VIDEO FEED
===

Jeff: [00:00:00] Over these seven years to see us go from 900,000 daily active users to 12 million daily active users. There's more companies entering the space that are diversifying this question of like, how much should someone have to pay in order to access music? And if you're allowing this gigantic section of the world who can't meet that $11 a month threshold, if you're cutting those folks out, how much money are you leaving on the table?

Welcome to Launch Pod, the show from Log Rocket, where we sit down with top product and digital leaders. Today we're talking with Charlie Kaplan. VP of product at Audio Mac about product market fit and how to tell if you've got it or you don't. In this episode, we'll discuss how he drove 50 X user growth at Symbol and why that still didn't matter because they lacked proper fit.

The story of how he launched Audio max product org and grew the company to 42 million monthly active users on the back of strong product market fit and how he transformed failed features into new revenue streams. Helping Audio Mac grow into a platform large enough to host artists like Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, and more.

So here's our episode with Charlie Kaplan.

All right, [00:01:00] Charlie, welcome to the Showman. Stoked to have you on. I think we, we got to chat a little bit before we did this, and one thing we share is both a background in music before we kind of got into tech, but you just took yours a lot further. So maybe let's start there. Like, we always say people have a kinda odd way into product, but this one.

Is right up there with potentially taking the cake. You did not start in engineering. You were a music journalist when you, when you got outta school.

Charlie: That's exactly right. Yeah, it's right after I got outta school. I was the general music intern at NPR. That was like pretty far from you know, where I've since ended up. But, my dream from the time that I was like a senior in college, so even before then was to start companies. While I was doing like a day job which I really enjoyed like writing about music and working for NPR in the, you know, nights and weekends, I was really trying to start companies.

That led me to a, the little brother of a friend of mine. Let me know that he was working on like this new project that was like, kind of gonna be like Instagram, but with like [00:02:00] songs instead of, you know, photos and videos. Did I wanna help out with it? You know, could I introduce him to some music journalists?

And it, it was such a combination of my interest at the time, you know, it was like, here's a chance to work on a startup, but also I get to use like relationships and music and interested in music. And then like six months after we had that conversation. He raised over a million dollars and maybe the first employee of the company.

And my path to product was strangely through becoming the CEO of that company, they made me the CEO 11 months in. And then later on, you know, audio Mac reached out to me and said, Hey, if you'd ever like to launch the product division at Audio Mac, you should come do it. Audio Mac at the time was like, I think 15 or fewer employees, so it wasn't much bigger than symbol was.

It was kind of always the part of entrepreneurship that I was most interested in was thinking about product and finding product market fit more so than like, engineering or design or any of those things. And product is, as you're kind of alluding to, it's a weird discipline in the sense that like, you know, [00:03:00] kind, I feel that, you know, the only way.

To it is to do it. So as a, because I had worked on a startup for a few years, I felt comfortable doing this job that I'd never done before. 'cause it felt like a distillation of the parts of being a CEO that I liked the most. So I, I came over to Audi Mac and I think next week I will have been here for seven years.

It's wild.

Jeff: Pretty much every role you've entered a company at. You have been, not just as the first time you're doing the role, but you were the first one doing that job at the company. So like not only did you have to try and help define these companies, help them find product market fit, you had to find almost like job company fit at the same time.

Charlie: it's true. It's such a strange fact, but it really is true. It's strange. I would feel probably most unfamiliar. In a job that was familiar to someone else. Like I'd always, I've always been in a job where there's been like a degree of latitude to discover what it is. And I think that there's a lot of components to that for me.

Part of [00:04:00] it is I feel most confident when I understand something personally. Like I feel pretty not confident about received wisdom. Uh, So, you know, when somebody tells me how a job. You know, has worked in the past or is best done, I have this underlying kind of worry that in perhaps I'm kind of sleepwalking in the wrong direction.

But when I get to go do a job and I get to try stuff, watch it, fail, try stuff, watch it fail, try something, and then see it work.

All of a sudden now I feel like I can develop for myself kind of like a thesis or a narrative around what the whole thing's about, you know, like, okay, like where are we going? How could this work? And also like, feel pretty certain about how to not waste our time. Doing stuff that I've already tried that doesn't work.

So for me, it's a very steadying thing to get to come into something and invent.

Jeff: You know, that's normal. Chaos is studying for some people. Right?

