Fear of Failing Publicly 3: The Rise and Fall of OLOVA Music

This is part 3 in a series about my institutionalized fear of failing publicly. I am using the series to share the businesses and opportunities taken and dropped, failed and succeeded. I am sharing these because failure is not something we should be ashamed of even if society ridicules those who try and fail. You are not the first to fail. Read Part 1 and Part 2 here.

Part 3 now follows the story of the Music purchase and promotion app that I started with three of my good friends. It was really cool but don’t take my word for it. Read this article by Zim Investor.

The Culture Change Theory

I’ve mentioned that we wanted to change a culture with the Olova Music app. I guess that’s what every startup says. Well I believe we really were. I believe it even more so now because it still hasn’t been done and the need is still as real. Zimbabweans bought music pre-1990s; the cassette and CDs era. Beyond that it was bootleg and free music culture. Artists could only make money through shows. Some hustled hard and became Backpack rappers – the moved around with backpacks with their CDs and sold them to anyone willing to listen.

It was 2013. The world had accepted the ipod and itunes as ways of purchasing music. Some Zimbabwean artists had daringly put their music exclusively on itunes and you could only buy it to listen. They soon gave up because no one listened. The credit card (Visa and MasterCard) was so far away from the standard music-loving Zimbo. Instead, music hawkers had cropped up on every street corner, selling bootleg CDs and offering to put hundreds of songs on flash drives for a fraction of the price. The consumers were benefitting, the hawkers were benefitting but all the artists would be lucky to get if at all was fame.

We wanted to change this. Olova would make it possible to download music onto your phone! Sounded creepily like itunes and international services which would mean we had done nothing. What was our unique selling point? We turned to mobile money. It was just becoming popular among Zimbabweans at the time for minor transactions. Also, a song on itunes would cost at least $0.99. Not that it wasn’t worth it because artists put in their heart and soul – it’s just that Zimbabweans were not going to pay that for one song. We got our second unique selling point then! You could buy a song for as little as $0.05 or $0.10 cents.

Initially that sounded insulting to artists, but when we made them realise that they could make the money from pushing volumes they understood. Besides, most of the time it’s songs that become famous and not albums. So this became an opportunity for them to actually make a lot of money. I remember we had a coffee date with one rapper soon after he had released his album that had gotten close to 33,000 downloads on a free site. He had made no money from that. We showed him that even if just 10% of that were die-hard fans that bought even just 3 songs each on Olova he would have made $990. A cool $1k. His story became our pitch to all other artists and the response was amazing.

We got a Telecash merchant account and a Ecocash merchant account and set it all up. The Olova App was ready. We launched it at the 2014 version of the Shoko festival, they gave us an opportunity to set up a stall. That we used to network and engage new artists.

The one banner we could afford, Tied to a goal post at the Shoko festival because budget

The Shares we should have sold

We registered a legitimate company. I remember asking my uncle for his company registration documents and using them as the template for our Memorandum and Articles. It took me days to complete that document and I promise you the company we registered can go into about any business.

We started getting offers for stake in Olova. In retrospect, ALL the offeres were reasonable. We were greedy. maybe not greedy really but when you;re too close to the action you tend to put more value on something than it actually has. That’s what we did. We probably thought we were worth millions. If I knew what I know now. We would have taken that money and used it as runway to keep us afloat for an extra year or two.

My advice if you have a startup is accept most of the offers you get. Well depends on which stage you are on. You should only be picky with the offers if your startup has started generating a steady income or the user base is growing substantially.

It’s better to own 5% of a billion dollar company that to own 90% of a business valued at $0!

In the end the Olova App will always be one of our greatest achievements. We made local newspapers and blogs with it. It was something that would definitely change the face of the arts industry. Ultimately, we added a section with local events, a newsfeed to allow users to share feedback about songs and to also encourage consumers to try new songs. We started selling books as well through the app (only one author signed up but that was enough).

Music. Events. Books

How it Ended

I don’t remember how it ended. But I remember we got busy. Chasing making a living. Onai couldn’t keep supporting the entire operation on his salary and more and more we needed to be more operational than about the launch. Operational work needed us to be more hands on. The actual truth is we needed to grow the team but we couldn’t. Resources ended us.

It was all difficult. The one time Google deactivated and deleted our app from the app store and up until today I have no idea why. We did again and put it online but it was just one of the many wars. Nothing hurt more than the day the Olova Music website went down. Our piece of changing the world was gone and we would be forgotten.

I have been part of several software product teams since joining formal employment and I know I owe this experience a lot. Even till today, I believe if Olova came now it would be a perfect fit for the market. The culture change we wanted still needs a lot of work. And with my current experience I now understand culture change needs a big budget. It’s not something you can do while you are guerilla marketing and using a team of four.

There were possibly other minor details in our team dynamic and the points we were in our lives that contributed to death of Olova but it was all lessons. Some of the lessons I learnt I later shared in a post about How to Build a Badass startup team that I wrote several years later.

2019 is the year that I acknowledge my past failures. Olova was not a failure because we didn’t do all we could. It was that because we had to pull the plug before the culture change was complete. It felt disappointing to tell the artists who had believed in us that we couldn’t go on anymore. We also couldn’t ask them to pay to keep the lights on, though we should have tried that. Maybe we would still be around.

Take the lessons from your attempts and continuously improve yourself. #KaizenYou