guy I love Char

Chari uh he will go he will retire in a few months the guy has been describing on his own iTunes music over years so the day shallowing will quit this company that is a quoted company the asset is not owned by Universal it's own the asset of the

knowledge of the catalog is owned by an employee not by the company it's totally crazy so what we bring the value we bring to the to the industry is huge but like you said before that was your question it's not always that easy to have some people that's really unome that in this specific field of music whereas in other fields we would

be played like a massive amount of music to help them with that kind of subject so yeah it's and I still don't really understand why we maybe we have a relation where all the internet all the beginning of the internet was built was on the promise to say okay you will not have to pay CDs anymore come and use ADSL and don't pay music put your

music on onsl so maybe we have a kind of trauma here I don't know but it's pretty special one of my new theories I work a lot I work in a sort of researching music tech financing that's one of the things I really love and really interesting about that space is as far as I can see there's pretty much no academics on it and yeah and I

Understand why it's a small niche market and so I'm trying to do a lot of exploration and one of the things I hear a lot from investors in general and talking with founders where investors say is that music is a small market and I believe that is a not so nuance common for many different reasons when it comes to sort of the potential of multiples in investment company but there's also another element to it that I think

You're touching upon which I think is quite interesting and that is with a smaller market um you know music in comparison just to the other creative industries is relatively small there's also about the amount of potential clients and customers for example so let's say if you would take a market that might be 10x bigger uh and you would have many different types of companies some are skeptical some are

Early adopters but here if you have let's say a small selection of potential customers and just a subset of them are really skeptical that's going to represent a big part of the market if that makes sense and your opportunities of going to the client that are not skeptical is are there but there's just less of them like actual

Number quantity so it can be harder to find those early adopters that leads the way and pushes the innovation forward just because the actual quantity of number of potential customers or smaller that's at least a working theory I have which I think is quite interesting which is sort of the flip side of the small of the small market it the reason why I'm saying that is just love to get your opinion on it do you think that plays into it that

Because there's of course there's of thousands of potential clients but in other industries there might have been hundreds of thousands of clients potential clients is that a thing that you think and feel totally that maybe the question that uh can uh keep me uh a wait for years but because that's a

Pretty complex one um but when like I said when I started being conscious that there was rooms for building a new business from what I've been building with but also in around 2018 at this precise time uh I had in a way two options I could just turn my

Tool uh and put my tool as it was on the market uh and I would have made this pretty quickly or and I can this second solution I had I want I could just think about the idea of is there a wider a bigger

Vision and so like I said earlier we made interviews because if we were turning trial.io on uh the market then you we would compete at this time with uh s tank and disco okay that are great tools but the snc field is very tiny like you say if you are um considering

The music market indeed many investors consider that it's a very small market I had this conversation at wnia in Belgium with this guy saying that in fact the market of music is smaller than uh the incomes of uh Starbucks coffee for one year so just show the scale of it and indeed when you are pitching as a music

Tech entre you are not that much aware about what other field you are competing with and so at this precise time I made the decision like I said to make interviews to see okay I tackled pain of in the life of a music supervisor

Nice but is this pain uh close to the pain of other persona of the music industry and that's where these interviews were very insightful because we understood that yeah whatever you do within the music industry you will share music whether you are the creator of the music whether you are the manager the

Publish the label maybe just at the extreme end of the ecosystem you have people that are just recipient yeah medas uh um TV producers uh advert ing agencies but in the in between everyone is more or less receiving sharing storing and so on and once again we don't have any solution for that so when

I understood that I understood that there was room for a big company I mean a company that would not just convince 1,000 music supervisor but millions of creators but that said and that the risk behind all that kind of ideas um you need to find the path the way to go to

Your big market uh and you can't just decide that okay this is a product that is been made for everyone so everyone is coming so you need to in other uh terms you it's not because you have a product that will help the whole music industry that you that it will work like this you need to segmen tiz uh

