AmptUp: Making pivotal and strategic changes to the business and product to launch a viable and reliable MVP
AmptUp is an all-in-one live music booking app for independent venues and festivals. It streamlines the booking process (from coordinating scheduling to communicating soundcheck details to negotiating contracts to managing payouts), turning 10 back-and-forth messages into two clicks. This saves money, avoids show-stopping errors, and strengthens venue-artist relationships.
AmptUp Co-Founder Holly Hagerman ran into massive challenges when it came to getting the app built. She worked with two different development agencies over the course of two years. The first she hired to build the technology and worked with for a year and a half and the second she hired to try to fix the broken technology the first one built. She had also hired someone to act as an interim CTO to help manage development, but it turned out that individual didn’t have the necessary experience that she thought he had. Throughout development, she was paying large monthly retainers without clear results and with a lot of delays. The app had huge stability issues — it was constantly breaking, which held up the ability to launch it and to onboard customers.
“It prevented us from doing even basic-level marketing because I couldn’t do demonstrations. I would be setting someone up with a profile and it would break right then and it would eliminate their confidence in it.
I don’t wish on anybody what I went through going through those two experiences that wasted the money of family and friends, wasted all of our savings and also time that I poured into this business because it wasn't working. You can't get that time back.”
Having spent hundreds of hours listening to music industry professionals about their needs, Holly felt like they were on the right track with product-market fit, but were being held back by the broken technology. By spring 2023, after spending two years with those agencies building a product that was still broken and having development continue to drag on, Holly knew it was time for an overhaul.
An investor in her company advised her that she needed to find someone who had the experience and qualifications to inspect the work and advise her so that she would only pay for work that was being done correctly. Going into her search, Holly was concerned about getting burned again.
“I was just worried I was going to get in the same situation that I had been in before where I hire someone that talks really well and then costs tens of thousands of dollars and all of the money is spent on them and they walk away and we’re left with a broken thing.
I was concerned we would go through all of our money and not have enough to make it to the end of the rebuild, or we'd make it to the end and not have enough money to keep the company going afterwards. I thought, ‘If I have this happen again, I will just close this. There will not be another fight left in me to find the right team and build this product.’”
Holly asked other founders for referrals for CTOs and someone she met at the Music Tectonics conference mentioned me. From our earliest interactions, Holly says it was clear it was a good fit and the concerns she had about going down the exact same path as before were abated by my process.
“Two or three things were really distinct — the questions Sam asked, the process that he had in place and the project flat fees that he initiated the work with, instead of just going into an endless monthly retainer without clear results.
It only became a monthly retainer afterwards, once we had a clear plan with a clear outcome with deadlines and milestones that could be met or missed as a determination of the success. Whereas everybody else said, ‘Pay me these tens of thousands of dollars month-to-month, and a couple of months into it, I will tell you that I couldn't deliver on what we thought would be possible because we got into it, we opened the hood, it was actually much more complicated, and you have to understand that these things take time…’”
Assessment and analysis of the current state, making pivotal strategic changes to the business model and development process, building a viable MVP
I began with an assessment — reviewing the existing code base and platform infrastructure and architecture as well as interviewing the people who were currently involved in design and development to get a fuller picture on the background of the development of the platform, the current state, and what was coming up on the roadmap.
“An expert is marked by the questions that they ask. In that assessment I could clearly see that he was asking intelligent questions and that we would be taken care of and that he'd be able to guide us. Then he presented us with the analysis, which was just very realistic and very clear. There was some good with the bad, and it just felt very secure.”
Based on what I found, I recommended we re-architect the platform to build an MVP. I presented two options for doing so (along with the pros/cons/risks of each option) and the necessary technology and process changes. We decided to get more laser-focused on the scope of the product and rebuild an MVP from scratch.
I dove into the platform architecture design — choosing the right language framework and database infrastructure — and into revamping the deployment and development sprint process.
I recruited a UX designer to create a prototype and later a product manager to collaborate with Holly on turning user research and feature lists into an actionable, prioritized backlog. I also identified early on that the development relied too heavily on a single developer who was struggling to deliver. I helped bring on an additional developer to hedge against that risk and keep the team on track. Holly appreciated how I held the team accountable.
