We introduced a feature recently that shows you suggested users based on common artists you both listen to! Hopefully it should work well enough that it can show you some of our users from India if you have any artists in common!
The app is currently completely free to use to entice more people to join and get a feel for it! I'm from Australia I will follow your Instagram now! That would be awesome if you have university contacts that would be interested in using an app like ours. Our key demographic would be people at the university age!
Yeah for sure and we did get great feedback on the idea prior to launch I just feel maybe we don't have enough features to keep drawing people back on to the app consistently yet. Social proof will also help once we can get some of that going too I hope!
Definitely trying to market to that demographic but still struggling to get decent traction unfortunately. So hard to know how these other apps and platforms manage to get such a large user base in a short time even with a large marketing budget. I feel like more social proof might be the answer but it's difficult to get that with a very limited marketing budget as I have.
I am definitely planning to go cross platform in the future and integrate other music streaming services such as Apple Music, however, the APIs that these other services offer are nowhere near as good as what Spotify offers unfortunately. Also when I first began creating this app around 3 years ago, and just prior to launching the Spotify hate wasn't nearly what it is today. My plan is to keep releasing updates and features for now until I'm at a point where I'm happy to start integrating other streaming services. Would be interested to hear your perspective on this idea.
Yeah it's really hard to know how to market ideas well with little experience in the marketing field. Hoping some people out there will have some great advice for us! :)
A little over a year ago I released my app - a social media app focussed around music, and I have seen some growth in users and user retention (monthly and daily active user counts), however, I feel like I'm not where I should be at yet. I currently have 680 users but given it's been around 15 months this feels really low.
I don't have much of a marketing budget as I am fully bootstrapping this app (I just use money from savings when I can and I'm not sure when/if I'd even be able to get funding as I have no prior business experience and acquiring funding seems near impossible right now).
From the marketing I have done which is primarily advertising on Meta products such as Facebook and Instagram, I get a bit of reach but hardly any downloads. Granted my campaigns are usually around $50-100 only but I still am lucky to get 2-3 signups from a campaign of this budget.
I would love some inspiration and tips and tricks to increase the rate that I can acquire new users and get them to also invite their friends on to the platform! Any advice is most welcome.
Some more information on the app: In a very brief description of the app - it's called Solance and it is designed to be a social media platform where you can follow friends, family, colleagues, or even other users you don't know, and interact with each other through the songs they have recently been listening to.
I am always refining the app and adding in new features, but I can only release updates every month or so as I work on Solance on the side and work full time.
Here's the link to my website: https://solance.app (I still need to update the website some time soon with additional features and updated images of the app)
Some really interesting perspectives here and I agree with you I believe most if not all people will still love to be discovering and sharing music until they die. There really is such a thrill in knowing you got someone onto a certain song or artist that they now love.
You're right we definitely won't eliminate algorithms as they definitely do play a great role in everything nowadays, not just music discovery, but we want to alleviate a lot of that reliance that is currently placed on them, and provide another avenue for discovering music through humans, rather than machines.
Radio is definitely a great one, my only issue is that people of today, specifically younger people, want to consume as much content as they can in the shortest period of time as they can (not all but a large portion), and radio doesn't do well for these types of people, where you can't quickly change songs, and have to sit through lengthy ads. However, I do agree the radio is a powerful thing and for those who still have the patience for it, it's a forgotten gem for most.
I've spent the last 2 years building out my product, which is aimed at providing a fun and engaging way to discover and share music with your friends.
The app is called Solance and is available on both App Store and Google Play Store.
The best way to describe Solance is a social media platform (similar to Instagram), where you can see the music your friends are listening to (only on Spotify at the moment but Apple Music is on its way!), and interact with the songs they listen to through playing the song previews, likes, comments and also save songs you find and like directly to your Spotify Liked Songs. playlist.
I'm looking for music lovers who are willing to test the app with their friends and provide feedback on the current platform, as well as the types of features they'd want to see in the near future! The app is totally free so don't worry about having to fork out any money to help me! :D
There are currently just under 300 users but I really want to nail the next phase of the app and best capture what users would really want. I've used the app to find so many new songs that honestly I don't believe I would have discovered without it.
The biggest issue currently is that there isn't really too much value when you don't follow people e.g. your friends. I am working on a feature that will recommend you users with similar music tastes, that will also be used to populate the feed when you first sign up (which currently is empty) (really bad I know). Other than obvious features such as recommending other users, what other features do you think would make the most sense and really provide a lot of value at this early stage?
Any and all feedback is greatly valued and appreciated!
Unfortunately we are putting all our efforts into making the app great right now but we would love to get a web app going eventually! Hopefully you change your mind about downloading!
It's mainly very narrow right now because this is just a MVP and we are looking for initial users to provide feedback on the experience. The reason we made it is because nobody else has really done it. I also feel like where we plan to take this app it couldn't be handled within a social media platform alone. It will definitely require a standalone app once we get it to where we want it to be.
We need date of birth due to age requirements of social media unfortunately.
As for requiring friends to use it, we are very early stage at the moment and don't have enough content to populate the feed of users without populating it with their friends' content. But I definitely appreciate the feedback thank you!