Find and play music from the web, mixturtle.com

Written on 29th July 2008                                                                                                              9 COMMENTS
Joop Dorresteijn, East Asia correspondent

Every week we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views.

This time we’re interviewing Louis Turtle, the co-founder of Mixturtle.com. Mixturtle is a music search engine and player. It allows users to easily find and listen to songs online within 2 clicks. We’ve got over 2million songs in our database and growing by the thousands each day.

The interface is Ajax based so it allows users to search and play songs simulataneously. New songs can be added to the playlist with 1 click. The playlist is automatically saved for returning visitors. The playlist is accessed by right click mouse and multiple playlists can be saved by free registration.

It’s a simple site that brings music to surfers who are unable to download music (office workers) and those who are not tech savy enough.

How did you come up with the idea of MixTurtle.com?

“Far away from home on a contracting job armed with only a 4GB ipod mini, the same songs got old fast. Internet access was granted at work but downloads were not. Though streaming was debatable and soon our 1MB connection got hogged with Youtube music and other audio files. Of course deadlines were imminent but the banging banging trance tunes kept us at good working pace. This was where the basic idea came from. We had to eliminate the time-killing process which was trying to locate good reliable music sources scattered around the web. We wanted to streamline the searching process down to as few steps as possible. From search to play within 2 clicks.”

What was your biggest challenge during the development process?

“The biggest challenge was finding the balance between simplicity and usability. Sure there were a million other features we could have included which would’ve complicated the interface and taken more time to develop, but we really weren’t sure if our idea was going to be a hit or a miss, so we launched it in it’s most basic form to get a response and minimize time wasting.

Can you describe the UK start-up culture compared to Silicon Valley?

“In the UK, the start-up culture outside of London is close to none-existent. There’s certainly no weekly gathering of entrepreneurs that we’re aware of in our hometown. Attempting a start-up here teaches you to be more financially efficient. Funding can sometimes lead to a ‘kid in a candy store’ scenario, overspending on things that don’t matter. However Silicon Valley is the birthplace of grand ideas and the concentration of resources there will rocket boost any start-up with the right people involved.”

What will be the influence of your start-up on the next web?

“We’d like to reinforce the idea that providing a service for users to achieve their desired outcome in as few steps as possible, and as fast a possible, is definitely the way forward. There are a lot of great ideas on the web, but sometime they can be shrouded with unnecessary junk which ultimately dillutes their main selling point.”

Where to go from here

“Since launching our hosting costs has gone up with the traffic and we’ve received lots of feedback from users regarding bugs and suggestions. So these are the areas we’ll be moving forward with from here. For monetisation we’re looking into the advertising model but using less intrusive methods as possible.”

Give it a try

Go to mixturtle.com and try it for yourself