Ciarán O'Toole & Michael Coll; The Story Behind Songbox; A MusicTech Startup

Jakob

Hey guys and welcome back to the Sound Connections Podcast. Today we have Song Park, Sunbox in the studio, Kiran and Mek. Welcome to the studio.

Ciaran

Thank you.

Michael

Thanks for having us, Jacob.

Jakob

Kiran, we had a great conversation three weeks ago and I saw your product and heard about your story and I was like, we gotta get that on a podcast because it's a very interesting journey that is maybe a bit atypical for music tech. So thank you for being on. For the people who don't know who you are and what your product is, who are you and what do you do?

Ciaran

We are Songbox. It's really the brilliant idea of Mick, my co-founder and long-term friend for nearly 20 years. And Songbox at its core is a platform and service to share music privately. And I think when we talk about our journey together and where that idea for Mick came from, a lot of things will start to make sense during the course of the podcast.

Jakob

Hmm.

Michael

My name's Mick, I founded Songbox along with Kieran. A long time ago in another life I was a professional musician myself and that's where the idea and the concept originated from and we can go into that in more detail later should you wish Jacob.

Jakob

Yeah, so tell me about it. What is it like?

Michael

Okay, so I'll go back to the origin then I suppose it makes the most sense. So in the late 2000s, early 2010s, I was in a band doing relatively well. And one of the things that you have to do when you're in a band is promote yourself. So I was sending away CDs, because it was CDs back then, sending away CDs in the posts, occasionally emailing out MP3s. And the problem that I found very frustrating was that when you dispatched your music, you had no idea if the person received it or if they listened to it or whatever. And I always thought in my head, there's got to be a better way to do that. A few years later, when the band was a little bit more successful, I was on tour with a very prominent American rock musician. And he was at the time recording a demo to send in to American Idol to be a contender to be used as one of the songs on American Idol and I asked him about two months after he sent it away, did you hear anything back from American Idol? And he kind of shrunk his shoulders and says, I don't know, you never hear back from them, I don't even know if they got it. And it was like a lightning rod moment in my head where I'm thinking, well if I am this kind of mid-level slash nobody and I've got this problem and this guy's... sold 50 million records and won a Grammy award and he has the same problem, then this is clearly a universal problem for the industry. Once my journey ended catastrophically, I went off and got a normal job, just a normal 95 job, but the idea stuck in my head. And one weekend I had the house to myself, my wife and my family went away to visit her family. And I was left in the house myself and I just thought I would knock out a little prototype and I knocked out the prototype and kind of the rest is history. Started to... People were interested, so I saw a demand for it and I guess that's, you know, we can go into that part of the story in more detail later, but that's what the idea and the concept came from, being a working musician in the music industry and seeing a real problem that...

Michael

Everyone had from the low-level guys playing unsigned band nights all the way through to the Grammy winners and multi-platinum artists they had the same the same kind of issue which is how do I get this track from me to you A privately and securely and B how do I get some data around whether the fact that you've even received it or listened to it or whatever and that's kind of kind of it in a nutshell platforms growing to do a lot more but that's

Jakob

Mm.

Michael

The core concept is basically that.

Jakob

Amazing. Yeah, and it's interesting. Sometimes when I speak with founders in the music industry that are solving issues, sometimes it's strikingly obvious what problem they're solving, but they haven't been, it hasn't been solved. And it's very interesting to contemplate why. I think there's many different angles. I think a lot of it has to do with, you know, financing or like how big of a market it is. But other times it's just because There's not a lot of people that has felt the problem that are also capable of converting that into a solution. I guess, Mick, if I understand correctly, you also have technical background, like development wise too able to. Yeah.

Michael

Yeah, so I'm an engineer. I use that term loosely because there's a lot better engineers than I, but I can write codes and I can build products and that's something that I'm lucky enough to be able to do as well as, you know, be a musician.

Jakob

Yeah, and starting a company really at its core is understanding a problem. Like even more than building a solution, it's understanding deeply a problem because the solution can take many forms and shapes. And Kiran, where did you come into the picture?

