Ideation Beyond the Algorithm

We finally passed the Lean Canvas stage!

Our team met today to discuss how we were going to prepare for the Innovation Stage. As we started fleshing out the business model, we encountered several problems, one of the most prominent being copyright.

To legally stream music ourselves, we'd need licensing agreements that would cost an enormous amount of money. That simply wasn't feasible for our team, so we decided to pivot ChillMuse into a Spotify plugin instead. This way, we could focus on what actually made ChillMuse unique: its recommendation algorithm, rather than building an entire streaming infrastructure from scratch.

However, another problem emerged. We weren't confident that users would be willing to pay for a recommendation plugin alone. So we started brainstorming additional features that could make ChillMuse more engaging and valuable.

One idea was a customizable avatar that reacts to the music users listen to, reflecting their emotional journey throughout the day. Another was an emotional diary where users could record their moods and revisit their emotional patterns over time.

We still have plenty of things to figure out, but at least we're starting to move beyond the algorithm itself and think about what ChillMuse could actually become as a product.