PonoMusic Success Story Kit
Community Cloud for Customers, Partners, and Employees
Customer-Facing Assets
Customer-Facing Success Story PDF
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5 Things to Know
Salesforce1 Community Cloud and Pono:
1. Working with Salesforce and CloudCraze (AppExchange partner), PonoMusic designed
and launched a full-blown social music store in less than 6 months.
2. The Pono Community received thousands of daily logins before the player even launched.
3. Members have access to self-service features, including a full knowledgebase and Q & A,
so any product questions can be answered within minutes.
4. Innovative features such as Ideas allow members to reach out to PonoMusic and help the
company develop its product roadmap.
5. The long-term goal of the Pono Community is to provide a social collaboration platform
where artists and fans can engage each other and have a direct dialog and communication.
Customer-Facing Abstract
Pono resurrects a lost art in the Community Cloud
Neil Young, backed by one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns of all time, is bringing portability to the vinyl
experience with Pono, a digital player that plays music files in ultra-high resolution. Completing Young’s vision, the
PonoMusic team joined forces with Salesforce to launch the Pono Community, a full-blown social music store where
members can visit individual artists’ pages and stream albums, share playlists, and engage with other fans.
Developed in less than 6 months, the Pono Community is powered by the Salesforce1 Community Cloud and
CloudCraze, an e-commerce application that runs natively on the Salesforce1 Platform. “The level of community
interaction has been amazing,” says Pedram Abrari, EVP of Technology at PonoMusic. “We want the Pono
Community to flourish into a full engagement of artists and fans—and we believe that that’s the future of music.”
Pono Community Success Story
COMPANY PROFILE
LOCATION San Francisco, CA
COMPANY OVERVIEW
COMPANY SIZE
PonoMusic is a high-resolution music startup driven by a grassroots movement to save
music from compressed audio formats. Founded by Neil Young, PonoMusic aims to
preserve the feeling, spirit, and emotion that the artists put in their original studio
recordings and to provide the best possible listening experience of digital music. The
Pono Community was born from the philosophy that music needs to be a shared and
social experience.
CHALLENGE
• Provide an integrated social collaboration/ecommerce platform where artists and fans can
engage one another and have a direct dialog
alongside high-resolution music tracks
• Centralize the customer support experience
BUSINESS VALUE
• Rapid deployment with less IT overhead
• A seamless user experience between the Pono
Community and the music store
• Access to self-service features, including an
extensive knowledgebase and Q & A
• A constantly growing community where fans can
interact with other fans and gain deeper insight into
the music they’re passionate about
INDUSTRY Audio/Music/Retail
COMPETITOR Geek Wave
SOLUTION(S) Community Cloud
FIRST ACTIVE: 2012
SOLUTION
• A highly scalable, full-blown social music store
powered by the Salesforce1 Community Cloud
Email Example
SUBJECT LINE: Double your engagement, double your brand’s growth
Hi Susan,
When the cloud came along, it helped accelerate great ideas into successful businesses—but it also brought
people together across geographies. That’s what the Salesforce1 Community Cloud is all about—connecting
customers to your brand in new meaningful ways.
One of our more recent success stories involves rock legend, Neil Young. Neil’s quest to revive the soul of music
came to life with Pono, the first-ever music service that brings high res., studio-quality sound to a portable player.
In less than 6 months, his vision was complete after reaching out to Salesforce to help design and launch a fullblown social music store where music lovers can stream and purchase music, share playlists, and engage with
one another in a completely open forum.
The Pono Community was a huge success—bringing together over 30,000 members before the player even
officially launched. There is no other social e-commerce platform for music fans on the market quite like it…and
it’s clear that Pono’s success story has just begun.
Let’s talk about yours.
Sincerely,
Lisa Henderson
Blog: Neil Young Gives Us the Full Studio Experience at
Dreamforce
When it comes to listening to music, are we settling for “good enough?” The artists certainly think so. Listening to compressed digital music such as MP3s is
like “seeing a xerox of the Mona Lisa,” according to Elvis Costello.
In our quest for portability, we lost more than the charming pops and warm, fuzzy crackles we experienced listening to music on vinyl; we lost the emotion and
feeling of music. Until Pono, listening to albums on vinyl used to be the closest thing to being in the recording studio with the artists. With the popularity of
compressed digital music, we learned to settle for good enough. Pono is here to change all that.
Neil Young, backed by dozens of artists and a phenomenally successful Kickstarter campaign, is bringing back that studio-quality sound with Pono, a portable
device that plays music files in their native resolution, the way the artists intended.
Pono will have a huge presence at Dreamforce this year—with Young as one of the keynote speakers and Pedram Abrari, EVP of Technology at PonoMusic,
answering questions and showing live demos of the new Pono Music Store & Community, a social high-resolution music store powered by the Salesforce1
Community Cloud. The Pono Community gives music fans worldwide a place to discuss their favorite artists and music—and potentially, with the artists
themselves.
Dreamforce attendees will also get a chance to experience the PonoPlayer firsthand in the Community Cloud Campground. Stop by the Pono lounge and
listen to music the way the artists heard it in the studio. The PonoPlayer transports you to a sublime musical experience, from the most delicate passages of a
string quartet to the thunderous power of a heavy metal band. We’ll have a headphone listening lounge and listening booths, for a shared home audio
experience with Pono.
