In 2007, Case Western Reserve University sophomore John Knific and his roommate Marc Plotkin came up with a seemingly fail-proof idea.
The duo, both music majors, saw a huge hole in the number of quality online social networking opportunities for aspiring professional musicians. There were no LinkedIn-type sites for performing artists to share portfolios and audition tapes with potential employers. “Everything out there was geared toward garage bands, not professional violinists,” Knific says.
In 2008, Knific and Plotkin enlisted their computer-savvy buddies, Eric Neuman and Kyle Napierkowski, to create an online portfolio-sharing site for musicians. They presented their idea at dozens of local entrepreneurial competitions and spoke with potential investors — even getting the Cleveland Institute of Music to sign on as beta testers. Finally, after more than a year of consultations and tinkering, they proudly unveiled their product.
Then they sat back and waited for the site to catch on.
Only one problem: No one seemed to find the site quite as useful as Knific and his partners. Months after debuting the site, they realized that very few people had any desire to pay for a service like theirs.
“It was a pretty big colossal failure to be quite honest,” Knific says.
Rather than accept the failure and give up on the idea altogether, Knific and his partners re-examined their process and realized they had approached the project in the entirely wrong way. They’d never asked potential customers what they were lacking. Instead, the partners had presumed a need and continued to work off of their own premonitions. “It was a huge lesson for us,” Knific says.
Contritely and humbly, Knific and his partners approached the Cleveland Institute of Music with a new set of questions. “We asked them: What are you lacking? What do you want as a customer? What are you willing to pay for?”
This time, Knific and his partners came away with an actual, quantifiable problem to solve — and when they eventually figured it out, the system went on to net them more than $50,000 in early sales and land them among
BusinessWeek’s top 25 entrepreneurs under age 25.
It’s Tuesday night and Knific is sitting at his desk in his Westlake home, juggling phone calls with board members and sending e-mails to partners in New York City. At CWRU, Knific double majored in biology and piano. Yet he turned down medical school and hasn’t touched his piano in months. His focus is on CitizenGroove, a company that helps digitize and streamline the music school application process.
“John, to me, reminds me of the lead character in the movie
Buckaroo Banzai,” says Charles F. Birchall Jr., an entrepreneur at JumpStart and one of the first people to advise CitizenGroove. “Dr. Banzai is a brain surgeon, a rock star and a secret agent. And then here’s John, a bright musician who goes to Europe to perform and gets accepted to med school. If he were not doing music, he’d be the next neurosurgeon. He’s just that smart and diverse.”
But perhaps more importantly, Knific and his partners are flexible, persistent and resourceful. As undergraduates, they’d competed in every entrepreneurial competition they could find. They received more than $100,000 in startup funds to launch their music networking sites. Along the way, they also amassed a chain of local advocates and advisers who supported their work and encouraged them to keep trekking.
When Knific and his partners approached the Cleveland Institute of Music again, they learned that CIM and other music schools had been struggling with a problem for years: While many undergraduate institutions had digitized their application processes, music schools were still largely living in the 1980s. Applicants were still using the post office to mail CDs and DVDs of their performances. Admissions officers then spent hundreds of hours sorting through and categorizing them.
“Faculty evaluators used to have to wait [long hours] for physical recordings — CDs, DVDs — to be received, processed and distributed,” says Michael Manderen, director of conservatory admissions for the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. It was a pain and a waste of time.
Knific and his partners recognized the entrepreneurial symphony. They already had a model on their dorm room computers that could be molded to fit this new vision. But experience had taught them something else: the importance of having signed commitments and guaranteed consumers.
At the meeting with CIM administrators, “we kind of finally grew some balls,” says Knific. “We asked them to sign a purchase agreement before we started working on
the site.”
To Knific’s surprise and relief, the school agreed.
It took the group just three months to remodel their social networking site into a marketable, easy-to-use digital application tool.
The CitizenGroove system allows music school applicants to easily upload and streamline their audition tapes into clear-sounding, viewable bites that admissions officers can click through and comment on at their leisure — without having to parse through thousands of individual DVDs.
The system caught on quickly in the niche music school market and grabbed the attention of local investors.
“I first saw [the group] present probably two years ago at a student competition called Launchtown,” says Todd Federman, director of North Coast Angel Fund. “We’d been talking to them for more than a year. John, we thought, was bright, capable and highly adaptive.”
And now that Knific and his team had a workable model with a built-in audience, Federman’s team was ready to invest, dropping $200,000 into the company. “We think this is just the beginning of the beginning for CitizenGroove,” Federman says. “They have a first-rate software system and a first-rate software solution.”
Other investors agreed. By the time CitizenGroove launched in August 2010, it had received funding from nearly every pre-seed/seed fund in Northeast Ohio, amassing more than $350,000 in startup capital. “Out of the 300 or more IT entrepreneurs who have applied to JumpStart TechLift, [JumpStart’s Entrepreneurial Network], CitizenGroove is the only one that I know of who received from all of these sources,” says JumpStart’s Birchall. “It’s really quite remarkable.”
Today, 11 music schools have purchased CitizenGroove’s digital application system.
Admissions officers report positive results. “The concept is elegant and simple, the look is clean, the instructions straightforward, and the support service quick and efficient,” says Manderen of the Oberlin Conservatory.
By 2011, Knific hopes to place CitizenGroove into 50 new schools. But Knific and his supporters believe CitizenGroove could also be a valuable admissions tool in other areas, including athletic and performing arts recruitment. Eventually, Knific also sees the system being used to screen job applicants at big institutions such as orchestras and performance halls. “We’re trying to pivot into tangential markets,” Knific explains.
But today, the young innovators are just glad to have survived their first admissions season. All together, they processed more than 1,500 applications, working day and night to make sure the uploading procedure went smoothly on both the submission and admissions end. On Dec. 2, the day after most music school deadlines had passed, they celebrated by getting a full night’s sleep.
“As much as I’ve enjoyed the success of CitizenGroove, I will not miss walking parents through [video uploads] at 2 in the morning,” Knific says with a laugh.