This is exactly why I wanted to have you on today and talk to you about this because I think this kind of background is the [00:05:00] perfect. Situation to walk through Something that, that I hear people talk about a lot, which is this idea of like product market fit and the fact that you had to go through two different companies and kinda one had it, one didn't.

You, you were the CEO of the one that didn't for a while, but you also kinda had to find your own way in walking into these new roles and really help them see like what product is and how do you do some of these things. . So basically you started, like you said, as a music journalist and then ended up at Symbol, 

so maybe layout for us, kinda you walked in, what was going on maybe layout for us how in 11 months you went from being employee number one to CEO.

Charlie: I think this is a fascinating story. So, you know, symbol was launched on a college campus. It was launched at Tufts. It had these three uh, friends of mine, you know, came together with this idea about creating a music social network. They launched it and then within Tufts and then also within a few other colleges in Boston started to pick up.

So before they raised money, they had like, maybe like. [00:06:00] 3000 users, if I remember correctly. And they tapped into you know, a student-focused VC fund called Rough Draft Ventures, which is part more broadly of General Catalyst. And this kind of snowballed into them raising this million dollars of funding.

Both because, you know, there was this like early traction and also because, you know, this was a fund that was focused on finding student founders. So it was definitely, you know, right place, right time. When you would describe the idea to people, I. They would get super inspired by it. So the idea being like, okay, imagine Instagram.

This was 2015. So Instagram was like very much like rocket ship, new novel idea. So exciting, you know, but like, what if it's songs that seems like a super exciting, untapped opportunity, you know? And who better to uh, lead this than like really young people? That hype alone got symbol, this huge feature on the homepage of Forbes.

In the homepage of Forbes, [00:07:00] there was this picture of the three co-founders all sitting on a table looking very like bright-eyed, bushy tailed, and it said headline at the top of the homepage. Is this the Instagram for music question mark who's not gonna click that? Unbelievable. So, you know, this happens soon after I joined the company and we are seeing like instantly, like tens of thousands of people signing up.

But in addition to that, we're seeing like these , echoes on other websites. You know, like, like the next web is writing about us Vice is writing about us. People are talking about it on social media. What I'm describing is hype and hype is not product market fit. It's the fact that we learned the hard way several months later when lots and lots of the users who came signed up, you know, excited about the product left and when they would Right.

Product reviews for us or support tickets for us, you know, and I would be like. Sitting around reading them, trying to [00:08:00] figure out what was wrong. They would kind of always say the same thing. They'd say like, the idea is great. The app is beautiful, the execution is beautiful.

There's just one problem with it, which is that my friends aren't there now. We can't code that. There's no product update that makes your friends arrive. But what that did was, it was extremely helpful because it presented to us what product market fit. You know, required in this particular use case for product market fit, for a symbol for a social network is that your friends are there, your friends posting music is what's valuable.

If your friends aren't there, there's no one to post the music. There's nothing in your feed and you're gonna churn. And so it has this escape velocity problem, which is that you need to have enough people there to have it be populated for you know, it to be interesting to you. 

Jeff: So how'd you guys look at kind of tackling that? Or what was the plan once you unraveled that?

Charlie: There's a fork in the road and the fork in the road was like, do we try to crack this [00:09:00] problem as a social product strictly? So do we try to figure out how to like make social work on symbol or make symbol work as a social service or do we. You know, let's take a step back and try to create some kind of genuine single player mode.

And you know, in hindsight, the right answer to that question would've been to create some sort of single player mode. You know, make people use the service and survive long enough on it that, you know, when their friends show up, they're around to connect with them. But instead, what we did was we were like, look, our identity is a social platform.

The social graph isn't working for us. Let's try building an interest graph. And so we, you know, we allowed people to follow hashtags, follow hashtag hip hop, or follow hashtag rock, or you know, hashtag shower music and connect with other people through. Not their personal relationships with one another, but their shared interests.

So rather than Facebook have it be more like Reddit, for example. And it just didn't help that much. I mean, it sort of reified this core idea that, you know, [00:10:00] it's paradoxical, but if you wanna start a social network, you don't start with a social network. If you wanna start a social network, you start with like a single player mode, let people survive and then move on to, you know, a case where they connect with one another. So in the case of Facebook, for example, my read of that is that was early. On enough in this, in the era of social networking, that social network by itself is kind of a novel idea. But what happened with later social networks, like for example, with Instagram, I mean, you know, I'm old enough to remember that when Instagram launched, it had one key competitor, which was called Hip Somatic.