Ciaran

So again, context is really helpful to understand the backstory. So from Mick as a professional musician, that's how our paths originally crossed. So Mick is from Scotland and I'm actually from Ireland, but I live in Scotland now and Mick and I have known each other nearly 20 years. And for me, I've worked in media for a very long time and I used to run radio stations and at one point in time I was running a rock radio station and Mick had a rock band and they basically sent their CD into us to give it some play and to be fair Mick's band were very good and we played them on the radio and that's how I got to meet Mick and followed his story from getting signed to a major label to being out in the US, making his album with a quite renowned producer. And when all of that kind of, as Mick said, catastrophically imploded, like many stories in the music industry, we've always kept in touch. And Mick has always been technical, being a developer and also a product designer. And at that time, I but then moved my role to work for a large media organization in the UK. And I was specifically looking at designing and developing subscription media websites. And this is going back like 15 years. And Mick was part of that journey as well. And then actually what happened was one of the ideas I had, kind of expanded and we had a couple of co-founders and we ended up getting a large private equity raise, a significant raise, a multi-million. And we made a series of acquisitions and developed quite a big business. And Mick was one of the lead developers in that business. And when we were working together in our office in either in Glasgow or in London, there was this corner of the office where all of the CDs and the mini discs

Ciaran

and the tapes and the envelopes went to. And it was just, it was like stacked pile high. And Nick had coined the phrase, the corner where dreams go to die. And that would have been in about 2013, 2014. And I'd always recognized the problem being in media. Like at a radio station, you get hundreds of demos a week from local unsigned bands. Never ever thought about it. But because Mick was really experiencing that problem as a touring musician and had recognized it in other musicians and then working together, as soon as he told me about his idea and showed me his prototype, which would have been in like early 2020 during COVID, I got it straight away. It was so obvious and so simple. And that's why Mick and I are really aligned on the product as well, because we see it. From slightly different angles, but it's the exact same problem. And that's just the kind of context of the 10 previous years as to how Mick and I kind of got to the starting point with Songbox.

Michael

So let me jump in because Kieran's selling himself short a little bit there because I told Kieran, so the prototype was out and it had some traction, had some big names even using it. And I think that's why I first, that's the reason I first brought it to Kieran because I'm like, look man, I've got something here and there's some pretty big names using it. Then, so that's his Kieran's selling himself short, right? Because he said to me, cool, have you got a business? And I was like, no.

Jakob

Hmm.

Ciaran

Ha.

Michael

Well, have you got your IP protected? No. Do you have a bank account? No. Do you have any legal protection at all? No. And he was like, God, right. So from a founder's perspective, you definitely need...

Jakob

Ha!

Michael

The me, you need the guy with the idea and the product and the ability to execute the product. But 100 % you need the businessman. You need the guy who knows about IP protection and shareholders agreements and setting up legal entities and setting up all that stuff. That's, Keiran brings all of that to the table. Because even though I know about that stuff and I probably could do it if I really had to, it's not my thing. And Keiran brings up.

Jakob

Yeah.

Michael

Keaton brings a world of experience around how to run a business to the table.

Jakob

I think that's so important and I think almost in all business partnerships like that, that needs to happen. Very few people are able to cover that themselves. For example, myself, I would pride myself to have a lot of experience in very many diverse ways of building business. But I am completely sure even after being part of building 10 plus businesses, I would never be able to do it myself. Even though I know all the things pretty much. It's not knowledge. It's not... capacity, it's more like personality and drive and the mixture of those and like how your brain works, how you structure things. And yeah, it's super important. But Kieran, like how did this work out? Did you guys just abandon your jobs, nine to five and go into it or like how did it look?

Ciaran

So, Songbox is 100 % bootstrapped and has been for three going on four years. Again, experience and... circumstance plays a big role in our journey. And again, why you mentioned it's, it's not typical of many kind of music tech startups. So Mick and I have had a lot of positive, but also some really negative experiences. And they're not negative in the sense that they're really bad. It's just a hard, hard learning curves, really hard learning curves. Mick had an enormously hard and familiar hard learning curve from the music industry. When the label dropped the band, I've had quite a few hard learning curves from running businesses, but then running my own businesses and going through different experiences like raising private equity money, making acquisitions of other companies, winning government tender contracts in the UK, selling my company. They're all huge experiences and some of them were disasters. The PE raise ended up being an absolute disaster, you know, three to five years into it. And I learned a huge series of lessons from that. And then from winning a government contract, which would nearly break you as an independent, to then ultimately selling a business, which is a very hard thing to do as well. These are all real life lessons. When Mick and I started the business, we decided that we were going to bootstrap it and not just kind of turbo charge it with money. Because a lesson I'd learned and Mick had learned is you can have too much money or you can have the wrong money. And that gives you quite a different experience in how to manage money.

