Choosic

Set up by a team of London University Alumni, including Thinh Truong Ha from UCL PaLS; Choosic is a music discovery app that brings you personalised music recommendations and fast playlist building.

Choosic – the next big thing in music

The sound of start-ups

Choosic is a music discovery app that delivers personalised recommendations to its users. With a focus on a seamless user experience and integration with social media, it has the potential to make major waves in the world of social start-ups. The team behind it is an ‘allstars’ group of London university alumni, comprising data scientist Thinh Truong Ha (UCL BSc, Psychology, MSc, Royal Holloway), Project Manager Alessia Sannazzaro (Goldsmiths, University of London) and Founder Chris Underdown (London South Bank University). Starting life as a YouTube channel that gave a platform to up-and-coming artists, Choosic soon changed its offering to an app.

Hitting the right notes

In 2014, the team took part in the UCL Summer programme, an 8-week course which focuses on key entrepreneurial skills, from learning business basics to starting and growing your own company. “We found the lectures that focused on subjects such as how to develop a business and how to create a financial plan incredibly useful – they were brilliant,” says Alessia. “ UCL Innovation and Enterprise offers fantastic resources for student entrepreneurs. The UCL Summer programme was particularly enlightening, with many valuable lessons learnt,” says Thinh

Ha, Choosic’s Data Scientist. Choosic also got start-up support from UCL Business Advisor Christian Rayner. “Music is a vibrant industry in the UK,” says Christian, “and Choosic has the potential to really open up the market for music discoverability, enabling the little guys to get noticed and hopefully increasing their chances of becoming the next big thing.”

And the beat goes on

The team then entered the UCL Workshop and Business plan Challenge – and won! The Challenge shows entrants how to start a business by helping them do it for themselves. Choosic’s outstanding business plan and vision landed them £6k of prize money, which they are using to develop the product. It is currently on iOS and Choosic are aiming to get it onto Android and Windows too. Further help from UCL Innovation and Enterprise includes securing sponsored incubator space for one year at MeWe360 in central London. With this all in place, Choosic are rocking out. Finalists in the Santander Universities 60 Second Pitch Awards, the team also landed in the Top 50 of the Big App Fund competition, sponsored by Facebook, which looks to find Europe’s next big apps. They were semi-finalists in the online incubator Passport to Pitchswag’s Launch Event, have been nominated to be one of the digital trends in 2015 by NetBooster France and have started curating live events where unsigned artists can meet industry players in central London.