At Rough Draft Ventures, our goal is to help find and support student entrepreneurs in the Boston area. With that mission in mind, I’m excited to announce our investment in RequestNow.
Matt Auerbach and Guy Aridor, both rising seniors at Boston University, created RequestNow to simplify requesting music. Their initial product, combined with their dedication to this idea, made this a clear investment for us. Both Guy and Matt have been working on this project for the past year and we’re excited to help them continue to grow.
With our investment, the RequestNow team will work on over the summer months, adding new features and extending their network. We’re excited to have a new team join our portfolio family. Below, Guy has shared a few words on their story so far. RequestNow was also covered in Boston.com's tech section today. Onwards and upwards!
“Without music, life would be a mistake.” -Friedrich Nietzsche
RequestNow originated from the days when Matt DJed. As partygoers continually bombarded him with song requests, he realized that a better system could remedy the problems he and other DJs faced. A few years later, after meeting in an Intro to Computer Science class we began discussing the idea of a text-based request system. As we built the bare bones and launched a beta, we realized that what at first we thought was a simple idea had so many potential avenues of growth. We became extremely excited that our product could be used to help DJs make themselves more well-known and that better music could be played at events all around the world.
Matt and I both love music and providing DJs the tool to easily discover what their audience not only wants to listen to but to be able to predict what their audience might want to listen to excites us. This, and many other tools we’re hoping to provide for DJs, is the foundation for the idea behind RequestNow: to make the music better.
We’re incredibly excited to announce that we’ve received our first investment from Rough Draft Ventures. This commitment allows us to continue working throughout the summer and provides us with the capital we need to get our product to DJs and venues. Thanks to the support from Rough Draft we’ve been able to commit our time this summer thus far to rebuilding our product from scratch and we’re excited to announce that we’ll be leaving beta today.
We’ve added new features that allow DJs to better interact with the audience that our beta users were eager for us to build including the ability to respond directly to users that have sent in requests, custom messaging, and the ability to send a text after to all the people who attended the event. Without Rough Draft we wouldn’t have been able to be at this point this soon. We’re excited for the future of RequestNow and we’re excited to have Rough Draft along for the ride.
This post can also be found on the RequestNow blog.
