What challenges have you faced and how did you overcome them?

Throughout our journey, we have encountered several key challenges that have shaped Chordify into what it is today. One of the most significant challenges has been ensuring the accuracy of our chord recognition technology in real-time. This challenge required a lot of innovation and fine-tuning to perfect our algorithms and deliver reliable results to our users.

Scaling our platform to handle a fast-growing library of songs while maintaining high reliability has also been a challenge. We learned a lot and are working with the best team to continuously optimise our processes and technology to ensure that users can access our services smoothly, even as our database expands.

Have you had to handle any copyright hurdles?

Building partnerships with music publishers to respect copyright laws was another critical aspect we had to navigate. Ensuring that we operate within legal frameworks while providing valuable services to our users requires careful negotiation and collaboration.

Additionally, as early adopters of AI technology, keeping up with the fast-paced advancements in the AI landscape has been both a challenge and an opportunity. We constantly strive to integrate the latest developments into our platform to improve our offerings and stay ahead of the curve.

What's Chordify’s advantage over your industry competitors?

Chordify stands out in the industry due to several key factors. Our deep expertise in AI and our status as forerunners in the field give us a significant advantage. From the beginning, we have leveraged advanced AI techniques to create a great user experience. This technological edge allows us to offer the largest song library with accurate, AI-generated chords.

Our platform is designed to be user-friendly and interactive, making it accessible to musicians of all skill levels. Features like animated chord diagrams, a digital capo, and the ability to upload and chordify personal music files enhance the user experience and support a more engaging learning process.

What recent features have you launched?

Evolving Chordify into a more educational platform has been an ongoing mission. We aim to cater to both beginners and advanced users, which means continually developing new features and content to support a wide range of learning needs. For example, we have just launched our Toolkit on all platforms with never before seen features like the Live Chord Detection or Practise your Chords.

Our active community of Chordify users plays another crucial role, not only to ensure chord accuracy, but also with their valuable feedback which helps us improve our services continuously. 

As a musician myself, I share the same passion as our users, which drives us to create features and improvements that truly resonate with the needs of the music community.

What are your key targets in the coming few years?

Looking ahead, we have set several ambitious targets for Chordify. First and foremost, we aim to grow our platform with state-of-the-art technology, continuously improving our services to meet the evolving needs of our users. Enhancing chord accuracy with advanced AI techniques remains a top priority, ensuring that we provide the most reliable and precise chord transcriptions available.

We also want to continue adding valuable features based on our users' needs and grow as an educational platform doing so. We aim to offer personalised lessons and resources tailored to individual learning paths, making it easier for users to progress and achieve their musical goals.

We also plan to increase community engagement to ensure chord accuracy and enrich user interactions. Building a vibrant and active community is essential for the long-term success of Chordify, as our community is what is most important for us. We want everybody to live their music, that’s what inspires us day in day out. 

What motivated you to join Techleap for Scaleups' Rise programme?

At Chordify we have certain core values that inspire us to greatness everyday. From being excellent to each other, to being daring, one of the core values we hold dear at Chordify is: Grow As You Go. It reflects our intrinsic motivation to keep learning, keep exploring and stay curious. This curiosity to learn from the best tech entrepreneurs in the Netherlands motivated us to join the Rise programme, and the programme has exceeded our expectations!

What’s the most actionable insights you’ve received from the programme?

We learned so much from Rise, and there have been many big and small insights that will shape Chordify moving forward. For example, rigorously focus on the problem you are solving - focusing on the bottlenecks and not on the opportunities - this is something you see at all the successful Techleap companies. But also, “getting comfortable with being uncomfortable”. Often, we know what the hard choices are - we just have to make them.