
FratMusic.com searching for tech co-founder - mhm6b
FratMusic.com is searching for a tech co-founder. FratMusic is an online music forum targeting the college demographic. Before the site was shut down in May for legal reasons, we reached 100,000 visits a day. We're looking to re-launch by the beginning of September.<p>The site needs someone young and hungry to work their ass off for equity. Interested programers should contact mark@fratmusic.com.<p>http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/fratmusic.com#
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fname
_Before the site was shut down in May for legal reasons_

Have these been resolved? Can you expand upon what happened and how you
resolved it?

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mhm6b
yes, they have been resolved. I will expand upon them more through email.

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jgg
What will this site do that Grooveshark or Last.fm doesn't, besides market to
a different demographic?

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k33n
I find the term "cofounder" to be way overused, especially on HN lately. Once
a company has been founded, and an initial product launched, how is it
possible to "hire" a cofounder?

Also:

> The site needs someone young and hungry to work their ass off for equity.

If you can't afford to pay a programmer, you should probably just work your
own ass off.

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mhm6b
I'm looking for someone that is going to drive the site forward without having
to watch over them. I'm looking for someone to take ownership of their work.
Thus, equity.

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enjo
One simple request: Can you please make sure you provide adequate counseling
about the tax implications of 'working for equity' that given an already-
launched product can be quite onerous?

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damoncali
This is HUGE. The new hire can wind up with a substantial tax bill, and no
cash to pay it with. Don't gloss over this!

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grasshoper
Surely the government would accept equity in an ambitious young startup poised
to reshape the world of online music.

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damoncali
Why not. They seem to accept equity in over-priced homes.

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quantize
As a university student, I can attest to the popularity of fratmusic.com - it
is a resource used my many of my friends from across the country at different
universities.

It's recent shutdown caused quit a bit of chatter among all of us and we were
sad to see it go. It would be great for it to come back with an even better
and more substantial offering.

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omarish
I'd like to add a little bit to this discussion. Disclaimer: I wrote most of
the site's code and worked extensively with Mark for the past few months.

To start, Mark is a great co-founder. He doesn't code, but he always has a
strong vision about the product. Yes, at first I thought that a visionary co-
founder was a glorified way of saying over-zealous MBA, but Mark has the
ability to see both the forest and the trees when it comes to building a
product and developing software on a constrained schedule. The two of us
worked extensively on the product, building and scaling it from a simple
flatpage app to something that appealed to college kids around the US while
handling 22 concurrent req/sec.

I left FratMusic for two reasons. First, I didn't have enough time to dedicate
to developing the site. Second, I was concerned with some of the legal issues
that the site could be facing. Despite this, I know Mark has been working
diligently to find a way to make the site work. If I had more time, I
definitely would have stuck with the project.

Technically, the site is pretty fun. I wrote it all in Django and it comes
with some interesting problems, both tech and systems. From a technical
perspective, I spent a fair bit of time trying to better recommend music to
users, and to A/B test purchasing avenues through iTMS and Amazon. From a
systems perspective, the site has a grown a lot. Last semester, we were
doubling our slice's ram just about every three weeks. We switched from Apache
to nginx and are now running in a full MySQL / python / fcgi / nginx /
memcached environment. There are a lot of fun challenges in there to.

FratMusic is a household name on a lot of college campuses. Here's a twitter
search: <http://twitter.com/search?q=fratmusic>. Our facebook page has about
25K fans and is growing. The site is very simple, but it works.

Anyways, if you have any questions, feel free to ping me as well.
omar.bohsali@gmail.com.

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CharlesW
FWIW, I'm not dyslexic and still had to read this a couple times before I saw
something other than "FartMusic".

Also, "frat" is not a positive word in most people's minds.

Two good reasons for changing the name before you do anything else.

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zackattack
Who are you and what do you bring to the table?

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mhm6b
who are you and what do you bring to the table?

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mahmud
You don't know Zack, but he runs a kickass online music service, bootstrapped
by himself and he built everything.

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arram
Very impressive Mark - congrats!

