Gene: Today we're here with Boian Vedenoff and we're going to learn today about Enote. .. I wonder, why don't you start by introducing yourself and tell us a little bit about the basics of the business.
Boian: Thanks, Gene. It's a pleasure to be on your podcast. Yeah, I'm Boian I'm a conductor. So I'm a musician who always had some interest in technology since I was a small kid. And therefore it came naturally at some point when I was really fed up with carrying so many scores with me that I wanted to change something about it. And of course also seeing what powerful possibilities there are with technology and seeing that we're still stuck in a very analog world musicians it felt somehow, I felt the urge to do something about it and put technology in the service of music.
And so then I started Enote. Enote is an app that is basically a sheet music service on demand where you can access on a tablet or on your phone or, or your Mac you can access basically a huge library of sheet music and it comes on one side with a library, basically, that you can search with filters, and then it also has a very powerful reader that allows you to do things that no other app can right now in the marketplace.
Gene: And how did you put the team together? When did you actually start the company? And tell me about the early days of how you got going.
Boian: We started in 2018. I was thinking about it with my good friend Joseph already since 2016. And in 2017, we. Got the nudge from one, a supporter of the orchestra back then of my orchestra, who said, why don't you write a business plan?
And so this is how it all started. We started writing this business plan and figuring it out on the way, basically. And 2018, we got our first investor who believed in us and gave us a million to get going and start building something. And also it was the beginning of a big research project because we wanted to use artificial intelligence to recognize musical symbols.
Basically this technology is called OMR, “optical music recognition,” and we really pushed the boundaries in that field and enabled a lot of functionalities that we nowadays have in the app through that technology.
Gene: So let's talk a little bit about what that technology can do that's different than simply taking a PDF copy of music and putting it on your iPad. Your technology enables a lot more, why don't you describe that a little bit?
Boian: When you have a PDF and you just put it in a PDF reader app it's great. You can carry it with you. But I felt like it's not really what a musician should be doing with technology. If there is technology available, it should do more than just display a PDF. And it should make your life easier and give you possibilities to spend more time with the things that you really care about as a musician, learning the score or practicing rather than doing the same kind of manual labor, just on a screen instead of on paper.
So we thought it would be really cool if the device can understand the music and can help you. For example, when you come to a repetition, it just shows you a button and you can press it and jump back to the right place. Or that you can navigate to another movement with a few taps because it knows where the movements are.
That it can separate pieces from books because nowadays, things are published in books. and very often you have many sonatas in one book, but you play just the third. So it would be great if when you search, you just find that third sonata and not the whole book and have to go to page 300 something until you find that piece.
And of course, if you think further that it listens to you, it turns the page automatically, that it helps you practicing. And one day it automates theaters and things like this. So I really like pushing the boundaries where one day you have a very powerful technology that can really be implemented also in artistic venues.
And as I said, with theaters, for example, automatic lighting, staging, all those kinds of things. So the vision is big. And we started with an app that right now has we call it… it's an intelligent PDF basically, where we recognize a lot of things in the music and offer the musicians really. Cool and handy features that help them be more productive with the sheet music.
And we have already a prototype also where we give full digital material. And in that, with that material, you can change the text size, change the font, transpose it into another key, et cetera, et cetera So pianists often are facing the task to either have to transpose right away, like at first sight, which is really hard and not a lot can do it, or they have to write it down in this new key. and that's a lot of labor and work. Gene: So tell me a little bit about how far along you are on the path. How many customers do you have and how do people find the app and that, talk a little bit about the business as it exists today.
Boian: So today we're actually very open as a business in terms of the product is free for the majority of things is actually free because what we want to achieve is that the musicians really get it into their hands and really try how we envision technology should be serving sheet music.
And therefore if you go on the app store and look for e Enote and download it, you'll see that there's a really cool app with a lot of material that is totally for free in your finger at your fingertips. There are, of course, things which we ask money for. If it's copyright protected material that we are licensing from publishers there is a premium subscription for that.
And of course, also, if you want to have all your data stored in the cloud so that you have it all forever saved, that costs us money too, therefore we of course charge for that. Otherwise, the app we really try to have a very broad, free product so that the more musicians try it out, the better.
