Building & Closing-ish a Music Streaming and Selling platform for Kenyan Artists.

Lessons on building for a Kenyan audience and consumer in the Kenyan music industry.

Hi Andrew, what’s your background and what has been your career?

Hi I’m Andrew. I started out as a graphic designer in my early campus days, doing logos and posters mainly for practice but later I realized I could make some money on the side doing this. I got into UI-UX design around 2016, through mobile game design.

At the time I wasn’t even calling myself a designer, I was trying to build my first game in Unity and C# was giving me headaches, I didn’t know where to get help thus I went on LinkedIn and started searching for groups and people doing game development in Kenya.

I stumbled upon a group and in that group found someone building his own game, I saw that the UI was not yet well done and being that I was already good with graphics, I offered to do his UI if he would help with the C# code for my slider game.

His game ended up becoming really awesome that I forgot about my own, I decided to work on it full time.

This was my introduction to UI-UX/Product Design. As the years have gone by, I have worked on a number of products with a number of really great people, some successful, some failed and some like Fom, providing some much required learning experiences.

What were you working on and how did the idea come up?

I was working on Fom (toafom.com) with Chege aka Kace a great backend developer. Fom was a music streaming and selling platform for upcoming Kenyan artists. The platform enabled artists to sell their music directly to fans and be able to earn a living directly from their craft. More of a crossover between Spotify and Bandcamp.

We had so many friends and acquaintances who were budding artists and music producers and they would always complain of earning very little from streaming platforms, a lot of them also didn’t know how to even begin getting their music onto these streaming platforms.

I had also been part of a team that had managed one of Kenya’s hit makers, Chris Kaiga thus this gave me the confidence to want to look further into the complains we were getting and try come up with a solution.

Kace (who had also done music at some point) and I decided that we had the skills and the experience to work on something that would make it easier for Kenyan artists to have their music audios online without having to go through 3^rd party music distributors and be able to sell directly to fans and get that money in real-time.

It was so easy to upload music videos onto YouTube, why then was it such a task uploading music on streaming platforms?

We got to work building something that would give the artists as much autonomy as YouTube does.

How did you build the idea?

We needed something fast. So we could test out our hypothesis. For the frontend I got a template on Envanto which I edited as the Html developer that I was while Chege worked on the backend using PHP. For payments we used the Tinypesa API which was a God-send, it came exactly when we needed it to.

A short while after Kace was building the whole thing (full-stack) while I was doing sales and marketing.

How did you get your first customers/users?

Being that we already knew people in the music industry, getting our first users was not hard at all. We simply approached the friends who were artists and producers who had music studios to try it out. These are also the guys who helped us get other people on board.

It was a bit easier as they saw the importance of the platform.

Afterwards of course we had to employ further marketing tactics like doing free photo shoots for the artist, album art design, animated videos, some simple social media marketing and small exclusive events for music promotion.

We used the skills that we already had to offer additional value to the artists so they would talk about us to other artists.

When did things start to go wrong?

Things really didn’t start to go wrong, but as the famous American hip-hop artist JCole says, “this music biz is a cliff”. We realized that such a platform would need some substantial amount of financing to help grow it further as well as rump up our marketing and educational endeavors.

There would have to be a lot education taking place to enable the artists do enough marketing and content creation/music production that would then allow them convert fans into customers.

We also had about 180 Artists at the time but the speed of content creation and quality tracks being added to the platform was very low.

What were the causes for product’s failure?

I would say two things, the first one being that the platform had no real way of making money, we had a subscription for the artist at 200 bob a month which was not very useful. We also intended to replace this with taking a small cut of every sale in future but how to implement this was also a challenge being that one of our biggest selling points was that the artist would be able to get their money in real time and we didn’t know of any payment API that would make this easier to implement.

Payments and payment APIs are just a whole headache.

Consumer based products where you cannot control the quality of the product can be tricky, especially for a product such as music. There is a certain quality standard for music that has already been set by international players as well as other African greats, this cuts across lyricism, production quality as well as consistency in putting out content. To ensure such standards are met on our platform we would have had to invest a good amount of time and money into the artist and partner music studios.

I also slacked with marketing, the heart was beginning not to be in it for both of us and we had another product going that would take up some of our time while also doing freelance work.

If you could start over, what would you do differently?

This has been a great learning experience and still is. I still monitor the platform from time to time and talk to friends in the music industry who use it as well. Still gathering data.

I wouldn’t change much, we did a lot of things right, especially marketing, but if by some luck we would have had a payments API that would have allowed for real-time payments to the artist while we also got a cut for revenue generation, that would have been great.

Do you have any advice to others starting businesses in Kenya/Africa?

As long as there is a customer you are serving, even if your product is software based, you still have to talk to the customer/user.

When the customer knows who is behind the product and they know that you are willing to help out, they help you out even more. Talk to the people you are building for; they will always tell you what they want.

Are you working on anything new currently?

Yes, we are working on something that we hope will aid the fragmented e-commerce sector in Kenya work more efficiently.

But more than anything, we are building this newsletter and a simple platform that we hope will help other founders and builders build better, make less mistakes as they go and secure that first sale a lot faster than we did.

A platform for collaboration, education and knowledge sharing for those building in Africa for an African/global consumer.

Where can we go to learn more?

You are already here. Read other founder/builder stories and stay tuned for more to come.

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