Vinylfy: Like Facebook but for Record Collectors

May 13, 2013— -- Attention record lovers, new startup Vinylfy wants to change your life.

Launched just this February by longtime friends Jose Pimienta, 24, and Osniel Gonzalez, 29, Vinylfy is a social network for record collectors, where they can not only upload their collection but also interact with other users, create wishlists and share record information.

And it's precisely Vinylfy's social networking component that makes this startup stand out from similar websites like Discogs, one of the largest online databases out there with four million records and counting.

"There are other sites that are using forums and technology from the 90s, so we wanted to make it more modern and more interactive," says Pimienta, who's a huge Pink Floyd and Def Leppard fan and has around 1,000 records in his collection.

With only $200 and a passion for music, Pimienta and Gonzalez launched Vinylfy from their bedrooms. A few weeks later they won $22,000 in cash and services at SuperConf, a tech entrepreneurship conference in Miami.

Pimienta and Gonzalez go way back- they're childhood friends from Pinar del Rio, Cuba and both majored in software engineering in that city. Pimienta came to Miami four years ago and Gonzalez last July. For both computer geeks who were used to dial-up speeds in Cuba, encountering high speed internet in the U.S. has been a life changer.

"In Cuba we wouldn't have been able to do any of this, because first of all we don't have the resources and second of all you don't have the opportunity to do anything," said Pimienta from The LAB, a coworking space in Miami's Wynwood neighborhood and epicenter of the city's burgeoning tech scene.

"What's happening to us with Vinyfy is something you can't even imagine in Cuba," said Gonzalez. "What we have achieved here in a couple of months wouldn't have been possible there."

Since launching Vinylfy four months ago, Pimienta and Gonzalez have garnered 800 subscribers and 15,000 records, and counting,with very little promotion. They are currently seeking investors that love vinyl as much as they do so they can launch an app and expand Vinylfy.