Have you heard of StartupBus? Basically it’s a road trip from San Francisco to SXSW where you ride together on a bus with a bunch of other scrappy startup hustlers and build a crazy idea - which you show off when you arrive.
Right down my alley, so I’m applying. This is my application:
Scrappy. Hacker. Hustler. This is me.
After graduating college in 2008, I decided “screw getting a job” and went the entrepreneurship route instead. I didn’t have any money saved up, and I didn’t know any investors, but I did have the overwhelming burn to make it on my own. I got my Dad to give me a small stipend to live on while I worked around the clock in my apartment to hack together my first iPhone app, Forex On The Go. I managed to release it before a single other Forex app was available for the iPhone, and so it was an instant hit. But – I needed to do a lot more to stay on top, and to monetize it. Still working from my living room, I hustled high and low to find top-notch people who could work remote and on commission. I found them, and today Forex On The Go is still the top Forex application for the iPhone and white labeled by over 30 brokers.
You would think that would be enough for me, but no. With the first business off the ground and profitable, I knew if I could stay really scrappy, I could go after my true passion – Music. And so I did. Without knowing a single person or having any idea where we would stay, my girlfriend and I packed up and moved across the country to Silicon Valley. We used our skills we learned before, and again found great offsite people to work with and relied on our pure determination while we worked night, day and weekends out of our apartment to build our new music app LetsListen.
Needless to say, we know how to work in confined spaces and make big stuff happen in very little time. StartupBus is calling our name, and we’d love to be apart of it.
Thanks,
Cole Flournoy
Ok so here’s the deal… Facebook’s brand new “Listen with me” feature that’s been getting so much attention – LetsListen already has it, and it’s had it for a long time. So why haven’t you heard about it? Because Facebook hasn’t allowed you to see it.
To date, Facebook has only allowed certain companies with special insider deals to integrate with ticker feed. They've given the “insider” companies an enormous and unfair head start to be the first to market with this new extremely powerful feature, and left all others out in the cold to wait.
For example, prior to the F8 conference in Septemeber 2011 (where ticker feed was announced), Facebook had already made a secret deal with Spotify to let them integrate with ticker feed long before the majority of their competitors even knew about it or were allowed to apply. In exchange for this huge advantage, Spotify had to agree to solely use Facebook as its user account login mechanism.
Spotify posts every single song you play to the ticker feed, and so what this insider deal did was allow Spotify to completely dominate the ticker feed and gain major market share while 99% of the would-be competitors were simply excluded from competing. Many have recognized this anti-competitive head start as the primary driving force behind’s Spotify’s success in the US thus far.
LetsListen is certainly one of those competing apps that could have been first to market with the “Listen with me” feature, had we not been excluded. We have had this feature ready long before Spotify, but Facebook just hasn’t let us show it to anybody yet. Here is a video of it in action (made using developer test accounts):
Zuck if you are out there, let us in. We’re a small bootstrapped startup in the “working out of the apartment phase”, but we’re scrappy and we think we have integrated with the ticker feed in a better way than any other music apps out there. We don’t require any download, we don’t force the user to authorize with Facebook before using our app, and we are free forever. We also have a more social group listening experience where our users can share and suggest music to each other in real time. So please, approve us and let us compete with the big boys, we're ready.
via thefailcon.com
A big thanks to Dolby Lounge and Michael Leifer for sponsoring LetsListen at FailCon, Cass and Diane for putting on another great event, Ron Sheridan for hustling with us all day, and of course all our fantastic team members.
via SoundCtrl
