I was already in college at that point and studying computer science. I had already expanded to maybe five or six different channels, and had hundreds of thousands of listeners coming to our site per month. That's when I felt that it was time to launch this as a business. I did it by putting together a subscription service that allowed people to listen to the channels without commercials. That was the main attraction, but to be honest, back then in the early 2000s, there wasn’t much advertising to put into a streaming operation. This was very much in its infancy so it was primarily about subscriptions before that became the popular way to go.

DI.FM is a boutique service that pays attention to our specialty, which is electronic music. At other companies such as Pandora, Spotify, Google, and Apple, electronic music has become a commodity and it gets lost in the sea of other music that’s available on those services. Listeners have to do a lot of digging to find what they’re looking for there.

At the end of the day, their functionality may differ a little bit but they're essentially all offering the same catalogs. It’s like going to a McDonald's or a buffet with everything versus going to a specialty restaurant. Sure, we may not be as big and we may not be a huge national chain, but we are a boutique service and we specifically cater to our type of listeners. If you are a fan of sushi, you're going to go to a restaurant that specializes in sushi and not the place with sushi on the buffet. The listeners we serve are people who really care about the distinctions we make between different sub-genres of electronic music. It's not all the same for us. We don't bunch everything together under “dance music,” we have over 90 distinct channels streaming curated content from each of these different subgenres of electronic music 24/7.

Our curation allows listeners to enjoy what is termed a “lean back experience.” When they start listening, we want the music to continue to be so good that they don't need hit the “next” button to skip to another song over and over again - the music should be so good that it just flows. We want our listeners to trust us to play what they want to hear, and they already very much do.

We have been growing through word of mouth all of these years. We are a service that until now never had any outside investment - this is our first experience with fundraising. We kept the company private and all the growth that we have had over the years was through using the money we earned through the business. Now, word of mouth extends to people telling each other about DI.FM, but there are other methods such as getting listed in certain radio directories or app stores so people are able to discover us that way. If they search for electronic music, we likely come up pretty high if not number one in all those areas.

We haven't spent a lot of money on marketing to bring in new listeners, so it has mostly been through their own discovery and word of mouth. One of the main reasons we're doing this round of crowdfunding is that we want to jumpstart this growth by spending more significant money on user acquisition.

We make money three ways. For the first two, the DI.FM service generates revenue through advertising and subscriptions. On the advertising side, we make money by selling audio and visual ads that listeners hear on the stream and see while they’re listening on the website and mobile apps. We also make money from selling subscriptions to our premium service, which gives people access to even higher quality streaming without the advertising. DI.FM Premium is our main revenue source at the moment. Advertising used to be higher at certain points, but now premium accounts for a bigger portion of revenue.

The third revenue source is lesser-known to our audience, and it comes from our service-based platform. Because we own our own stack and the technology that runs our platform, we can monetize the platform by licensing to other Internet radio brands. For example, we provide the backend technology that runs services such as JAZZRADIO.com, ROCKRADIO.com, and a couple of others that pay to use the same platform as DI.FM to monetize their own users through ads and marketing integrations.

Our focus at the moment is growing DI.FM. We have contracts with our established clients for the platform use, so they're staying. We're not focusing on necessarily growing the business-to-business side, although if something comes along we'll look into it. The focus now is on growing the DI.FM user base, making the service stickier, and monetizing it effectively.

One of the things we look at is how many people continue to subscribe. We have a very high number of people who continue to subscribe month in and month out, so that tells us the service is sticky long-term. Some of the numbers that we like to look at are metrics related to the number of streaming hours used and if people continue to use the service after registration or at what point they drop out.

The music and the curation of it are the most important. We bring a human touch to all of the music being played on our service. It's not just algorithms or computers guessing which tracks will go well together. We also work hard to develop the tools to make the listening experience continually better when people come back month after month to tune in.

