Rap Genius Explains Why Worse is Better

There seems to be 2 philosophical camps in the startup world when it comes to design/execution. There's the Rap Genius approach of make something wanted and get it out there asap even though it looks like crap. Then there's the we can only ship something that is beautiful design snobbery camp.

I guess it's obvious which one I favor. Maybe it's because I'm bad at design, but I tend to roll my eyes when someone says "Hey look at this new app, it's just like X but beautiful and well-designed"

Good job Rap Genius. I'll put this in my bookmark folder of links to show my designy friends.

I'm not sure if the controversy made them MORE popular as the article suggests. Seems like they will have to slowly fight to get certain search query terms higher than AZlyrics, ones they were winning before. But perhaps the controversy helped bring the name to new people AND the site will gain back all of its traffic?

Anyhow, if the HN community is interested, they do discuss the controversy in this podcast interview (interview starts at 7:30): https://soundcloud.com/thecombatjackshow/rap-genius-episode-...

Regardless of what you may thing about their recent imbroglio with Google, these guys are doers. Nothing especially new here for hackers, but you have to love the Rap Genius guys' scrappiness.

"The Secret"... really? I wonder if he really believes in that kind of thing.

(the book is on his desk in the picture)

I've seen this advice all the time but somehow I wonder how did they get their first thousand visitor. Did they do something like reddit and have bots filling up the database until they got the ball rolling? I'm genuinely curious.

"there are many things that are important but web hosting is not one of them"

Spoken like an ignorant developer. Uptime and scalability is just provided by the magic server pixies.

"Worse is Better" is one of the slogans popular among small companies that want to stay small.

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