Why I picked it up
I use Spotify constantly. Walking, studying, gaming, playing football, in the shower — changing the playlist to match whatever I am feeling has become an ordinary part of the day. At some point I got curious about who built it, how, and why so many people ended up using the same thing.
I found Spotify Play while I was in the middle of planning Gunner Up, a service meant to help Arsenal supporters around the world get up in time for a match that kicks off in the middle of their night. Not a louder alarm: something that makes the feeling of today is a match day arrive naturally, and starts the routine that goes with it. I wanted to learn how a company builds a service around the user rather than around the product, and how it grew while the streaming market was being fought over. So this was not really reading for its own sake. It was reading to make my own idea more specific.
What the book says
It is not a book about how to succeed at a start-up. What struck me was that Spotify did not change the music industry through technology and capability so much as it changed how people listen.
Daniel Ek looked at an industry that was collapsing and paid attention to the one thing nobody was treating as the problem: the experience. In the era of illegal downloads, people were choosing that route because it was free, fast and easy. Ek understood this, and instead of offering only legality he offered something better. Music that started playing in two tenths of a second, so that a user’s first reaction was surprise that it was already going. Behind that were a great many problems that had to be solved precisely because the experience demanded it.
The larger problem was the negotiation with labels and rights holders. However good the technology was, without persuading the industry there was no product to ship, and the book is full of that reality. Ek’s approach was not to make enemies but to propose a new revenue model — a structure in which everyone could survive.
What I took from it
I think the same thing applies to Gunner Up. It is not an app that sends supporters an alarm. The core of it is designing the feeling and the ritual around a match.
Which means I should be spending less time thinking about what I can implement, and more on the relationship with the supporter community and the club, and on how to give people the thing they actually want — the feeling of a match day.