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Comment by memset | Hacker News Reader

This is super interesting! I started selling my own notebook (not a diary) for musicians in February this year, and went through many of the same steps of trying to find a physical print shop without knowing anything about paper. I learned a lot!

What I haven't been able to reproduce is the rapid success! Sometimes I will get upvotes on, say, reddit, and sell $300 worth of books in a week. For the most part, social media influences have been a bust - promising to leave a review in exchange for a free book, but never doing so. I haven't spent tons of money on SEO, content, or advertising, so perhaps I should do that. Just hard to know what the ROI would be.

After reading this post, I might look at putting more money into some of these efforts (Instagram ads, google ads, creating content for my website for SEO purposes). Just hard to know where to begin!

(If you are curious, the product is themusiciansnotebook.com :)

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Your notebook looks functional and useful, but pretty simple, based on the pictures on your website. There's nothing wrong with that (and if I composed music, I would probably order a copy), but it doesn't necessarily attract the eye.

You might want to consider an edition that has little things a musician might find interesting or useful included in it. That seems to be how these planner people attract people, is a lot of little things that people probably don't really need but enjoy filling out anyway (the link says they compiled all sorts of stuff into their planner, and for anecdata my fiancee is a huge planner nut and loves checking out planners with all sorts of different approaches to layouts and fields and organization and whatnot).

For example (and I don't recommend going this far necessarily, but it might inspire you), a board game designer decided to design a playtesting journal for other board game designers, and threw all sorts of little things in there, like a built in scoreboard, a die number on the page so it could be opened to a random page to simulate a die roll, added achievements with a sticker page, lots of fields to remind the designer to ask certain questions at the end of the playtest, a game contract checklist, a page with guidelines of sizes for various components for getting the game printed by a manufacturer, etc. He did a Kickstarter for it and raised $30k for it (not as much as the article, but still not bad). I backed it and got a few for myself, even though I've kind of settled on my own method for playtesting games, I'll give his a try.

Anyway, his journal serves a specific niche like yours does, so maybe something in there will inspire you to find ways to make your notebook stand out and attract more people to purchase it.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/828934174/fail-faster-t...

Sounds to me like you want it to be a different product than it is.

I would recommend memset to look at Field Notes[1] for inspiration. They do an amazing job of turning simple ruled notebooks into something desirable.

Some suggestions:

- Make the cover look nicer and more inspiring (like Field Notes), not just plain white paper.

- Find someone who is good at drawing sheet music by hand, to show some really beautiful examples of the product in use for your shop. Again, inspiration.

- The site says you “pored over every detail”. I think you can tell that story better (again, think Field Notes).

1: https://fieldnotesbrand.com/

That's a good idea too. Field Notes do attract the eye.

No, I don't mean that they should change the product necessarily. I think there's value in what they currently have, and said that if I composed music myself, I would probably buy a couple.

But there's nothing wrong with seeing what other people have done and being inspired by them. I am constantly taking in ideas from all over and pairing them against all of my different game designs and story ideas and wondering if those ideas could be used in some way. Maybe seeing that link sparked a "Oh, maybe I could put in a... whatever... scale reference, or common key signatures list, or a box for a version number of the song, or whatever" and adds one extra page to the journal, and advertises it, and sees a 10% increase in sales or something.

I don't really have any desires one way or another in what the product should be. I'm just aware of that other journal, and thought maybe they might find it interesting, and probably aren't aware of it since it's for a different niche field.

You've come this far and IMO may as well throw a bit of money at it to do it justice. Better to know you gave it a better shot than wonder what might have been. I once bought a domain and mocked up wine tasting notepads to see if there was a market for it, then I barely showed anyone and it predictably went nowhere.

I'd get some professional photos done with a couple of musicians as models. Upgrade the site. Set the cheapest pricepoint as $30ish for a three-pack (and maybe a bulk option for schools/teachers?). Then try some Instagram/Facebook advertising either as a one off, or with a $50/wk budget.

Then, after a few weeks, if it's had no traction, make a decision to proceed or bail. But at least you will have given it a bit more effort.

I checked it out, have you considered doing something similar to a diary? To keep aspiring musicians on track with practice, theory, performing etc. I play guitar and find it difficult to commit time to practice and improve. Would love a planner/diary that could help me do that.

I want to second that (also a guitarist with almost zero time on hands). There are so many books, and now apps that help practice, but I don’t know any tools that have helped me keep on track.

Hey memset I'm Tom the Co Founder of Saint Belford. Thanks for your kind words. Your notebook looks great. Certainly worth running some ads at musicians, just target people like yourself if you're the end user of the product. This is all we do for ads at Saint Belford. Best of luck!

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