A year ago, 18-year-old Chris Clifford (now CEO of Floshare) was sitting at a party and listening to friends make up their own raps over recorded beats. Snapchat had just become really popular and he thought, why not create a “Snapchat for freestyle rap?” Out of this idea came the concept for Floshare.
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The concept of Floshare went through several changes after meeting up with Barefoot Solutions and eventually joining forces with the CBA Incubator program through LMU, where Chris goes to school.
He realized the possibilities for an app where people could record, mix and share their own creative renditions of tracks would be limited by just sharing clips that would disappear if adhering to the Snapchat model. Following the needs of the music industry, Chris began thinking about all the individuals who want to get themselves heard by record company executives and how some singers or rappers may want to record their own voices over popular beats or DJs may want to create beats of their own that need voices from others.
Ideas started flowing about how big-time musicians could interact with undiscovered talent... sort of like a Twitter interaction for music, so tagging and hashtagging made their way into the platform and so did the ability for people to start “rap battles” by dueling with a friend or calling out someone famous by tagging them on a post.
During the time this Floshare concept had started shaping up, Clifford met Vidya Priyadarshini, who was working on an international project of her own at CBA and it had some international tie-ins to help kick off FloShare. Along with Priyadarshini’s partnerships and experience, Chris started speaking with senior figures in the music industry like Bill Silva of Bill Silva Entertainment, Abe Batshon of Beatstars and Tom Delonge of Blink 182 to figure out what their areas of the industry were lacking and how his Floshare platform could help. He then brought on a team of individuals to start handling the other areas of the business such as social media and business development.
Today, the Floshare team of six are in pre-launch mode with an app designed and loaded with features. They have just above $5,000 contributed towards their $20,000 goal to get the app built and all the licensing and partnerships worked out to launch the India, Singapore and Portugal markets shortly and the U.S. market soon after that.
If you like what you hear, you can lock in your username now by purchasing it for $1 on Floshare’s Kickstarter page.