And

The. Single player mode for both H systematic and Instagram was putting filters on your photos and then sharing them to like Tumblr or Twitter or Facebook. And they stuck with that single player mode long enough that ultimately enough people were on the platform that they could just, you know, rather than going to Tumblr to see what another's Instagram photos they would see on Instagram for it.

And so developing a single player mode for symbol was very challenging because unlike. On Instagram where you take a photo that you [00:11:00] own on symbol, you were sharing music that actually was owned by an artist and you access through an API and so we couldn't create the same sort of like single player mode, you know, experiences.

That taught me a ton. I mean, it was a giant breakthrough for me, and I think. Looking back on it, there's lots of different ways that you could build a single player mode for a music experience. Which we didn't do mostly 'cause we ran outta money and time. But it really taught me that listen, you start with an experience that's sticky and then you follow from that.

Jeff: Yeah, no, I think that's a good point because I remember, I think I remember reading about Instagram actually fairly recently this came out that one of the big unlocks for them was they basically found a way to share. Photos into like MySpace or Friendster, one of the early, you know, a couple of the early networks.

And they got a ton of users because as their users posted there, people click through, came through, and they were driving a ton of traffic and user growth that way. But it was, had they, you know, been shut down by the [00:12:00] other network and not allowed to do that, or had that not worked you know, we probably wouldn't have Instagram as the, you know, phenomenon.

It was in the, you know, big piece of meta that it is now. You gotta find the way to, you know, get people to use it and then get people to share a little bit and then find the way that you can build your network. And if you don't do that the inevitable thing sadly, is time kills everything, right?

Like you run outta cash and you run outta time. And that's game over that you don't get too many chances. So finding that fit you do have to hurry. It is a race.

Charlie: It's totally true and platform risk is so real. The thing you're describing, like Instagram's dependencies on those other social networks was how they leveraged themselves. But it's also, it meant that, you know, there was a critical pathway there that could have been cut with us. It was our reliance on Spotify and SoundCloud.

I mean, SoundCloud was very close to bankruptcy while we were in 2016, while we were relying on them as a service and they reached out to us and they said, you know, we're gonna shut off our API access because. We just can't support this any longer. That would've [00:13:00] meant that a tremendous amount of music on our platform just would become unlistenable, which would really negatively impact the user experience.

So I think it's impossible to fully avoid, you know, platform dependency, but it is a real risk,

Jeff: One thing I just wanna make sure we touch on real quick is in the end didn't work out right?

You ran outta money, you ran outta time. But you did see, you know, 50 x user growth in a year. You saw millions of plays over that year. You can look at that in the moment to think like, oh, we've done it. But in retrospect, you know. What were some of the key things that you could have looked at to say this is, you know, like you said, this is hype.

This is not fit necessarily right now.

Charlie: The thing that we were constantly monitoring that was telling us that we needed to pivot continually away from what we were doing was churn. , we as the. Team. Team, it was easy for us to see how it might work because within the network, people knew who we were so we could, our feeds were full, people were posting.

It felt great, but getting into the shoes of somebody who didn't have any friends there, or maybe showed up and followed [00:14:00] accounts that were inactive. That was the really clear insight about like what wasn't working on the platform that described the churn on the platform. And you know, in order for symbol to work, what would've had to have happened was for those brand new users who didn't have connections, there still would've had to have been some kind of experience that kept them around.

Now, you know, there's a couple of ways we could have looked at this and probably thought about it differently. One would've been. One of the key insights we found is that the page that people listened to the most, where the greatest number of plays came from on symbol was someone's own profile, which is interesting.

You know, we conceived of it as a social network. Our assumption therefore would've been that it would've been from other people's songs, their feeds. But really what people were also doing was they were like curating their own music taste on their own profile and coming back and listening to that. And that was.

Maybe a hint about the direction that simple could have gone in. Now you see other services in the space, like Disco GOs is a [00:15:00] good example of this. Or Rate your music, rate my music rather your last fm, you know, companies where, you know, the they that are successful, where the sort of core premise of what they do is about, you know, curating a collection like, you know, to step outta music letterbox, just like that.

Good Reads is like that. So, you know, pushing symbol more into a place that was about. Describing your own music taste. Right. You know, basically creating your own record shelf. And then having that be the stickiest core feature of it. Discovering how that could work would've been a path for us.

