In your own words, what does your company do?
Songstats is a group of music lovers, ultimate frisbee players, and close friends that came together in Bali, Indonesia with the shared vision of building the best music analytics app for artists and record labels. Our core product is the Songstats dashboard and mobile app, a SaaS platform that aggregates insights across 14 different music services, including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Shazam, and more. Our objective is to make it easier for artists, record labels, and industry professionals to monitor the performance of their releases, and to employ data-driven marketing to maximize the reach of their music.
In addition to many upcoming new features on Songstats, we have some related businesses on the way soon.
📈 Monthly revenue $80,000
📈 ~% Churn: 10%
📈 ~% Net profit: 15%
📈 Funding: Bootstrapped by us
📈 Initial cost/investment to start the company: $360,000
📈 Number of team members: 8
📈 Number of founders: 4
📈 Started: 2020, April
How does the company make money?
💰 Artist, Label, and Professional subscription tiers for the Songstats website & mobile app.
💰 Enterprise API offering for other companies like music distributors or web3 platforms who want to include music analytics in their own offerings.
💰 Custom data solutions for companies that solve unique business problems in a variety of different applications.
3 strategies that have worked to attract and retain customers?
✅ Auto-generated sharing artworks: We enable subscribers to auto-generate a sleek artwork showcasing an accomplishment, such as getting added to a big Spotify playlist or charting in a particular country. The artwork can be shared to Instagram Stories from the Songstats mobile app in one click. This is a widely used and loved feature by our users, and also one that helps to market the platform when users share the artwork with our logo on social media.
✅ Top-notch customer service: We personally reach out to every new customer, welcoming them to the platform, providing useful information, and opening up a direct line of communication should they have any questions, feedback, or concerns. Our support team is also well-trained to handle any type of communication-related to Songstats.
✅ The Songstats Lab: We leverage our blog and email newsletter to communicate with everyone who’s ever signed up for the Songstats platform, showcasing product updates, customer case studies, industry insights & more.
3 things that you’ve learned about hiring and retaining great talent?
✅ Find people who want to be there for the long term: It takes time for employees to grow into their potential, and we want someone who wants to be around for the long term, become a subject matter expert in various components of the business, and feel empowered by their contributions to the company. For the most part, this is much more valuable than getting short-term contributions from contracted work (though there’s a place for that too for one-off projects).
✅ Focus on cultural fit when recruiting talent: We’re a small, tight-knit team. While performance is obviously very important, so is the bond with the team. We’ve chosen a path where we have control over how we build Songstats (rather than seeking out funding, for example), and this is by design – it’s more than just a company to us, it’s embedded into our lives, and we want to surround ourselves with a group of friends that share the excitement and embrace this journey together.
✅ Hold regular feedback sessions: Take a step out of the day-to-day work and set up a forum for providing positive feedback and areas for improvement, while also encouraging feedback from employees about how we manage the business.