Cadenza
What is the product you’re building?
Today, Cadenza's main focus is FanLabel, a "fantasy sports-meets-music" experience.
FanLabel enables fans to be the engine that drives music forward from the artists they love and be rewarded for it.
We enable the FanLabel community to become a series of “micro-labels”, creating talent scouts out of thousands of players, each one trying to earn amazing rewards by proving that they not only know music, they know hit music. This is achieved by using data and analytic insights to optimize an existing strong framework and continuing to integrate a compelling model of social gameplay tethered to music, with listeners at the helm, at every stage.
Listen to the full segment here.
Share an interesting side project from a team member
One of Cadenza's core tenets is actively encouraging the outside project success of our team members.
Most everyone has a project, game, experiment, app or concept they're collaborating on outside of the studio: whether that be Alex's Mine Blocks or Fynnland, Steven's WaveCrash!!, Leah's Any Fun, and others including hihey, Dozy, Pico Strategy, and more.
What does your workplace look like?
What are your team's proudest accomplishments?
While the team has created products played by hundreds of thousands of users, showcased at The GRAMMY Awards, national festivals, and beyond - one of our proudest FanLabel-related accomplishments was receiving the 2020 Fantasy Sports & Gaming Association "Best New Fantasy App" award.
What are the biggest challenges facing your team?
Aside from the obvious of growing a team during a pandemic, one mantra we return to often:
"We're fighting against the state-of-the-art"
Projects we find meaningful enough to undertake have no immediate solutions, relying on our ingenuity to find ways to solve problems without clues.
Some evidence can come from our users, some from observing trends and intelligence in the market, but most answers come from rigorous testing and iterative cycles. Importantly, we hold the willingness to tear things to the ground and start over if they're not right.
Lately, we've been seeking resources to help grow our team to tackle this next exciting phase of our product cycle.
How does your team manage meetings?
Aside from "standies" twice daily: Just enough to keep everyone on the same page - nothing more.
What advice would you give to people who want to join your team?
Our mission as a team is always to drive towards building community, first. Whether we believe our products have the potential to make a dent in the music or not - it stems from the willingness to grow a passionate base of people.
Find the right spirit, the way you want to build it, to make something we're all personally proud of together.
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Flex your autonomy, actualize beliefs
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Learn to build off of each others' skillsets
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Ask questions
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Thorough commit messages matter
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Prefer Walgreens as your pharmacy (our studio is above one)
What’s a particularly hard bug that your team solved?
We like to work with large datasets, and in the case of FanLabel, that includes working within the volatility of data in the music business: streams, plays, commercial success indicators, and artist & song metadata. When this comes from so many directions, handling this elegantly requires constant push and pull.
However, sometimes it's the seemingly smallest of issues that require full attention, like infinite login loops. The solution might be as simple as something like tokens being revoked, but not obvious when you're looking in the wrong places.