And find the right segments that are fitting perfect well with your product as it is at the moment to make them your early adopters and then from that uh spread the world the world to other personals and that's something that we were not that aware at the early

Time of bridge where we were always saying uh bridg is for everyone working with music and audio come but if it's for everyone is it really for me that's the question so and now we are really focusing on labels publishers that are our main users uh at the moment and every user that is coming at Bridge they

Are bringing with them all the ecosystem so today we are onboarding many people some of them are onboarded thanks to say efforts because uh you need to convince uh labels to use and help them with their own body but many of them are self un boded like

Uh it's a plg like we say and so uh today yeah we have more or less 3,000 new users uh amounts without any effort from us and uh but the there we are taking them to the product making a product to and uh and yeah making them switch from Dropbox or whatever they were using before

Oh so that's uh I don't know if I answer well your question I even don't remember question well it was talking about it was talking about sort of market size from the flip side of the amount of customers available yeah another thing I talk a good deal about which I have clear opinions on is when it comes to building B2B tools and sort of the two

Directions you can take um there's like two viable directions one is much harder than the other uh you're doing the hard one in my opinion which can also be very good but there's the there's the um ecosystem mindset which I would describe Rich audio is as like it's a ecosystem of tools and approaches that's going to give a holistic approach to how you can work with your music and then there's um how to describe it the best pieces of

An ecosystem so that for example be you know in your case it could be um the company you met uh from France AI attacking right that's a piece of an ecosystem and what I generally uh recommend to founders I speak with is not choose the ecosystem path not because it's not a great thing like you do it's just so incredibly difficult to get it financed um because

Whenever you build an ecosystem it requires money it requires a lot of time requires a lot of effort and a lot of customers but the more uh generally speaking on a statistical level the product feature in the in system is of less potential yes but it's also more viable when it comes to actually having a statistical chance of success so I also really respect the people going the

Ecosystem route because that is a journey I myself would not be able to take just because the let's just take you know um SoundCloud you know it's ecosy right 16 years to become profitable like that is the that is the usual journey story of these ecosystem products when you went out to Bri

Audio and you saw I have this tool and now it's even better than what you had did you understand what journey you went on out on like was has this been something you've understood later uh no I understood it by reading it to be honest like yeah pretty often in my journey of entrepreneur I'm not an entrepreneur that is uh thinking like 10 years before launching something

I even don't know if there are any entrepreneurs that are in that shape but uh but yeah I totally agree with you I would say that we are uh in an in between the two models you are talking about uh we are we don't consider uh Bridge as a as

Um what was the word you say the ecosyst an ecosystem uh or at least a close ecosystem um but it's indeed an ecosystem uh but we also have uh we are also building API to make Bridge very easy to use with other features so for in but we

Are still at the early stage of this API part of our strategy so for instance uh I don't think that one day we might have for instance uh the ability to make uh or a newsletter within Bridge because I really prefer having an API that will

Help you to plug your uh Mach on it we will not do anything on bridge that might make our market smaller uh because if you try to answer a question that is just dedicated to one of the person now we want to help with bridge then we miss we lose all

The other if we want to make Bridge something that you will use whatever you do then we need to make our user be able to plug at the end of the day we are not at the moment doing it but it we come in 2025 2026 we will have a lot of ability with API so you can plug for

Instance a bridge with a zapier and have a bridge working together with Med G like I said or to release your music on your uh distribution company we will never for instance do digital distribution I don't that's not what we do we are just a solution to organize uh store share in a one to one relation but

Also many to many relation so the idea is just to be entral point because we need our industry is in the need of a what I call Switzerland of digital music digital asset where everyone would work together on the same tool because we are sharing music all day long and we are almost no music is owned by only one

Person very often you have co-publishers and so on so that's also why I explained to the major of the industry they can't build their own solution they used to do this they were all of them were spending millions into internal tools that none of their employees are liing because it's slow it's not working that well but not only it's slow but