Ciaran

Because if you've got a lot of cash sitting in the bank, either personally or professionally, human nature is a willingness to want to spend it on stuff, right? So we decided to bootstrap and every penny or every cent that we made in Songbox, we just kept pouring it back in. So Mick and I have effectively built Songbox in our evenings and weekends, literally just the two of us. And it's been a very long journey. But now we agreed at the end of 2024, having done that journey for three years, all of our evenings, all of our weekends, literally winning each customer one by one, one by one winning our customers. We are now full time in the business. So at the start of 2025, we quit both of our roles, make held a very senior role at a one of the biggest businesses in the UK. I held a very senior role at one of the most recognizable brands in the music industry. And we're now full time in song box because we can see the growth while slow bootstrapped can accelerate. And we're now moving into a phase of actually probably going to raise, I would say, and accelerate the business.

Jakob

I do want to touch upon the hard stuff, so I hope it's okay with you guys. But before we go there, I just want to take a status check on where are songbooks now before we go a bit back in time and understanding how you took those learnings and maybe also if you allow me to understand more in particular what the hard stuff was with both of you. But before we go there, what is the status of songbooks right now? How many users do you have? What do you see going on in the product and in the company?

Ciaran

So in terms of the hard numbers, we have thousands of users, but in terms of our long-term subscribers, we're at about 400 right now, which doesn't seem a lot at all, those are our core paying customers. And that is a mix of what we call professional accounts and business accounts. So we have those, and then we have

Jakob

Hmm.

Ciaran

the activity they're doing, is in the millions of streams, millions of streams in terms of the activity. One key point to know about those numbers is that's with zero marketing. That is all network effect word of mouth. So when someone shares a song box with someone, eventually, you know, just through monitoring, you can see that's kind of what's grown our business. It's all organic. There's literally, there is nothing that we have done in terms of trying to. by an audience and it's a very sticky product. Our churn rate is less than 5%. So when we get a subscriber, they're very, very sticky. And part of that is because a lot of the features and Mick will talk more to this point, a lot of the features on Songbox we didn't come up with. The customer came up with them. They told us what they wanted and Mick designed it and developed it.

Jakob

Mm.

Ciaran

And we listen to our customers all the time. And proof of that is if you contact Songbox on the customer service button, the intercom button on the website or in the app, or if you want a demo of Songbox, and me do it 24 seven all the time. In fact, at 2 a.m. this morning, I could see Mick was replying to a customer about a really silly question, but that's what he did. And that's how we've won customers one by one by basically

Michael

Yeah.

Jakob

Okay.

Jakob

You

Ciaran

customer service and just owning everything we do. You know, for insights on feature development and how we won all of those hard yards, know, Mick, apart from the core idea has consistent. I've never seen anyone listen to a customer as much as Mick listens to them.

Michael

I think that's when you're going to talk about the hard things, like that's what I would classify as the hard things because being a developer and being a product person, you can be inclined to think you know what's right and think that you know what should be. And I think the real skill, particularly in being a product manager and being a product person is understanding that your job is not to come up with the ideas. Your job is to extract the ideas from the users. And that can be challenging because I could tell you lots of stories about version one of Songbox that was 100 % out of here. And how some of that was very right and very good and some of it was way wrong, like way wrong. And it was through interactions with customers, hostile interactions with customers that you learn. Okay, right, I made a mistake there, let's go and change. And it's the constant iteration. It's product development 101, it? Build, measure, learn. It's like, build something, put it out, learn from it, change it, adapt it, make it better, learn on the next iteration again. And it's just a continual cycle of doing that, even till literally today, is deciding, okay, that feature didn't. do exactly what I thought the users thought it would do. So let's tweak it.

Jakob

Amazing. Before we go further, because I have a lot of questions that I want to sort of feed off that statement, is I do want, I'm curious now, I do want to figure out a bit more in detail. Mick, let's start with you. What was in particular that happened with your career that made it go so horribly wrong? And you can describe the details of the comfort level that you have. I think it's just, it informs the entrepreneurial decision.

Michael

Yeah, so, I mean, it's a typical music industry story and I won't go into too much detail, but we rose up through the ranks here in the UK. So we started playing locally as everyone does. We got on, we were doing good numbers locally and then when you do good numbers locally, the promoters put you on to support a bigger band. So a bigger band came through and we supported them and it went really, really well. And then the next time that band came through, we got the whole UK tour. And then one of our songs got into the charts, all going well, still doing this, trajectory still doing this. Then the band came through again and we got the European tour. And then we got other tours and then we could tour on our own. So the correct trajectory is doing this. And then we got a deal with Universal in America. We went to America, we recorded that album. With a very prominent rock producer, a guy who's won six Grammys and been Oscar nominated. The album was due to come out on October 2010 and we had a 48-date US tour lined up in the books. And in between going home from finishing the album in late July and the tour starting in October, at some point we got an email from the record label saying, we're going to put you guys back to... February because October's too busy. It's pre-Christmas time, it's too busy to put a new album out. Okay, disappointing but okay. And then in between October and February, they said, guys, we're gonna put you back to July. And then sometime between that and July it just disappeared. Everything just fell out. No tour. The album came out but with just a soft release. No push, no work, nothing. And ultimately that was the end of it. No support, no backing. And I was back in Scotland at the Jobcentre trying to explain to the guy what I've been doing for the past four years. They don't have a button for...