That was interesting. Another thing that I think would've been interesting was, you know, we were integrated with, these are Spotify, apple Music, and SoundCloud. In order to do that, we had to make them interoperable with one another. So we created like a single matching algorithm across those services. But if you think about the broader internet, you know, people are always encountering music that they can't listen to because it's shared from a different streaming service than what they subscribe to.

So creating like a [00:16:00] universal translator for music would've been kind of an interesting tool for us to make. Could have almost been like an API service where. You know, symbol would've been one platform for that. But you could create like a search engine for music. We created like a Chrome extension where translate all the songs on a page to, you know, be universally playable.

So that's a version of single player mode. It's pretty different. It's not even really thinking about like a social profile per se, but how people socialize in any context. So there's other, definitely other ghosts we could have chased down, but

Jeff: But the problem with all that is, is they're all different ideas and each one of them takes time. And as much as we'd all love to have, you know, infinite, magically productive engineers, we don't. So you gotta, you pick, you know, maybe one or two depending on how much you've raised and pursue it, and you only get so much time.

So, you know, I think the thesis you can end it on is it's possible to do tons of work and yield no results and not any sticky growth and, you know, end up what happened. Conversely, I think you, you went from there and you ended up over at Audio Mac once again, you know, first [00:17:00] person doing the job of you created product for them and the product focus, you brought over a lot of practices and you found yourself, you know, the first time in, in a role there and the first time in your role leading product.

It was a very different situation. There was. Growth and you found a central thesis and how quickly were you actually able to kind of come in and go, oh, this is what it's supposed to look like.

Charlie: Definitely. Part of what I had honed at symbol in, you know, besides my own experience like working on a, you know, music app was like a systematic approach to testing stuff. So, I mean, even before I worked at Symbol, when I was just interested in starting startups, one of the big books in my life was Eric Reese's The Lean Startup, which I basically saw as like a reskinning of the scientific method.

Basically, he was just saying like. You should test a lot of things. And the only way a test can be valid is if you have a hypothesis that can be disproven. So try to apply that to everything [00:18:00] you do and, you know, just get it, you know, iterate, get leaner and leaner. So, I just thought that was, seems so.

Intuitive and smart to me. So when I came to Audio Mac, it was clear that something had been working. I mean, they had nearly a million daily active users, blue symbol out of the water, but there was no systematic data practice at the company. So there was no way in which a, we were, you know, collecting data and watching trends over time.

Or b, that we were testing our hypotheses. So one of the first things I did was I got in, I proposed that we start tracking a lot of stuff and I started looking at what was working. And that quickly took me to like, basically a user story about the artist and a user story about the listener.

Now, you know, audio Mac definitely presents with a pretty hard. You know, network challenge like a marketplace challenge. Artists [00:19:00] want listeners, and listeners want artists. And if artists shows up a place, there are no listeners, it's not that useful to them. And if listeners show up to a place where there's no artists, it's not that useful to them.

The way that Audio Mac broke that cycle in the first place before I showed up was they were almost kind of like a file locker. For mix tapes. So it was like you know, mega upload or media fire, except for it was a player, it was an embedded player as opposed to just being like a download site.

And so, you know, lots and lots of websites, you know, would use them as the default player because an artist would send them music, they would just put it in the player and they could host it on their blog. But that leveraged them into a library. And it also. Allowed them to sort of redirect the traffic from those blogs to their homepage.

So they, they had the seed of a very legitimate community there. The thing that changed though the breakthrough thing that changed, the reason why Audio Mac is like over 40 million users today, is that because they were initially [00:20:00] reliant on direct uploads on UGC, they were able to amass a really strong library.

That could rely strictly on ad supported model. So that meant that if you're from a country around the world or you know, that has like low spending power, you know, you are instantly priced out of on-demand streaming services that require you to pay like 11 bucks a month. What we had realized, we had created, in fact, what our users showed us before we even realized it was that we had built a way.

To create like a world class music service for the people who just, you know, can't afford , the conventional streaming services.

We could be the streaming service that really provides for people all around the world, irrespective of what the spending power is. And the giant breakthrough for that, I think for us was in 2019 when in West Africa, all of a sudden these Afrobeats artists realized that Audio Mac was a [00:21:00] free upload service.

