Hacker News Reader

Comment by nagvx | Hacker News Reader

Please correct me if I'm wrong - isn't this a terrible business decision? It took a small team a year to make a product that is apparently taking the market by storm. Their secret sauce is apparently not some special algorithm, but common-sense automation. If the barrier to entry is actually this low, and they advertise the fact widely enough, they will soon be joined by competitors trying to do the same. They may be ahead of the pack, but they lose their selling point and their advantage faster than they would have done otherwise.

Why give away your hand like this?

View on HN

It's one thing to talk about your plan, it's another thing to actually execute it. We've seen bloated startup after bloated startup, I think running a lean (and I mean lean, 3 employees is nuts to me) ship like this is very hard to do and also must be very tough being the sole programmer.

It might be tough being the sole programmer, or it might be bliss.

I've been daydreaming about running a microISV recently - the ability to prioritise everything myself and crack on without justification appeals. Sure, I might be wrong, but that's OK.

The opportunity already came and went. Four years in means four years of catching up to do. If you come at it with more funding and a larger company structure you might be able to kill DistroKid by burning through a lot of cash, but you won't achieve the same "bottom feeder profitability", and your company might go under afterwards.

Basically, the only productive way to challenge this company is to also go in solo and be tough as nails, and there are almost certainly less contentious niches you can take on if you want to do that.

With more funding, long-term profitability is not a concern

I don't understand this. Do you mean "short-term profitability is not a concern"?

My take was that DistroKid is already taking bare minimum profits, so even if someone enters the market with cash to burn, they're only fighting for a piece of an already small pie, and there's little guarantee that will recoup their burned cash.

The argument against it from GP (if I read correctly) was it would not be profitable to do that.

My point was that profitability isn't a concern of highly-funded startups. Growth is. So if they can throw enough money at it and pull those customers away, they've met the definition of 'success' as seemingly applied by many VCs - fast growth and on-paper potential. The cost and loss is much less relevant.

I shouldn't have said "long-term" as it added confusion. I meant 'profitability' in general.

I don't necessarily think that the market is large enough to attract those well-funded startups, but we're talking hypotheticals at this point anyway...

"The Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing But The Truth"

"The untold story of the Microsoft antitrust case and what it means for the future of Bill Gates and his company."

https://www.wired.com/2000/11/microsoft-7/

> The only thing that surprised Microsoft about Netscape's strategy was the brazenness with which the upstarts shouted it to the world. Nathan Myhrvold told me, "There's a good analogy to bicycle racing. In bicycle racing, you don't want to be first until the end. What you want to do is draft the guy in front of you. And then, in the last minute, you dart out. The middleware gambit is about drafting the leader." Yet here was Andreessen publicly proclaiming in the summer of 1995 that Netscape's plan was to reduce Windows to "a poorly debugged set of device drivers." "They didn't save it up," Myhrvold said. "They fucking pulled up alongside us and said, 'Hey, sorry, that guy's already history.'"

Distrokid has been out for a couple of years now and it's easy to see that it's pretty damn popular. Sure someone can get a team together and create the next Distrokid (I'm sure it's happening), but they'll be behind a couple of years. By that time, @Pud will have made his millions and onto the next...

Yup, they have the userbase already. Also, they disrupted the incumbents by being an order of magnitude cheaper (or cheaper than that, based on how many songs you're selling) than their competitors, which helped their userbase grow.

It's hard to imagine a new competitor being able to compete with DistroKid on price at all, considering how cheap they are. An order of magnitude cheaper is probably out of the question. And these numbers (for the larger clients) are peanuts on DistroKid anyways, so even if you could compete on price it might not matter for much of the market.

I agree for price, you can't really beat Distrokid but disruption can come in other forms. Other competitors may think of better features, more connections, or simply better marketing. I don't know.

Will this likely happen? Nah.

Good question. However, I'd argue the entry to barrier is actually very high. It boils down to their audience base they've already built up over the years. This commands a big market premium because it cannot be replicated with engineering.

So they aren't showing any of their hand (how to build audiences for customer development) but able to convey the image that they are somehow david vs goliath by sharing their stories like this.

> It took a small team a year to make a product that is apparently taking the market by storm. Their secret sauce is apparently not some special algorithm, but common-sense automation

They're taking a part of the market by storm.. specifically Indies with a "do it yourself" mentality.

Speaking as someone who works for a music distributor who has one of the "Big Three" Record labels as a client (Warner, Sony, UMG), I can say that in general we haven't been a great fit for really small time acts (though we're getting better). But the breadth of Distrokid's offerings wouldn't be able to cover that of a major label (and although they claim they could, there's no proof that they could handle that kind of scale either).

For instance, the base Distrokid plan doesn't even allow you to specify a release date (presumably it just releases it right away). Major labels often run promotions in different countries (necessitating different release dates per country). There's also pre-order dates, some of which are tied to instant-grat tracks for certain release dates in certain countries. The fine grained control necessary for a big act is missing from most DIY offerings.

Distrokid is serving a different market than the incumbents, and that's cool. I'd definitely recommend it over the other flat rate model distributors. But there's a reason Distrokid isn't delivering the next <insert big act here>'s album.

I wouldn't want to compete with this. It's a whole lot of schlep [1], and even if you match their features, you'd have to charge less than $19.99 per year. I don't think there's any more room for innovation or lower prices.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html

> Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Not saying that DistroKid is perfect, but sometimes all it takes to be the best in any given market is to be exactly what's needed and nothing more. It may seem like giving one's hand away, but what could there be to add? There's certainly not much fat to trim. How would someone else compete?

Ideas are everywhere, it is the implementation that is the key.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com