Music Marketplace for artists and venues to book performances

Music marketplace development: start with MVP

Our client is an early-stage music industry startup that wanted to create an MVP for a two-way marketplace that connects musicians with venues for booking live music performances. The founder is a person with deep domain expertise, as he is experienced in the music industry for many years, as well as having an entrepreneurial mindset. Before seeking technical expertise, he set up a team to analyze his idea, structure, and form a ready-made request. The team then took a responsible approach to selecting a technical partner. They posted RFPs and tested about 50 companies around the world, including Corpsoft.io. Ultimately, they chose to work with us because our expert proposal and budget best matched their needs and expectations.

The goal was to develop a product MVP to validate the product’s utility and usability hypothesis. The next step in the global product strategy was to release the app to the state of New Jersey and attract as many venues and artists as possible to host events in that state. They were looking for a long-term partnership that would work with them from MVP planning, development, testing, approval to launch, and further support of the app.

Marketplace Description

The startup team defined the customer journey and the features required to support the journey and goals in the MVP, then they needed a team to refine the SRS document, help select the technology stack, infrastructure and design a robust and extensible architecture; development, QA, launch and support of the application.

Our team moved quickly in development based on a truly lean and prioritized vision of the product owner.

Finally, based on their request, we created a multi-role system, performed a detailed analysis of system flows, created and added a smart keyword/location-based vendor search, and added a payment flow feature.

Marketplace development challenges and key features

The Corpsoft team acted as a technical partner in developing the MVP project. First, we passed through the phase of thorough research: communicating with the client and his team, to better understand the context of the request and deliver the project focused on the product owner’s vision. So in the mid-winter, we moved on to the active development phase which took about 3-4 months.

Our client wanted to get a complete MVP development for the music marketplace ready within 3 months. So our first and main goal was to fit full functionality into a minimal number of iterations. In addition to this, we had a number of challenges, such as:

Smart search;

Algorithms for ranking search results in order to provide the highest relevance to the user;

API integration with third-party services;

Handy and convenient calendar;

Secure and reliable payment system.

The challenge of intelligent search was to realize complex ranking algorithms in a limited number of iterations. A distinctive feature of this is that the search finds not only by direct tags but by synonymous ranks as well. For this, we took into account the ranking factors that are meaningful to the industry. Results are systematized according to the specified criteria using a set of algorithmic ranking functions. So User receives a list of the most relevant offers. Seeking could also be done directly by the artist, location, music genre, and suitable dates, and one could listen to the artist’s music.

Furthermore, much time was spent prioritizing a number of critical elements, including third-party ratings, social media, and websites. This involved using API services such as Instagram, Facebook, Stripe, Google Calendar, etc.

A prior calendar idea wasn’t exactly user-friendly, so we developed a calendar integrated with the Google Calendar API. It allows artists to be flexible with their schedules and easily manage both single trips and entire tours. There is a unique ability for travel management to set a certain range of distances that an artist agrees to go for an event. It is also possible to find an artist by a convenient date. Therefore, results are given based on the artist’s schedule availability. This calendar can be used to track a musician’s tour dates so that the Venues can select and book a particular artist’s live performance.

So our final challenge was to develop a configurable payment system that combines multiple formulas. We linked bank accounts that allowed direct transfers through the US using Stripe. We then laboriously calculated all the commissions and co-payments for each case, namely the platform fee, Stripe fee, bank transfer fee, and US taxes, and based on those amounts we subtracted various percentages. The advantage for the client is that Admin can manage the commission for the payments, avoiding losing money on the transfers.

Value provided through music marketplace development

We developed a technical solution for the business in a limited number of iterations, designed and presented the client with a quality and fast-developed product that fulfilled their request 100%.

Together with the client’s team, we created a unique product that both venues and artists needed. We delivered all of the project goals in 3 months. This accelerated the project launch and proved the hypothesis of its usefulness and usability. The project was created strictly within the planned budget of $35,000. The first clients appeared right after the product release at the end of May. This allowed them to gain further insight into product development based on users’ feedback.

As a result, we created a completely new and innovative project for the music industry. So, Venues have a place to perform and a desire to complement their stage with live musical performances, and artists have the opportunity to find a place to perform where they want to perform and enhance their experience.

Process of work

We used the Scrum methodology with sprint-oriented development.

Clarify that the client had his own creative director and we collaborated with her on the UI theme. That allowed us to fill in gaps on our side when it came to details and elements of the customer journey while following the global vision shared by cr. director and client.

Tools used: Jira, Zoom, Slack