Michael

Professional musician so that was very complicated and that was it. It just kind of frittered apart from that. It's just the story you'll hear time and time again talking to people who've been through the industry. You get signed, you get dropped, you get no support and you're just left in this horrible limbo type experience where the band is still a band and the album is in the shops but there's nothing and as you know without push, without marketing, without some sort of driving factor behind it. It just disappears into the ether. So we went our separate ways and... I've kind told you the rest of the story. I got a job, worked with Kieran, had the idea, still bubbling around in my head and then executed on it. And then a few years later, here I am back in the music industry, but in a different form, which is all very cool. I don't regret a thing. Very happy with the way things all turned out.

Jakob

In a metaphorical sense, is this your second band? Is this you? It another go.

Michael

Yeah, and I don't have to tour so it's perfect. Yeah, I like that analogy, correct.

Jakob

Yeah, because, know, and Karan said you up to at night answering a customer. Like there's always this question, what drives a founder, right? And, um, you know, I would just assume hearing your story that you guys lost your career, or at least the potential career based on external circumstances that was just very difficult to navigate and whatever place you were as a band didn't carry that, couldn't carry that, shouldn't carry that. Um, and, now you have. Well, basically the same, right? You're working with the same things to some degree. Know, instead of having an instrument, you have a program and code and customers. And also, was also, that's one of the things I want to play off, but like being so obsessed with customers, I guess can also reflect back to the band. Like I want to connect with my audience. I want to tell a story. Like, do you believe that you're completely parallel and then that's sort of the reason why you're into this again, to some degree?

Michael

Yeah, totally. Absolutely.

Michael

Yeah.

Michael

It's a very, very interesting proposition. I've never thought about it like that. Do think connecting with people is a driving factor for me, yeah. Whether you're solving a problem for people en masse, whether it's solving the problem of having a good night at a concert or solving the problem of an actual practical problem you've got with your workflow. Yeah, think there's something about, I think any founder has that thing that's inside them where they want to... They want to do something that affects a lot of people in a big way and makes their life better. I think, and I do think there's definitely a parallel between standing on stage to 5,000 people or writing a program used by 50,000 people. Is it narcissism? I don't know, it a form of that? Who knows? But yeah, there's something in that, Jacob. It's probably too deep of a concept to pull apart right now on this.

Jakob

Hmm.

Michael

On this podcast, but I'm certainly going to think about it now, that's for sure. That's a good one. That's a good one.

Jakob

Yeah.

Jakob

Yeah, I struggle with the same like complexity of that statement, know, in my career, for example, I have been an entrepreneur for 12 years and, know, like full time, full time, full time for five years. And, you know, I'm pretty good at what I do. Like I would say I'm very good at what I do. And, you know, the amount of money I've made for five years is just ridiculous. Like it's nothing. It's, know, obviously I have.

Michael

You

Jakob

Found other methods of making money, like some real estate investments that's gone well, like nothing to do with my actual job. And I've tried to sort of also come to terms with like, why do I keep on doing it? Like, and a few words that I've sort of come to rely on lately is like obsession or like personality or like, you know. How I function, how I think. Like it's very much based on who I am, how I think and how I actually express myself. And I guess one of the statements I've also made to my wife is like, if whatever I do fails now, like I will go get a job, but I can't promise you I won't do it again. Like it's just, I think it's just core to who I am, if it makes sense. Is that, do you think the same way?

Michael

Yeah, 100 % and thinking about it, thinking back now, I have always been, always been this way, even from before the band. So before the band was a thing, I had a job and I was trying to be an entrepreneur back then. I went out and I bought, I purchased a 10 stack CD tower and I started a business doing CD duplication again for bands. So I've always been entrepreneurial. And I think there is something about the control aspect. I wouldn't say I resent, but I struggle with not being in control of my own life. I don't like the fact that my wellbeing, my wife's wellbeing and my family's wellbeing are dependent on the actions and the whim of another. My mission has always been to be in control of my own life.

Jakob

Hmm.

