This week Dmitri talks with Kiran Mampilly of Tarka Labs about his experience in guiding startups in the music industry. Some topics covered; the importance of transforming ideas into practical steps, the critical role of minimum viable products (MVPs) to test market viability, the strategic advantages of having a fractional CTO, and as always – ensuring your technological roadmap is scalable.
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Episode Transcript
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0:00:09 - Dmitri
How to start up. Welcome back to Music Tectonics, where we go beneath the surface of music and tech. I'm your host, Dmitri Vietze. I'm also the founder and CEO of Rock Paper Scissors, the PR and marketing firm that specializes in music innovation companies, and lately we've been giving you a taste of some of the topics that will be on everyone's minds at the Music Tectonics Conference, our annual event in Santa Monica at the end of October. But it's been a minute since we've released an episode from our how to Startup series, so today I'm matching up our themes by bringing you an expert on how to think about technical considerations when building a music tech startup. Check out this conversation I just had with Kieran Mompily of Tarka Labs. We talk about some basic principles for non-technical founders, nuances of working in tech in the music industry and how modular thinking can help you scale your startup in future phases. I got so many insights from Kieran and I'm excited to share them with you now. Okay, I'm really excited.
Today, one of our guests is Kieran Mompily. He is with Tarka Labs. Kieran's a seasoned tech enthusiast with extensive experience working with startups and enterprises globally, and during his time at Tarka Labs and its parent company, sedum Technologies, kieran has successfully guided numerous startups across North America, helping them transform their product visions into reality. His diverse background in e-commerce, product development and sales has uniquely positioned him to guide tech startups that are looking to make a splash in the music industry. As an independent agency, tarka Labs has a rich experience in the music tech industry, working for various brands, including TuneCore, universal Music Group, beatclub, songistry, madverse and a bunch more. Currently, kieran dedicates much of his time to collaborating with startups and enterprises in the music sector, leveraging his team's specialized skill set to drive innovation and success. Kieran, welcome to the podcast.
0:02:11 - Kieran
Thank you, dimitri, it's nice to be here.
0:02:14 - Dmitri
And I'm really excited to spend some time with you at Music Tectonics at the conference in October in Santa Monica. I think we've got some great ideas about how you're going to be able to help startups during sessions there and as you meet them out there by the poolside in Santa Monica, which is great, but I thought it would be great if we could give them a little sense of some of the things you can help them with now. Maybe some folks listening aren't going to be at the conference or maybe they're going to hear this and say, oh, I got to make sure to meet up with Kieran from Tarka, so let's dive in. How should a non-technical founder approach building a tech startup? I ask that because I think we get both technical and non-technical founders coming to Music Tectonics, but I think there's something special to understanding the technical side of things when you're a non-technical founder.
0:03:00 - Kieran
Of course, definitely so. Here at Tarka Labs we do deal with both the bunch of clients, right. We do have a section of the clients that have a very good knowledge from a technical side of things, and then we do have the non-technical founders approach us as well. In both these processes it's a separate level of, or it's a different level of, service that we provide. In a sense, when it comes to non-technical founders, we have to possibly like handhold them a bit more to introduce them to the technical considerations they have to make, how technology ties to their roadmap, so on and so forth. So, generally for non-technical founders, a couple of key things that I make them aware is that usually non-technical founders since they are not grounded with what is possible from a technology aspect, uh, they might be, you know, really fueled up and very excited, uh, about what they want to build. Right, they might want everything under the sun built on the first day absolutely yeah and oftentimes that might not be practical right?
so one of the first things a non-technical founder should be aware of is the fact how to break down their vision into clear pieces that are actionable and achievable. Right, and many a times, whether they like it or not, at the end of the day, if they are trying to build a technology startup, you need that technology guidance from the get-go, and it's either you have to sort of resort to having someone in your team that knows technology, so, let's say, like a chief technology officer but since your startup is, like, very young, you might not be able to hire a full-time chief technology officer, and that's where agencies like Taka Labs provide something called as a fractional CTO. So the fractional CTO sits with the non-technical founders in day one and they are able to basically decide the roadmap of what the product is going to look like. Right, many a times, non-technical founders they often overlook the importance of having a minimum viable product. It's not about building all the features that you foresee into a product on day one, but it's rather building out a version of your product that has all those basic features that you can use to test out in the market. Get the feedback, uh, integrate the feedback into the product and improve it right, and that's how you build traction in the market organically, and that's how you proceed.