It's nonsense it's we need somewhere where you can store your music because uh that's not what uh spoify does spoify does it at the end when it's finalized but when you are working within the music industry you are also storing your stems your uh your instrumentals your demos and so on so

That's the idea so I would say we are an ecosystem but we will never integrate uh um features that would make us amazing just for labels we really prefer that labels are using what we are doing well and if they need to connect our solution with a royalty uh solution then we will have API for that if they want to

Plug Google sheet or whatever they will be able to make it that's amazing yeah I think that's such a great nuance to my argument um because basically what you're doing is even though you are an ecosystem you also thinking about the larger ecosystem and for the larger EOS ecosystem you are a piece of the puzzle and I think that also comes to sort of

Diversification risk and so make sure that your market share can also be affected by others market shares to some degree so I think that's really wise um I had a question which mount might seem evident but it's quite serious U and that is when you when you talk about um being useful for as many as possible there might be several

Motivations behind that statement I can assume one is financial uh another one might be personal impact wise but where do you where do you measure them up against each other like the need for financial uh to be affected by as many users as possible versus is having a tool that impacts positively on people's

Uh workday like where does your motivations lie in between those two in fact uh the motivation is more I would say ecosystemic than financial at the beginning the idea is that as let's go back on streaming uh as a music supervisor or whatever you do within the music industry like I said earlier you

Are connected not only with other pro like publishers supervisors or whatever but also with creators arst and so on so we are all in the same boat so if we would do something that be just dedicated to the B2B and players that

Can uh afford to pay uh 20 to 1,000 bucks a month for an amazing tool then we would not have the artists the bedroom producers and all this ecosystem of uh music people whereas they are the beginning of all these stories they are the starting point and so it's not the

Question of having them to make money from them, uh, it's having them because they are the starting point of the industry, and so that's why we have a free version on Bridge. It's because other tools that aim to be to be really big, they always have a fation sound card as a three version. We

transfer as a three version. So we have to compete with that. It's not because we are more well made for big players that you we need to close the door to smaller players, and um, and that's really very important in our vision, and once again, it's both ecosystem point than at the end of the

day, if we succeed to do what all what we do, the fact that it might make us a billion dollar company, because it's not the thousand of professional worldwide that make uh finan VC things that you are building something huge, it's because you are able also to get the Creator economies. That's the only way, like you said earlier, the

music business is small, that's true. So if you are just taking a small part of a small business, then nobody might be interested in the VC world. Now if you are able to make something that is uh that might be of interest not only for big players but also for the Creator economy, then you can do something really huge, and

that's what we that's what we are building. That's really the idea. I don't say that we are already here because it's long journey, and like you said, it's uh especially with that kind of ambitious project, you need to be good at all the stage of the journey, but yeah, that's what we do, and uh, but

I like the idea of doing it for ecosystemic reasons more than for a financial reason, because it's not an option not to have them, because if we if we don't have the cre all the professional, we keep on receiving uh expired with transfer links, and we don't like

it so here at the end of the episode I have a question about the future because um you guys have had money invested in the company you can sort of look that up in crunch base but you also just briefly mentioned that you know there's a hypothetical potential that if you hit the right market and expand out there they could be a big company so what is the exit goal like what expectations

do you have in your investor backing plus your own, like what are you guys aiming for? Good question again, yob, and so may I go back just to explain our finance strategy? So sure, we already made two Financial rounds, that's what you were mentioning by talking about c b. The first one was

was in 2021. The idea was just to gather um some business angels, mostly because it was early stage, and even I made a very nice exit with criminal, it's not the kind of exit uh that would be good enough to rise money from uh V. So we made uh this 1 million uh round with

uh business angels that helped us to release the V one like six seven months after. So in May 2022 we released uh the AI on Bridge in uh July 2023, which allowed us to launch our Marketplace, because we have an internal Marketplace, that's a very important

