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Ask HN: Your opinion.

5 pointshajrice11 comments

Hi. I've been recently invited to join a startup as a founder. I'd like to hear your opinion on the idea:

Mudoo is a place for people to download music submitted by the artists. The thing is, in order to download you have to either invite a user or listen for a 20sec. ad. If you're a advertiser you can pay for a 20sec. advertisement that'll be played for only 20cents.

I've been thinking and the idea sounds good. What do you think?

..I mean I know it's not all about the idea but I'd really appreciate your opinion on this.

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My 2c: Ask an amateur musician what they think of the site (ideally ask several). If they all say 'wow', then consider it. If they all shrug & say 'I can do this on [say myspace] easier' then don't.

I've become really jaded about any ad-supported sites (putting my amateur musician hat on). The amount of effort I have to put in just to get my music onto them is hardly justified by the pittance I eventually get back. These days, I don't even bother, and I stick to myspace.

Very astute observation, sharpn. In business school they call it "top 2 boxes". When you ask a question like, "How likely are you to use this product..." with a 1-5 scale, you want 95% of your responses to be 4 or 5 (top two boxes).

The reason is that people are unwilling to criticize something as harshly, so the scale of approval on doing some market research really goes from 80% approval to 100% approval.

Kudos to you for figuring this out on your own.

> I've been thinking and the idea sounds good.

I think the idea is bad.

1. Shoveling ads down your visitors throats is a sure way to drive them away. Consider how Google does it - they display ads unobtrusively, in a way that helps you. If they were forcing you to read through the ads before showing the search results, do you think they'd be where they are now ?

2. Consider the artists. They need to be desperate to have their work preceded by 20 seconds of diaper commercials. I realize you can play relevant ads, but these might be very hard to come by. There's lot more Poker and insurance ads than those of high-end speakerphones and such.

3. In the light of #2 - desperate artists aren't probably be the source of an awesome material, so the quality of your site content is probably going to be low. Additionally the artist churn rate is probably going to be high and you will end up with stale material.

In general an easy way to validate an idea is to imagine that you are past the initial growth stage and now are at the stable operational state. Who are your contributors, users and advertisers ? Is their combination realistic and stable ? In your case it's neither, so the idea is not viable.

>> Mudoo is a place for people to download music submitted by the artists

Is it a place for amateur musicians to submit their own music? Or is this more for commercial, big-record-company music? In any case, there's already a lot of alternatives that don't have ads that are that noticeable, so it will really depend on your marketing/popularity and what else you can offer.

You're right it's not about the idea.

Is it completely off the wall an infeasible? No. Then again, if you had told me facebook's idea, or twitter, I would have laughed.

Evaluate all the other, more important aspects of partnering with these people (after all, that's what you are doing).

> Mudoo is a place for people to download music submitted by the artists.

If you're invited to be a founder that's what you'd like it to be :) Mudoo.com seems taken though, is that your working title or really what it will be launched under ?

If you're going with this drop me a line, we run two fair sized music sites, might give you a boost on launch.

As for advertising, audio advertising is going to be a tough sell on the web, especially since there is no 'click through' to be measured. I'd say you have to research the potential for ad sales (and preferably have some letters of intent) before you go all out to build it, look at what happened to IUMA when you don't have your businessplan worked out well and you do a high bandwidth project.

I think if it is your first time joining a startup, then go for it. The experience that you'll get is extremely valuable. And if it is not the first time, then most likely you already know what to do...

No, It'd be the third. :)

Would you use it? If the answer is no then I would pass.

I wouldn't use it. I think the business opportunity in music is discovery, not distribution.

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