So, let's say, when a fractional cto sits with these non-technical founders or any technology person sits with the non-technical founder, you know we do sits with the non-technical founder. You know we do a lot of exercises like consulting exercises. This is, like you know, your business model, canvas 101, in which we jolt down hey, what is the business about? What are the risks, how is the product actually going to make money? How are we going to scale, what are the partners? So on and so forth. We do various sessions called Speedboat and Anchors, but the objective of all these sessions is to bring that sort of like technical wisdom or technical considerations that the non-technical founder has to make from day one.
Another great approach that I often recommend when I'm working with non-technical founders is that we often build something called as a click-through prototype. So a click-through prototype is something that we built with our design team and the founders, in which we don't do any coding at all, right, but we build all the functionalities, we build all the flows and a user is able to click through various screens and understand hey, what is the product about? How does it give value to me? So on and so forth, will give you an idea about, hey, whether this is an actual pain point that exists in the market, whether this is the right approach to tackle that you know pain point.
And from an investment standpoint as well, this has huge advantages. For example, I know a lot of startups here in new brunswick that have done click through prototypes and have gone to various users and have gotten what we call as an LOI. It's a letter of intent so that, hey, in a hypothetical world, if we build this product, would you be willing to purchase it or consider it right? So I know startups that have gone out and created, like you know, 200 letter of intent documents and then, when it came for investments to actually build out the product, they basically showed the investor that, hey, this is the level of validation that we have done for our product and they are willing, you know, to use this product once it's built, and that has definitely aided in funding. So these are some of the things I would recommend non-technical founders, you know, have in mind when they are striving to build a tech startup.
0:08:02 - Dmitri
All right, we have to take a quick break, but when we come back, kieran, I want to ask you a little bit about what some of the intrinsic challenges of building a music tech startup are compared to other startups. We'll be right back.
0:08:13 - Ad
Hey Music Tectonics listeners. Shaley, here again with another conference programming update. First, I want to share a little bit about one of our keynote conversations by Verification the presidential debate with Mark Mulligan and Tatiana Sarasano of Media Research. As election fever builds, Music Tectonics brings you its very own music industry presidential debate. On one side, the traditional, streaming-focused music business. On the other, the emerging fandom and creator-centered sector. Streaming and social go head-to-head. Media analysts will present the case for each side as they explain how, regardless of which side you may be backing, today's music business will become too.
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0:09:42 - Dmitri
Okay, great. Those are some great great tips. For somebody who's doing this for the first time, or if they're non technical, sounds like you've got some really cool approaches you use to help boil things down the product and that, even when you have those click through designs you can do, they have value in themselves since you can bring them out to the market. You can bring them to partners and take a look at it. We've done a lot of interviews around music and music tech and it seems like music tech startups are different than other tech startups. What are some of the intrinsic challenges of building a startup in music compared to other startups?
0:10:25 - Kieran
Yeah, so we are at a really good position to you know. Compare how difficult is, you know, music tech startup compared to various other startups? Because when Taka Labs was established, we just wanted to be the best at technology. We are industry agnostic. We are sort of tool agnostic, so we work in a lot of industries outside music tech. We are sort of tool agnostic, so we work in a lot of industries outside music tech. But over the years since we have done a lot of phenomenal projects in the industry. We have been getting more and more music projects right, but always it has been very challenging and one of the reasons for this is that how music industry is actually set up.
So within the music industry, as you know, there are a lot of agents right, and these various agents control and disseminate information at various parts within the music industry. What I mean by that is that, see, when I talk to a person outside music industry on what it takes for an artist to create a song and then for that song to be heard in all your digital service providers, your itunes, your amazon music, so on and so forth uh, it boggles their mind on the process that goes behind the scenes. Uh, the distributors have to distribute the music to the dsps. Uh, you know, the dsps have to keep track about, uh, how the music is streamed. Uh, this information has to be sent back to the DSPs. The DSPs have to then split the royalties and give it to the artists, and then we have organizations like BMI and other organizations that keep track the checks and balances of this entire ecosystem, right?
So when you are building a music tech startup per se, or when you are engaging a development agency to build your product, they should be very familiar with the industry, because building a tech startup in itself is very challenging, and also having to educate the agency or your technical team on the basics of how the industry is laid up.