point of the tool. Not only we help you to receive store and share music, but also we will help you to amplify your discoverability with our AI of Music description, uh so the idea is to help all the whole music industry to be able to have more think opportunities, but also other stuff. We might make another

episode on that, and so we launched this Marketplace in January this year, in 2024. We made a second round of Finance with V's in March this year, it was a finance round of 2.25 plus 1 million in something else, uh and the idea for the future, uh to finally answer your

question, is that next uh next year we will do a fi third Finance run, and this one is uh will pretty surely be a mix of um Rising money directly from the industry, and this is why, because uh as

we are building uh a solution uh that or is a standard for the industry, our idea is also to say okay, why wouldn't we uh rise money from the industry players, Majors, independent and so on, but many of them, not just one. We would have just one uh industrial uh

corporate company interested in make spending money in Bridge, then we would not do it, but the idea is to do more or less but for other reasons what uh spoify made by opening the equity to Majors, but we will not make it make it for free, that's will be the main difference. Yeah, and the idea is to say

okay, you spent more or less 10 years from 208 to 2018 to spend to spend a lot of money within internal tools that were not working. Now almost all of the major, for instance, are using a mix of uh Dropbox, Google Drive, We transfer, uh

disco, uh Sy tank, uh promo jukebox, f b, but that's not their solution. And so the idea would be to say okay, you made something internal, it wasn't working, now you are in the process of having many different solutions that are pretty decent each of them, but you are you don't have it everyone on the same page. Let's finally have a solution that is

matching the most of your needs. Yeah, and you can also take a part of the equity, that's the idea of this uh next um uh fundraising, and to me that's a very important thing, because uh yeah, let's make this tool that is helping everyone uh owned

partially by uh the industry itself, and um that's a vision for the future, and uh yeah, I think that's just an important thing. And I had to talk with Jen Miller from audio um audio socket here recently, uh what we talked about sort of the concepts about the industry taking internal ownership of streamlining processes of using specific technology,

because the flip side of being in a small industry and also being relatively disorganized and agreeing of how to do stuff is that it's just not very profitable. The margins get smaller, uh the work and effort going into doing actual deliveries are more, and I think I think that's brilliant point that one of the ways of making the music industry

attractive both for external players and internal players is agreeing on stuff, streamlining stuff, making sure that what is out there is something we as an industry has decided on to make better together, because it's not B big enough to not having that sorted out in my opinion. Well great, um I look so much

forward to sort of following your journey on the sideline with Bridge audio, uh clont, it's Rel to having you here and talk about your journey, um and I really hope the next financing round will go through, because again, you have this bigger purpose around it. Yeah, of course it's raising money for a company, but it's also the commentary on like we should have something that just removes all those barriers we have set

for ourselves, and that's stre. Yeah, and what we have for us for this next Farm is that the execution is very good. I mean, the tool is very easy to use, that was something very important for me from the beginning, to have something that is very Lan, because if not, we would just lose the creators. And the other thing is that the

AI that we've been building is really even more uh powerful than what I was expected when I started to put my finger into this huge New Journey, and uh and to be honest, I yeah I'm really proud of it, because that's what makes the product really interesting, because you can brow everywhere on

Bridge in the received content, you can say did I received a track that would be Cloud R Sound by a female need in Spanish talking about San, and will find it, whereas today when you are receiving stuff, it just TR m a track, and that's the same for your own catalog. That's what I was saying with this

example of Universal, so an intern can make an amazing search within million of tracks, whereas the she or is just here for two days. And last but very important, it's also that you can make your music accessible by other people, and so as a music supervisor or at agency, I can BR on the sync h of Bridge and find a track

and finalize a syn opportunity with the right holder. So that's really the idea of making all this mer more in ra name. Love it, um I love that you building the bridge. Thank you so much, come on. My pleasure, thank you for inviting me. All good, we'll talk soon