Rejected Y Combinator company Bandsintown.com is now Live! | Hacker News Reader

Rejected Y Combinator company Bandsintown.com is now Live!

bandsintown.com

30 pointsknewjax34 comments

Hey, I like this! Every so often I'm like "Gee, haven't been to a show lately, I wish there were some band I've heard of playing around here". So I have to find some indie newspaper to look up who is in town, but a homeless guy took them all out of the rack and is trying to sell them, and I don't want to look on all the clubs' websites so I give up. Not anymore.

Thanks,

Rejected Jessica Alba suitor Brian McKenzie

Cool, I like it -- it immediately delivers on what I expected it would do. I'm not sure what the tag cloud significance is, however. Are the larger displayed bands more popular in searches?

By the way, I'm not sure why saying "Rejected YC company" is of any value. I don't introduce myself as "Stanford rejected person, Daniel Ha".

I kinda like having announcements tagged as "Rejected YC company", because it gives people considering YC funding a baseline to measure the actual benefits of the program itself, as opposed to the quality of the applicants.

Looking at YC-funded companies, I know that they've created pretty impressive stuff. But I have no way of knowing whether they are just kickass hackers who would've created great companies anyway, or whether they became great hackers because of the mentorship of PG et al. There's a selection-bias: the fact that they beat out 400 or so other applicants indicates they were pretty cream-of-the-crop anyway.

By seeing the outcomes of rejected YC companies, we can say "Okay, these folks are drawn from the same pool of applicants, and at least in YCombinator's estimation, they were less promising. Let's see what their success rate is compared to the ones that YC eventually did invest in."

There's still a survivorship bias, because people who were rejected, tried anyway, and then crashed and burned are unlikely to post on news.YC with their postmortems (though I'd absolutely love to see some). But at least it'd give a control group of people who were just as motivated and came from the same applicant population, to compare with the outcomes of those selected for the program itself. Right now, we just have PG's assurance that they roughly double the expected outcome for a startup, with little data to back it up.

I agree 100%.

Yes when you are not logged in the tag cloud represents popularity.

When you sign up and add favorite artists the tag cloud then represents your personal musical tastes instead.

The reason for using labeling ourselves as "reject" in this forum, is because There seems to be a large interest in ycombinator companies. Even the ones who were rejected.

We do not label ourselves as this outside of this forum. I also hope it inspires some of the other companies who may not have been accepted as well.

I just had a peek and found out that my favourite band is making a rare european tour and is soon playing just a mile from my front door. So rare, infact, that I don't even usually bother to check their tour dates. Anyway, I just spent $100 on a pair of tickets - shame that bandsintown didn't get a penny.

Hi guys, I like this a lot. Quick feedback:

It isn't immediately obvious how to change my location. However, once I found out that you just click on the city name you detected my entry very well.

Like others, I'm wondering what makes a band's name appear more prominent in the tag cloud. I clicked on the largest name for my area.

I don't know why indy vs label delineation is broken out in detail, but genre is not. Maybe you should show five genres which users can click on as examples before entering their own.

You guys found me a show: terance blanchard at Yoshi's in Oakland. Thanks a lot!

We will improve the ability to edit the location, Especially for users who are signed up and just want to check out other areas, without changing their account settings.

And as far as the sizing, it is based on overall popularity when you are not logged in. When you sign up and add favorite artists it begins to personalize itself to your taste in music.

Hopefully this makes the site useful to everyone, but VERY VERY useful once you signup and begin to add your favorite artists.

Don't know much much about tag clouds, so excuse my ignorance: But, has this basic idea been done before, except with things other than bands?

The reason I ask: My first impression was very strongly, "This is a neat tool, but why would they limit themselves to bands?". You could do this with ANYTHING...but with branding like "bandsintown" your potential market is 0.01 percent of what it could be. I strongly recommend getting a generic name (like myspace) and then:

1) Allow different product categories (Nearest coffeeshop, nearest book store that sells a certain book, nearest movie theatre playing a certain movie at certain hours, etc).

2) Allow different views of your model. Tag clouds strike me as a flash in the pan. Allow charts, bar graphs, pies, etc, etc.

"You could do this with ANYTHING"

I think the answer to that lies in the idea of "focus". Trying to do too much leads either to not being very good at any of it, or worse, architecture astronaut trips into the stratosphere of making things ever more generic and able to handle all kinds of data and odd cases.