That itself takes a lot of time and it's challenging, and in the startup world in which you know you have to really go fast, oftentimes it is really in your favor if you are able to find a team that already knows about the industries.
Like, even to give you a simple example, right, let's say you want to build a music product that is very much within the music industry and you approach a run-of-the-mill sort of agency or a technical team out there, they would not know what an ISRC code is right, but for us within the music industry, we know what ISRC code is. We know how data is transferred from DSPs to distributors, vice versa. What is the data that we can expect, what is that we have to supplement, we know the lead time, so on and so forth. So having that understanding about that industry itself gaining that has been challenging over these years and having gained that I can clearly say it's that agents and that special processes and the rules we have in the music industry as a whole makes it really challenging for new entrepreneurs to get into the music tech space without knowing the industry as a whole.
0:13:29 - Dmitri
I think that's super helpful for startups to understand, especially if they come from another tech sector, that there's this other combination of kind of challenges and solutions and obstacles that you have to get through as well. So that's valuable. That's sort of like what are the intricacies of the music side of the industry and how that can make a tech startup have some challenges. That's good to work with a team of folks who have some background there, no-transcript. But then new technologies, nfts emerge, ai emerges, you know metaverse all these things emerge. How can startups keep up with changes in emerging technology that might not have had anything to do with their original idea but might have an impact on the funding market or even what customers and users might be expecting down the road?
0:14:28 - Kieran
Of course, that's an excellent question, dimitri, and it's been something that I discuss with my clients day in and day out as well. Right? So, from a technology evolution perspective, as you know, in the last two years things have been, you know, moving at a scale that was previously cannot even be imagined. Right Like, the pace at which people have to learn just to keep up to date with technology is such a pace that has sort of like never been seen before. And definitely this also, as you rightly said, gives startups a unique opportunity to either leverage on the sudden shift in technology and new advancements, incorporate it into their business and have the potential to succeed. So various startups and companies we work with do it in different ways. So, if you take one end of the spectrum, in which it's a very sizable team and it's sort of like an enterprise team, how they approach keeping up to date with this evolution in technology is that they have a dedicated team within their organization that purely caters to monitoring these technological advancements. So this very lean team is filled with learners and their primary task is to only evaluate the technology landscape, coordinate with the business teams internally, understand the business challenges and, day in and day out, try to understand whether something new out there in the market can add tremendous value to the organization. Like, for example I remember when the AI wave was starting suddenly a lot of distributors we work with a lot of distributors in music tech space. A lot of Instagram shots, a lot of YouTube shots could actually be made much faster than before with the help of AI, which really helps artists to bring the cost of production down, and it also helps them to churn out more music or no entertainment assets for the fans to engage with. So this was possible because there were teams, sort of like innovation teams, within these enterprises and big companies that do this, and we at Taka Labs are often part of these innovation teams. So we are those technology experts that look at the business problem and dictate that hey, there is something new that has come in and this is how we can add value to it.
Now, the key to this is that you have it's a lot of experimentation, because not everything that comes into the market would be useful for those respective businesses. So we work in a model in which we do like a two to three week pocs. Most of the experiments we do is like two weeks because we believe in the ideology of, you know, try fast and fail fast if it has to fail, but this way we are able to validate most of the things that come in and we are able to find out those niches. That really moves the needle for enterprises and startups, and then we are able to enable them.
Now, for very young startups that do not have the bandwidth to form an innovation team, you have to stress, or you have to be very mindful about who you hire, because the people you're hiring should be active learners and they should be learning outside their day-to-day job, experimenting with newest technologies out there, so they can organically recommend things that further enhance your business right? So if you are startup for very small size, I would either recommend engage a really good fractional cto, because one of his roles is to evaluate the technology landscape and bring those ideas, or make sure that your day-to-day team has that learning mentality within so you do not miss out on the technology evolution wow.
0:18:43 - Dmitri
I feel like you're going direct to some very, very high level um useful tips for folks that are getting started with music tech startups and, you know, any of us can learn from it, regardless of whether it's a new startup or, you know, been in business for many years. These are some basics that you can go back to year after year as well. You know thinking about who to hire when it comes to a technology-related company. That's cool. We've got to take a quick break, but when we come back, I'd like to ask you about some of the best practices for startups when they're thinking about scaling their businesses. We'll be right back.
0:19:15 - Ad
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0:20:24 - Dmitri
Okay, we're back, so I want to make this relevant to companies that are maybe growing a little bigger as well. What are some scaling best practices that startups have to keep in mind as well?
