Why start My radeo?

It's March 2009, my buddy, Q, and I are walking from our hotel to the SXSW conference in Austin and throwing around different product ideas just for fun.  

Q: "Wouldn't it be cool to have something that helps you share songs with friends?"

Me: "Agreed -- everyone already shares, but make it faster and easier.  Go beyond playing songs for your friends in the car, sending email links or posting music videos on Facebook.  Someone's probably built it already, but lets hold on to this idea" 

Fast forward a few weeks later, I asked Q if he'd be interested in submitting our idea to to the the Y Combinator startup competition, which would give us some funding and a community of advisers to develop the idea.  Q was in.  Even if we didn't get in, it could be fun to go through the process and learn from it.

Q drafted the essay and designed cool mockups (share, discover) while I coded up a prototype (screenshot).  It was a proof of concept that YouTube could be used as a streaming music library.  The prototype included three of my favorite songs.  John Coltrane's My favorite things , John Mayer's I think that she knows  guitar cover,  and Jay-Z's Can I live

Our submission was rejected by Y Combinator -- neither of us are programmers, the prototype was very limited (<100 lines of code), competition for music products (e.g., Pandora, Last.fm) is substantial, and the online music business is a graveyard for startups because of music licensing costs.  In spite of all of this, we said "Build it anyway." 

The time was right.  A product like this could never have existed without a few key predecessors and underlying technologies

• YouTube - The largest and freshest music collection ever (e.g., unreleased tracks, live versions, covers, remixes)
• Facebook Connect - An automatic social graph and content from your News Feed with no account signup. A built in distribution mechanism for sharing with your friends
  
• Google App Engine - The ability to experiment and scale the service without any infrastructure cost or maintenance overhead

Looking back, Im glad we invested the time and effort because today, the original vision is close to being realized. 

My radeo is a stable service that has a few passionate users (who we are extremely grateful for) who login every couple of days to share and discover new music with their friends.  My radeo, today, is the result of a tremendous amount of feedback, advice, suggestions and encouragement from friends. The online music industry is still just as treacherous as when we started, but there is still opportunity afoot.

Special thanks to Adanna, Albert, Alper, Amanda, Amos, Arnita, Ayush, Brian, Camille, Chika, Chinny, Cynthia, Dan, Deen, Eden, Ekene, Eki, Fauna, George, Grant, Greg, Ike, Ikezi, Jamie, Jasmine, Jason, Jessica, Joissa, Julia, Julie, Linus, Liz, Matt, Mike, Min, Min Li, Morin, Nick, Nicole, Nwando, Patrick, Payam, Prashanth, Rami, Ricky, Rishan, Ronojoy, Russ, Samantha, Sanjay, Sinan, Sydney, Teff, Theresa, Thomas