The digital age is demanding for artists. Simply releasing audio is often not enough. You have to take care of artwork, video material for Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook, and then you still have to figure out how to get people to actually pay you.
The time has come for a new band member – even if youâre just a bedroom producer. That band member is the visual artist.
The case Iâm making is not new. It has happened before. On a tremendous scale. Back in the early days of hiphop, DJs needed MCs to hype up the crowd. As MCs moved center stage, they needed DJs to keep their shows dynamic, so these two different disciplines combined and allied. It was necessary for the format of that day.
The format of this day is audiovisual. It needs to compete in feeds, it needs to stop people from scrolling, and has to get them to unmute the video in order to hear your music.
Like the DJ and MC in the 1980s, the musician and the visual artist face similar problems today:
You need to get your work in front of peopleâs eyes;
And, outside of certain well-established business models, itâs challenging to monetize.
For the visual artist, you are usually the client, not the people who watch the final work. So theyâre used to be commissioned to create their art. Itâs you who monetizes the live performance and the recording. Teaming up creates the possibility to do both, together, like for brands.
Advantage #1: combining business models generates new revenue streams for the musician and the visual artist.
But before the business model comes getting your work under a lot of eyes. That requires honing your skills plus defining and refining your style. This can be challenging by yourself, but in partnership you can work off of each other. Instead of stepping in when a big part of the creative product is already finished, the visual artist can be involved in the creative process from the beginning. This has the effect that the music and video are integrated elements of the same work, rather than two separate works, and over time, the symbiosis between the artists develops further.
Advantage #2: music and video are interwoven elements, rather than separate works made at different points in time.
Advantage #3: the creative product is a new container uniquely suited for, and born out of, the digital landscape.
The song, as we know it, came from the record. Weâre still thinking in songs, but it has lost its novelty as a format. While audio-only music is obviously not going anywhere, the most engaging material on social networks right now is video. Moving image is powerful â it took a while for video to take over the web, but with growing data caps, increasing network speeds, and great cameras and screens on our mobile devices, video has finally conquered the web.
What is also not going away is the live experience. In fact, itâs one of the most important revenue sources. Engaging live shows are hard if youâre a solo musician. If youâre a band, theyâre tricky in terms of logistics, and possibly costly.
If you can do a live show with just 1 or 2 people the economics are much better. Bringing not just your own music, but also your own visuals that extend from the experience you provide on your site, your album artwork, and your audiovisual experiences on YouTube, Instagram, and other social media.
You should actually be able to charge a bit more for your bookings, because of this show element.
Advantage #4: the economics for live are better, and you get to offer a very integrated experience to fans.
Advantage #5: it gives a live, real-world experience to the visuals â which is something that may be trickier to achieve if the visual artist were on their own.
For some good examples of artist collectives who strongly emphasise this audiovisual fusion, check out NAAFI, ZZK Records, NON, and Meneo:
Today Iâm excited to announce that Iâm joining IDAGIO, a streaming service for classical music lovers, as Director of Product. Iâm already in the process of relocating to Berlin, where Iâll be joining the team later this month.
In this post, I want to explain why I so strongly believe in this niche focused music service and IDAGIOâs mission. I also want to shed light on the future of MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE as a newsletter, a type of media, and an agency. (tl;dr: the newsletter lives on!)
Two months ago, a friend whom I had worked with in Moscow, at music streaming service Zvooq, forwarded me a vacancy as a Twitter DM. By then, I had developed a kind of mental auto-ignore, because friends kept sending me junior level vacancies in music companies. I was never looking for a âjobââââI had a job (but thanks for thinking of me â¤ď¸). However, I trusted that this friend knew me better as a professional, so I opened the link.
I was immediately intrigued. I hadnât heard of IDAGIO before, but Iâve spent a lot of time thinking about niche services. At one point, the plan for Zvooq was to not build a typical one-size-fits-all app like all the other music streaming services are doing, but instead it would be to split different types of music-related behaviours into smaller apps. The goal would then become to monopolize those behaviours: like Google has monopolized search behaviour (now called Googling), and Shazam has monopolized Shazaming. Long term, it would allow us to expand that ecosystem of apps beyond streaming content, so we would be able to monetize behaviours with higher margins than behaviours related to music listening.
We ended up building just one, Fonoteka, before we had to switch strategies due to a mix of market reality, licensing terms, and burn rate. That was fine: it was what the business needed, and what Russia as a market needed.
