cvinson

There are tons of places bands can sell their music without a middleman or fees. Our site, Bandzoogle.com is one (if you want a full blown website), but you can also use one of dozens of widgets like Bandcamp.mu if you already have a site.

In terms of paying the middleman to be on sites like Amazon and iTunes -- this is really just based on the policies of those stores. They make you go through a middleman because they don't want to deal with artists directly. Because of this, someone has to track royalties, encode the tracks in proprietary formats etc, which does incur a bit of work, which is why they are all fee-based.

We'll actually be posting an opening for an intern at Carleton; we can definitely use a generalist like yourself. Our company, bandzoogle.com is based in Montreal, but we have employees in the UK and US. We're not really a "startup" anymore, but we can give you some experience in scaling a web app (we use S3/EC2). If you're interested, hit me up at chris[at]bandzoogle.com

I have done a thorough analysis of this; I have a band website builder app that has a MP3 store.

You should look primarily at the fees. Paypal's standard account has is around $0.30 per transaction + 3%. If you Google "PayPal Micropayment" they have an account that is not advertised publicly with lower fees for small transactions. The downside is you have to make a new account to use it, including a different bank account. I spoke to our PayPal account manager, and he said there is no internal plans to change this or promote the micropayments plan.

I strongly disagee with josefresco. I have a 5 year old "startup" with 6 full time remote workers -- 3 developers. It works great.

If an employee isn't caring about his work, it doesn't matter if he is local or remote. Hiring smart, passionate people is the most important factor.

The problem with these methods is that they assume you can figure out average months before cancellation.

If 10% of your members are still active (have never cancelled) since you launched, how can you estimate this? They may stay on for another week or another 5 years.

Clearly, this isn't something that can have a hard answer, but it would be nice to reduce the guesswork.

Ferris likely made a lot more money from his book than from his "dietary supplement" business he is very vague about -- in the same way the "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" author skims over his own business results and sells a lot of books.

They are both easy sells -- not working much and generating tons of money -- but I would like to see examples of businesses that do this in the real world.* I work 60+ hours a week on my app (work I enjoy). I am convinced it is impossible to outsource and not put in the hours without competitors eating your lunch.

*plentyoffish being the only example I can think of.