TempoTrader
From conception to launch, TempoTrader's mission was to equitably fund independent musicians' careers. With patent pending marketplace technology, the platform allowed users to purchase subscriptions to private music that they could then resell at a later date for profit.
Artists could upload and distribute unlimited music. Users could uncover up and coming artists. Both could profit.
My Involvement
During the summer between my sophomore and junior year at Florida State University, two of my closest friends and I had an idea for a platform where artists were paid equitably for their music and fans with good taste could profit. At the time, we had no real idea what that meant or how that could be achieved. Over the course of the next 3 and half years, we'd secure grant funding, launch an MVP, alpha and beta, implement digital marketing strategies, execute event marketing tactics, and partner with over 75 musicians in the Greater Nashville Area and beyond.
The cofounders (Maxime Riahi and Sage deLisser) and I led each of these efforts with the help of developers who we partnered with after a year or so of planning, research, advisement, wire-framing, and mentoring. Setting biweekly scrums, both marketing and development, coordinating scrums via Google Hangouts, managing the project through use of tools like Trello, Slack, GitHub, and staying committed to the mission for over 3 years taught us all a ton about entrepreneurship, innovating, and problem solving.
Intellectual Property
One of my favorite experiences that came as a result of TempoTrader was collaborating with leading intellectual property lawyers in Nashville to lay claim to TempoTrader's marketplace as a proprietary invention. Officially listed as "Method For Distributing And Managing Tradable Content License Subscriptions", the provisional patent explores the definition, function, and framework surrounding subscriptions and the permissions that follow as part of ownership. TempoTrader's model is built as a continuation of "The Sharing Economy", in that formal ownership of music (especially legally) is becoming almost obsolete with the prevalence of streaming services like Pandora, Spotify, and Soundcloud. TempoTrader enables fans of artists to pay them directly, hold ownership of access to their private tracks through purchasing a subscription, and potentially turn a profit by reselling that subscription once they have fully enjoyed the artist's content.