Amman Ahmed learned a hard lesson when one successful business bit the dust.
But he is wiser for it – and now making waves with another venture.
The entrepreneur’s music video app business Rormix curated unsigned and indie music and built a base of 150,000 users a month.
Despite attracting £250,000 in funding and being recognised as a Rising Star in the 2015 Northern Tech Awards, he eventually wound it down.
New business Roundwave provides music to soothe animals and send them to sleep – and he is keen to not make the same mistakes again.
“Roundwaves was a side project for four-and-a-half years,” he told a BusinessCloud conference at the International Festival for Business.
“My failure with Rormix taught me to move slowly and not grow really quickly with the additional pressure from VCs.
“When you have investment, you forget about business – you’re too busy raising rounds and pitching in front of people.
“I don’t need investment. I can scale to $1m-a-year revenue, hopefully by the end of next year, and most of that is profit.
“We’re now doing 6.6million hits a month and 102m minutes of watch time a month for cat and dog music and a million streams a month on Spotify.
“We’ve a fan base of 500,000 subscribers and are growing at 10,000 a week. Now we’re going to scale out to as many connected devices as possible.
“It has always been a profitable business and is now really profitable – and low-cost.
“It’s completely free to listen to our music – we make all our money from advertising.”
BusinessCloud featured Roundwaves in the first edition of its magazine.