Michael

I guess ultimately that means financially and controlling my own life, but just generally to be in control of my own life is the overall driving factor I think for me. My personality type doesn't deal well with being told you have to be here at 9am and you have to stay here until 5pm and then I will allow you to go home and see your kids. That doesn't sit well with me at all. So I think the driving factor for me is definitely problem solving because that's always been a thing my whole life. But also the need to be in control of my own destiny, I think is the real thing.

Jakob

Yeah. And if you want to distill Starbucks to some degree, it's control of what you do with your, when you're sending out music, right? So creating the product of your personality. But, Karan, like again, the, the motivation that you're referring to, well, I'm assume is based on your previous experience, which is both, you know, experiencing something where things go wrong and also selling a company. You, you explain to me, what was it in particular that went wrong?

Michael

Yeah, 100%. You

Jakob

And how might it reflect on what you do now?

Ciaran

Yeah, so For me, I was never as talented as Mick to be able to play an instrument well. So I became a DJ in my teenage years. And to this day, I still DJ in a club every week. And I've always had an attachment and an affinity to music. And that kind of put me into the radio business because if I can't play it, I'll get as close to it as I can. So, you know, picking records or music has always been a thing for me. And that radio experience, that media experience, and then kind of the intersection with the Internet and e-commerce and subscription models and all of that really got my me thinking about, you know, what the world will look like for, you know, listening to music. And I was a very early adopter of Spotify and the whole idea of streaming. A lot of things like that just kind of made sense to me that how media was going to change. And what happened was I built quite a simple subscription media website, which did merchandising tickets. Content, everything like that. And in fact, actually, Mick helped me to develop it. It was like an incubator unit with a small budget. And that actually went really, really well to the point where you could see there was a tangible commercial model. But because it was outside of the core proposition of the media company, they weren't really interested in developing it because they didn't get it. So we took that idea.

Jakob

Hmm.

Ciaran

And we shopped it around in Scotland and then in England and particularly in London, myself and a few co-founders of that business who were also a mixture of kind of media executives. And it took a long time, but eventually we stumbled upon a group of private equity companies, and one in particular who got the idea, who recognized where media and even music was going to go. And we raised just over 15 million sterling back in 2012, 2013. And that then allowed us to make a series of purchases of magazines, national radio station, websites, YouTube channels, all of that. And the idea was that you would have all of these media touch points for the audience to come in from and then to ultimately converge in one place, which was to have an all you can eat. Subscription model, which was bundling basically bundling services. And at its core, it was probably a little bit ahead of its time. The messaging was a little bit muddled because we were still figuring it out as we went. And it actually, the core proposition did okay. But the problem was that when you take on such a large investment from, from private equity, you know, the targets start reasonable, but then grow because ultimately they want to see where their exit is coming in five to seven years time. So after the first three years, which were great, and that's when things really started to kind of take a turn. And it was the classic story that I would say we had too much money. So we were looking to spend to speed up the return on the investment for the fund. And we started spending money where on reflection, we just didn't need to spend that money. We started chasing things we didn't need to chase. If we had have stuck with the core proposition, I think it'd be a very, very different story now. But we didn't stick with the core proposition. And we chased things in America, in Australia, in Japan. I was all around the world looking at things and doing things and, you know, focus.

Jakob

Mm-hmm.

Ciaran

Is very, very important and it's also very valuable. And that was the big, big lesson from that is you can definitely have too much money. And if you're not focused, you're going to waste a lot of time and money chasing things that actually you've never validated that are going to generate a return. And just the whole business just lost all focus and just spun out of control. I left after three, three and a half years having started it because I fell out with my co-founders because we'd completely different views on how to run the business. I wanted to keep it quite simple, but we had different thoughts and actually it was a classic tale of founders not being aligned on what they're doing. And there was a lot of hard lessons. I could rhyme off a lot of lessons that you'll read in a dozen business books that I got literally. In the space of four years. Like what an education that was. And I came out of that absolutely completely, you know, somewhat shell shocked on the back of it and lost a lot of money as well. And a lot of belief in how to kind of build these businesses. And, but I came out in the back of it, much like, you know, Mick coming out of the band that, you know what, you either sit there and you feel sorry for yourself and you go, well.

Michael

Ahem.

Ciaran

Or you pick yourself up and you go again, right? You go again. Within six months of coming out of that business, I'd started another business. And that one actually turned out really great. And I ended up selling it. You know, although they're hard lessons and they're hard, you know, the experiences feel terrible at the time, it's actually such great learning to apply.

Jakob

Yeah.

Ciaran

Your next experience. And when you come to where we are with Songbox...

Jakob

Yeah.