“We are launching Pono at Dreamforce and hope to get our message out far and wide. Come help us energize the Pono movement,” says Abrari.
Dreamforce is your opportunity to hear it first.
Published: October 14, 2014
Internal-Facing Assets
Sales-Facing Abstract
Pono resurrects a lost art in the Community Cloud
After earning over $6 million from Kickstarter supporters, Neil Young’s vision to revive the soul of music came to life
with Pono, the first-ever music service that brings high res., studio-quality sound to a portable player. Young and his
team at PonoMusic reached out to Salesforce and AppExchange partner, CloudCraze, to help design and launch a
full-blown social music store where music lovers can stream and purchase music, share playlists, and engage with
one another in a completely open forum. The Pono Community deployed in less than 6 months, receiving an
impressive level of community interaction before the player even officially launched. For Pono, the community isn’t
just a nice to have; it’s the cornerstone of the company’s music service and long-term vision. “We were looking for a
community experience that’s front and center, that drives e-commerce as opposed to simply being in support of it,”
says Pedram Abrari, EVP of Technology at PonoMusic. “We want the Pono Community to flourish into a full
engagement of artists and fans—and we believe that that’s the future of music.”
Background Assets
Pono Community Success Story
COMPANY PROFILE
LOCATION San Francisco, CA
COMPANY OVERVIEW
COMPANY SIZE
PonoMusic is a high-resolution music startup driven by a grassroots movement to save
music from compressed audio formats. Founded by Neil Young, PonoMusic aims to
preserve the feeling, spirit, and emotion that the artists put in their original studio
recordings and to provide the best possible listening experience of digital music. The
Pono Community was born from the philosophy that music needs to be a shared and
social experience.
CHALLENGE
• Provide an integrated social collaboration/ecommerce platform where artists and fans can
engage one another and have a direct dialog
alongside high-resolution music tracks
• Centralize the customer support experience
BUSINESS VALUE
• Rapid deployment with less IT overhead
• A seamless user experience between the Pono
Community and the music store
• Access to self-service features, including an
extensive knowledgebase and Q & A
• A constantly growing community where fans can
interact with other fans and gain deeper insight into
the music they’re passionate about
INDUSTRY Audio/Music/Retail
COMPETITOR Geek Wave
SOLUTION(S) Community Cloud
FIRST ACTIVE: 2012
SOLUTION
• A highly scalable, full-blown social music store
powered by the Salesforce1 Community Cloud
More Detailed Info and Quantitative Results
Color Commentary and Notes About Details of Deal or Implementation (taken directly from interview)
NOTES
“I was pretty familiar with Salesforce from my past career, including Chatter and the Community Cloud, but I’d never thought of Salesforce as a B2C platform, so I didn’t
get around to looking at Salesforce’s ability to help in this regard until late in the evaluation process (once I’ve exhausted the alternatives). Once I realized I wasn’t
getting the kind of user experience I wanted from anyone else, I kept going back to the previous Dreamforces I’ve attended and some of the great work I’ve seen
companies doing with Chatter and Communities functionality. I was convinced this was the platform for what we wanted to achieve…but what was missing was an
ecommerce dimension to it. I went to the AppExchange and found a Salesforce partner in CloudCraze, which has an ecommerce platform that runs natively on the
Salesforce1 Platform. So, I engaged them and we designed this seamless user experience.”
“The auto-elastic nature of Salesforce1 and the fact that all of this IT overhead is taken care of by the platform meant a lot less resources that we had to hire and a lot
less expertise that we needed to bring to the table. It allowed us to focus on our main differentiation, which is really the social music store. And the results have been
phenomenal. Any new startup that is considering bringing any kind of cloud-based service to the market should consider Salesforce very seriously as a platform that
could really catapult them into the market and allow them to grow and expand and maneuver very rapidly in a very agile fashion—in ways that have traditionally been
impossible to do when trying to take on an undertaking of this size and magnitude.”
QUANTITATIVE RESULTS (IF AVAILABLE)
Recorded numbers at the time of story interview (before the community officially launched)
• 22,000 members logging into the Pono Community
• 5,000 daily logins
• 400 new users a day (on average)
Salesforce.com Confidential
Solution Detail
MORE DETAILS
Competitors of Salesforce engaged in sales cycle:
None
Previous technology replaced by Salesforce:
None-Salesforce was part of the original vision
Salesforce products deployed:
Community Cloud (customer community)
Customer Business Model (B2B, B2C, or Both)
B2C
Salesforce Product features:
Ideas, Knowledge, Gamification
If using Service Cloud, list use case (e.g. customer support, call
center, field service, telesales, etc)
Customer support
Integrations:
E-commerce platform (through CloudCraze)
AppExchange Apps/Partners
CloudCraze
Solution ‘Go Live’ date:
October 2014 (official launch at Dreamforce)
Salesforce.com Confidential
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We will not contact the customer without reaching out to you first.
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Email of reference approver:
Salesforce.com Confidential
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