Last week Eric Czech became the first addition to the NBS engineering team. Beyond Eric’s ability to quickly complete super-human amounts of work, make databases go super-fast, and optimize every last bit of code, he brings an uncanny ability to forget the location of where he parked his car.
Eric has been working with NBS for the past few months on a handful of smaller projects and we’re excited to have him join us full-time in our Boulder, CO office. He’s currently working with Samir and Walter on our backend infrastructure and database optimization to make NBS sing.
We are back in Boulder after roughly three weeks on the road meeting with labels, managers, bands, agents, and music tech companies in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York City. We are more excited about what we are building and where we are headed than ever before.
We want to take a quick minute to highlight The Founders series shot this summer by Megan Sweeney. Here is a trailer of the series Megan posted this morning.
Megan’s artful encapsulation of the Techstars experience was elevated by the excellent music used throughout the video series. While the episodes profiled the entrepreneurial and business side of our lives, it did not capture the concerts we went to all summer, the music that is constantly blaring in our office, or the constant conversations we have around the future of the music industry and our favorite up and coming artists. A couple of the bands whose music was used in the series we’ve had the pleasure of seeing live and meeting in person.
The music really made the series unique and we want to highlight the artists themselves (that we are, of course, tracking in our system). If you are writing original music and looking for exposure you should contact Megan at Alpine Light Pictures.
So one last thanks to the Techstars teams and mentors for an incredible 3 months, thanks to Megan for capturing and presenting it to the world, and thanks to the bands for providing the soundtrack for the summer!
Last Thursday around 8 AM we launched nextbigsound.com. A few hours later we presented at TechStars’ Investor Day at the Boulder Theater to a packed house of mentors, investors, and the Boulder community. It’s crazy to think that so much has happened in the three short months we’ve been here.
The morning of August 6th we lifted the need for an invite code on nextbigsound.com and enjoyed traffic from a bevy of tweets, Read Write Web, and TechCrunch. Thank you to everyone that’s tweeted out a link, reached out to us via email, or provided feedback. We’re thrilled with the response.
The current site is the core of the product, and we have a clear vision of where Next Big Sound is going. We’re excited for it to evolve.
It’s hard not to sound like we’re gushing when we talk about TechStars — honestly, it has been the greatest experience our team has had together. It totally transformed our business and gave us a stable platform of mentors, advice, and resources to launch from. On a personal level, we learned a ton from the brilliant people who surrounded us, made some great friends, and fell in love with Boulder, CO.
Vanilla founder Mark O’Sullivan says it well in his post TechStar For Life where he talks about the friends he’s made: TechStars is all about the people, and what great people they are.
The mentors that TechStars has attracted proved to be the most valuable part of the experience. Whether they were answering questions on the super technical details of system architecture, providing key introductions in the music industry, or helping practice for investor day, their guidance was stellar.
Running a twitter search on TechStars reveals a ton of blog posts and mentions of investor day and the program in general. Sifting through these provides a pretty accurate take on what the last few days have been like. I can’t say it enough, the community here is awesome.
And with that, a big thank you to the TechStars mentors with whom we worked closely, the extended network of mentors that provided help, the excellent staff at TechStars, and the greater Boulder community. It’s been an amazing summer, and the Next Big Sound is really just beginning. I look forward to what the future holds and can’t wait to meet next year’s crop of TechStars teams.
Yesterday we started the private beta of the new nextbigsound.com. We’ve been testing the site since it’s very early stages with a great group of people that have provided awesome feedback and it’s at a point now where we can let more people in while we refine the product and make sure everything is stable.
We haven’t talked too much about what we’ve been building this summer at TechStars, and until we fully launch we’re going to keep relatively quiet. With that said, the current sign up page pretty much sums things up, “Actionable Intelligence for the Music Industry”.
If you’re in the music industry and interested in helping us test the new site please email us or make repeated attempts to guess the invite code.
TechStars ends for the summer in 10 days. It’s amazing how quickly it’s gone and I apologize for not keeping this blog updated more regularly. We’ve been heads-down working on the product and talking to customers, but as soon as we’re out of beta expect a lot more updates.
Also, the video series ‘The Founders’ is a weekly webisode documentary style show on everything happening at Techstars that’s followed our journey all summer. It’s a pretty great look at both TechStars and Next Big Sound. A new episode is coming out today at noon and you can watch past episodes at techstars.org/thefounders.
It’s been a long time since we’ve updated The Next Big Sound blog, but it’s not without good reason. A lot has happened in the past few months and we’re excited to share what we’ve been up to and where we’re headed.
Techstars and moving to Boulder, CO In early April we found out that we were accepted into Techstars. More about Techstars:
TechStars is a mentorship-driven seed stage investment fund. Each year we run a summer-long program in Boulder, Colorado and Cambridge, Massachusetts. We’re very selective – each year hundreds of companies apply to the program and we only take about ten per city.
It’s hard to explain how excited (and grateful) we were when we found out about the acceptance — basically, we were ecstatic. We left Chicago on May 8th around 7pm and drove 1,000 miles overnight to Boulder, CO. I wish we’d taken more photos, packing three dudes into a 2 door hatchback filled to the brim with dirty laundry and computer monitors was quite a sight. We did snap one or two pictures, here’s one of the sun rising as we entered Colorado.
We rented a four bedroom house on The Hill near CU and set-up shop. Boulder is lovely. We’ve made some great new friends, met some exceptional mentors, and been super impressed by how strong the community is here.
The Video (look up there ↑) Techstars is making weekly videos following three teams over the summer. We’re stoked to be one of the teams included and today at noon the first episode was uploaded to techstars.tv. This video details the first week of the program… more to come soon!
What We’re Working On Between getting into techstars, moving to Boulder, and having a sweet video series made about what we’re up to it would be a shame to not share what we’re working on. Basically, we’re exploring a bunch of different ideas and directions to take The Next Big Sound. We’re really excited and we’ll be unveiling more details as the summer continues. If you’re super curious about what we’re doing, you can follow us on twitter. I’m @dodeca, Alex is @shalek, Samir is @samirrayani, and walter is @walterblaurock. See how the two engineers both use their full real names? Tricky tricky.
