Music Mastermind Testimonial
Reza Rassool, Chief Technical Officer at Music Mastermind
Music Mastermind intro
Music Mastermind is a company, a startup company that has the mission of enabling anyone to create music in a fun and easy way. We do that by presenting a virtual studio with a video game front-end. But underneath the surface is professional studio quality, signal processing and all of this is implemented in a cloud solution that allows anyone to be able to pick up the software, have fun and create music that sounds professional.
Choosing Sierra Atlantic
It’s quite interesting. We put a search out for outsourcing a large body of work. We just didn’t have the man power to implement and our business development team and I searched and amazingly we found Sierra Atlantic both independently and I flew up to San Francisco to the game developer conference to meet with Sierra Atlantic over there. And on the same day, on my Blackberry, a meeting appeared for Sierra Atlantic and a conference call and lo behold, two independent parts of our company had actually narrowed in on Sierra Atlantic. So I thought it would be worth looking at further.
Initial skepticism and overcoming it
Yes, In fact throughout my lone career, this is the ninth start up for me and I never outsourced any work. I believe that I always have to develop and build up a team in house and implement it all myself. I had heard so many scare stories about outsourcing and the loss of control over your software and all sorts of management nightmares. So I came into this whole process somewhat skeptical and I have to say that a lot of my fears have been allayed. The project is not over and done with but at least I am no longer a skeptic.
Understanding Music Mastermind's business needs
That was one of the issues in the beginning of my search for an outsource partner, was to find one that had a track record and a space that I was working in, the game space but also in building massive enterprise systems, the back-end for a game and Sierra has that experience already. We did some due diligence. We looked into existing customers of Sierra, spoke, interviewed and got onto a level of comfort where we believed that Sierra had the credentials to meet our needs.
Addressing Music Mastermind's key pain points
It’s been a journey of discovery. The interesting thing is that I did not have a large requirements document on day one, saying “Here, this is what I need.”What I found refreshing about Sierra’s approach was that they were able to embark on this exploration with me and help me find out what the requirements were, help me document them and help build a project plan in advance of any contract being in place and that was the interesting thing. Sierra was quite willing to put some skin in the game, flew engineers out to me in California, to sit with me and go through this exploration process in advance of us hammering out a contract.
Sierra Atlantic’s resourcefulness
We’ve been encouraged by Sierra’s willingness .If they didn’t have the expertise to acquire the expertise and when they didn’t have the knowledge base, we were able to fill that gap either by further recruitment or by a mix of onshore and offshore development.
Sierra Atlantic’s unique capabilities
For me, this is the first time I’m resorting to outsourcing. So in terms of Sierra’s unique capabilities, I can only talk about what actually surprised me about Sierra was that, they are a large company of 2000 staff and were able to interface with a small start-up. So a large corporation that you would think would move at a slow, grinding pace was able to meet the needs of a rapidly moving start-up whose direction was almost fish-tailing as we were trying to find where we were going so that’s what surprised me and I believe that is unique to Sierra.
Recommending Sierra Atlantic
I would definitely recommend Sierra, Yes and I would choose them for other projects. As I am learning about their other capabilities, I’ve got other projects on my mind; follow-on projects that I chose to outsource rather than build a team for.
Music Mastermind makes music creation fun, easy and intuitive for everyone, regardless of musical training or ability. We design products that allow anyone to create professional-quality music and collaborate with others in a compulsively fun environment.
