Chapter One

Tell us about how Riff was founded. What was the motivation behind it?

My friend from high school, Andriy, was one of my best friends during freshman year. We used to hang out, play FIFA, watch soccer, and partner up on class programming projects, which meant we hung out in the VT CS lounge a lot and talked about pursuing half baked side projects pretty often. We had a lot of fun hacking together, diving into technologies that neither of us knew and just complaining and stumbling around in the dark until we figured everything out. For example, we put together a Go server that analyzed the FIFA Ultimate Team economy and invested in players sold at a premium price before reselling them for profit. One day we had a totally non-serious idea: we wanted to put together a campus directory site that allowed students with marketable skills to meet students who needed those skills—for example, fixing someone’s computer for some side cash. Around our week 1 prototype, we heard about an entrepreneurship club event with free pizza and soda (and probably other stuff too, but we didn’t really care) so we went to scope it out. After some entrepreneurs gave talks, there was a mixer and we basically hung out without approaching anyone because we had no idea what to do. The thing is, there was this one loud guy who was dressed like a frat star and talking to everyone he could find, and we happened to be one of the people he could find. He had a cool idea for a music app, called “Flash Hits”, which he envisioned to allow users to send short clips of music. With the pitch, he was trying to answer one question: “why isn’t there a service that lets me send the one line in a song that I actually find clever and want to share?” It seemed like a decent enough idea, right? I’ll never forget the question he asked us to “vet” our programming skills in a sense.

“Are you guys good?”

I turned to Andriy and kind of muttered something, which prompted this guy to ask again:

“Are you good?”

*sigh* “Yeah, we’re f*cking good.”

And just like that, that was Drew, our new co-founder. Andriy and I started messing around with an Android app prototype. A few months and several dorm foosball table meetings later, we took the summer to stay at our new friend’s apartment and crush out the first real prototype of the app, complete with iOS.

During college, how did you balance school life (academia, social life, clubs, etc) with Riff? Do you think taking a break from college was worth focusing on your company?

I was never the type to spend hours upon hours studying and doing homework. I knew how to play the school game and I played it well, so I had enough time to do Riff pretty much full-time on top of school. That wasn’t healthy though, and it definitely ate into my social life a bit (although that was somewhat by design—it was always a convenient excuse!). I only spent one semester working on both school and Riff, and after that semester I vowed never to do it again. I wasn’t satisfied with the fact that I wasn’t dedicating my 100% to either school or Riff.

I think taking a break from college is up there with the best decisions I’ve ever made. I'm twice the person now, 2 years on from when I started, as I was before. I can confidently say that a clone of me who had settled for just being in school, or just working in a corporate environment, would have maybe 10% of my employability and marketability right now. I learned how to work; how to pitch; how to sell my skills; how to maintain a work-life balance as a driven individual; how to network; how to manage an entire technological system from the ground up; how to teach; how to lead; you name it. On top of that, I’m doing well building a network of freelance programing clients as a sort of contingency plan and bootstrapping aid for Riff.

What is Riff?

In a few words, Riff for Artists allows a musician to efficiently create and post powerful, auto-playing video clips of their music to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat in under 3 minutes.

The motivation behind it is twofold: 1. People don’t listen to full songs unless they get recommended them by a friend. You can sugarcoat it and you can find exceptions, but this is the #1 issue with posting a Youtube or Soundcloud link to your song. 2. Artists and labels spend lots of money on social media promotion but are missing a quick conversion from “someone that thought a post was funny” to “someone who listened to our music”, precisely because even when the user lands on an artist’s social media page, they still have to find that artist on Spotify or Soundcloud in order to sample their music, feeding into point (1)—many never even find the artist’s latest work or what they are most proud of, preferring instead to click on the first popular song under the artist’s name on Spotify, get bored of the intro, and never listen to the artist again.

How does Riff solve these two problems then? Again, twofold: 1. Riff makes it not only possible, but convenient, for a musician with no knowledge of video editing (e.g. Adobe After Effects) to put up the snippet of a song that will catch people’s attention the most. Artistic integrity is preserved because we offer a one-click option to include Soundcloud/Bandcamp/Spotify links in the caption under the video. 2. The video clips integrate directly into the first three social platforms, autoplaying with an animated visualizer, but without sound, on all fans’ newsfeeds. The animation but no sound catches attention but does not annoy, and all a user has to do to turn on sound is tap anywhere on the video as instructed.

At a high level, the entire process of creating and posting a promotional clip from scratch is: (1) pick a song from your music library or your Soundcloud/Bandcamp/Reverbnation/Spotify and record the clip that you want, (2) optionally add album artwork for the song (usually auto-loaded) and select from our library of visualizers and visual filters.

An artist can quite literally post a riff in 1 minute if you use the most basic options. Even if they already pay a promotional team to spend time and money making music videos, Riff would enable this promotional team to work more effectively.

The proof is in the pudding. Our engagement numbers quadruple the median engagement rate on Instagram and Twitter, and are even more impressive on Facebook.

What are some of your biggest challenges while running Riff?

Challenges are numerous. There’s onboarding technical team members, which involves mentoring and management; there’s planning for the future when those team members decide to leave in favor of corporate life; and of course there’s the issue of motivation. Motivation doesn’t come in unlimited quantities. Sometimes I just don’t feel good about things. When that happens, it’s important to think about why I am where I am today. It’s because my cofounders and I share a dream and a passion—something that united us, convinced us to make sacrifices, and ultimately, something that we believe in. That’s the fire that got me going in the first place. Sometimes fires burn out. So, logically, the solution is to stoke the fire: to have a conversation with my cofounders about whatever: our encouraging stats; how we’ve actually created something useful from scratch; how, if we can execute on this and make some key partnerships, the world is ours. Without fail, I always feel more motivated after a team meeting.

How do you effectively market your app in order to consistently augment your user base and stay ahead of your competitors?

We have a multi-pronged strategy. We attend performances by local groups and introduce them to Riff. We also reach out to remote label executives, social media managers, and artists, and introduce them to Riff as well.

What stage are you in your capital investing phase? Are you currently looking for more funding?

We are currently interested in exploring investment opportunities. If interested, please reach out to my cofounder Drew Meeks at drew@riffdigital.com.

How do you see Riff being major key player in the musical industry within the next 10 years?

If we can adapt with changing demands and the evolving social media environment, it’s pretty easy to imagine a future where Riff is at the heart of music production worldwide. The app is useful to just about every player in the music industry: labels can use it to promote artists signed to them, independent artists can use it to promote themselves, and venues can use it to give a teaser of upcoming shows.

What are some exciting things we should be looking out for in the next iteration of Riff?

As far as Riff for Artists in the medium term, more integrations with social media, more features that allow artists to make their created riffs (video clips) more engaging, and more analytics to help them grow their following.

Beyond that… I didn’t touch on this before, but Riff before the pivot was actually a music messaging social network, where users could send short clips of songs back and forth. Despite the realization that our initial product-market fit was not good enough, properly executing the ongoing release and marketing of Riff for Artists could effectively create the opportunity to reintroduce the original Riff app, and would unlock huge opportunities to redefine artist-fan interactions, music messaging, and music discovery.

With that said, we have to keep our feet on the ground. Just like a sports team always has to focus on winning the next game instead of having their head in the clouds about the championship game, we have to execute here and now, first and foremost.

If you want your startup to be interviewed, please reach out to me at taehong.min18@outlook.com. Thanks!