After Hosting 1st VR Concert sofasession Now Develops New Educational Music Tool

How would you describe sofasession in a few words?

sofasession combines our love for music with innovative software – sofasession.com is a platform where musicians can make music together online – when looking for a new band member, composing own songs or practicing improvisation. etudo.co is a new educational tool for music classes we’re developing right now.

Helmut Herglotz, co-founder sofasession

What inspired you to create the online platform? How did it all start?

One of the sofasession founders, Helmut Herglotz, realized he had less time to meet his band in real-time after everybody started working and having family responsibilities. Then, the idea of an online rehearsing room was born – a place to make music with new musicians, have band rehearsals or just jam for fun with friends. That was in 2014. Together with his co-founder, Marian Tokar, Helmut started looking for a developer and funding to start working on the first prototype. Three years later we are 9 people working on sofasession and etudo – everybody with a musical background.

Jam sessions are primarily about creating music but the atmosphere of a session that also physically takes place is hard to recreate. How do you tackle this problem and what’s the opinion of your users?

sofasession is not meant to replace personal meetings with musicians but to enable more jamming. For example, you can play for 20 minutes after work – without having to look for a rehearsal room or travel back and forth, you can just open the site and be creative for some time. Our users love the service, especially for the low latency and friendliness of the community. You can meet musicians of all levels and use the songs created in the community to practice on your own if you don’t want to jam.

Are you using sofasession internally? How does that affect the viewpoints in the team?

We do! Very often we stay in the office to have a jam session with our users. Or somebody records or jams at home. Then it’s a big challenge to enjoy time on the platform instead of seeing millions of possible features or evaluating our own service. And of course, there is never enough time to make music 🙂

What is the biggest challenge that the company has faced?

It’s a big challenge to build something completely from scratch. If your product has already been developed by somebody else you can learn from the mistakes of your competitors and improve little things to become better. Being a pioneer this is not an option, so you have to make many mistakes on your own. We thought too late about our consumers and learned that many disliked some aspects of sofasession only after we released the beta version. It’s also a big challenge to reach out to people who will find your product useful but never asked themselves if something like this already exists.

You recently hosted the first live VR concert, connecting SXSW & Vienna’s Konzerthaus. What experiences could you draw from the project?

It was a very challenging experience as we didn’t know if the internet connection would be sufficient enough. Gladly everything worked well! We’ve learned that there are so many opportunities VR concerts could be used for and are planning to do similar concerts in future.

What is the most memorable moment throughout the history of sofasession?

Many different moments come to mind, but if it has to be one particular: Helmut told us he was on sofasession jamming with some woman. They started chatting while jamming and she told him she is so excited to be making music with another human being. Because she is living in Rural Guatemala she has few possibilities to meet with fellow musicians. This kind of moments remind us that we are creating unique experiences and chances. This is very motivating to keep moving forward!

If there is one thing you could wish for in improving the European startup ecosystem – what would it be?

It would be great to be able to find employees all around Europe easily – especially developers are hard to find in Vienna. Unfortunately for other positions, it’s difficult to cooperate in Europe as we are only looking for native German speakers to work in marketing and business development. We would wish for more cooperations and connections between European startups. There are so many great ideas out there and having limited time we cannot grasp all the great business connections we could have with them.

Lastly, what’s one piece of advice you can give to fellow founders for their startup?

It’s a hard and challenging job to found a company – even if you are backed by funding, investment or your own capital. It’s advisable to talk to as many people as possible and think very broadly about all upcoming challenges in advance – but don’t be scared to make mistakes. The biggest learning curve can only be achieved by trying and evaluating each decision afterward. It’s not stupid to make a mistake once – but it’s very stupid to repeat it.

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