DemoBox was a tool born out of the PayPal Start Tank accelerator in London in 2015.
The concept was formed from meetings with my then client, later turned business partner, who wanted to discuss a platform that would streamline the talent discovery process for the music industry, and came to me to flesh out ideas for the product.
After several meetings, I was excited about the concept and we had a good idea of how it would work.
The problem was that record labels mainly use email addresses or basic web forms to invite new music submissions. They then receive tens of thousands of emails/messages per year, with no way of organising and filtering them, thus wasting lots of time and making it very difficult to unearth the 'diamonds in the rough'.
The (proposed) solution was to create a platform that allows for the efficient receiving, filtering and organisation of music submissions.
With contacts in the industry, I was well placed to help guide the early stages of product market fit, and so before jumping in, I convinced the client to allow me to conduct some interviews with the type of music industry professionals and musicians who were the target end users.
The research questions were focused around the current process(es) in place for receiving and managing new music. I wanted to understand where the process worked, where it didn't, and where the real paint points were in it.
I interviewed around 10 record label managers and talent scouts, and a handful of musicians (to see what the experience was from their point of view).
I also went to these meetings armed with some basic mockups of the proposed platform, to get some initial feedback on the proposed user flows and UI.
There is virtually no process! I was quite amazed to find that even larger music companies have paid very little attention to the whole process of receiving new music/talent (the life blood of any record label). Many have inboxes stuffed with countless unread emails and there is often no process for filtering the funnel from a large number of songs to a focused shortlist of interesting music.
Everybody we spoke to received the UI mockups well and were excited to beta test our solution in the coming months.
I created a basic user journey based on interviews with label managers/talent scouts, which informed the important task flows and wireframes created from these flows. There were some key flows to get right, so I tested the various approaches by sharing clickable prototypes (created in Sketch/Balsamiq) via Invision with a few talent scouts at record labels. It was clear that to be able to review hundreds of songs as quickly as possible, a very simple approach would be needed so a tinder-style swiping approach was adopted.
It was currently taking anywhere from 1-5 minutes to review each track via inbox submissions, and we estimated that our approach would bring that down to 20-30 seconds in most cases.
Once we'd iterated on the wireframe prototypes to make the submission and review flows as efficient as possible, I worked on the final UI in Sketch.
The design was built upwards from mobile to desktop, with minimal changes required across breakpoints, other than column counts and music player approach.
We launched DemoBox at the end of the PayPal Start Tank accelerator, with clients such as Sony Music, Warner Music Group and more using the beta version, with excellent feedback from both artists and labels. There were some areas for improvement on the UX front, and had we had more time to iterate and test more approaches with real users, we would probably have eliminated them before launch.
As with any early stage startup, time was always against us. It would have been nice to user test some hi-fidelity, detailed prototypes to get more detailed feedback from users, but overall the beta launch was a big success, with some major music brands using (and loving) the product, as well as hundreds of submissions a day from artists from launch day and multiple new music brands/labels signing up in months after launch.
