This is our first public stakeholder update. As Endlesss moves to a hybrid model of part open-source, part closed-source, we’ll share quarterly updates on our blog to provide an accessible reference for current and future stakeholders.
Let’s get to it…
1 - Overview
2 - Growth Initiatives
3 - Honing our Value Proposition
4 - Measuring our Funnel
5 - Marketing
6 - Roadmap
7 - Revenue
8 - Fundraising
1 - Overview
The last year we focussed on building core functionality that transforms Endlesss from a novel innovation to a serious platform for musical creativity. Now we’re moving our focus to scaling. We’ve run growth experiments over the last quarter which have shown exciting signals. We have a lot of headroom to deploy more resources and accelerate growth on our path to provide the 100s of millions of music-makers worldwide with a place to make and share music in minutes.
We’ve seen steady growth in the number of rifffs created on the platform in the last quarter, our overall measure of the health of Endlesss, rising from 220k in June to 264k in September.
Monthly rifffs created, June to September
2 - Growth Initiatives
Weekly “Top Of The Rifffs” show nearly doubles listening in a couple of months
Rifffs listened per month, July to October
In September we kicked off a weekly chart show in collaboration with two of our most engaged and camera-friendly community members Katinkera and Dsorce. Each Sunday they count down the top ten rifffs in the feed and award the number 1 spot with a $20 cash prize. This drove an increase in monthly rifffs listened to from 14,416 in July to 26,504 in September.
The beta phase of the collectible jams marketplace generated over 3000 sales
“Collectible jams” marketplace
We rolled out the beta phase of the Endlesss collectible jams marketplace to a small group of 100 creators on the platform in August, generating sales of over 3000 rifffs. This has given us a deep understanding of what drives collection behaviour and what features the community are looking for. Read more on our plans for the marketplace in the Roadmap section.
Automated mailers boost retained userbase by 30%
Retained users, mid-july to mid-September
In late August, we experimented with customer e-mail journeys about forthcoming features and calls-to-action within the app. During this initiative the number of people who come back to the app over 30 days after signing up rose from 1710 to 2302, a 30% increase in one month.
Improved onboarding increases activation by 60%
Activation funnel: step-by-step conversion for the first 50 rifffs made by new users, comparing this year (bright) with the same time last year (dim)
In September we built our mission framework, a scripting language which allows us to build step-by-step music-making journeys on top of Endlesss. We used this to build a new onboarding flow on iOS which increased activation by 60% and plan to use this framework extensively to further improve onboarding and provide fresh journeys for those who want a more guided experience.
The Endlesss Beatmaking Arcade Machine is our most successful marketing tool
Tweet showing the Endlesss Arcade in action
We recently sold our first ever Endlesss beatmaking arcade machine to NBA basketball legend Baron Davis. Our social media post about this was our best-performing post of all time across all of our channels, sparking conversations about event partnerships and sales.
There is significant demand for Endlesss Arcades at events and venues and we’re already in discussion with some major artists about creating activations for their events and concerts that provide added value to their fans and an acquisition funnel for Endlesss.
If you're interested in having an arcade machine at your event, venue, recording studio or private residence you can find out more here
New short-form video formats have doubled our engagement on social media
Our latest posts on Instagram
The average number of views of our 10 most recent instagram posts is 1844, compared to the average number of views of all our other posts which is 837.
We’re incredibly excited about the capacity to accelerate growth these experiments have demonstrated.
3 - Honing our value proposition
When we launched Endlesss we learned from early adopters that the ability to jam live with other musicians around the world was magical. Over the last two years we’ve focussed on improving this experience, bringing it to more platforms, finding the right business model and communicating its value to a wider audience.
But those who haven’t yet experienced Endlesss don’t ask for the ability to jam together online. Rather they talk about their frustrations with how hard it is to finish music and find an audience, how lonely it can be and how much effort goes in for so little reward. These are all problems which Endlesss solves. The missing piece is how we communicate our solution to those who haven’t yet experienced the magic of live collaboration.
In a world where we expect our creativity to reach an audience instantly, for music-makers it still takes weeks or months to go from idea to impact. This puts huge downward pressure on the adoption of music-making. Endlesss is uniquely well-placed to solve this problem for the 100s of millions who aspire to make music. The message that resonates with a broad range of audiences is “make and share music in minutes”. We use this as our primary message going forward.
4 - Measuring our funnel
We’ve agreed on clear metrics for each stage of the Endlesss journey from awareness through to retention. These will allow us to measure the success of initiatives to improve a particular stage of our funnel. For example our recent work on the activation phase already yielded a 60% improvement in activation rate, the number of people creating 50 rifffs within the first 24 hours of signing up.
Our funnel map and how we measure it from awareness to retention
5 - Marketing
Historically, we’ve had to fit marketing activities around building the product so we’re thrilled to announce we’re being joined in December by Kelly Scanlon who steps in to be our head of marketing. We worked with Kelly previously when she was at 33 Seconds, the PR agency we worked with in 2021. Kelly impressed us with her lucid copywriting, extensive media relationships and ability to deliver impact within tight deadlines. With experience in both social media marketing and PR, we’re excited to have a dedicated team member who will be devoting her full attention to marketing.
