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Comment by pinaceae | Hacker News Reader

How exactly were they pitching their actual business model? Any clue?

I get the annotation idea, but how the hell do you make significant money off of it?

1. Have the "right kind" of founders, Ivy League, brash and exciting and magnets for press. Also have the "right kind" of company, lots of coders and claims of having an engineering culture.

2. Have a somewhat successful user generated content site.

3. Mutter some generalities about how we're "not just X man, we're like totally X for the entire internet"

4. ??

5. Profit

Don't forget telling anyone who will listen how you're the "Uber of [industry]".

I'm not a huge fan of the founders or the overall biz model (if there was one) but when they raised a bunch of money they did have pretty solid traction with users and that can sometimes be enough for VCs to take a gamble. $15m was entirely too much money. But that was a particularly frothy time. I don't think that deal would get done today.

They raised $56.8 million at a valuation of close to a billion dollars for a site that at the time was basically a lyrics site with not bad UI and SEO.

Not bad UI, but I wouldn't call the site good UI by any stretch. It loads fast and is simplistic, two things I appreciate, but it definitely lacks something. And whats with that logo?

>"Have the "right kind" of founders, Ivy League, brash and exciting and magnets for press."

I found their "right kind" to be cringe worthy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NAzQPll7Lo

The founder on the right seemed borderline drunk.

Genius has a "broader mission" to "annotate the world"[0]. That was the pitch that led to a $15M investment from Andreessen Horowitz. This on top of meteoric growth in becoming one of the top lyrics sites on the internet.

"While Facebook’s mission may be to connect the world, Rap Genius' mission is to bring context and knowledge to those connections. Rap Genius is itself a kind of social network, but its a social network based around texts and discussions of texts."

[0] - https://genius.com/Marc-andreessen-why-andreessen-horowitz-i...

I might sound snarky but it looks it's more important how you sell the idea to investors than to your actual customers. Not that I much care about, investors are the ones losing their money in the end.

Still don't understand how or what they showed about how are they going to make money, I do understand the "great vision".

Don't have to sell to customers when you can sell to Google/FB/Amazon instead.

but, again, i get the mission - nowhere does it say how you make a few billion in profit off of it.

did we have a bubble with no burst? just a fizzle?

Remembered that that the book Launch Pad chronicled them - then as Rap Genius - quite a bit. Here's what they said back then:

"This is what a lyrics site looks like now. You go, you get a big ringtone ad. This is terrible! Where can you find the lyrics?" [Lehman] then mocks the site, as the crowd laughs at the absurdity of an ad for breakfast cereal next to the lyrics of Lil' Wayne...

"We're basically going to dominate the lyrics space. We're going to kill MetroLyrics, kill all these sites. After that, all texts. Poetry. The Bible. Literature. Tax code."

Strangely, the other areas are mentioned in a blur, with no mention of what will actually be next after rap lyrics."

I think it was supposed to be a platform. I would be curious how to know how royalties work for publishing lyrics though.

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