Since then, there have been a number of niche music ideas, like services for indie rock, high quality streaming, etc. And while those are all commendable, I was never quite interested in them, because it just seemed like those services would not have a strong enough strategic competitive advantage in the face of tech giants with bulging coffers. Their offers were often also just marginally better, but getting people to install an app and build a habit around your service, unlearn their old solution, learn to do it your way⌠thatâs a huge thing to ask of people, especially once you need to go beyond the super early adopters.
But niche works on a local level. You can see it with Yandex.Music and Zvooq in Russia, with Anghami in the Middle East, and Gaana in India.
Over the last decade, Iâve lived in Russia, Bulgaria, Turkey, and The Netherlands (where Iâm from). Each country has unique ways of interacting with music. Music has a different place in each culture. I think local music services work, because they combine catalogues and local taste with a deep understanding of how their target audience connects to music. It allows them to build something catering exactly to those behaviours. Itâs music and behaviour combined.
When I started talking to the IDAGIO team, I soon understood that they too combine these elements. Classical music, in all its shapes and forms, has many peculiarities, which will remain an object of study for me for the next years. The fact that the same work often has a multitude of recordings by different performers already sets it apart. One can map a lot of behaviours around navigation, exploring, and comparison to just this one fact.
An example of one way in which IDAGIO lets people explore various performances of the same work.
Despite being younger and having more modest funding, IDAGIO has already built a product that caters better to classical music fans than the other streaming services do (and also serves lossless streams). Understanding that, I was fast convinced that this was something I seriously needed to consider.
So I got on a plane and met the team. Over the course of three days, we ran a condensed design sprint, isolated a problem we wanted to tackle together, interviewed expert team members, explored options, drew up solutions, and prototyped a demo to test with the target audience. Itâs an intense exercise, especially when youâre also being sized up as a potential team member, but the team did such a good job at making me feel welcome and at home (â¤ď¸). Through our conversations, lunches, and collaboration, I was impressed with the teamâs intelligence, creativity, and general thoughtfulness.
Then I spent some extra time in Berlinâââafter all, Iâd be moving there. Aforementioned friend took me to a medical museum with a room full of glass cabinets containing jars with contents which will give me nightmares for years to come. Besides that, I met a bunch of other friends, music tech professionals, and entrepreneurs, who collectively convinced me of the high caliber of talent and creative inspiration in the city.
Returning home, I made a decision I didnât expect to make this year, nor in the years to come. A decision to make a radical switch in priorities.
Motivation, for me, comes from the capacity to grow and to do things with meaningful impact. MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE has exposed me to a lot of different people, a lot of different problems, and has allowed me to do what I find interesting, what Iâm good at, but also what I grow and learn from. With IDAGIO I can do all of the latter, but with depth, and with a team.
Classical music online has been sidelined a bit. It makes a lot of sense when you place it in a historical perspective: a lot has changed in recent years. The webâs demographic skews older now. You can notice this by counting the number of family members on Facebook. The internet used to be something most adults would just use for work, so if you were building entertainment services, you target the young, early adopter demographic. Thatâs pop music, rock, electronic, hiphop, etc. Classical was there, sure, but Spotify wasnât designed around it, iTunes wasnât, YouTube wasnât.
Now weâre actually reaching a new phase for music online. The streaming foundation has been built. Streaming is going mainstream. The platforms from the 2007â2009 wave are maturing and looking beyond their original early adopter audiences⌠So weâre going to see a lot of early adopters that are not properly served anymore. Theyâre going to migrate, look for new homes. A very important segment there, one that has always been underserved, are classical music fans. And now, this niche audience is sizeable enough to actually build a service around.
Why? Well, the internet has changed since the large last wave of music startups. Mobile is becoming the default way people connect to the web. For adults, this has made the web less of a thing for âworkâ, and has made entertainment more accessible. Connected environments make it easy to send your mobile audio to your home hifi set, or car speakers. The amount of people on the internet has more than doubled.
This makes the niche play so much more viable than just a few years ago. It has to be done with love, care, and a very good understanding of whose problem youâre trying to solve (and what that problem is). IDAGIO has exactly the right brilliant minds in place to pull this off and Iâm flattered that in 2 weeks time, Iâll get to spend 2,000 hours a year with them.
What happens to the agency?
