Dogfooding Case Study: RAIDAR
The below is an excerpt from a longer post on the Entrepreneurship & Art blog, published here with permission.
It’s better to show than to tell. One of the most satisfying projects I’ve worked on over the past years has been Berklee’s RAIDAR. RAIDAR is a licensing platform that allows Berklee students, alums and faculty to upload music to a blockchain-based database where those in need of music can quickly, fairly, and transparently license works.
We’re at the early stages, and who knows how it’ll go (in my mind it’s already a success, as I’ve seen more student engagement and understanding of copyright and contracts in the past months because of RAIDAR than I have in the past decade and a half of teaching), but two things are becoming clear: we’re scratching our own itch and eating our own dog food.
Explaining how not only illuminates the concepts, but also shows how crucial it is to bring a product to market in order to better understand where the fit can occur.
Our initial RAIDAR conceit was that we would build a two-sided market where student filmmakers from other colleges and universities would license the musical works Berklee students posted. This led to a very fruitful partnership with Lesley University that rapidly accelerated our growth and helped us refine the product. This type of use will always remain a core offering of RAIDAR, and we will expand to offer Berklee student’s works to many other institutions where student filmmakers are in need of high-quality music. However, as we were telling others at Berklee about RAIDAR and its early success, something surprising happened: members of various Berklee external affairs offices (i.e. marketing and recruitment) let us know that they too would be interested in licensing music for their videos.
This hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks. How could I have been so myopic? Of course Berklee should be using their own students’ musical works for their promotional videos, etc. Berklee should be eating its own dog food.
I’m particularly embarrassed about this oversight, because my company is hired by universities to develop strategies and implement solutions for things like growing enrollment amongst BIPOC students, and we create videos and then have to license music for them. Brick, meet head.
I’ve long said that the licensing of music in the 2020s is like booking travel in the 1970s: opaque, time-consuming, and expensive, etc. For me to miss the obvious — “uh, let’s see if Berklee wants to be a RAIDAR customer” — is the type of oversight that occurs when you’re heads down in the fog that is getting something off the ground. I don’t beat myself up too much; the market has a funny way of telling you what it needs if you’re willing to listen; even if you should have known in the first place.
So, of course, we’ll begin offering — at a market-driven price — music for not only Berklee to use in their promotional tools, but other universities as well. We momentarily forgot to eat our own dog food, but now we’re chowing down.
Itch Scratching Case Study: Entrepreneurship & Art
The second prong related to ensuring that you don’t get lost for too long in the woods on the way to product/market fit nirvana relates to scratching your own itch.
At the early days of the pandemic, I wrote a couple of pieces — Purpose in the Time of Quarantine and A Purpose with a Classroom; Not a Classroom With a Purpose — that I then made audio recordings of and played a little guitar underneath. Additionally, myself and my partners in crime have been putting out a podcast for some time now, and we’ve been licensing music for it.
But now, because of RAIDAR, I can scratch my own itch and license music for my spoken word pieces, and — should my fellow travelers at Entrepreneurship & Art agree (it’s a democracy) — we’ll certainly be licensing music from RAIDAR for our podcast.
Entrepreneurship & Art is an Open Music Initiative signatory, and, hence, has access to RAIDAR; it’s a prerequisite to ensure that the values — “the use of RAIDAR will help Berklee students create sustainable careers on their own terms” — are aligned.
To wit, you can listen to a distilled version of this piece here, and that beautiful music? It’s a song called “Skeletons in My Closet” by Berklee student and artist, Maya Wagner - and, yes, I paid for it and licensed it all through RAIDAR, and, in so doing, scratched my own itch and ate my own dog food.