We’ve also recently started working with Motive Unknown, a performance marketing agency listing many major labels and artists, music platform Beatport and many other music tech companies as their clients. Motive Unknown will manage our paid acquisition spend across all platforms and have already achieved great Cost Per Acquisition results in the last couple of weeks.
The Endlesss arcade machine has proved to be an unexpected marketing opportunity. Originally built as a hobby project by community member NJ Lang, we debuted the first prototype at NFT NYC in New York where we could barely keep up with the number of events we were invited to show it at. The arcade machine provides a compelling impression of what Endlesss is about within a few seconds of someone seeing it and provides immediate entertainment for those who play on it. Based on the conversations this has sparked with event partners we believe this could be a unique opportunity for growth and brand recognition at events and venues where the heart of music culture is forged.
6 - Product Roadmap
In the last half of this year we rolled out powerful creator features such as plugin hosting, the ability to drop stems into Endlesss from other DAWs and the beta phase of the marketplace. These were all significant infrastructure efforts which led us to develop technology such as our web player, preset creation and a universal rifff object which will accelerate future feature development.
Here is our product roadmap for the next year. We will build these features in parallel with ongoing growth initiatives and will be subject to change as metrics and market conditions unfold.
Q4 2022 - Social graph
Just last week we shipped personalised profiles across all apps and web. By the end of the year we will have shipped a follow graph and personalised notification feeds. These features unlock the ability for creators to curate the way they show up on Endlesss and build an audience directly on the platform.
Q1 2023 - Publishing, marketplace and lossless audio
Early in 2022 we will turn our focus to improving publishing features to give users more power to present their work the way they want, in higher resolution. We will also roll out marketplace features across the platform, allowing users to release their work to the marketplace through seamless integration of the web3 technology we used to build the marketplace beta. Additionally we will roll out a high quality lossless audio option across the platform.
Q2 2023 - Soundpacks & delivery optimisation
In Q2 we will focus on shipping a new sampler and soundpack creation engine, enabling the creation of user-generated soundpacks which can be released and traded on the marketplace. Alongside this we will optimise delivery of all features across the platform.
Q3 2023 - Preparation for token launch
In Q3 we will focus on carrying out engineering and token design groundwork in preparation for launching the $ESSS token in Q4. We will integrate token earning and staking mechanisms into our ‘web2’ stack and optimise the web3 wallet integration to minimise friction to the majority of users who will come to the platform without having interacted with web3 technology before.
Q4 2023 - Token launch
In Q4, depending on the state of the market and platform growth, we will execute our token launch. In recent weeks the token markets have been in turmoil due to the collapse of FTX. Prospects for the next year are unclear. Our timing decision on the launch of the token will be driven by solid market fundamentals and a clear, compelling and user-tested implementation of the token's functionality within the product.
7 - State of the market
While volume and prices in web3 have significantly decreased since their peak last year we remain confident that the opportunity to build a peer-to-peer digital marketplace around a free-to-use creative social network is epoch-defining. The fact the recent market has flushed so many out makes us even more excited to be at the forefront of this opportunity in preparation for the next market cycle.
Since the turn of this millennium, platforms like Craigslist, E-Bay, Etsy and De-Pop have demonstrated the viability of online peer-to-peer trading in physical goods and services. Equally user-generated-content platforms like Youtube, Instagram and TikTok have shown that digital content is highly valuable.
But until recently the technology to package digital content as products has been absent. We believe this technology, its use-cases and the user experience built to deliver it will mature over the coming years from niche to mainstream and propel a new wave of growth in media. We remain excited to be paddling for this inevitable wave, well ahead of time.
8 - Revenue
Our primary focus remains on building a peer-to-peer digital economy where we generate revenue when our community does. Equally more work must be done to improve the experience before this becomes scalable.
While we do the necessary work, we’re exploring other revenue streams such as a subscription service for our forthcoming lossless audio service and sales of arcade machines.
A lossless audio subscription would be in line with the ‘Studio HD’ package we offered as part of our Kickstarter campaign in 2020. All Kickstarter pledges would count towards redeeming this subscription, including lifetime pledges. All other tools would remain free to use across the platform.
We have already received a number of enquiries about purchasing Endlesss Arcades and have spent some time investigating producing short runs of them. You can read more about it here
9 - Fundraising
We're currently closing out the first tranche of our token pre-sale where we were joined by some great angels and funds including D1 Ventures, Big Brain Ventures and Cogitent Ventures.
In the new year we will launch a larger fundraise to accelerate growth, providing opportunities to acquire either equity in the Ltd company, a token allocation through the Foundation or a combination of both. If you’re interested in joining our journey as we scale, please reach out to investors@endlesss.fm.