In early 2005, while finishing my MBA at ESSEC Business School, I founded my first startup, Connect’In Advertising (CIA - no pun intended). The concept was simple: given the rising costs of video game development with the next generation of consoles (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360), the industry needed new revenue streams, including advertising. To tap into this new opportunity, we developed one of the first ad servers focused on in-game advertising (think web ad server but with 3D models to fit into a video game). We rented a small office in Paris, in an incubator called Paris Innovation, where a few other startups were being founded, including Lovelee, a free dating website co-founded by Daniel Marhely and two others.
By mid-2005, we had our first version and started testing it with a few publishers of PC games in France. Unfortunately, the volumes were shallow. We found a growth opportunity in China, where online gaming was the main type of game available, gathering hundreds of millions of gamers every day. We found a local partner that owned the rights to serve ads in over 50 video games, representing over 150 million players. My co-founder and I, along with five engineers, moved to Beijing. After six months, our partner offered to purchase our technology, which we agreed to, given the communication barriers and the significant differences in business practices.
By late 2006, the transition was underway, and I decided to return to Paris. There, I reconnected with Daniel, who was working on a side project called Blogmusik, which had garnered some attention from TechCrunch.
Daniel was self-taught, did not graduate high school, and was the perfect scrappy hacker. He fell in love with Adobe Flash early on and founded his first software development studio. A few years later, he co-founded Lovelee to compete against Meetic (eventually acquired by Match.com). They raised a €1 million seed round, one of the largest in France in 2006, and Daniel became the CTO, responsible for both product and technology.
Like many others, Daniel loved listening to music while working and used RadioBlogClub to stream music for free. RadioBlogClub leveraged a loophole in copyright law, offering a free embeddable music player compatible with MySpace and other blogging platforms. This allowed bloggers to stream music while hosting the tracks on RadioBlogClub servers. The site indexed these files, allowing users to search, stream, and organize them into playlists. Like YouTube, RadioBlogClub saw itself as a hosting company, claiming it was not responsible for the uploaded and streamed content. You can read this Wikipedia page to learn more about this service and what led to its closure.
Daniel got fed up with RadioBlogClub’s clunky design and built his interface while streaming content from their servers. He launched Blogmusik.net in May 2006 with a simple, elegant interface inspired by the iPod.
![Blogmusik web interface - may 2006 Blogmusik web interface - may 2006](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3eae1616-1943-4629-bf45-89d13c1572bf_2676x1070.png)
By the fourth quarter of 2006, when Daniel and I reconnected, he was down. He quickly shared the tension between him and his co-founders. Lovelee's numbers were poor, and investors were nervous. The company needed more money, and investors wanted to do a recap as it had missed its milestones. Additionally, he had received a cease-and-desist order from SACEM, the French music rights organization for authors, composers, and publishers in the music industry, to shut down Blogmusik.net.
At the time, I was living with my best friend, Mathieu, in a large apartment at 78 Boulevard de Sébastopol in the 3rd arrondissement of Paris. Our place was the happy hour spot for our friends, and we often partied. Daniel stopped by frequently, usually rumbling about Lovelee.
One day, the three of us were working on our projects on our laptops in the living room when I shouted (I had my headphones on): “Hey Dan, how many users do you have in Blogmusik?” to which he answered: “I don’t know; I haven’t checked in a while.” We asked him to look into his database. He then replied: “roughly 100,000” in a monotone voice. Both Mathieu and I looked at each other and we sat next to Daniel, asking him to review the request. He tried again, and we saw the number; there was no error. I was shocked! I remember instantly saying: “Let’s build a business out of it, I am sure there is a way to make it legal!“. Then we thought about the challenges and moved on.
Over time, our conversations shifted more and more to Blogmusik and its potential. Daniel knew there was no future for Blogmusik in its current iteration. When we discussed building a startup together, he was hesitant as he was still fully involved with Lovelee and did not feel like leaving his baby. He also felt betrayed by his current partners. I knew I had to earn his trust, so I decided to help him with the cease-and-desist matter for Blogmusik.
I contacted my friend Daniel Katz, whom I had met through a business trip organized by the French government to build business relationships between French and Chinese entrepreneurs. He immediately introduced us to one of his friends, a lawyer specializing in copyright laws. We met for coffee on the left bank in the 15th arrondissement on a Saturday morning in October 2006. The meeting went well, but eventually, he did not feel he could help us. Instead, he introduced us to another attorney specializing in music copyright. Unfortunately, Daniel decided to take his time and informed me that Blogmusik was a long shot and he was talking to other people to make sure he would avoid making the same mistake he did with Lovelee.
As the holidays approached and the tensions between him and his partners increased, I suggested Daniel take a break. We decided to spend a week in an all-inclusive resort in the Dominican Republic starting December 15, 2006.
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Salutations Jonathan, très bons souvenirs de nos échanges de cette époque. Je m'étais risqué il y a quelques temps à écrire une histoire de Deezer https://musiczone.substack.com/p/deezer-licorne-du-freemium-nee-en