7 Reasons Why My Social Music Site Never Took Off | Hacker News Reader

7 Reasons Why My Social Music Site Never Took Off

dmix.ca

69 pointsdmix29 comments

"Bad launch, the launch of the site wasn’t planned very well at all. I decided to use the “genius” marketing ploy of having a private beta to create scarcity."

What percentage of great/enviable web startups had a GREAT launch? I'm not saying a good launch isn't valuable, but it doesn't merit being on a list of top reasons you failed.

Read this: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/06/not-so-grand...

A good read dmix but do not despair. Only a very few startups ever get any traction and you have done a nice job of identifying some of the reasons.

The nice thing about software startups is that no matter how unsuccessful a business model or product introduction might be you have expanded your personal code base and increased your marketability to potential clients (e.g. now you will be able to charge $200 an hour instead of $100)..

I find it inspiring that you managed to get this up and running as well as you did while in college. Keep trying and I'm sure you'll go far.

Did you consider that your site may have failed because it uses a black background? How many very successful websites do you know that use black backgrounds?

> He called at about 11pm

That seems late for a phone call to somebody you don't know. Or is it assumed in the startup world that everybody is a night owl?

Yeah, he was calling from California on the west coast and we were in Toronto on the east. I think it's about a 4 hr difference.

About the Cold Start problem...couldn't you have written a bot to crawl the web looking for random albums? There are quite a few mp3/music blogs. Or another interesting idea would be to scan Last.fm and see what's going up the charts.

Anyway, great post :D

"We were offering information on great albums and community voting. But other sites like Last.fm and Hype Machine were offering the actual music"

Hard to have a music site without actual music. My $.02. Good insight though, thanks for sharing.

Interesting story. If the cofounder couldn't contribute much on the technical end, it seems like he should've been more involved in finding new material for the site. But then you said that he didn't like indie music much. So why was he your cofounder again?

I think that was the gist behind the "Niche Social Networks are not Businesses" section near the end. His friend was brought on as a cofounder because he believed that business knowledge would be important. He learned that, at least in his case, having a "business knowledge" person was not very helpful in getting the site off the ground.

I love the part about the phone call. That's the sort of thing you can look back on and laugh, but at the time it probably seemed like a huge deal. At least its something you can learn from next time, and thats a good thing.

Good stuff:

Niche Social Networks are not Businesses

They aren't?

http://howardforums.com/ http://www.gaiaonline.com/ http://www.ytmnd.com/

From: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/meganiche_pr.html

Businesses can be made from niches. Niche business can have social networks. However, niche social networks are not businesses.

You see which way it flows? With a niche business, the social network is a subset of the functionality if it exists at all. If it is just a niche social network, it probably is not a business.

I don't know, a social network can be made into a business, but one has to treat it as a social network, before it becomes a business.

Once the social network qua social network is healthy, you can then monetize it. It's a lot of work, and the financial rewards are little, but if you do it right, you can get a strong and loyal user base and maybe make a few friends.

Facebook started out as a niche social network for Ivy League students.

And technically it's still losing money hand over fist. But I'm with you, I think niche social networks have more money making potential actually. Linked In is a good example, they have been profitable for a while.

People who work is not really a niche

People who work AND network online is a niche I would say.

you know people always talk about "our site was not ready for TC", but has anyone ever posted what kind of infrastructure you actually need to be ready for all that traffic?

I think his technical infrastructure was ready for it, but his marketing infrastructure was not ready to take full advantage of it.

I've been TC'd once before, and it hit us at the worst possible time- a temporary banner was up for the hours before launch. That banner got more attention in the article than the service. The site held up fine, but >80% of the traffic was wasted. I think this is a pretty common phenomena.

what were your server(s) specs?

TechCrunch really just doesn't send that much traffic.

If you can do 50 reqs/second you will be absolutely fine; it doesn't take any kind of special server.

Ditto. I handled hitting the front page of /., digg, and yahoo tech on the same day on a single dual core server. The site slowed down a little during the worst of it, but page load times were always reasonable. Unless your app is a total beast and/or you require a large amount of resources to service each user, a single server is probably fine.

when we launched younoodle we hit NYT / techcrunch / venturebeat within a few hours. me and the other engineer slept through it and the site didn't go down once - it even stayed pretty fast throughout that day. btw, techcrunch doesn't send much traffic at all, we got more from delicious.

A single VPS, and it was running completely un-optimized code. It held up fine.

We get more traffic now on a regular Monday morning than TechCrunch ever sent us. Their influence is greatly overstated.

> Their influence is greatly overstated.

But doesn't being TechCrunch'd help your googleability/google page rank?

Probably a little bit, but they're just one site. Google would never put so much influence on one site- it is too gameable.

As subwindow posted, it was more about marketing preparation. I actually hosted it on a shared host for the first few months. Scaling is a loved topic among developers but for a simple rails app its really nothing to worry about with something like TC. I also got on a bunch of other blogs like CNET's news.com.

I think there's a lot of steps you can take to get the most out of the press you get from a launch. I think it's one of the easiest ways to get press.

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