Started uploading their music and sharing links that were bringing their listeners to the platform. And, you know, year over year, we have grown and grown and become really now the dominant streaming service in sub are in Africa. And when I think about like who we are as a company, I really feel like we're the streaming music service for everybody.

We're the service that's dedicated to access that's dedicated to, you know, trying to return the greatest amount of value generated, irrespective of what the spending power of a listener is trying to create a world where listeners and artists can get extremely close to one another , without boundaries.

Jeff: Like you said, you got into a world where those artists realized they could build, you know, further access their own audience that they've built by, you know, in a way that their audience could afford versus being kinda shut out of some of the bigger providers that, you know, have licensing fees around accessing the, you know, biggest pop stars in the world.

And Right. You said the magic was, there [00:22:00] was, you had the thesis though of that, of we want to give access to everyone and make it possible that, you know, despite the fact that in many countries, 11 bucks a month is a lot of money, there's other ways to fund the company and do that, and that gave access to these.

Regional artists to access their fan bases, but it also gave you guys the great side effect if you got music that wasn't being licensed from other, you know, providers, but it was being licensed, directed from the artist, and you were able to provide that and that drove a lot of usage on your end, right?

When you think about advertising revenue kind of as a channel or a monetization channel, you need a lot of people. And you have to kind of either build an audience or access someone else's audience. And you guys found a great lever to access a lot of people's, probably like mid-size audience. Our audience.

They're not the size of, you know, Taylor Swift with a billion people listening to them, but you take a lot of those people with hundreds of thousands or you know, a couple million fans, that adds up real quick.

Charlie: Absolutely. It's so true. [00:23:00] And on top of that, you know, this became kind of like a snowball effect for us because once we were able to demonstrate, for example, to the major labels, Hey, here's this population of people who they are not going to pay you on a subscription basis because they don't have the money to buy your subscriptions, however you can get paid from them.

Using ad revenue. That, that was our step into being able to negotiate major label contracts and to get Taylor Swift onto the platform to get Drake onto the platform to get Kendrick Lamar on the platform. If you think about globally spending power of listeners, the bottom of the pyramid was just being disregarded because they weren't meeting this arbitrary threshold, but they represent so much potential revenue and giant fan bases.

The big challenge I think for the future of the music industry, which everybody's talking about is about, you know, how do you. Not only diversify forms of revenue, but how do you diversify, you know, revenue targets? How do you get [00:24:00] people who can spend more than 11 bucks a month to spend more than that?

That's like what, you know, folks like Lucian Grange called like super fans. But similarly, how do you get people who can't spend up to $11 a month to still return value to you? You know, this very rigid description of how , paying for music should work. Returns a lot less money than it otherwise would 'cause it's inflexible.

Jeff: We had the head of product over at Kickstarter on he's new within the past little bit of time you know, as the company's kind of reinvigorated itself. And it's interesting hearing him kind of talk about a similar thing is one thing is how do you get.

Existing power users, you know, that are power spenders, how do you get, you know, them to fund more campaigns and push for that. But also how do you get more of these creators who have their own audiences in, and that brings in, you know, a portion of revenue. And then these super funders bring in a portion of revenue and you need both of them if you're really gonna hit that unlock velocity.

But to kind of curl back onto the proc market, fit the way you [00:25:00] guys found to get, there was this piece of, you had that initial thing around access to artists at a rate that could be afforded by a, you know, probably 80% of the world that was kinda locked out of some of the higher priced streaming services.

And they came back. A million daily active users is nothing to sneeze at, but like that right there, if you get people coming back daily you've got fit, now it's time to pour, you know, gas on the fire. But until you can kinda show that you got people coming back and you have that core thesis, honestly, like you said, you could get hype and score a bunch of users, but if they're not.

Active after a bit of time, like all you kind of did is burn burn some server time and maybe used up some usernames that people would've wanted.

Charlie: Right. No, it's completely true. It's totally true. And again, you over these seven years to see us go from. I dunno, maybe it was 900,000 daily active users to today, 12 million daily active users. I really feel like it does come down [00:26:00] precisely to what you're saying, which is it's a structural economic explanation.

The market needs a product. The market is people who, you know, again, they are structurally excluded from like the economics of streaming. So what they need is a product that can give them this access. And so, you know, in many ways what audio Mac is it's just the right product for that particular market.

