Apply HN: Hillside.fm - listen to music with other people in rooms

Hillside.fm lets you listen to music with other people in rooms. You can open private rooms to listen with friends, or join public rooms to discover new songs together with a reddit-like community. Whereas existing services have focused on the party/club/dj aspect of shared music, Hillside is quiet listening rooms for introverts. We're not a video game.

The shared music market is confirmed to exist. The problem is, no one's figured out how to run such a service cheaply. But a music room service is fundamentally a node.js/socket.io app, which is super cheap; and if you get the music elsewhere, bandwidth costs round down to zero. So all the money problems people are encountering must be self-created, from e.g. hiring too fast, or buying users.

We plan to keep the team small, write small, efficient software, and grow organically. We'll write everything in Clojure, letting us execute a million times faster than the competition. Thanks to ClojureScript, React, and Electron, we can use the same code across our web, mobile, and desktop apps, which will make us even faster.

Ads won't work; we'll have to have subscriptions. One intriguing idea is to cap the number of people per room, and charge companies for team rooms.

We'll stream the music from YouTube initially. Hopefully that's legal. Genius and plug.dj do/did it. If this ends up being a problem, by the time anyone complains we'll be out of the seed stage, and making deals should be easier.

I can answer questions.