I guess my problem is that the name prevents any expansion later on, unlike the example myspace (which started out aimed at bands).

Yeah we do see the ability for expansion as well. Under another brand of course because you are right we do limit ourselves with our stratedgy.

The reason i do not use eventful and tools like that is because of the lack of focus. I know with bandsintown that I will be discovering new local shows and nothing else. This was our primary goal.

Okay, one last suggestion. The domain zintown.com is available. Thus:

band.zintown.com movie.zintown.com

(intown.com and other better variations were already taken.)

Thats awesome. Thanks, We own a few more ___intown domains as well, but i like this idea a lot.

I think he's totally wrong and what davidw said about focus is right on. It's easy to generalize any idea, but most of the time it just leads to mediocrity. Force the expansion out of your mind until you've completely dominated your current target. By then you'll probably see much better ways to expand than this obvious generalization.

Thank you for the input staunch. I def agree with everything you said. I also think its good to set goals for yourself and think well into the future, even though most of your original ideas and plans will end up far from where you had anticipated.

"Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning."

Your interface rocks. Its instantly usable right when you visit the site. Took me just a few seconds and I had it figured out. Living in a very live music-oriented city I find this tool very useful.

I've just passed it on to a few friends here and their reactions are similar. Keep up the good work.

My only complaint is that I'm personally not a fan of tag clouds. May want to consider evolving the bands list into something more eye catching and readable. I also agree that you should consider modifying the name early so that you are better setup to expand into areas other than bands.

Whatever you use to automatically determine my location doesn't quite get it right; it thinks that I am in a small town that I vaguely recall as not being that far away from where I now live, so it's not the biggest deal.

Also, you may want to set distances to metric for people in countries where that's the standard. It's not at all impossible to get some users in e.g. Northern European countries without translating into the local language, but the size of a mile is not something people around here tend to be familiar with.

Yes for sure, we know we still have to do some distance and monetary conversions for outside the US. We will get there!

This site is very well designed and a great idea. Good work!

I just signed up and played with it for a few minutes... so far I'm very happy with the concept. I'm glad they went ahead with the idea on their own.

Congrats! You even auto-detect location via IP, and have maps and expanded info. Slick. This site is easily better than many YC-funded ones.

Pretty cool, but the randomly sized band names could use some work. For example, "the police" should probably be in a font large enough to me to read without squinting.

Hi Paul, The Police is probably smaller on your screen because out of the favorite artists youve added we have not picked up on a similar relationship. If you add the police as a favorite artist, or a bands similar to them, they will grow in size. The Site is built to compliment your musical taste so the tagcloud is not completely based on overall popularity.

for instance the police are very large on my tag cloud. http://www.bandsintown.com/user/knewjax/

I was thinking about doing this exact same concept! Definitely fills a niche of something I was looking for and very well done. Good work.

Fantastic UI. I wouldn't use it for a "real" app, but for fun stuff, it's awesome and fun to play with.

Best of luck!

I really dig the UI. Very clean looking. Nice job! What libraries are you using?

Hint: Click "View" in your browser menu, and the click "Page Source". Right at the top there's a list of libraries. ;-)

Looks like Prototype plus several of Prototype extensions, plus some other random stuff--probably a few custom libs given the filenames.

What's the big, mostly blank, turquoise box in the middle for?

Hi, Where are you located? My guess is there are no shows in you area or you have the time frame set to small. Try expanding your time frame, choose to show unsigned artists, and extend the distance.

this is an example of my homepage for Boston, MA with my preferences. http://www.bandsintown.com/user/knewjax

I'm in Auburn, AL. There's a few shows listed here, but not much.

The problem I always saw with trying to start something like this is providing all the info about local shows and small bands that are likely only listed on bar and club web pages -- did you guys find some way to get around that?

We'll we allow anyone to post shows. So we are hoping that as we grow, dedicated fans, the artists themselves, or the venues will add their schedules to keep things up to date.

sonicliving.com

FWIW, I like bandsintown a lot more at first glance. I didn't have to click anything, and I instantly found out a lot about what's going in my area.

It looked like I had 5 or 10 more clicks at least to get anything good out of sonicliving. I'll probably never go there again unless someone I trust strongly recommends it. I'm sure I'll idly pop into bandsintown a few more times over the next few months.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com