The Pursuit of Scrappiness #23 - Helmuts Bems 🇱🇻 (Sonarworks) on just raising $6 M, entering China 🇨🇳, building B2B partnerships, evaluating R&D progress, and never voting on decision when to pivot
Helmuts Bems is the co-founder and CEO of Sonarworks, a company making individually perfected sound for creators and listeners used by Grammy-award winning producers. Having recently raised a fresh investment round of $6 M led by Almaz Capital (and $13.8 M in total to date), Helmuts and his team are working tenaciously on getting their software into your headphones and changing the way you listen to music, podcasts, and any audio content forever
In this episode we talk about the future of sound, discuss the peculiarities of conquering China and other innovative Asian markets, building a B2B strategic partnerships business that is targeted at B2C as well as the nature of developing an R&D intensive product
The topics covered in this episode with Timestamps
[03:15] - Introduction and sound tech
- Making any sound come out of any sound device
- How do listeners know what sound they like?
- Bass&Treble knobs - in fact, a super complicated UI
- Simplifying the sound taste discovery experience
[20:40] - How Sonarworks products can improve your listening experience
- Sonarworks SDK is integrated into headphone manufacturers
- Customize your sound taste via the Sound ID app
- Megatrend - hardware products as base products and software upselling as the main business
- Whoever owns the user data, has the value in the supply chain
[29:45] - Conquering China and global markets
- China is more innovative than the west, at least in consumer electronics
- Who is better fit to produce the future car - Volkswagen or Apple?
- Europe is a global laggard in consumer electronics
- Having B2B product, but with a B2C engagement
- User interfaces in China are generally different than in the west
[39:10] - Specifics of selling a B2B product with B2C audiences
- Leveraging professional niche market for consumer product credibility
- Benefits of using partner marketing budgets for your promotion
- Working with media and bringing media benefits for partners
- Working with influencers
- Structuring a long term integrated partnership
[56:00] - Building an R&D intensive product
- Planning of R&D process with a sprint+iterations approach
- Managing pivots & building teams with strategists and executors
- Soundtech cluster in Latvia and its origins
- Hiring highly specialized engineering talent
- Using Winamp to develop automotive sound products
Find out more on https://www.pursuitofscrappiness.co/
Support for this episode comes from Nexpay > https://paynexpay.com/
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The full interview with Helmuts is available NOW on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts
Find out more on https://www.pursuitofscrappiness.co/