One week since our launch...and... | Hacker News Reader

One week since our launch...and...

14 pointscomet17 comments

It’s been a week since we soft launched our startup, Moshbag (http://moshbag.in), a distribution platform for artists, and… “We’ve had hundreds of artists signup & thousands of subscribers!” is what we’d have ideally liked to say, but…the truth the far from real & it’s honesty time! We’ve had almost no new signups, little response to our email campaigning, & a tad over 5 new likes on our facebook page. The whole episode has humbled us & we're not so sure where we've gone wrong! Any advice or help from fellow hackers will be much appreciated! P.S. We’re looking to increase the number of artists who signup with us & truly appreciate any help from your end on this. So if you have a good network of artists following you or if you can just help us reach them, we’d be grateful.

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I have no experience with your target market so by all means take my feedback with a grain of salt.

* I don't like the site. Visually it's far too basic and dated.

* Your USP isn't immediately obvious. You need to be screaming from the rooftops about what benefits you and your company/site offer that's different to anything else that currently exists.

* What lead you to believe this would be a success? You've obviously invested time and effort into the concept so somewhere along the line you must have had a realistic idea of how to attract the right number of people within the right demographic. Was that based exclusively on an email marketing campaign?

* Never underestimate Twitter. Twitter drives infinitely more traffic to our site than facebook. I'm sure this varies dependent on your market but more often than not, twitter is the most effective way of reaching out.

* Be patient. A slow start doesn't preclude you from success. Work hard, remain patient and most importantly, remain passionate. If it can work and you believe in it, you'll find a way to make it work. Starting a business isn't easy.

Peroni, Great inputs! Will keep them in mind. Thanks! Btw, Unlimited Patience is all we startup guys have anyway. I'm totally passionate about this & not letting it down anytime soon! :)

Launch is just a start. Remember the golden saying of Reid Hoffman - "if you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late."

So you have crossed one of the greatest hurdles - that is launch. Rest is bit easy now.

1. You need to focus on marketing now. It starts from your site.

2. Try to get some of your friends to signup. Analyse deeply what are the actions they are doing versus what you have expected them to do.

3. Focus on that one thing which you think is the highlight of your product. Tweak it, re-tweak it until it really stands apart from all your other offerings.

4. Go to local events, try to showcase it to any crowd you can get your hands on.

5. If you have a little budget, try to do content marketing. Try educating people in your niche what are the problems they are facing. You can start doing that on your company blog or other blogs on your niche.

Be your strongest critic, and you will continuously evolve.

betaout - That's by far the most kindest feedback we've got till now. Thanks for that. We'll put all these suggestions to work for sure!

Thanks, but it is full of typos as did it from my mobile. Anyways best of luck with your venture.

First up, I have to say I LOVE this idea, however I think you may struggle to get people using it, but that's not to say it wont work.

My first thought is temporarily remove the subscriber and artist count from the homepage. While you're still starting out the low numbers may be a turn off.

Get media coverage! When I first launched BugMuncher, all was quiet for a few days, then The Next Web published an article about it and the users started coming in. Admittedly that was dumb luck, but since then I've been actively getting more blog coverage, and it really works.

As others have said, at this stage you need to get artists on board, maybe you could try some kind of sign up incentive, and then have further incentives for artists encouraging their fans to sign up.

The design, while clean and very good, reminds me too much of a news paper, I'm not sure that will resonate so well with your target audience.

Best of luck with it

Thanks for the kind words Matt! We're looking at getting some press, but we thought it'd yield us better results once we have a good number of artists on board & have something to show for. We are also reconsidering the UI & will revamp it to have more call to action right away.

And I agree, we have to work on simplifying our on-boarding process for artists.

I'm a graphic artist and art director, and probably not your target market. But having said that, I think you've got a good idea.

However...

- I would have like to see a very quick visual narrative other than the video that efficiently explained what Moshbag is.

- The site has poor UI and UX.

- Visually the site is dull.

I don't know what resources you have available, but here are some nice examples of simple visual summaries/narratives: https://developer.apple.com/programs/ios/ https://build.phonegap.com/ http://www.getballpark.com/

Keep going though. You want to be able to say you gave it your best.

Andrew, thanks for the feedback. The biggest take away from all corners for us has been the UI & I assure you we WILL fix.

I like the youtube video. I dont think the website looks dated, it is just minimal.

One thing I think you should focus on is getting Artists on there supporting you. You wont get any subscribers until you get the artists. Once you've got the artists producing media - you can use their fan base to grow membership.

I would never subscribe to this service unless there was an artist I cared about using it. I would suggest a strong marketing campaign focussed on winning some Artists. I have known bands with tiny but dedicated followings - those are your paying subscribers.

Best of luck!

cstrat: You've hit it on the head. That's exactly what we have planned. We'll soon be putting out profiles of artists and their new releases up on the website. We've already requested our fellow friends (bands,writers) to start contributing & save our asses! :)

And No doubt, no one will ever pay for something like this, unless they exactly know what they're getting in return! So we haven't or say won't ask for it until we have something to show for!

You have a chicken and egg problem.

You don't seem to be a part of an artistic community.

The minimal design of your site is not appealing to artists and the lack of stuff to look at / download is not appealing for potential subscribers.

What is the value proposition?

You are asking a group of hackers on how to encourage artists to sign up to your site. This seems wrong.

Get out of the office with print-outs of various designs for your home page and get talking to the people who will make your site work, and gain some more perspective. Or, in short, learn about your customers.

Richard, I'm very much from the artist community back here in India. Used to be singer songwriter & frontman of my band. Most of the artists that we have on board right now are predominantly from here. But we've seen good number of signups from artists outside India as well. So reaching out to a larger crowd is what we've considered.

Agree on the value proposition & UI! We need to fix it like ASAP! Thanks for the feedback!

I think its too early to judge yourself in low esteem. You should hold some road shows and also go to events where artists hang out and demo your product to them..That should help..apart from that I guess you should keep on going for at least a year so get some traction. Don`t assume to have thousands or millions signing up in few weeks and months... First few weeks and months are slow

Sahil, thanks for the feedback! :) We are surely going to be patient ducks for as long as it takes! I think Pinterest has done us all a favor by being role models!

Shoot me an email. I have some ideas that might work.

orangethirty: Thanks! Email sent...

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