This fundraising campaign is an opportunity to get in on owning the “Spotify” of electronic music. I strongly feel that because of our history of being lean, responsible, and smart when it comes to music and technology, that this is a solid investment. I feel confident that our team will work hard for the investors.
For our listeners and the fans of the music, this is also an investment into keeping electronic music independent from the influences of very corporate interests. This is where our passion comes in, and I think it's important that people invest in a business where the founders and employees are fans themselves. It's important to invest in a service where people are passionate about what they do and want to keep it alive

That can be a bit of a loaded question. These days we generally have a lot of music coming directly from labels or record pools. We have a team of curators that goes out and listens to a ton of music and they select only a small percentage to stream on DI.FM. Each curator likes to listen to the music coming from different sources, including a combination of license deals that we have with certain distributors. We also have record pools that we can pull music from because the labels set them up for the purposes of promotion, and a lot of the music is purchased from digital download sources that allow us to use the music because we’re a licensed streaming service that’s going to pay royalties on the plays.

On a high level, our goal is to progress with some of the technology changes and improvements that we're constantly making and grow the service by acquiring new listeners at a much greater pace than ever before.

On the tech side, one of the things we're working on is making our service more interactive. Right now if you come to our service and you want to replay a track or your favorite tracks, that's not something we’re able to let you do for licensing reasons. One of the projects that we're working on is to go out to different label distributors and made deals with them so we’re able to use their content in fully interactive ways. That would mean they would let us use the content and replay it or skip forward or make it into a custom playlist. It's a challenge for us to go out and start making deals with a lot of these independent labels, but we have been making them already and are confident that we can continue doing so.

For user acquisition, we have run a number of tests and have learned our costs for acquiring new listeners and Premium subscribers, and we now know how to do this profitably. We plan on marketing through a variety of channels to tell more people about DI.FM, win over new listeners, and then convert them to our paid Premium subscription.

I want DI.FM to be a service where when people want anything related to excellent electronic music, they first think of us first, and they know that if they come to DI.FM, they'll be able to find excellent electronic music in myriad ways. All the different functionality that you would expect from a fully-built service -- playlists, repeats, skipping, and backtracking -- I want it all found on DI.FM but specifically geared for electronic music. That's my dream and I don't think we're far from it.

To be quite honest, the biggest worry I have in this business is tied to the streaming music royalty rates. I am not losing sleep over building the technology because I think we have a capable team. We know what we're doing, and we know what the listeners really enjoy and like. But to operate in the environment that we have, where the royalty rates are sometimes making the margins a little too thin, doesn't always leave us with a lot of room for spending on user acquisition. I'd say that's the only thing that keeps me up at night.

I founded the company. From the very beginning, I was a computer science major and I built the earlier versions of the business, the code for the subscription service and some of the streaming technology. That was how I learned programming and various related things, so what I bring to the table is the concept for how the business and the service should perform, plus I have the technical knowhow to understand the technology behind it and how it needs to grow.

Then we have Eloy Lopez who joined us quite a number of years ago. Eloy also has a very interesting background. His relevant previous experience was at Beatport, which is one of the world's biggest digital retailers selling electronic music. Eloy is one of the co-founders of that service, having served in various executive roles after founding Beatport. Eloy brings an excellent level of managerial experience to the team having operated a bigger company than DI.FM. After Eloy was no longer at Beatport, he reached out to me to find out more about DI.FM. He's also a diehard electronic music fan so we got together to talk about it. One thing led to another, and he came onboard as our Chief Operating Officer and now President of DI.FM.

Since 2013, Eloy has built our Marketing team, which is headed by Alaina Bravo. Our Content team is headed by Christina Duran, who also came from a strong background in electronic music including some time at Beatport. Finance and Accounting is led by Emily McCullough who has an unmatched understanding of music-industry reporting and royalties. Our team of engineers and developers is led by Jo Friedman, who brings many years of experience to the team. In total, we have about 35 people full-time with the company right now.