My co-founder (Jon) and I have been using and loving Grooveshark since their “Flash days”. We also bought the e-book Startups Open Sourced and loved their story. As you can see we have a love story with Grooveshark.

This year Jon and I decided to launch a new startup, BugSense, a service that collects and analyzes errors in mobile apps. Jon was an alpha tester of Grooveshark for Android for a long time. One Saturday the past May, Jon calls me on the phone:

Jon: Grooveshark is using BugSense.

Panos: No way, stop kidding, I have work to do.

Jon: No! Check the database!

So I checked and their domain was there! Jon just sent them an email, they evaluated the service and they started using it! I felt like some young football players who join the team they supported since they were kids. Statements like “I was always a fan of Real Madrid, it’s an honor and a dream for me to join Real” came to my mind!

But it’s not only the excitement that such a user can give you. Having so high profile users provides you with great feedback, feedback that you could not even imagine. So thanks to the requests of the great Android team at Grooveshark we managed to:

Add extra viewers per project so that the whole team could get reports.

Improve our deduplication algorithm (merge different thread, ignore hex sybmols and so on)

Started working on ProGuard integration.

The aforementioned tasks have been proven to have really great value for our users. As most people in startups do, everyday we think of new shiny and amazing features. Grooveshark requests made us concentrate on our core product. We didn’t add those crazy features for now but we just kept on polishing our main feature, tracking exceptions. If you have read the Rework book you came across titles like:

Start at the epicenter

Focus on what won’t change

Quick wins

Long lists don’t get done

Underdo your competition

Supporting a big customer like Grooveshark just put pressure on following all of the above and it really paid off.

- Panos