Ciaran

Mick and me talk about this sometimes, it's perhaps our hard lessons and maybe negative experiences have led us to be actually quite conservative with Songbox and to bootstrap it for so long. Maybe we've bootstrapped it too long or maybe we've bootstrapped it long enough. That's now to be decided. Those experiences that both of us have had have definitely, definitely led to Songbox just DIY, just doing it ourselves.

Jakob

Hmm.

Jakob

Hmm.

Ciaran

The whole way along.

Michael

Yeah. And again, part of that, I'm now paranoid about this Jacob, but part of that is also about retaining control. Because we've both seen very clearly that when you bring money, particularly a lot of money into a business, you lose a lot of control. And for me, that's a very unattractive prospect of, because again, like, I don't want someone telling me what song box should be, because Kieran and I know what song box should be and we're proving that. But you bring in money and then you need to start having those conversations and that's very unappealing prospect. Which we'll have to. We'll cross that bridge, certainly for sure, at some point, hopefully soon. But yeah, that's a real factor.

Jakob

Yeah, I think that's really interesting. And when it comes to raising capital, I myself, I'm more of a scholar, academic approach to raising capital than actual, I've raised a good deal of capital myself, nothing special international context, but within my environment, it's a good deal of money. But I do analyze a lot of cases, I research a of capital, races, especially music tech. And indigenon markets. And what I see right now is very insecure capital race market that's going to happen in the next couple of years. And that's not the podcast for this today. It's a lot to do with AI and not so much about hype with AI. I think a lot of it is very, very real. It's just things will fundamentally change and the capital structures and strongholds and whatever will change. There's a lot of things people... don't expect to happen that I truly believe will happen. And that is having a traditional raised capital scale fast the next couple of years, I believe to not be maybe the best idea for many different reasons. But besides that, what I also see in music tech in general is raising capital is harder to do when it comes to the same amount of money, oftentimes at much lower valuations and oftentimes compromising a lot. Because most of the investors you will talk with will not understand, they will not approve or even if it's a company that wants to have even more growth after three years, there's gonna be a misalignment everywhere. And you guys are in a place now where it's probably not a dream scenario, but it's better than most, which is you now have the means to at least take the right decisions, I guess, or what you assume to be the right decisions. Is that where you see yourself being right now?

Ciaran

Yeah, I think that's a very good series of observations, Jacob, and somewhat what Mick and I believe. Everything changes and also works in cycles as well. By design, would say maybe a little bit longer by design than we thought initially. But then again, you're always naive, right? Because you don't know what you don't know. We probably thought two years into Songbox, we might take a seed raise. Nothing bigger than a seed raise because we always believed that Songbox wouldn't be exponential growth. And we weren't kind of... blinded by ambition that it had to be exponential hockey stick growth like, you know, the startup dream. I would say it's more the startup reality making me your living, which is, you know, don't waste a penny or a cent. Keep reinvesting it, grind it out. Evenings, weekends, keep grinding it out, grinding it out. And when you think you can't grind anymore, grind more. Right. And just keep going.

Jakob

Hmm.

Ciaran

And so three coming into four years now making me are like, okay, now it's serious time, right? We're like three years into the life of the business. Is it a hobby or is it a business? And no, it's a business because actually it could nearly support us. So let's take risks. Let's leave our roles and let's carry risk now and let's continue to grow the business. You know, customer at a time, but more aggressively. And I would say we are going to raise seed for this, probably nothing much, million dollars, right? And you go, well, what's that for? It's just to speed it up a bit more and to make the feedback loops for the customers and for the product development a bit faster and to continue to gain

Michael

Heh.

Ciaran

Growth, but at a faster rate. And something we may come on to talk to in this podcast is because what's happened with Songbox is it started as a core proposition of share music privately, one-to-one for artists and producers primarily. But over those three years, our segments have grown. We have composers, songwriters, engineers, podcasts. So segments have grown. We're also in different markets beyond music. We have customers in education. Have customers in religion. We have customers in agencies and even in film. So what we don't think we're gonna break out necessarily into these, we still need to support them. So we can see growth in other segments and other sectors. And also again, the customer feedback.

Jakob

Hmm.

Michael

Huh.

Ciaran

That we see is like, actually, you know, we want more features in the mobile app. Okay, well, that's going to take a bit more investment to get that in there faster. We want you to improve the publishing tools. We have a publishing suite in Songbox and the publishers are like, can you get it to do that? And we're like, yeah, we could actually, we could get you to do that. The music managers who are managing their artists' rosters, they want a bit more feature set. And we're like, okay, we can do that as well. So the more segments we've got, the more requests we get. So the seed money is really to meet that demand of those requests and that'll just continue to grow the business.

Jakob

Hmm.

Michael

Yeah.