We have around 150,000 users across the globe. A lot from the US and Germany actually. And most are pianists. And I think that's normal also, because it's the biggest group of musicians -- around 40 percent are pianists. And you can see that still because of this PDF format it's those who have large iPads, of course, those who have large iPads are the ones who are really like power users and use it every day. And they're really, really happy. Those who have smaller devices, we can see that they use it more like to look up something. But they're not there yet.
Maybe on the journey of really trying to play actively just from a device. And I think with this digital format we were talking about where you can change the text size, I think this is when we really will be able to make that leap also for everyone who has a smaller device, because you can make the text big and it automatically becomes a really suitable replacement for paper.
And this is where we're pushing to go in that direction to really enable everyone, even with the small devices. To say I don't need any more paper, but I also don't need to spend thousand bucks for a device that kind of helps me replace paper.
Gene: Sure. And so now if you look forward two, three, four years from now, what's on your roadmap? Where would you like to be? If you and I have a conversation four years from now. What are the things that you'll be doing then?
Boian: I mean, right now we're focusing a lot on building a product that is meaningful also to institutions. So, for example, to educational institutions. But also to orchestras we try to create something that makes their life also easier, for example, with sharing music with their own students or with the orchestra musicians. So there's a lot of effort going in that area. And we're trying to get the publishers on board as many as possible.
It's not an easy task. There are, there are people who are very much open to the future and others who like the past and so it's a transition moment right now. It's a disruptive situation for the business models also, the traditional ones, and therefore it requires a lot of convincing, a lot of conversations.
We hope to be able to, in four years, to have a platform that gives access basically to all of sheet music, all the all kinds of materials around sheet music, like for example, manuscripts, letters. So to really integrate everything from all publishers, libraries, to have it all there and have a really strong and powerful tool that helps musicians to to really use it as a paper replacement and not just as something that you have as a backup.
Gene: Tell me a little bit about the company. You're headquartered in Berlin, and how big is the team, and what kind, who makes up the team, and the leadership, Tell me a little bit about the, that.
Boian: We are, we have four founders. And I'm of course the musician in the group. I'm responsible for the product vision, but I have a colleague who is, more into the business development part and somebody from the tech of course side and from the operations.
Then we have around 15 people who are working on this. We have been also bigger at some point in time, so when we needed more speed and development, but this is the current size and it's divided in developers front end, back end. And then we have a musicology team that is working on getting all the material on board. And then we have a few freelancers helping out sometimes. Yeah, this is more or less the team.
Gene: Now the thing that I'm particularly interested in is around the funding of the business. You mentioned that you had an initial investor who put in a million dollars, which is unheard of. That's -- congratulations. But I wonder if you could explain a little bit the journey of, in addition to that initial investor, how have you funded the company and what are your prospects for additional funding, if necessary.
Boian You know, when we started, we started it as a R & D project and there was a lot of research and development at that time because there was, it was not yet clear which technologies to use.
We pushed a lot of the boundaries in that technology of OCR, but we also developed a lot of rendering technology that was available back then that was pretty much in its early days. The the new format is a development from the music XML format -- we've invested a lot of time and money and resources into developing this kind of thing.
So over the time we won a grant from the European Union they supported the company with 2.5 million euro. And then later they also invested they were matching every private investment in total until now around 20 million euro went into this project.
Gene: Wow. And that's how many individual investors, the initial investor, the European Union, and then how many others more or less?
Boian Three or four. Yeah. It's the initial investor who put the most money in the European Union, I would say.
Gene: So congratulations. That's really, really great. If there's one thing that you would like people to know about the business about learning about it or if there is something I haven't asked you so far what would that be?
Boian: I think the important thing for any kind of business is to communicate its mission and what they want to achieve with it. And for us, it's democratizing access to sheet music and bringing innovation to a field that has not been developed so much for over 200 years. So I think if you are about trying out new things and trying maybe out also new flows for how your life could be better as a musician when looking at sheet music, but also like when practicing, then give it out to try, because I think that you'll like very much what we've built.
Gene: It's very exciting and delightful to talk to you about this. Of course, as a musician myself, I have downloaded the app, so I know very well how it works, but I wish you really all the luck and we'll keep up with you in the future. And perhaps we will have this conversation in a couple of years.
Boian: Great. It would be a pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you.
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