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Welcome Brendan.  Tell us a bit about Soundwave?

“Soundwave is a free app for iPhone and Android that allows you to instantly and automatically share what you are listening to, and see what your friends, family and favourites (musicians, athletes, celebs etc.) are listening to for inspiration. There's a location feature where you can draw a circle over any location (country, city, street, building) and see the top played and most recent played songs in that circle. Since launch two weeks ago, we've been featured by Google, and received the coveted "Editor’s Choice" in the Apple App Store.”

How does someone with an idea, no money and no team go about making their dream a reality?

“Have laser focus, maintain momentum and execute! And take advantage of the really great support structures that are in place here in Ireland now. There are great accelerator programmes like the NDRC LaunchPad that invite companies to pitch their early stage ideas every 6 months for a place on the programme.

“If accepted, these companies get access to an amazing network of mentors, micro-seed funding, office space and structured supports. We went through it and couldn't recommend it enough as it allows the team to focus on the idea and the product and takes away the "unknowns" of how to actually create a company.”

What’s the future of the music business?  Is there even a business in music anymore?

“It’s an oldie but a goodie - what gets measured, gets managed. Right now the industry is suffering from a shortage of data. They used to rely on sales data, but with the increase in illegal downloads these are no longer truly reflective of music trends.

“As a result, the industry is stumbling around in the dark, running focus groups, spending millions on A&R trying to find ‘the next big thing’ - but in reality they are missing some key data points that would really help them. The future lies in real-time data and the industry needs to understand what its market is doing…in real-time. Right now they are guessing.  We know where, when and what people are listening to. The music industry isn't dead – it’s just changing, and change is good.”

What does it mean to be innovative in business today?

“For us, being innovative means having a direct link to users and checking constantly that you are building a product that other people actually want.  We included the users in the product development cycle for over a year; used online forums to ask what people wanted and talked to our friends and family about “this friend” who had an idea called ‘Soundwave’ so we could hear objective, unbiased feedback.

“When we started developing we held community open nights where any interested parties could come by our offices and see what we were building, critique and offer feature suggestions and tweaks. When we had a stable beta version of the product – we opened up a 12-week, 1000 person beta trial – where we collected mountains of feedback and iterated the product 6 times. We wanted to build a product that people wanted not a product we wanted; and we wanted to build a product that our grandmothers understood and not just us! Throughout this process we picked up some great testers and later on endorsers. Stephen Fry, Steve Wozniak, Ashton Kutcher and Mark Cuban all participated as beta testers.” 

What drives and inspires you?

“We've always been entrepreneurial in spirit and very competitive - so I guess those two traits have pushed us! Aidan, our CTO, has a degree in computer science and was working towards his PhD in the same field when Soundwave lured him away. Craig, our COO, is a lawyer with a great attention to detail and all things operational. I have an undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering and a Master’s degree in Energy Engineering. All three of us have been entrepreneurial from the outset.

“When I was in college I designed and manufactured a fleet of rickshaws, then organised for a team of drivers to rent the rickshaws and another team to sell advertising on them - learning a lot in the process. The other two have their war stories too, everything from affiliate kickback for online biscuit sales to online property startups!”

L-R Brendan O’Driscoll, Aidan Sliney, Craig Watson

More Information

Soundwave is available now from the App Store, and on Google Play. For more information visit soundwave.com

This article was written by Aidan Cassidy, Head of Digital Content, Communicorp.

This article originally appeared in Newstalk Magazine for iPad in July, for more details go here.