Vocalita: A Little Bit Story

Well, it's been a while since I was last blogging at 2012. My last post was when I finished my internship at Telkom Research. And it's been a while too since I and Vocalita team launched our first Beta product. I think I want to share some part of the story a little bit, how the idea started, how it began, and other stuffs. However if you haven't already known about Vocalita and what it is. You can simply click the link here or just simply go straight to Vocalita.com. However, I'm gonna tell you about it at the end of this article. So, let the story begins.

The story began about 1 year ago, around March the last. It was on my fourth semester of academy at IT Telkom. Back then, I had just finished a project with my friends for a competition of Imagine Cup. It was just not so long after the project, I looked into my Facebook and Twitter, then I saw some of my friends are posting a status about a song. They were expressing their feelings and moods with a song. Well, it was not only them. I, on the other hand, loved expressing myself with music too. And it simply begins to light a bulb on me. What if there's an exclusive app for people expressing themselves with music. I thought that "That's what music is mostly about. It's about people, it's about humans' expressions, people's life, love, romance, and many other things people related." This idea stayed in my mind for some days, even weeks. Actually, I really wanted to start that idea that time. But, well, there was some school's errand keeping me busy for it.

Until that one day, April 28th 2012, I thought maybe it's really time to start it. I mean, maybe this idea can go big someday, and even I can turn it into a company, a digital company. It had been my dream since High School to build a really cool Tech Company. But, that time I haven't thought of that far. My Facebook were opened on my laptop, and I saw a friend of mine from the MobileComm lab is online, +Aldira. So, I started chatting with him and talk about the idea I'd been keeping for a while. The idea got bigger as we're chatting. We started building the concept of the idea, adding some features, brainstorming, etc. Until the brainstorm was finished, we started to think of inviting another people to join the project. It was done, the people are fixed, the idea has been conceptualized, and the date for the first meeting were placed.

The Founding

April 30th 2012. The date for the brainstorming of the idea. The meetup has been placed. So, I was there sitting at the lab drawing the User Interface of the product while waiting for the other members to come in. The UI idea was mostly based on the slide gesture. I thought that it's gonna be really fun having a User Interface mostly using a slide gesture. Then the other members came in. We talked a little bit about the concept of the idea, then started to comment on the User Interface that I just drew. However, we haven't talked about the name for the product. We still have no idea for it. So we stick with the name of MSN, Music Social Network. And the project was called MSN Project.

May 24th 2012. We saw a poster about Open House of Bandung Techno Park at Facebook. It was a Tech Expo of some products from the Bandung Techno Park tenants and for any other Telkom Students teams. There were some shiny things on the poster that made us interested, such as funding, market access, office facility, etc. And we thought, maybe it's time to take the project to the next level. Time to show this thing to people.

Introducing... Symphony

We started building the prototype of the idea, there was actually nothing at the time. Even, it was still zero on progress just before the day of the expo. What's more? It was on the Final Exams of the semester. We tried to make a time for the project, chasing the deadline of building the prototype, and making some raw business plan. There was another problem. We haven't thought of the name of this product. We started to think of many names for the product. There were so many idea for the name, such as Rhythm, EarShoot, Tone, etc. Until +Aldira came up with a name of "Symphony". We agreed to use the name and started to design the logo.

May 30th 2012. Things got really interesting as the day to show this idea came. It was still on the final exams week. We tried to make some times and making some shifts to stay at the stand of exhibition. So, there we are, with an orange desk, an LCD screen, speakers, a book of slides, papers for subscription list, and some devices for the prototypes, obviously. The exhibition occurred in 2 days. The first day was the most interesting one. My shift started around 10 o'clock, because I was having an exam in the morning. There I go, with a nice shirt and jeans, going to the BTP, staying at our stand. It was really interesting to see how people respond to the idea. The response were pretty nice. They like the idea, even some of them have registered their email and phone number to our waiting list. There are also some suggestions from them, such as a request for a karaoke social game, the ability to upload, etc.

After the exhibition, the project still continued. And we agreed to make this to become a company. So there we were, started to think of the business, making some timeline planning for the next two years, though the planning was still really raw that we didn't stick with it.

It was really interesting days back then, we were developing the product on our holidays after the final exams. We started developing the product from scratch because the code of the prototype was pretty bad and unstructured. Even on our internship days, we still developed the product at night. Doing internship at daylight, and developing this product at night. It was pretty struggling back then.

What If Vocalita?