Jakob

Yeah.

Jakob

It's interesting that it's so audience first, like your approach. Karen, you touched on it quickly. Maybe, you can describe it, but like, if you go into the website, you have a very prominent person on your team as well. And I know behind the stories that it was just really about addressing their need and listening to them. But Mick, maybe you can talk about that. Like, who is this person and why do they even need the team?

Michael

Yeah, so we are honoured to have Brian Adams, the Canadian singer-songwriter, as a co-founder of the business. And that was a very, very early thing that happened and it was very impactful and meaningful to me. Obviously, the product was basically a prototype at the time and every morning I would wake up and check my reports and I saw this email address. At bryanadams.com and I thought there's no way, like there's no way that's real, it can't be. So I copied and pasted the domain to make sure it wasn't a spoof domain. I copied and pasted it and it was Brian Adams' website. So I emailed the contact 100%, not even assuming, but knowing it would be an assistant or a manager or someone. And just said, do you need any help getting set up? Because who's not a fan of Brian Adams? LOL. And it was Brian. So he replied to the email extremely courteously telling me that he had been looking for something like this for a long time. And he asked a few questions about security. I answered. He then replied a few days later with a phone number to say, me a phone. So I phoned him and I spoke to him and I spoke to his engineer Hayden and they gave me some feedback. And Brian was just really, really nice and really, really gracious about the product. And we stayed in touch. And about six months later, I got the courage up to ask him for a testimonial for the homepage. And literally within minutes of sending the email, he replied with a testimonial for the homepage. And our relationship continued to grow. And about six months after that, I approached him and asked him if he wanted to join the business for real. And he said yes and it was just incredible. So Brian's insights have been twofold. So a lot of the early feature development came off the back of Brian and his assistant Hayden being power users and saying, so for example, Brian was like, I need lyrics, I need to see, because we had metrics on plays.

Michael

But he was like, need to see downloads. So we built in metrics for downloads. He sent me an email one night saying, I'm at an event and I can't be bothered going through the process of creating a song box. I need to be able to do it in one click. And I was like, that's so obvious. It's so obvious why haven't I done that. So we developed a one click link generator. So you could just basically go to a track, hit a button and it would give you a song box to share rather than going through the wizard state process of choosing tracks, choosing a name. Uploading their artwork. Brian came up with the idea of just having this express one-click solution. So as well as having that real-life insight of a independent artist, because Brian is an independent artist these days, obviously a huge global star, brings all this insight to the company in terms of use cases. But also he's Brian Adams, so he has a lot of contacts.

Jakob

Hmm.

Michael

For example, we had a very, I won't say the name because we don't have our say names unless people give us permission to, but a very, very famous band sign up one night. And I said, I messaged Brian saying, this one of yours? And he's like, yeah, I think I said to that guy. And that guy is one of the biggest names in industry, right? But yeah, I think I said to that guy. I've also been involved in email chains with huge, huge stars because He's just sent off an email saying, check this out, I'm involved, what do you think? So the story there is twofold, threefold actually, his actual product insight, because he's had some fantastic ideas for the development of the product, his contacts who he's graciously exposed Songbox to on our behalf, and just the fact that for me as a... At the point where Brian signed up, was just a thing, this was just one of five or six products that I was playing with on the side, like just a hobby thing. To have someone like that believe in it and get involved in it and then actually put his name to it, I mean, how much more motivation do you need as a product builder than that? It's been incredible, it's been incredible having part of the team.

Ciaran

Yeah.

Ciaran

Yeah.

Michael

And is, some people make the mistake of thinking Brian was a paid ambassador or like a PR campaign. He's part of the team. He's not a day to day part of the team obviously, but he's part of the team. And he has shares in the company, we talk regularly. He's part of it and it's a cool thing.

Jakob

Hmm.

Jakob

Hmm.

Ciaran

He's and also he's so straightforward. He like the way the three of us would speak is like. Three people just having a conversation. It's so straightforward. So, you know, to the point and at times quite funny as well, you know, everyone brings something in terms of insights and thoughts. You know, I think Mick wrote on our website because the three of us have made this joke before, so I'll repeat it. It's like an Irishman, a Scotsman and a Canadian walk into a bar. You know, that's what you've got. With the three of us.