“From day one, Sam never missed the deadline. And if he approached the deadline but it wasn’t going to turn out exactly the way we thought in terms of results or delivery date, I knew about it in advance. And he was not just saying, ‘Hey, I don't think we're going to make this deadline.’ He was saying, ‘Hey, I don't think we're going to make this deadline. Here are the reasons why. Here's the plan B I'm recommending. Here are the changes we need to make so this never happens again.’ It's only because that Plan B was intelligently put in place early enough that we met our extended deadline that we had set.”
During our work together, we made strategic and pivotal changes to the scope of the product and the business model to match Holly's resources and timeline and shift the viability and feasibility of the business.
The company had been operating on a commission-based model where venues would pay a 10% fee whenever they booked a musician. Holly was able to get venues to sign up using that model, but then found they weren't using the platform. I explained the benefits of going with a subscription model, including helping get the business more predictable revenue and increasing user engagement.
The company had also been trying to grow a double-sided marketplace for venues and musicians, including a feature that had musicians creating profiles on the app. I advised that growing a double-sided marketplace came with a lot of difficulties, especially for a startup. Cutting the musician side would allow Holly to focus on one side of the marketplace and grow it well. This change also cut development time to get a working MVP in place by two-thirds. Between this and other changes to the scope of the product, we ended up cutting about 50% of the features.
“We got really clear about our business focus. The switch to subscription, removing the musician profile side, and removing a lot of the bulk did an amazing thing for the business model. And that was not something I ever expected to receive from a tech guy.”
Holly particularly appreciated my ability to communicate the changes we needed to make the business successful.
“Sam had a great way of explaining either difficult technological concepts, but mostly broader concepts of why we need to do certain things like ‘we need to cut the site by 50% in order to deliver.’ There were a number of things that I had heard other times from other people, but it wasn't until he explained it to me with his analogies that I could fully comprehend a lot of the things that he was trying to get me to do strategically. So he had a great way of interfacing with me and explaining complicated or challenging concepts or maybe ones that I didn't want to hear, that might've been emotionally hard or financially hard, but he was clear that it would be the right way to go.”
Launching a working MVP in under six months, seeing steady month-over-month user growth, feeling supported by the right expertise
Before the official launch, Holly was able to get 10 pre-launch users to pay for a subscription for two months in advance.
“I was able to do that because we had a fantastic prototype created by a UX designer that Sam chose for us. I didn't have a prototype previously that was super functional, so without that, I wouldn't have been able to sell it.”
Having these customers lined up allowed us to onboard them immediately in the week before the full launch, which allowed us to more fully test the technology and user experience ahead of time.
We fully launched the MVP in early October 2023, within a week and a half of the target launch date I set with Holly near the beginning of our work together in May.
“In five and a half months, we delivered a wonderful site fully rebuilt from scratch. Most importantly that site worked and it has continued to work. We only have occasional, small, very minor bugs that do not majorly impact the user experience, whereas previously the bugs were fully halting any forward progress by the user.”
Being a SaaS product for the live music industry, it’s slow to grow to larger numbers of customers and so Holly says some of the results are yet to be seen, but that she is seeing encouraging growth. Post-launch, the number of weekly active users grew steadily each month — increasing by more than 5x within the first four months.
“We’ve continued to grow and our numbers are up and to the right. Almost every week is a better week than the week before. That’s a sales effort, but we couldn’t do it without technology that is very smartly designed.”
User engagement also grew over those four months, increasing tenfold from one booking created per venue per week to 10 bookings created per venue per week.
“Moving to the subscription model allowed us to get concrete numbers in the door to assess our viability in the marketplace. Before, people would sign up and tell us how great it was, but then they wouldn’t use it. So the switch to the subscription model made a big difference and allows us to triage, ‘Where are the problems? Are users using it? How do we get them to engage? Do they like it?’”
Beyond being able to launch a working MVP and start to grow the business, Holly says the greatest benefit of our work together is an emotional one of feeling secure and supported.
“That is something that I think every founder everywhere wants — not to be on that lonely journey, feeling like you never know if you're doing the right thing. Sam has just so much experience. He's intelligent and deeply kind. He supports you in getting to where you need to be. He's frank and he's clear, and I think that his honesty is a kindness as well. You never ever fear that he's saying yes to you to keep the job or make more money. He is always giving you the answer that is in best support of something that will be most functional in your market or for your audience or with your technology.”