And again, you know, I think in the, if you think about Hi historically. The core objective of streaming in the first place, right? Going back to like Pandora, Spotify, SoundCloud, you know, 2007 to 2010, zone 2011 zone, like the objective for those companies was to demonstrate that people will pay for convenience.

Instead of piracy is free, but it's inconvenient. You know, streaming is paid, but it, you know, it's on demand. It's extremely quick. Proving that out with a $10 a month subscription was a gigantic [00:27:00] coup, right? I mean, if you look at, you know, recorded music revenues year over year from 1999 till 2015, they go down every single year, and the only point at which they inflict and start coming back up again is when Stream music becomes the dominant source of recorded revenue.

So they proved that thesis out, but in so doing, locked themselves into. The use case that they began with, right. The deals that they had with labels was for that amount of money and. They have been trying to break their way out. Both, you know, to be able to generate more revenue for themselves, but also because I think that they recognize that, you know, there's more companies entering the space that are, you know, diversifying this question of like, how much should someone have to pay in order to access music?

And if you're allowing, you know, this gigantic section of the world who can't meet that $11 a month threshold, if you're cutting those folks out, how much money are you leaving on the table?

Jeff: maybe let's, Let's take one step deeper now, right.

We've kinda looked at, you know, what does fit and lack of fit [00:28:00] look like and how they can kinda look the same and present the same very early on, but pretty quickly you should be able to tell the difference. And if you can't tell the difference, you probably don't have fit. But that had a lot of follow on.

Effects into how you then did growth experiments and how you grew the company because I mean, you kinda enter the company around what, a million daily actives and, and 4 million monthly that did not stay that way very long though. Right? It's what something up to 42 million monthly actives at this point.

That's a lot of people.

Charlie: it's a lot of people. It's a ton of people. It's a ton of people. I think it was when I joined, I think it was 4 million monthlies and now it's 42 million monthlies and it was like 900,000 dailies and now it's like 12 million da. It's

Jeff: Right. So I mean, what was kinda the key to building a successful practice of growth, and driving growth experiments.

Charlie: Yeah, the answer, which is like you have, I feel you have to be monomaniacal about. Is measurability. I feel like, you, you can try virtually anything you want as long as you are following from something that you've learned [00:29:00] in the past, and you are allowing yourself to be proven wrong in what you do next.

So I'll give you an example of this. So, you know, in the beginning, you know, audio Mac very simple revenue premise, right? Which is true of YouTube or anybody else like. Free tier has ads pay to remove ads. So it's, you know, ads and subscriptions was basically the model for Audio Mac. And, you know, we knew for a fact that there was spending power latent, untapped spending power on Audio Mac that we had to not only, you know, claim for ourselves, but to return to artists.

Like if we could build engines whereby. Listeners who, who can pay more, do pay more in order to return that value back to artists. Now it's we're an even more compelling platform. So, I mean, from my perspective, you know, my like pie in the sky objective, which I'll spend the rest of my career trying to get to is I want audio Mac to not only be the most open [00:30:00] and accessible music platform, but I also want it to be the most profitable for the artist.

Like, if I could achieve those two things, which seem in contradiction, but if I could achieve those two things, I really feel like that would be winning. So, you know, our initial idea for this was like maybe 2020. We were like, okay. Is there a world where listeners could pay more to get special access to artists, which is a service we launched called supporters.

The idea would basically be like, we would give out like special badges if you had supported artists. We would allow artists to privately send message blasts just to people who had paid them. You know, we thought that there was an element of altruism to it. Like, Hey, I really feel an affinity for this artist.

I just wanna give them money. So we wanted to build a whole suite out of it, and we had what we thought was interesting, kind of anecdotal evidence that this might work. So, you know, we had seen people, you know, saying to us like, Hey, how do I support artists more? We thought that was a sign. There could be a solution here.

We launched it and it did. Kind of okay, but you know, [00:31:00] not that great. And so we looked at it and we were like, well, what's really actually going on here? Let's look at like the user behavior here. It wasn't, nobody doing it would happen is every now and again there would be like these big spikes and we would say like, well, what is that?

What we found, and this was kind of mind boggling, was that people. Were supporting themselves. So an artist would come onto Audio Mac and they would give themselves a support. We were like, what kind of sense does that make? They're coming out with less money than they put in because they have to pay a fee to do this.

What, how does this work? And then we realized that on our homepage of the app, on the dashboard of the app, there was a section top supported projects. And most. Recently supported

projects. So people, artists were buying display advertising for themselves. You know, they were just basically saying like, I need to get more visibility.