Jakob

Think the beautiful full circle moment I'm seeing here is, you this experience, even as a, what you would describe as a medium sized assets, which probably was bigger based on how you guys talk about yourself, but let's say medium sized assets, and experience these problems firsthand and basically sticking to the conviction of that problem and seeing product market fit from. Focusing on the users and sticking to the problem that you knew to be true, I guess, for last 20 years. And the learning I take from that really is I think oftentimes as founders, have this very delusional sense, delusional relationship to the problem solution that I think a lot of the motivation often is driven in opportunity. Rather than, or the lack of, but driven of opportunity rather than this is the problem I'm obsessing about. And I think that's where a lot of us making mistakes, including myself. And of course, every single founder journey is different and you guys have had your own founder journeys that were very different from this. But what I see very healthy about what you do and hopefully some of the listeners can take a learning from this is that in music, maybe more than other industries, the conservative way is often the better way. For the particular reason that it is harder to get at scale, it is harder to get to mass. So you can't afford to be so random in your choices. Like you actually need to understand what problems to solve and you probably don't have a lot of chances to do so. So I think there's a lot of sense to that. And then also in my book, you guys are doing the completely right thing and I'm very...

Jakob

I love your story because it's right reminder for me like really about how to double down on that problem that audience if that makes sense because I get lost in it to myself like the opportunity outlook it so What is what is the next steps of your journey? Like where do you see songbooks going? Where do want to bring it?

Michael

So this is one of the things I said earlier was around when you're a product you can't assume that you know the path that you should be taking. You have to listen to your users. We have had, so caveat here, Jacob, we can't go into a lot of detail here because this is an upcoming thing that's going to be news when it comes out. But over the past few years we've had a lot of people saying artists, like artists and musicians saying.

Jakob

Yes.

Michael

We love song box, we'd love it to do this. And we've kinda, not exclusively, but we've kinda been of the mindset, well that's lovely, but it's not what we do. Until Kieran and I had the epiphany earlier this year in Nashville that why not? Why is it not something that we do? It's a perfect, the thing we're talking about is a perfect evolution of from where we're at. We've got, basically in a nutshell, we are looking to help musicians.

Jakob

Mm.

Michael

And artists with a career in an even more significant way than we already do. And this is a product evolution that's been driven from our customers requesting that we step into this lane. It's a slightly different lane to what we're in, but we've had our customers saying they love the way that we run the business in terms of we talk to them one to one all the time. They love the fact that we're focused on product design and user experience to a very significant degree. So they're like, can we not do this thing with you guys that we currently do kind of elsewhere, but not really good. We think you guys could do it great. So that's where we're going this year. We're still very much artists and musicians and producers, still very much helping these people just in a slightly different way than we do just now. And that's the focus for 2025 and there'll be some news on that later in the year. And we'd be happy to come back on and talk to you about it if you would have us.

Ciaran

Yeah.

Jakob

Yeah.

Michael

You get anything to elaborate on that Kieran, I feel like I was very mysterious there, but I think we need to be at this stage.

Ciaran

Yeah, I think you're think you're suitably mysterious. I suppose one of our goals as well, Jacob, is that with the experiences we've had, and also Brian's view on the music industry is we are working towards having a song box model at low cost or no cost to artists. You know, musicians who aren't signed, who are independent, we're going to have a formulation that gives them this service at no cost. And that's important to us as well, because to a small degree I do, but Mick certainly does, and I'm sure Brian still remembers the early days. It's bloody hard being a musician and it is exceptionally hard to make a living from the industry. So, there are commercially ways and songbox is growing nicely in terms of enterprise for businesses, buying it for multiple teams and users, cause we've designed and built it that way. So actually the need that every single musician has to pay for the service. I can see that diminishing over time and making me, yeah, it's a business and it has to have a level of profitability to sustain itself. But we are not driven by how much money it makes. We're driven by how many customers and people we help because then it's a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way. It's a virtuous circle because everything feeds itself in a positive manner. So back to focus, our focus has always been a musician, an artist and solving that problem. And that won't change, but what might change and hopefully will change is that actually we can make their lives even that bit more easier by giving them a service that they value at a lower no cost. And then we build the business in other areas for them. So that's definitely an aspiration we have.

Jakob

Amazing. Well guys, this has been a really great talk and I take a lot of learnings and perspectives from this. I myself am in a period as an entrepreneur where I'm trying to figure out the sustainability of what I do, especially in music. And I think that's the key to any startup in this space right now. Where's your sustainable perspective on what you're building? We do need to build different in this industry, most of the cases. And there's a standing illusion that we don't, but we do. Because it's the parallel to music, it's the parallel to Atsis careers. The chances of succeeding is so low. The financial outcome parallel or compared to what you could do afterwards is also minuscule. So you gotta think about it a different way and I love this journey. Guys, it's been a pleasure. Thank you for being on and we hope to talk soon.

Ciaran

Yeah, thanks for the invitation, Jacob. Appreciate that. Thank you.