Iâll be winding down the agency side of MxTxF. This means Iâm not taking on any more clients, but Iâm happy to refer you to great people I know. Some longer term projects, that just take a couple of hours per week, Iâll keep on to bring to completion.
What happens to the newsletter?
The newsletter goes on! I get a lot of personal fulfilment out of it. The agency was born out of the newsletter, so who knows what more it will spawn. Iâm actually figuring out a way to add audio and video content to the mix. I expect Midem and SĂłnar+D next June will be pilots for that. Berlin is a great place for music tech, so if anything, I hope the newsletter will only get more interesting as time goes on.
Besides the personal fulfilment, it allows me to be in touch with this wonderful community, to meet fascinating people, and occasionally to help organise a panel and bring some of my favourite minds into the same room at the same time.
If youâd like to support the newsletter, you can help me out on Patreon. You can become a patron of the newsletterâââwith your support, I can add extra resources to the newsletter, which will let me push the content to the next level (high on the list: a decent camera).
Elgar making an early recording of the work in 1920. Those pipes are acoustic recording horns, which were piped to a diaphragm which would vibrate a cutting stylusâââdirectly turning sound waves into a material recording.
Iâd love to hear about your favourite works and recordings. Feel free to email me on bg@idagio.com, with a link, and tell me what I should listen for.
Whether you’ve ever used Snapchat or not, you have felt the influence of the social app’s design choices. How will it shape the future of music?
Snapchat is perhaps best known for its photo filters
Snapchat created something called ‘Stories’. Stories are composed of photos and short videos that stay available for 24 hours. They allow people to get a look into other people’s days, including celebrities. The feature has been shamelessly copied by Facebook and integrated in Instagram, but the low-barrier channel-flicking content format is now seeing integration in unexpected places.
I decided to take a stab at the challenge and conceptualize how people may interact with music in the future.
How people engage with content
I specifically looked at Soundcloud, Instagram, and Tinder for some of the most innovative and influential design choices for navigating, sharing, and engaging with content. Soundcloud for the music, Instagram for visuals, and Tinder for how it lets people sift through ‘content’. I apologize in advance for all the times I’m going to refer to people on Tinder as ‘content’, but that’s the most effective way to approach Tinder for the sake of this article.
Learning from Soundcloud
One key strength of Soundcloud is that every time you open the app or web client there’s new content for you. Either from the artists you follow, through its Explore feature, or through personalized recommendations. People should be able to check out content as soon as they open the app.
Text is easy to engage with: you can copy the parts you want to comment on, quote it, and comment. With audio this is harder. Soundcloud lets people comment on the timeline of tracks, which makes it much more fun to engage with content. YouTube solves this problem by letting people put time tags in comments.
If you really love the content, you can repost it to your network. This makes the service attractive to content creators, but also to fans, because the feature gives them a way to express themselves and build up their profiles without actually having to create music themselves. Compare this to Spotify, where the barrier to build up your profile as a user is much higher due to the energy that you have to put into creating (and maintaining) playlists.
Recommendations mean that people can jump in, hit play and stop thinking. Soundcloud is one of the few music services that seem to have found a great balance between very active types of behaviour, as well as more passive modes.
Learning from Instagram
There’s a reason why I’m highlighting Instagram instead of Snapchat. Instagram has two modes of creation and navigation. You can either scroll down your main feed, where people will typically only post their best content OR you can tap one of the stories at the top and watch a feed of Snapchat-like Stories. Tap to skip!
Instagram makes it really easy to create and navigate through content. Stories’ ephemeral quality reduces the barrier to sharing moments (creating) and makes people worry less that they’re ‘oversharing’. Snapchatâs filters, which Instagram hasn’t been able to clone well (yet), make it easy to create fun content. People open up their camera, see what filters are available, and create something funny. No effort, and it’s still fun for their friends or followers to watch.
Learning from Tinder
The brutal nature of dating services is that profiles (people) are content, which also means that the majority of users will not be interested in the majority of content offered on the service. So you can do two things: make going through content as effortless as possible and build a recommendation engine which delivers the most relevant content to users. Tinderâs focus on the former made them the addictive dating app they are today.
Quickly liking and disliking content is like a bookmarking function which also helps to feed information to recommendation algorithms.