0:20:37 - Kieran
Of course. So this is a very fine line, right? Because, from day one, do you account for scaling or do you account for actually establishing the product market fit? See, if scaling was a scaling-enabled system or ready-to-scale systems, if it was possible to be built everywhere, I'm pretty sure all the startups we see around us would be leveraging it. Right, but that's not the case. The reality is, to make your product be ready to scale, there's certain time, there's certain costs and certain efforts that you need to put in from your site. But how do you confidently put in all this time and cost without even validating the product market fit? What if you validate the product market fit and then you realize that, hey, this is not the direction that you want to go into. But then again, at the same time, you have burned thousands of dollars into making sure your system is scalable, which is not relevant anymore, right? So that is a conundrum that a lot of startups face with. But my take on this is this right, like, yes, you do not have to have uh, you don't have to go all in and have to have a ready to scale system from day one, but, just like any other thing, there are a lot of best practices that you can resort to. So I'll touch upon a couple of best practices. Right, like, for example, many a times when, um, sort of like a startup that has an established product market fit, when they come to us and when they when we take over the project. Uh, one thing sometimes that is really hard for us to push the needle to is that the basic product is built in such a hackish way that there is no documentation that exists. Right, there is no basic or best coding practices that were followed when you were building that product. And it is good, it is good for you to get into that velocity and to actually ship code out the door. But once you actually approach scaling, if there was proper documentation in place, if some of the best practices were there too, it really makes it a lot easier for you to scale the system. Otherwise, we would have to invest that much time and money in understanding what the previous employees have done or your engineers have done and then pick it up from there, right, so it's always a challenge.
Now, another thing one of the low-hanging fruits that I feel startups can leverage on are things like design systems. So what is a design system? Right? So a design system, to put it into simple terms, is a comprehensive set of standards or documentation and reusable components that guide the development of digital products. Right? So this is uh design systems.
In layman terms, think of it as lego pieces, right?
So when you are actually building your design we talked about design systems earlier we built a design system on day one that is highly modular, just like lego pieces.
So when you are building new screens or new functionalities, you can just put them together, as in how you put together lego pieces, and everything just works seamlessly. You don't have to, sort of like, reinvent the wheel again when you are trying to build something new. So when you build your product on top of pillars, like design systems, it makes it extremely effective or easy for you to scale your system. When you are building out new features, new functionalities, your design system already will be able to handle it. Even if you, let's say, make a decision to change colors or you change branding on on the fly after your product market fit right, even changes like that can be easily implemented onto your system by using design systems. So by focusing on, you know, documentation, coding, best practices and having strong pillars, like design systems from day one is basically setting up, setting yourselves up for ease of scale when you finally find your product market fit amazing, kieran.
0:24:51 - Dmitri
This has been such a deep dive so quickly in just a handful of minutes. Uh, what a bunch of valuable content. I'm really excited to continue talking to you at the music Tectonics Conference. I know you're going to be speaking at the conference as part of a session on a pretty similar topic what it takes to build a music tech startup. We've just confirmed David Ponte from AudioMac will be joining you so you can talk through how they went about building AudioMac. We've got other folks that we're about to announce on that, but I can just tell you have so much expertise, I think people are going to have a blast meeting you at the Music Tectonics Conference. We'll have to have you back on the podcast again sometime, go even deeper, but this has been great. Thanks so much for joining me, karen.
0:25:31 - Kieran
Thank you, dimitri, it was a pleasure being here.
0:25:35 - Dmitri
Thanks for listening to Music Tectonics. If you like what you hear, please subscribe on your favorite podcast app. We have new episodes for you every week. Did you know? We do free monthly online events that you, our lovely podcast listeners, can join? Find out more at musictectonicscom and, while you're there, look for the latest about our annual conference and sign up for our newsletter to get updates. Everything we Do explores the seismic shifts that shake up music and technology, the way the earth's tectonic plates cause quakes and make mountains. Connect with Music Tectonics on Twitter, instagram and LinkedIn. That's my favorite platform. Connect with me. Dimitri Vietze, if you can spell it, we'll be back again next week, if not sooner.
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The Music Tectonics podcast goes beneath the surface of the music industry to explore how technology is changing the way business gets done. Weekly episodes include interviews with music tech movers & shakers, deep dives into seismic shifts, and more.
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