Introduction
For those unfamiliar with us or new to our product, we're BeatConnect, and we are aiming at bringing the fun and creativity back to online music collaboration. As a company, sometimes it's to pass over all the good moments in favor of what's next. But we feel it's important to reflect and look back at the successes and learning opportunities of the last year.
Journey Through 2023
2023 was a big year for us, learning more, meeting the community, and pushing out a product we were really proud of. Starting out the year, we launched our revamped BeatConnect Website - which we have since redone again š . Soon after in March, we went into Early Access. Early Access was something we were extremely familiar with as a concept, but as a company, we were breaking new ground. Our goal was to get the product in your hands as soon as possible. Being that we are a collaborative platform, we only saw it fitting to include you, the community, in the process of adding features, testing bugs, and more importantly hearing what you like and don't like about the current state of the product.
From here we hit the ground running with Beat Battles and we couldn't have expected how accepting and outstanding the community around this experience has been. Battles help drive content through our Discord as we grew to over 1,500 users. By the way, if you haven't joined... what are you waiting for? Official BeatConnect Discord
Battles were our first experience and a good playground to help us understand what type of flow we needed to integrate into our platform to make it fun and engaging. It also showed how the community can gather, collaborate, and provide constructive feedback to help each other grow their music-making skills.
If March laid the groundwork for our first major milestone, then July was the payoff, with BeatConnect hitting over 10,000 users in the first 4 months of Early Access! It was amazing to see the community get behind us, but we had no intention of slowing down. Over the next few months, we added update after update, stabilizing the software, adding highly requested features, and even going viral on TikTok! Hitting over 830,000 views on one video.
Following our virality, in October, we reached one of our 2023 strategic milestones of 50,000 users. Not only did we achieve our goal, but we surpassed it by reaching almost 70,000 users from all around the globe by the end of 2023! This was an important goal for us as it was a requirement to keep building our vision of the future of music collaboration. Thanks to you and the interest you showed in our vision, we are getting one step closer to bringing it to life.Ā
70,000 users in one year...
Survey Results - December 2023
As I have mentioned before, community feedback is the driving force behind BeatConnect. Throughout the year, we sent out several feedback forms, but none was more important than our end-of-the-year 2023 Survey. This survey boiled down to learning more about our user base, who you are, what you do in your free time, and most importantly, what level you see yourself at when it comes to music creation. With that being said, the results of the survey were extremely important for us; it helped us confirm our assumptions and allowed us to focus our development efforts. We now have a clear understanding of what we need to deliver this year to finish our first polished version and get out of Early Access.
One thing the survey highlighted is that most of our users are gamers and appreciate great UI/UX design over anything else within a DAW. The current digital music landscape is full of software that doesn't connect with users in the same way a video game does. Why can't music creation have a lower barrier to entry? Technical prowess shouldn't be the defining requirement for creativity. All this helped us refocus our efforts toward making the platform easier for creatives to get into music production.
What's Next?
To say 2023 was a success would be an understatement, but we wouldn't be here without the support of our incredible community.
So, what's next for BeatConnect? Well, that's a complicated question; we have a lot coming but not a lot we can talk about at this very moment. I will let you know that we are shifting the product into the experience we truly know BeatConnect can be. We have taken all of the user feedback from our surveys, Discord, and direct community involvement, and we will be improving the product and pushing into an upgraded vision of what BeatConnect could be. This means that you will see a fully revamped and improved music creation experience and collaboration flows. We will also introduce more ways to lower barriers to remote music collaboration while helping creativity spark through fun community-based activities.
This being said, we have a lot to work on in the next few months as we ramp up our releases toward leaving Early Access. We hope you guys will keep on testing and providing feedback as this will help us provide you with the best possible experience. ā ā
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ā Thanks again to our incredible community,
Kyle