Meet Our Team!

Osamah Mandawi: A computer science and business sophomore student at Brandeis University, born in Baghdad, Iraq, and living in the United States.

Ivonne Pena Alejo: A computer science and Health, Science, Society and Policy major (HSSP), junior at Brandeis.

Avi Shapiro: A computer science and music major, senior at Brandeis.

No more wasted music talents at Brandeis

Brandeis Improv Collective
The Brandeis Improv Collective Ensemble

Every student who plays an instrument knows how daunting it is to find students to collaborate on a music project, rehearse and practice for an event, or simply jam and have a good time. However, this does not have to be the case. Almost everyone has a smartphone, and, with the world at the peak of communication technology, there is no reason for campus musicians to stay disconnected. JamSeshNow is the missing piece. We offer an efficient connection medium for students who want to meet and play music with each other. It’s as easy as setting up a profile, searching through filters, and then looking through the profiles of other musicians with their own sample music playing in the background. Once any number of musicians choose each other, they can decide where to meet from a variety of spaces and studios on campus or locally.

Sneak peak

Mockups
Mockups of the JamSeshNow Android/iOS app

Head and shoulder above competition

competition
Matchmaking apps for musicians comparison chart

What can we provide that our competitors couldn’t provide in their web-apps? How do we appeal to student musicians at Brandeis? There was only one good way to find this out: ask them! With the help of Avi’s large network of Brandeis musicians, we were able to create a channel to conduct in-depth one-on-one interviews with our customer segment. We received very encouraging feedback (we discuss this more in our MVP section), and we learned that accessibility is crucial for our service. We pulled together a combination that is sure to guzzle the atmosphere in an all-in-one, easy to use Android and iOS application. A product with helpful, customized filters, like location and musical instrument, a matching algorithm that emulates best-in-class apps like Tinder, and a creative one of a kind Instant Music Play feature that makes searching through users a breeze.

But can you make enough money?

Year1
Wikipedia image

We had intended for our app to advertise local music stores, and include local music studios in our jam locations menu. This would be in exchange for a percentage, or an annual subscription by these stores and studios. Upon contacting eight local music studios, and six local stores, it became clear that they were not as interested as we had hoped. This led us to pivot one last time and choose to focus on providing very high quality and necessary premium features to incentivize our users to pay a monthly subscription. We set up a few more in-depth interviews, and looked back at our online survey results, concluding that it is ideal for our business to offer a premium subscription of $4.99 to our users, and once we have a large number of users, partner with marketing companies that are interested in showing advertisements on our app in exchange of a monthly fee. We can reach their network to get more customers while we offer them value through our audience. These transactions might happen in person, by telephone or by email. The automated services approach will not add any more costs other than the ones we have from running and maintaining the mobile app.

Looking ahead

Year1
JamSeshNow Year One chart with estimated revenue growth of 20% and expenses growth of 13%

We want to start at Brandeis, become popular among music students, and then move to another college near Waltham, as shown in our JamSeshNow Financial Plans graph, in the Appendix. This is essential to our business plan, but we must make sure that we build a strong app first and test it thoroughly with the students at Brandeis. We are focused on having a sticky engine of growth because we need users to come back month after month since our revenue comes from their premium subscriptions and ads. Moreover, we will have to hire more engineers to provide higher quality premium features, like creating tutoring sessions and finding artists to play within a gig, and data engineers to maintain our growing database of student musicians and help us set metrics to analyze our data and improve our app.

We hope that we can one day create inter-college jam sessions, where students from colleges all over the country meet up and jam! Although this is far from our current vision, one day, we may not be just improving the on-campus music scenes, but our service may have a hand in improving the nation’s music, by allowing artists to emerge out of college with enough practice and a rich network.

Our story is not yet over

Story book

Although our pivots have been many, our vision is still the same. Based on our research, the results we obtained from our MVPs and the validation of our leap of faith and solution hypotheses, we know exactly who our customers are, what their needs are and how we can provide the product to them in a way that allows us to maintain a sustainable, ever-growing business. Brandeis student musicians struggling with the deficient on-campus music environment desperately want us to continue, as their practice sessions, creation of new bands, and enjoyment of music in college depends on us. JamSeshNow is set to create a buzz on college campuses loud enough for all student-musicians to hear and jam with.