If you really want to dive deeper into a piece of content, you can tap to expand it (open profile), but basically the app’s figured out a great way to present huge amounts of content to people, of which the majority is ‘irrelevant’, and make it engaging to quickly navigate through it.
Must haves
The key qualities of social content apps right now are a high volume of content, easy creation and interactivity, and fast navigation. Bookmarking and reposting allows for users to express themselves with little effort.
Breaking it down
This is the most important feature for the end user. There are already a lot of good services in order to access large catalogues, to dive deep, to search for specific content… Music Stories should not try to compete with that. Instead it is a new form of media, which needs to be so engaging that it will affect the creative decisions of artists.
Soundcloudâs feed is a good example, but so is Snapchatâs main Stories screen (pictured below). Both show the user a variety of content that they can engage with immediately by hitting the play button or by tapping on a profile image.
The content in the app needs to be bite-size so users can get a quick idea of the content immediately and decide whether they like it or not. If yes, they should be able to go deeper (eg. Tinder‘s ‘tap to expand’) or interact, like reposting. If not, they need to be able to skip and move on.
When a user has an empty content feed, you can serve recommendations. When a user went through all new content already, you should invite them to create something.
You want people to be able to lean back, but ideally you’ll pull people into your app a few times a day and get them to browse through some fresh content. To get them to re-open the app, there needs to be meaningful interaction. That can come in the form of swipes, comments, or remixing.
One of the cool things about Snapchat is that you can discover new filters through your friends. Think:
“Woah, you can be Harry Potter? I want to be Harry Potter, too!”
So if we extend that to Music Stories, creating some music idea needs to be as simple as making yourself look like Harry Potter or face-swapping with a painting or statue in a museum.
Snapchat is why millennials visit museums. (jk)
This means that artists should be able to add music to the app in a way that allows people to remix it, to make it their own. All remixes can stay linked to the original. You could even track a remix of a remix of a remix in the same way you can see repost-chains on Tumblr.
How do you make it easy to create and to interact with music?
That’s the biggest challenge. People are shy or may not feel creative. Â You could let them use images or video (like Musically), or you could let them replace one of the samples in the beat with a sound from their environment (imagine replacing the “yeah” from Justin Timberlake‘s SexyBack with your own sound), or you could let them play with the pitch of the vocals.
Options need to be limited, easy-to-understand and manipulate, and inviting. It should be as simple as swiping through Snapchat filter options.
Through creation and interactivity, users build up a profile to show off their music identity. Content is ephemeral, unless you choose differently (like on Instagram). I’d go for ephemeral by default and then give users the option to ‘add to profile’ once content reaches a certain engagement threshold. This will need a lot of tweaking and testing to get right.
Interactions are not ephemeral. Reposts go straight to profile, until you undo them.
Stories are all about being able to jump through content quickly. Tinderâs Like / Dislike function could work in Music Stories as a ‘skip’ and ‘bookmark’ function. By letting people bookmark stuff they’ll have content to come back to when they’re in a more passive mode. Perhaps an initial Like would send music to a personal inbox which stays available for a limited time, then when you Like content that’s in that inbox it gets shared to your profile, or saved in some other manner.
Music Stories should NOT be a Tinder for Music. Tinderâs strength is to let users navigate through a lot of content that doesn’t appeal to them, while making the interaction interesting. It’s an interesting model that manages to create value from content that may be irrelevant to some users.
Translating to features
The next steps are to start translating the concept into features. This means user stories (what you want users to be able to do with the app) need to be articulated clearly. Mock ups of specific interactions need to be drawn and tested with audiences. Challenges need to be considered, like the classic issue of getting people to start creating content when there’s no audience in the app yet (Instagram solved this by letting people share content to other social networks).
Now I invite YOU to take this challenge and develop the vision for Music Stories.
Why the next big innovation in music will change music itselfâââand how our moods are in the driverâs seat for that development.
Over the last half year, Iâve had the pleasure to publish two guest contributions in MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE about our changing relationship with music.
Then last week, James Lynden shared his research into how Spotify affects mood and found out that people are mood-aware when they make choices on the service (emphasis mine):
Overall, mood is a vital aspect of participantsâ behaviour on Spotify, and it seems that participants listen to music through the platform to manage or at least react to their moods. Yet the role of mood is normally implicit and unconscious in the participantsâ listening.
Having developed music streaming products myself, like Fonoteka, when I was at Zvooq, Iâm obviously very interested in this topic and what it means for the way we structure music experiences.
