Tech Entrepreneurs: Discover how Eva and her team turned their final project into a full-time commitment!

Hello, I’m Eva, I’m originally from Germany and I did the Data Science summer bootcamp batch #701 in Amsterdam. I started coding because I’ve always wanted to learn it so I made the decision to take some time off of work and jump in. I wanted to do the full-time bootcamp as I thought that it would be a great opportunity to fully emerge into code and learn the new skill. My learning experience prior to the bootcamp was mostly on a voluntary basis which, to be completely honest, wasn’t as motivating for me. Learning on my own meant that I needed to dedicate my free time to the cause. For all of these reasons, I took the leap and joined Le Wagon.

Before joining Le Wagon, I did my masters and bachelors degree in business administration and industrial engineering in the field of chemistry. I’ve therefore always been in this field of science but with a tight connection to business management. 

Most recently, I was working in strategy consulting. During this time, I worked with big corporations to figure out their strategy and collaboratively work with the client on different problem sets. Most of these past problem sets did revolve around the question: how can I leverage data? This was also a big motivator for me as I wanted to apply the field of data to my role as a strategy consultant. 

I am still working as a strategy consultant, but I'm currently on a leave. I originally took this time off to complete the bootcamp, but have recently extended it to further deepen my programming skills. 

At first, my main motivator to learn how to code was to be able to understand and discuss with programers. Hence, I decided to actually jump into coding and learn it myself so that at the beginning I could program smaller things and at some point work with more experienced programers. Now, I can program much more than I thought I would be able to before joining Le Wagon. I advanced far more than I ever imagined to. 

I had a really great learning experience at Le Wagon! It was full-time so very intensive, but the sense of community, including both the fellow students and the teaching staff, really helps you grasp the concepts in a very quick manner. There were of course some days where I felt as though I was really struggling with grasping these concept. Nevertheless, it was a great learning experience and after the 10 weeks (9 weeks + the additional Career Week), I truly realized how much I had learnt. Overall, the teachers, TAs and fellow students were the key to my motivation throughout my learning journey at Le Wagon. 

Our final project was settled in the music industry. I came up with my original pitch after discussing with a fellow colleague of mine who is working as a producer in the music industry. He inspired me with the idea of a project around data science and the music industry, which I thought could be quite interesting. This whole idea was then developed quite quickly. We then had some discussions with Place Called Home, the record label that we started the project with.

We decided to take on this journey and build our project to see how far it would bring us. The first product that we built was a prototype that would help a record label predict the number of streams for given songs on given playlists.

Following our Demo Day presentation, the record label really liked the end product and wanted to continue working with us on this project. We’re now building the MVP (minimal viable product) and we’re very excited for what 2022 has in store for us.
Learn more about Project Pl.ai.list and watch Eva's Demo Day presentation (18:52):

What truly inspired me was the excitement that was behind this project and also the idea of working in the music industry. For me, when I was younger, I always thought that working in the music industry was so cool but that I wasn’t creative enough. This is therefore a little bit of a twist to the story because I may still not be as creative in terms of music, but by taking this data driven approach, I’m able to apply creativity in a new way and get started in the music industry.

I think there's a lot of opportunities where you can actually apply this data science knowledge to diverse topics. I may not have followed my dream of working as a traditional artist or singer, but I’m happy that I was able to take my on twist on this and follow through!

The project was about using a dataset from the record label, which was historical data of songs, playlists, number of streams and number of followers. Based on this dataset, we trained the machine learning model to predict future or current number of streams for a given song on a given playlist. Why did we do this? Well, the issue with record labels is that they only have a limited kind of visibility of how many streams they can achieve for a certain song. 

If you think about Spotify, you have all sorts of different playlists and you ideally would like to know, how many streams and therefore revenue you would receive if you put a given song on a given playlist. This was the record labels core problem that we tried to resolve with this machine learning model that we build for the client.

Today, I’m still working with my project members from the bootcamp. Our team is made up of myself, Jerome Drescig and Leonardo Pereda. We’re working collaboratively as a team, but focus on our roles. Jerome has been working as the Chief Programming Officer, having a background as a business analyst, he’s now been working on implementing the packages. Leonardo has been working a lot on the Frontend of things, but also on the model itself and implementing the user interface. I myself have mainly been acting as a Product Owner, having built the first structure and then adapted based on feedback from the team. 

My favourite part, although it sounds painful, was actually bug fixing. It was extremely rewarding when you had these aha moments and actually found solutions.

Another one of my favourite moments, especially since we had been working virtually with Covid, was when our whole team was able to come together and meet in person for the first time in Amsterdam. This first moment when we all sat together as a team was really special. Finally, of course, the excitement of presenting our project on the Demo Day was a great feeling as well.

Jerome, Leonardo and I are all located in different countries. Myself in Germany, Jerome in Belgium and Leonardo in the United States. With this being said, we’re somewhat playing it by ear and working remotely in the meantime, but eventually we plan on coming back together in person if other factors allow for it. 

My immediate goal is to have a good time on the project and build a good MVP. On top of that, on a more personal note, I want to advance in programming and get back to coding to ensure that I maintain my knowledge from the course.

I'd like to say a big thank to my team, but also to Place Called Home, the record label behind this, without whom it wouldn't have been possible to build this. 

I also would like to say that the bootcamp was 100% worth it. Although it’s very tough, you just need to trust the process as the teachers always say!