For those of you who aren’t familiar with Flight of the Conchords, they are a folk-comedy duo from New Zealand. The great thing about these guys, is that HBO decided to make a fictitious self-titled sitcom about their band. My co-worker Greg Bell and I accidentally discovered the show this summer while on a business trip to Seattle. Needless to say, we completely fell in love with them, and haven’t missed a show yet.

Anyway, to get on with my story: in the HBO series, they have a band manager named Murray. Murray is extremely organized. He takes attendance at meetings, he organizes all of their gigs for them, and even takes them on sight-seeing tours.

And so, I decided to name (or rather, code-name) my online band management application after the best band manager in the world!

The thought of Murray came to fruition when I was in a band, and we were struggling to get ourselves organized. We tried many different methods and software, but nothing fit very well. That’s when I realized that there was a real need for this kind of thing. We weren’t the only band that couldn’t get our shit together.

When I came up with the idea for Murray, I really wanted to do it right – from the ground up. So, I started with a competitive analysis, just to see what was out there for band management software. The results were actually quite stunning: there is absolutely nothing good!! I spent a few weeks just playing around with some of the software that is currently out there, and found myself ever-more excited to get started on Murray.

My problem is that I like to rush into things, and I really didn’t want to do that on this project. So, I decided to put together a survey, to ask musicians how they keep track of all their shows, sessions, rehearsals, etc., their current methods, and what they would need in a piece of software. I sent it out to every music contact that I have, and got some great feedback.

I tried to take everything to heart, and come up with the best possible solution.

I’m currently working on the sitemap, trying to develop the basic structure of the site. I might also throw a card sort in there just to make sure I’m on the right track.

After that comes wireframes, and then design. Then, I’m going to be developing Murray using Ruby on Rails.

You can expect to see Murray in beta at the end of March.