Another topic I love to think about is artificial intelligence, generative music, as well as adaptive and interactive music experiences. Particularly, Iâm interested at how non-static music experiences can be brought to a mass market. So when I saw the following finding (emphasis mine), things instantly clicked:
In the same way as we outsource some of our cognitive load to the computer (e.g. notes and reminders, calculators etc.) perhaps some of our emotional state could also be seen as being outsourced to the machine.
For the music industry, I think explicitly mood-based listening is an interesting, emerging consumption dynamic.
Mood augmentation is the best way for non-static music to reach a mass market
James is spot-on when he says mood-based listening is an emerging consumption dynamic. Taking a wider view: the way services construct music experiences also changes the way music is made.
The playlist economy is leading to longer albums, but also optimization of tracks to have lower skip rates in the first 30 seconds. This is nothing compared to the change music went through in the 20th century:
The proliferation of the record as the default way to listen to music meant that music became a consumer product. Something you could collect, like comic books, and something that could be manufactured at a steady flow. This reality gave music new characteristics:
Music became static by default: a song sounding exactly the same as all the times youâve heard it before is a relatively new quality.
Music became a receiving experience: music lost its default participative quality. If you wanted to hear your favourite song, you better be able to play it, or a friend or family member better have a nice voice.
Music became increasingly individual: while communal experiences, like concerts, raves and festivals flourished, music also went through individualization. People listen to music from their own devices, often through their headphones.
Personalized music is the next step
I like my favourite artist for different reasons than my friend does. I connect to it differently. I listen to it at different moments. Our experience is already different, so why should the music not be more personalized?
The gaming industry has figured out a different model: give people experience to the base game for free, and then charge them to unlock certain features. Examples of music apps that do this are Bjorkâs Biophilia as well as mixing app Pacemaker.
But itâs early days. And the real challenge in creating these experiences is that listeners donât know theyâre interested in them. As quoted earlier from James Lynden:
The role of mood is normally implicit and unconscious in the participantsâ listening.
The most successful apps for generative music and soundscapes so far, have been apps that generate sound to help you meditate or focus.
But as we seek to augment our human experience through nootropics and the implementation of technology to improve our senses, itâs clear that music as a static format no longer has to be default.
Exploring the value of being a first mover, connecting with founders and building a profile in a nascent community.
While reading through a Medium post a couple of months ago, I stumbled upon an email subscription form near the bottom of the article. Iâm always thinking of how I can better convert readers to my newsletter, so it immediately caught my interest. Why? Because I had never seen an embedded form on Medium.
Up until then, I had been using a service called Rabbut, which embedded an image that looked like a form and when clicked, would open a new page with the actual form. The new service looked much better. I immediately signed up.
Itâs called Upscribe and after signing up, I went to see how I could export collected email addresses. This service, like Rabbut, was geared at the bigger email newsletter services, like Mailchimp, but Iâm an early adopter of a service called Revue. So I chose âOtherâ. I got an email from the founder:
So I told him about Revue and after a week he wrote me back, telling me he had added the integration. Super awesome.
Being an early adopter makes you a VIP
Early adopters are often servicesâ most important users. This may mean that you can interact directly with the serviceâs founders or chief product person.
Revue founder Martijn de Kuijper mentions that all the time they put into talking to their users is essential for feedback and validation of the product. A feature he says came directly out of user feedback is their recently launched Themes. âWe got a lot of requests for HTML templates and customization options, so we developed a new feature that lets people add personality to their digests in an easy-to-customize theme.âÂ
Other examples of how the Revue team connects with their community are a Slack channel, where they ask people for occasional feedback, but also keep the community connected, and an open roadmap on Trello, where users can see what features to expect and can give input on features through comments.
This means that as an active early adopter, you can have a lot of sway in the product direction of a tool and have it tailored to your needs, with a bit of luck.
Wil Benton, who founded Chew, a livestreaming platform for DJs and other personalities in music, feels that the âfirst 100/500/1000 users are the most important users youâll ever have.â In part because you canât think about everything yourself and users help you figure out things you missed.
He adds:
âEarly adopters are critical to you going from janky MVP that only you would ever use to a product a completely random person on the opposite side of the world could (and would want to) use.â
Being an early adopter makes it easy to stand out
There are benefits beyond being an important voice for founders. If youâre active in a young community, itâs easy to build a profile for yourself.
