746 - Rohan Agrawal (Incentify) On Building a Social Network Around Music Discovery

[00:01:12] Mat Sherman: All right, how's it going, everyone. Welcome to another episode of forward thinking founders, where we talk to founders about their companies, their visions for the future, and have the two collide. Today. I'm very excited to be talking to Rohan Argowal. Who is is a co-founder of Incentify . Welcome to the show.

How's it going?

[00:01:26] Rohan Agrawal: Hey, man, what's up.

[00:01:29] Mat Sherman: I am doing really well. I'm just here excited to learn more about what you are working on over at your company. For people that haven't heard of Incentify , what are you working on that, what's incentify.

Sure. So

[00:01:39] Rohan Agrawal: our one-liner is basically incentivizing social network for music and as part of our MVP, we incidentally launched a couple of weeks back and our MVP is a platform we launched to share playlists, links, and discover playlists.

What we have done is that we have integrated with Spotify and apple music, and we are building a repository for playlists, musically, which anyone can add. So for example, like which streaming [00:02:00] platform you use to listen to music,

[00:02:03] Mat Sherman: I use Spotify.

[00:02:04] Rohan Agrawal: So have you ever faced the issue of, sharing a link with someone and maybe they are not.

Or any other platform. So if you have faced that, then our solution will be perfect for you in the sense that, our typical user journey is something that in, you sign up for, incentify, you link either your Spotify, apple music accounts, and you import all your playlists onto us and we convert them into what we call clubs on incentives.

And now these club links can be shared, and these are agnostic links. So for example, if mark is importing his Spotify playlist, He can share it with Rawan, who use apple music. So I can just directly click of a button, export it directly back to apple in one go. So library who that friction.

So this is very basic. This is a basic functionality that you're trying to do and your launch this. And we are trying to build on this and trying to position this as a social network for music.

[00:02:50] Mat Sherman: So walk me through walk me through a little bit about why you decided to start this, what's the origin story here and what's interesting about this whole sector for you.

Sure.

[00:02:59] Rohan Agrawal: I'm an avid [00:03:00] music listener and I've been facing this problem, around on music sharing and discovery, streaming is great because it lets you access millions of songs, there's that social aspect behind it, which is really missing. And I shared latest links and music links all the time with my friends that I'm sure that I just thought to myself, that I should be better way.

And instead of waiting for someone to do it, I was like, why not give it a short bite? And that's how the origin story is really. And but we started out with the idea of the social network, but we really want to make some meaningful impact in the industry. And the idea basically is to get users, gain some leverage and then convince artists to come on board and, basically then monetize that.

So that's the backstory.

[00:03:39] Mat Sherman: And as you've gotten started on this, I'm curious what have been a couple of things that you've learned, or one thing that you've learned as you've gotten this off the ground and working on this, whether it be product related, marketing fundraising, what are some learnings that you've had so far?

[00:03:51] Rohan Agrawal: So the primary learnings have been in product, right? I suppose I founded, and this was my first experience of really building a product. [00:04:00] And what I found was that despite the fact that, founders who are experienced and this can have repeated tales of, was the right approach to building a product, et cetera.

When you actually go ahead and do it, you just repeat all those mistakes all over again. And this is something that I experienced and, whether it does not focusing on the right outcomes or not building for the right. But having launched our MVP, I think I'm in a better position now to, for the improvement, but that is one learning that no matter how much you read from books or from things of other founders, until you actually try your self, you really come to know what it's like.

[00:04:31] Mat Sherman: That is something that every, I guess you could say second time founder, or at least leader stage first time, founder. But there's always the people that think they know it, from the books, they just got to jump in and then they actually get to understand how it all works. So if you were you're working on this, every day, this is your thing, but if you were to zoom out, 5, 10, 15 years into the future what do you think, the world would look like with this as a really big company, or in other words, what's the big vision here and what direction are you growing in.

[00:04:58] Rohan Agrawal: But yeah, basically [00:05:00] just change how the music industry works. I've been tracking this space for a long time. I've been writing about this also that the industry is really broken. Streaming has made it great for record labels, but then the artists, they get barely anything posturing. So I'm really bullish on the web three ecosystem and the crypto space.

Help build the next platform or the next spotify, which lets artists monetize their music on their own terms, tokenize it. And there are all these possibilities now with smart contracts and with tokenized IP rights that are possible. So I really want to be at the forefront of it and hopefully Incentify.

I can do it, but you've got to start somewhere. So we'll be starting with the social net.

[00:05:38] Mat Sherman: And in order to make it happen right. And make the vision, come to life, you'll need some help. It takes a village to make a startup work. So my question for you is how can the forward-thinking founders community help?

Are you hiring? Are you raising money, looking for, users or customers? How can we assist?

[00:05:52] Rohan Agrawal: Of course, first and foremost, I'd love to get feedback. Music, I guess everyone uses, I think this product would be a good fit for anyone to get feedback. So I'd [00:06:00] love to get. Just to start off. In terms of fundraising.

I wouldn't say that I'm actively fundraising because we want to get product market fit. So the second version of our product, which is, we'll just started building it. We are focusing fully on that, but having said that there is an opportunity I'd love to speak to a founder who shares the same.

Who can help get us contact in the industry, the music industry, and, really is aligned with the goal and the mission of our company. Yeah, that is where we are.

[00:06:30] Mat Sherman: And, for kind of the last the last question, if someone, was interested in what you're doing, they want to learn more and they want to check you out or get involved in some way to give you feedback.

How can they find you? Do you have a website, social media account and email address? How can someone find you online?

[00:06:42] Rohan Agrawal: We have a Subtack setup, so you can subscribe to our newsletter it's or.com. We have a website as our web app is up up or , just , DM on Instagram, on Twitter pages. I'll drop the links for that as well.

So yeah it's called club Incentify. So at rate club incentive by on Twitter or Instagram, so feel free to hit us up over there. [00:07:00] Subscribe to our newsletter. I'm happy to chat to you guys. And first and foremost test out a product and we'll be happy to get your feedback.

[00:07:07] Mat Sherman: Cool. Thank you so much for coming onto the podcast and sharing what you're working on with us.

I wish you the best of luck building this out. Thanks for coming on.