Idea Napkin No.1

1)    You.  Who am I? That is an excellent question. I couldn’t help thinking of the song from Les Miserables “Who am I” sung by Jon Val Jon. I suppose that example of how my brain works pretty much explains me as a person. I am a quirky, young, music student trying to figure out their place in the world.

 So far I have come to the conclusion that I am somewhat talented in the art of music and in its performance; even though I had a band director tell me one time that there is no such thing as talent, but hey I must have been at least good enough because I made it into the music school here at UF to play trombone so…

Besides music though, I would say that I have a skill for people, for communication. I love to talk, and with that I love to know what is going on, what’s new, how is the world in another person’s view today? With speaking to others I learn about how their minds work, their emotions, different perspectives on life, and I end up getting ideas for how I can change my life for the better.

With that skill of having no fear to talk, I have come to embrace public speaking and I got an amazing experience in my senior of high school to make a 45-minute presentation on the issue with Syrian refugees in front of a panel of judges representing different sectors in the community, as well as in front of my classmates.  Strangely enough, performing music in front of others has also given more experience when it comes to presenting oneself to strangers or to the public. In high school I did so many trombone auditions to community bands and to state ensembles, as well as performing solos, trios, and quartets in front of judges just to receive feedback. It was all getting me ready for how things work in college. Preparation and finally no fear, just confidence when it comes to the actual performance, or presentation, or anything for that matter. It is all just one huge learning experience.

So with that, I am definitely still learning. I’m figuring out my likes and dislikes, my limits to what I can do. For instance, when I came to UF I was on a Pre-Health track in combination with music performance with the dream of becoming some top medical surgeon. This semester however that idea completely changed. I figured out that maybe the whole STEM career thing just isn’t for me. So now I’m trying business because it is diverse, it is used in everything, and well I just have no clue what I want to do now and I had to pick something so here I am.

With that though, I do not want to limit myself to doing something just because I may profit from it in the end, or because people may see it as a so called “successful” occupation to pursue. That is not what I aspire to do at all. To me there is more to life than just working to live. I just want to live. It may sound naïve; I mean you can’t go around living without realizing the reality of the world. I see that reality, I get it, but that shouldn’t mean I can’t pursue the true riches that life has to offer. I wish to find those simple pleasures in life that people have lately been missing out on because they are too busy looking at their phones or worrying about petty things.

Alright so now how does all of this and my potential business venture tie into my life? Well fingers crossed if it is even possible to do it and have it become some huge success, my life would be made in the shade. I first of all would be a huge success in the technology world, I would be helping people everywhere, and I would be making profit. From there who knows what other ideas I might get, any improvements I could make to it, the possibilities are unless.

  

2)    What are you offering to customers?  My idea is to develop an app that can recognize people’s voices and humming’s of different parts of songs. It is to solve the issue when let’s say you have a song stuck in your head, but you don’t know any of the lyrics or who the artist is. So with this app, you can sing to it parts of the song you do remember. Whether that be the guitar solo, rhythm of the drums, or humming along the melody, the app would be able to recognize it and find the song for the person.  

3)    Who are you offering it to?  My customers are the general public. Essentially everyone and anyone who has the capability of hearing music and the ability to vocalize sound can use my product. In the end my customers would all have in common the trouble of not remembering lyrics to a song, so my product will help them find out what song they are thinking of. The demographic goes from young children to the elderly, from any social, religious, and ethnic background.

4)    Why do they care?  Well the example I could think of to use in my argument is how popular the app Shazam got. Its functionality is to identify any song playing from the radio and tell the user what song it is. So my app is similar in that sense. It is just simply informing the user of the song they are trying to identify, only difference is that my app can identify the song by picking up vocalizations made by any human voice singing any main part of the song. Therefore, the user doesn’t have to know the words to the song, all they have to do is sing some part of the melody they remember and the app will pick it up. Imagine how helpful that would be for people who just can’t remember lyrics well? For anyone who just heard a song and want to know who it’s by. Music business people would be all over this kind of technology, and would definitely buy into it, and afterwards, so would any technologic company interested in having a stake in the music app section. 

5)    What are your core competencies? 

It is the technology that I have that no one else does. It is the capability of taking any human voice and being able to decipher it to find a song that matches it, is something completely different than what is currently on the market. 

Evaluation

I believe these elements do indeed fit together. My prospective business correlates with my love and enthusiasm for music while at the same time, fulfilling other people’s love for music as well. The potential that other people who listen to music would be interested in my app is highly likely, and therefore would deem success for my business.