As someone that can’t really play an instrument, I can get lost in music apps that helps you easily make catchy beats like you somehow know what you’re doing. That’s the fun part of Disco Fingers, a newly released iPad app that lets you crunch out tunes, throw in some voice filters, and share them with the community or your friends.
The app was created by Oslo-based Propell, who we last covered as they launched a “Netflix for Children’s books” targeting the Norwegian audience. CEO Per Harald Borgen tells while they saw the difficulties of scaling children’s ebooks to more and more markets, one thing they found was the best part of making those books was making the music. So rather than the traditional music creation tools with their fancy sliders, they figured they would bring down the barrier to entry and help even the tone-deaf make music in a fun way.
“It’s first of all very easy – you can’t go wrong. It’s very funny, not only because of the characters but because you can add your own voice and add filters, so people use it and have a great laugh,” says Borgen.
After you’ve got your tune set up, you can then easily share it to your friends through a link, or if you think it’s good enough you can push it to the Radio of the Disco Fingers community. To keep the quality high, each new user starts with enough credits to publish two songs to the radio, but if you get enough likes on your beats then you can keep pushing out more.
Probably the best example of this is the ArcticStartup theme song made by Borgen, which is apparently rated 9th on their list of 363 songs on the radio. It’s pretty catchy.
For a revenue model you can pay for more of these radio credits if you feel you’re a misunderstood artist, but in general they’re pushing people to unlock the premium version of the app, which allows you to get access to all the instruments and voice filters.
Sharing everything
One of the most interesting things about Propell is that they’re sharing all of their ups and downs and how much revenue they need to hit before they run out of money. It’s a fascinating read that can be found with daily updates on their blog. Yesterday’s starts out:
On Sunday we got 1 155 downloads. But only 70 USD in revenue, which means an even worse conversion rate than the day before.
The majority of the downloads were in Spain, probably because of this article.
What’s interesting to see it that 300 of the downloads are from an educational institution. They probably won’t convert very good, but it might help to spread the app further.
Each post then ends with the numbers, which are currently:
Revenue so far: 285 USD
Runway left: 81 days
It’s so real, and from my perspective of an inbox full of “we’re killing it” bullshit from entrepreneurs all day it’s really refreshing to read. If anyone’s interested in publishing similar posts on ArcticStartup, let us know at [email protected]
“We don’t want to feel ashamed of having little money,” Borgen tells us. “So we try to turn the fact that we’re in a bit of a struggle into something positive that can help us.”
Thanks to the blog, the company says they’ve received several requests from people that want to help them for free.
Soon the company hopes to release an iPhone version and in the meantime will be focusing on acquisitions and that conversion rate. You folks reading this on an iPad can download it here.