I wanna get on the homepage. And we said, wait a minute here,

Jeff: we 

Charlie: thought about this in the wrong way. We can do this. And then we started realizing, wait, this is actually a way bigger thing than what this [00:32:00] is. Because you know, I'm sure you come across this in some conversations with other folks, you know, fraud in music is becoming like a way bigger problem, you know?

If you Google, like buy audio, Mac plays, buy Spotify plays, buy SoundCloud plays, there's all these scammers out there who are trying to take people's credit card information in exchange for plays, and either they do, they bought streams, or worst case scenario, they just take the money and run. We said, wait, if, what?

If we can make an on platform, an on app advertising platform for artists where we basically create like a safe channel for them to do this? And they'll never get scammed. They can get real plays from real listeners. We can guarantee that we're delivering this to like, receptive audiences. Like, can we build something?

This is what these people are trying to do already. 

Jeff: They're trying to build their own daily active listeners.

Charlie: exactly a hundred percent Right Platform of platforms, turtles, all the way down. And so, we built this thing called Boost. Boost has been like a really huge success. Boost has been like a way for us to like. [00:33:00] Enable artists with spending power to grow their fan bases directly and generate like a brand new revenue stream for us, which is incredible.

But it wouldn't have been possible if we didn't have this core idea of a having a disprovable hypothesis could support us work. What would support, you know, what would success look like? Launched it. It was not successful. But then also to follow that failed hypothesis with another hypothesis. Okay, if not this, then what's going on?

And let's try this other thing, and this other thing works. So, you know, in a nutshell, you know, did this help us launch like one of our most successful revenue features?

Jeff: This is something I think a lot of people miss is I. You can still learn a ton from a failed experiment. If you look at like, what was the real thing going on here? And can we bend this a little bit?

Or are we five degrees off kind of thing. And oftentimes the difference of wild exponential success and failure is like not, you know, 90 degrees. It's like two degrees. And if [00:34:00] you can just dial that in, you can find it. 

Charlie: To say something just about that, like the thing about product market fit is it's a lot like gravity in the sense that you can feel it pulling you 

You can't really build something successful away from product market fit. But when you have product market fit, it keeps telling you that it wants more things like that.

And it's a strange kind of disembodied force that you end up working. With or against, you know, you can either have big creative ideas that fly in the face of it and challenge it, and if you're at the luckiest, maybe you're right, but probably you're wrong. Or you can listen to it and you can float downstream with it.

It's an incredibly profound thing once you're around it. And, the tragedy I feel like of symbol was that. It was clear what the product market fit that people were telling us they wanted was, it was simply that we couldn't provide it for 'em 'cause we couldn't code their friends into place.

But at Audio Mac, you know what product Market Fit is just [00:35:00] giving artisan listeners access to one another. That's it. 

Jeff: I think this is a lesson that people really should internalize is, you know, and I've said this to my team a lot, when you find the thing that works, don't try to reinvent the wheel, like double down, like fricking crazy on it. 

But as much as I feel like I could just sit here and we have like eight more experiments on our doc that we kind of talked about previous to that we could have talked about that we missed, But I gotta give you the rest of your day back, man. Thank you so much for joining, Charlie. This was a really good time. And if people want to reach out and maybe hear more or pick your brain about some of these other experiences we weren't able to get to is LinkedIn the best way to do it or is there another way you prefer?

Should they find you on Audio Mac as a user?

Charlie: Well, first of all, Jeff, I just wanna say thanks so much. I had a really great time with you. This is really fun. Great conversation. Happy to come back anytime you want. 'cause yeah it's a blast. And yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. I look like this. So if you'll see, you see my profile picture, it's not too different from this.

, I mean, you wanna hit 

Jeff: Awesome. 

Charlie: I'm around.

Jeff: Awesome. Well thank you so much for coming on. And listeners, if you think we have product market fit and you're listening on YouTube, give us a subscribe. If you're on Spotify or on Apple [00:36:00] Podcasts, you know, subscribe there, follow write us a review, all that kinda stuff. That is what helps us get out to listeners.

So if you think we got product market fit and you wanna hear more of it, please do that. Please, Charlie, it was a blast, man. Thank you for coming on. Let's stay in touch and thank you so much. We'll talk soon. Cheers.

Charlie: Of course, cheers.