Heroes (we could be)

Alesso – Heroes (we could be)

My most important job, before being a founder and entrepreneur, is that i’m a husband and father of 2: Alice (11) and Francesco (4 months)

My 11 year old daughter Alice has always asked me so many questions about musixmatch and I couldn’t always find the right way to answer.

A few days ago, sitting in her room, we were playing a Q&A game. She was the only one allowed to ask questions and I had to respond.

I’ve recorded our conversation (thanks to evernote !) as its the most accurate and smart way of explaining musixmatch. And it came from an 11-year old…here it is:

A:Dad who owns musixmatch?
Me: 30 million of people in the world. Everyone using musixmatch.

A: Cool. But are you the boss?
Me: Well NO. We are a team of 30, we have four major investors who have put many pennies to grow musixmatch. It’s Not mine. It’s about All of us.
Without all of them and our users we wouldn’t be where we are.

A: Are you making money out of it? Can we buy a new house?
Me: When you have an idea, when you want to build something, when you want to solve an issue and you feel something strong inside that pushes you to build that …. you don’t really think about how much money you can make out of it. You have to build what you have in your mind. You can’t give up. We’ve built a platform for paying out songwriters, the people who put words in a song. We gave words to the music, so now anyone can read any lyrics while playing their music. It’s like playing with LEGO. We’ve built the infrastructure. That comes before the money.

A: Promise me please you won’t sell musixmatch!
Me: You know when you make your bracelets and want to sell them in your stall? Well it’s not quite the same in the case of musixmatch.
It’s not for sale now.
We’re building an audience.It’s a company that helps other companies grow too. Tomorrow it could be useful to any of these, or maybe not. We didn’t create musixmatch to sell it. We wanted to do something big and useful.

A: What about if i want to create something on my own?
Me: Alone? It’s very unlikely that you will succeed. You will need a
team, someone to help you. Keep in mind this requires passion, energy, an enormous amount of strength….and time.
If you’re alone it’s really hard. Are there any girlfriends you can
think you’d like to do something with? Girlfriends. No, not
boyfriends… (Disclosure: i’m italian)

A: I’ll give a try. But can i know if my idea will work?Me: There is no way to predict if it will work or not. Ideas need to be built. It’s not just about a drawing. It’s not just about buying LEGO. You have to build something out of it. Focus on how you will build your ideas. How you’ll make them come alive. One thing: you don’t like feedback (like me). Be prepared to get as much feedback as you can from users, friends. Anyone using your product. Be prepared to listen.

A: My teacher said he has an incredible idea that will disrupt the world and wants to talk to you about that.
Great! But you know… an idea disrupting the world should be made first than discussed. And I’m not the best judge of whether an idea is good or not. The world will judge that ;-)

A: Back to my homework now Dad. Love you.

Then in early August, I got an email from Google’s Marketing team: they loved musixmatch and how well it was doing on Android and they reached out because they wanted to do a story about us. An “Android Developer Story”.

Google cares a lot about how you build your app on Android. And what’s behind it. They wanted to see what happened backstage at musixmatch so they could pitch it to anyone. They wanted to find out how we made it. So, video makers, cameramen, producers, actors, real users and a bunch of Google’s executives descended on my office. In Bologna (Italy). For 4 days.

They interviewed almost all of my team plus they wanted to get to know people from the city that hosts us (Bologna) and talk with real users.

They wanted to hear the musixmatch’s story from Varun, Sebastiano, Stefano, Matteo, Mattia, Michele, Susan, Simone, Lorenzo, Simone, Giuseppe, Francesco, Gianluca, Valerio, Stefano, Nick, Pierpaolo, Felasquez, Enrico, Simon, Paolo, Frank, Martino, Christian , Loreto, Luca, Daniela, Monica, Emanuele and Mario.

I hope that’s cleared up the musixmatch story. It’s not a story not from Silicon Valley, London, Berlin, New York .
It’s from Bologna, Italy.

It doesn’t really matter where we are, it matters what we’ve built, how we’ve built it. And all the love we have from our users.

It’s not about Me. It’s about us.

We have the best team i could possibly want. With people from all over
the world: India, Japan, Romania, China, Italy.This team is made up of some incredible people, so special that when any of them hacks something they scream and call everyone around their desk (yes we’re italian) to show what they’ve built. Cause they’re so proud of what they’be built.

It’s a team full of endorphins and their endorphins are on github. They deserve to be on the Android’s front page today.

We are a different kind
We can do anything

We could be heroes