Then there came the day for us to start thinking to buy a server and domain. We started to search for an available domain, but there was no available domain name for Symphony. The .com TLD was already used. We started to look for alternatives then we got into domain name "symphony.me". It was available for sale. However, the price were pretty high for our budget. We couldn't afford it.

So there we were, started to confuse of the domain name. On the other hand, after checking on the trademarks and patents site, the name "symphony" has already been registered for many products and services. I started to think maybe it's better to change the name. I talked to the team. They were pretty disagree with my opinion at first. We started to think of other names, there were some names came up, such as Odi, OdiTalk, etc. We went through all the names related to musics and entertainment for about three days. Until at day three, I came up with an advertisement of a Cell Provider offering their package with the name of "Socialita". I thought, what if I change the word "social" to "vocal". So there came the name "Vocalita". I looked up at the domain names on the internet, ta-da, it's available. I suggested that name to the other members, and started discussing about it. There we agreed to change the name to "Vocalita". And not so long after that, the domain name was bought.

We officially changed the name to "Vocalita".

The Adventure Started Challenging

The time kept ticking. And the project got more complicated overtime. We started to learn many things to keep the development phase faster and better. From Design Pattern, Test Driven Development, and many other technical stuffs. Even we had changed our code structure for many times. I think that's why we are pretty late in delivering the product, but that's okay, it's a lessons learned for us in doing a startup. We kept brainstorming and discussing about our work methods, managing times, the future of Vocalita, sharing knowledges, and new ideas.

Besides that, the business stuff got more interesting and challenging too, we started to pitch to some investors about the idea and the product. Meet more investors from time to time. Discuss the idea to some business guys. Started to spread out the words of Vocalita to startup communities. Place a meeting with Record Labels. Re-creating the business plans. Learning and practicing "Lean Startup" methodology. Things just got really interesting. So much interesting!

May 25th 2013, Vocalita Was Born Into This World!

There we were, a week before May 25th, preparing some technical stuff for our Beta Launch. Preparing the servers, fixing bugs, spreading Alpha to all subscribers, designing the event posters. It was May 24th, and we started to spread the launch poster to some Facebook Groups of IT Telkom. Inviting people for our BETA Launch.

May 25th, the day has come. The day where all these codes that have been built for about a year could come out and see the light. It was just pretty crazy back then, we set out the event for 1 pm. But, we were still coding and fixing things at the morning. The event was really humble. It was just a presentation of us about Vocalita, watching the videos, started to spread the products to the attendants and getting feed backs from them. So right after the presentation, and the product has been approved by Google Play, they started to try  out Vocalita. The first users of Vocalita. It means that Vocalita has been officially (soft)launched!

We're Just Getting Started

Well, maybe some of you think of this "just getting started" words as just a marketing gimmick because you have already heard it anywhere else many times. But, I would say no! It's really just getting started. What is on Vocalita now, and what's on the product today is just still 5% of our vision of what this should be. We have still so many plans and things to do for the future. It's still so much far away from our vision. There are still so many homework for us. However, our product is still on Beta, right?

From all this journey and adventure in Vocalita. There are so many things we've got. Experiences, lessons learned, theories, knowledges, business partners, networks, and many other interesting things. I don't know if Vocalita didn't start last year, my life would be as interesting as today. It's really different. The challenges, the pressures, and the visions at Vocalita make everything much interesting. I've never been this enthusiastic about Tech StartUp before Vocalita.

We're still looking forward for another interesting adventures at Vocalita. And we're looking forward for other innovations to make Entertainment much better than ever. Because, well, that's our mission. That's the mission of Vocalita. To create innovations and creations for a much better entertainment. We like to challenge the status quo.

Vocalita - Your Social Music Player

GOOGLE PLAY LINK

Share your music moments through Vocalita. Vocalita is not a conventional music player, it's a Social Music Player.

Vocalita lets you share your music moments, discover new musics, and play musics all-in-one app. You can discover what your friends are listening to at Vocalita Timeline, comment and like a status, or even mention your friends at your status.

Whether you just fall in love to that new song you've just heard or if you want to express yourself to the world with your favorite song, you can just share it on Vocalita, and also to Facebook or Twitter. Because it's better to express yourself, your mood, and your feeling with music.

Features

- Sharing music moments

- Integrated Music Player

- Share to Facebook & Twitter

- Mention, Comment, and Like

- Hashtags

- Music Profile

- Listen/Unlisten to your friends (similar to Follow/Unfollow of Twitter)

- Real-Time Push Notifications

- And many more to come...