

Ask HN: Is this an idea worth pursuing further? - scrr

Hello everyone,<p>two weeks ago me and a friend were in a bar and suddendly we came up with the idea for http://www.learntoplayanything.com . By now we have put some work in it and we get a few visitors each day. (Although Google apparently hasn't indexed everything yet.)<p>It was all done in the spirit of "f*ck it, let's just do it and see what happens", but now we wonder if it was such an excellent idea after all.<p>What do you think? Is it worth to invest more time into this website? What features can you imagine that would make the site more valuable?<p>We are currently thinking about inserting links to guitar tabs and piano sheet music and changing the layout to something more pretty.
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ggrot
The way I see it is that you are taking advantage of bad search results in a
specific area. You are simply creating a web page that tries to match a
specific video with a specific search query and monetize by putting your ads
around the content (the youtube video).

If you simply built a single page with a collection of links with that text to
the video of interest, you'd largely serve the same purpose for users - search
engines would rank the actual video higher for that query, but unfortunately
you wouldn't be inserting yourself into the middle in order to extract
revenue.

Your model is negatively effected by search engines improving their ranking
algorithms with respect to video content. That seems like a bad place to be.

~~~
vaksel
the problem is that all that great video content is only labeled one way. You
on the other hand can get traffic by letting those users who search using a
different string find it.

You win by getting traffic. Google wins by getting the people the results they
were looking for. And the people win by not having to do a 2nd, 3rd Google
search, and everyone is happy.

There is a very long tail to Google search. If you don't rank in #1 position
for "guitar lessons" you can rank for #1 position for "guitar lessons using
sweet home alabama song"

Sure it's not as profitable, with "guitar lessons using sweet home alabama
song" you might get 30-40 hits a month, instead of 5000, but that's all you,
and a few thousand such queries, will mean 80-100K users coming to your site
every month with zero marketing on your part.

Aiming for that long tail is a great way to build up your traffic and site in
the early days, until you start ranking higher for those more desirable
phrases.

That's what I'm aiming for in this stage with <http://styleguidance.com> hit
up the long tail, build up traffic, content and reputation, and eventually
Google will throw a bone our way, and decide...hey there is this great style
and fashion Q&A site, that has all the answers for the style category, why
don't I give their results preference over those generic blogs to get my users
better answers.

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vaksel
it's a good idea, and has some decent traffic #s(i.e. "sweet home alabama
guitar lesson" 14,800 searches/month) but it seems to be a little bit
competitive. Go exact searching for "sweet home alabama guitar lesson" and you
get 185,000 sites.

I think "sweet home alabama guitar tutorial" is a much better fit. Only 53,700
hits, and none are really an exact match for the search on page 1(which is
probably true for all other searches). And that still gets you 6,600 searches
a month.

So update your titles to be [SONG TITLE] guitar tutorial.

And you should be able to hit some decent traffic numbers with that.

~~~
vaksel
also, this will be a SEO play for you, so I suggest finding a domain that has
guitar tutorial(s) in the url. Having that will help you biiiig time when it
comes to ranking high for results

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greatreorx
I like the idea. Not sure about making money from it, but definitely see it as
useful.

typo on home page... "Also contact us if you want to contribute by helping uns
organizing the links."

Can you add more specific information to your search results lists? For me
right now, this page...
<http://www.learntoplayanything.com/component/tag/green%20day> returns 20
results that all are "Boulevard of Broken Dreams " - would be more useful if
there was some additional info to differentiate.

On this page:
[http://www.learntoplayanything.com/component/tag/green%20day...](http://www.learntoplayanything.com/component/tag/green%20day?start=20)
Which is the third page, the paginated link to page 1 actually goes back to
the third page. The link to page 1 on all paginated results pages seems to
link to the current page instead of page 1.

~~~
appathy
Another typo: "recommend us to your firends"

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NickNYC242
This is a good aggregation idea for learning - why not find a few content
providers/creators that could serialize a process for learning - so pieces of
a song, or basic chords for guitar. Get some content made by people looking to
raise their recognition, and customize it for the site. I'll bet you could get
free contributions, or even mechanical turk it for different languages. Ad-
supported is definitely the model right now, but what about taking requests
and getting people to "donate" for specific content providers to produce
requests - you may have a runaway hit for people that can tab/teach/play. Best
of luck.

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PieSquared
If you included guitar tabs and perhaps allowed users to upload custom tabs
(so that people can improve on publicly available ones), it'd be absolutely
great. I'd use it on a weekly basis at least, if not daily.

~~~
larrykubin
Agreed. I regularly visit guitar tab sites like ultimate-guitar.com. Most of
these sites are loaded with ads and have terrible design.

I'd love to visit one that has a clean design with correct tabs and videos
without all of the cruft. This site seems like a great idea if you can manage
to load it with plenty of content without running into legal issues (I've seen
many tab sites get shut down).

~~~
k0ban
Can you please e-mail me at kos@cbmsnetworks.com. We are almost ready to show
service like you hare looking for, so I am interested in your opinion on it. I
will provide you with the link.

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petervandijck
If you are hoping to turn this into some kind of business or money-generating
thing, it's not. You are creating very little long-term value, as the others
have noted, it seems mainly an SEO play.

I do like the basic idea though, If you really wanted to make it good, you'd
have to create much better navigation/browsing/finding options (that's the
only value you're adding), and you'd have to seed it with 10000s of videos,
and you'd have to add something, like forums or reviews something, that
increases the value for users.

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cmelbye
Pretty cool idea. It would be a more open competitor to Apple's GarageBand
music teaching features. I think your idea of adding more value to the site
would be a good one. Apple has quality and integration with a nice music
creation software. Perhaps you could include more information from lyric sites
and guitar tabs and sheet music as you noted.

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sant0sk1
clickable link: <http://www.learntoplayanything.com>

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Tichy
I like it.

Clicking on the logo should bring you back to the homepage.

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mattyfo
As a guitarist this is a very painful spot for me and good instruction is
worth a lot. If you can figure out a model that connects people like me with
quality content efficiently then you win.

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mkramlich
ask Adrian Holovaty what he thinks. maybe even get him to contribute. he's
clearly a good hacker, plus, a good guitarist. rare mix. may be smart to
leverage it.

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scrr
Thanks everyone for your input! Those comments are very interesting and we
have a lot to think about now. :)

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yters
I, for one, like the idea and can see myself using it in the future.