Sales can be interchanged with users, or other metrics youâre tracking.
Be active, engage with others, and if what youâre doing on the platform is really good, youâll build a following. This will get you featured. The power of being featured is that startups usually aim for something named hockeystick growth.
If youâre featured when the growth suddenly starts accelerating, you benefit from the network effect, because new users often end up following existing accounts, since they wonât have any friends on the platform yet.
Sebastien Lintz, who does digital for Hardwell, manages Revealed Recordings and Sorted Management, recently explained on a panel at Play & Produce in Ghent, that he had had a lot of success by simply being the first with quality content and a good strategy for new platforms, mentioning Musical.ly and Live.ly.
Iâve had similar experiences with Revue, where my newsletter was featured, and if I had more time, Iâd love to build a profile on DJ / remix apps like Pacemaker and 8Stem.
Check them out.
Your chance to be an early adopter
I really recommend spending about half an hour a week on Product Hunt. Itâs a place where people post new products and services, so youâre among the first to hear about them. If you want to be a super early adopter, you could even sign up to Betalist, where you can get early access to beta versions of products when founders need people to test their products.
And a special opportunity:
Iâm working with a startup thatâs building a tool to easily message large groups of fans on Facebook Messenger. The idea is simple: you onboard your fans, ask them for a few things like location and email address (just in case Facebook changes algorithms again), and then you can push personally relevant updates to fans about new releases or shows.
Iâm going to be writing a lot more about this topic once weâve got everything set up for you to give it a go, but if youâd like to get on the list and be among the first users: use this link.
With all the choices you can make for engaging people through their mobile phones, apps should be considered a last resort. Why?
Asking people to install an app means friction.
They want to do something;
They see the download app page;
Tap and go to the App Store page;
Wait for the app to install;
Have to login again.
At every step along the way you can lose people. Scratch that. At every step along the way you will lose people. Why?
The reason I hear most often is: so that you have your app on their phone and people can return easily. But do they?
Most people are not like you. Many of the people who read this will be tech early adopters, so itâs likely you use many apps and install them easily. But the typical US smartphone owner downloads ZERO apps per month (other estimates put it at 1.5 per month).
Apps are expensive to develop and maintain, difficult to make quick adjustments due to submission review processes, and not as engaging as other options.
So what other options do you have?
If you think you can get people to install your app, it means you believe you already have their attention. Great.
So you have two things to worry about:
Can the core functionality be achieved through mobile web?
If yes, then the next question is: how do I keep people coming back?
And if your core functionality is âI want to be able to send push notificationsâ then there may still be better ways. In music, examples of core functionality that may be hard to work around are:
Music listening in background, eg. when the phone is in the pocket and youâre doing other stuff.
Functionality thatâs available when the user is offline.
But I digress, because often those functions may be ânice to havesâ and may not be essential. Imagine if a venue has a site where you can check upcoming gigs and also listen to some music⌠Now a marketing manager there may say: âwe absolutely need people to be able to listen to music in the background.â But you can achieve this more easily by offering a Spotify playlist.
Back to push notifications. Keep your eye on messaging apps, because theyâre steadily becoming the new social networks and theyâre notification-based.
In order to hold onto peopleâs attention, you may not need push notifications. You need habit. This requires consistency from your side and design thinking on how to construct a habit forming product that people donât forget about.
You may also use reminders. You could collect email addresses or even phone numbers.
Artistsâ newsletters have a 20â25% open rate. 90% of SMS messages are read within the first 3 minutes of receiving. Since starting MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE, Iâve had a handful of unsubscriptions, but thatâs nothing compared to the number of uninstalls I would have had.
Still think building an app is a good idea?
Write down who your audience is. How do they use the web. Be realistic and donât project your own tendencies. Call a bunch of your users if you have to.
Write down exactly what you want people to be able to do. Frame it as a user story: âI can find information about my favourite bandâs upcoming gigs in my townâ.
Rank your user stories. Then mark the ones that are essential.
Small secret: the ones that you didnât mark as essential, youâll probably never build.
Think of ways in which you can achieve the same end results, without building an app that users need to install. (I can help you with that)
Now look at whether introducing the friction of an app is actually the best way to do it. Carefully count the number of steps required for the user to complete their user story.
Choose whatever has the least friction and still accomplishes your goal.
