Serendip
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Serendip was an Israeli social music discovery startup founded in 2011 by Sagee Ben-Zedeff and Asaf Atzmon in Tel Aviv. It built personal playlists in real time from what a users music friends were sharing on Facebook and Twitter, delivered through a web service and a mobile app, drawing the actual tracks from YouTube and SoundCloud. It raised about $850,000 in seed funding.
02 / Serendip FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
The cost of processing millions of social posts every day and serving relevant playlists to users across web and mobile was bigger than a small startup could handle. Although the music itself was pulled from YouTube and SoundCloud at no licensing cost, Serendip could not turn the service into a profitable business, and after three years it told users it could no longer sustain the product and shut down.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Operations ended
Serendip ended operations.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Playlists built from what music friends shared on social networks
- 02
High cost of processing millions of posts every day
- 03
No path to profitability despite free music supply
- 04
Shut down in September 2014